Arf Forum : The Unholy Marriage of Art + Comics Book

150 years of great cartooning under one cover!

The third volume of the popular "Arf" series, Arf Forum, runs the gamut from Krazy Kat's kartoonist George Herriman to heartbreak rocker Elvis Presley, Spider-Man's Stan Lee to New Yorker cartoonist Otto Soglow, Little Nemo's Winsor McCay to silent-film star Charlie Chaplin, Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller to Surrealist Max Ernst.

The sexy pin-up cover on Arf Forum highlights a feature on historical images of people reading comics, from a young Elvis reading Betty and Veronica on his first tour to a boxer-clad Rock Hudson reading the Sunday Funnies. Also ratcheting up the titillation factor is a spread on the sexy cartoons of the Italian artist "Kremos."

The Arf books have a special fondness for cartoonists doing wacky and surrealistic comics: Bill Holman's Smokey Stover comic strip is the hallmark of Dada meets Dagwood and this Arf features a generous sample including unpublished rarities. Also in this volume, macabre cartoonist Henry Heath goes devilish in the ongoing "Cartoonists Go To Hell" series.

A bona fide super-hero swoops into the pages of Arf when "Captain Marvel Fights The Surrealist Imp" in a classic tale from the Golden Age of Comics; meanwhile, real-life superhero Stan Lee introduces a section devoted to, in Lee's own words, Yoe's own "wacky, weird, wild comics that become Art with a capital 'A'!"

And finally, "Yabba Dabba Been Done" examines the caveman and dinosaur cartoons of masters T.S. Sullivant, Winsor McCay and Frederick Opper—all pre-Fred and Wilma Flintstone!