(Please visit the ADD Blog for more current reviews)

Pick of the Week -- A big, fun collection called Daily Delirium by M. Prado has to be the best value of the week.

Nearly 200 pages of witty, sardonic vignettes about life and the sophistry of man -- all gorgeously illustrated in a style that is part Euro Comix and part Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman.

Prado's pages are filled to bursting with sublime renditions of nature and architecture, while his delightful unique characters stumble through their lives in ways pathetic and hilarious. The production quality is top-notch, as it always is from NBM Publishing.

You can read a preview of Daily Delirium here and look for it at better comics shops and bookstores, or order directly from NBM.

Sunny D Beats Me To It -- I've been wanting to write about Eightball #22 for a long time now. I have been searching for weeks for my copy and over the weekend gave up in frustration (did I loan it to someone?) and bought one at Earthworld in Albany. Then I bought another one a short while later at Electric City Comics in Schenectady when I found it in their quarter bin (!).

Big Sunny D comments on this landmark comic book today, writing briefly but eloquently on the wonders of one of the best single issues of any comic book series ever. He even notes his unease at writing about such a sublime work, an affliction I share.

Suffice to say, though, that Eightball #22 is an astonishingly deep and diverse work, many stories pretending to be one pretending to be many, and it belongs in the libraries of every comics reader.

Most Beautiful Book of the Year -- You're simply not going to find a more beautiful or important comics-related book this year than Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library Datebook. Collecting hundreds of sketches, drawings and rough strips from the past few years, Ware opens up his creative process to let readers explore his art -- and really, the very core of his being.

It's fascinating to begin to see the recurring themes in his sketches, the obsessions that drive him and the refinements that his style takes on as the years roll past. Most amazing to me were the raw, elegant drawings of architecture demonstrating a deep, deep understanding of spacial relationships that the more polished, finished work in his comics demonstrates but does not as fully reveal.

At $40.00 U.S. this is not a book that casual readers will easily plunk down cash for -- until they see it, anyway. The book's design asthetics are mind-boggingly gorgeous; Library Retro Chic is about as close to a description as I can get at the moment, but the book-as-object truly needs to be seen to be believed, and once seen is irresistible.

It's not a graphic novel, there's no obvious story here -- there are plenty of comic strips, though, and the discerning reader will indeed find themselves picking up on a subtle tale being woven through the seemingly-random series of sketchbook pages. The story is the art and life of Chris Ware, one of the best cartoonists in the history of comic art. It's a story you owe it to yourself to fully explore. Buy it here.