Every success story has its humble—or arrogant and mean-spirited—beginnings, and now Fantagraphics Books is tickled pink to present Mean, collecting Weissman's early, self-published, unpublished, and otherwise rare "Yikes" comics. Enjoy your favorite characters' awkward, embarrassing first appearances; watch them stumble from their early, crude glory into their mature sadistic and masochistic selves. Li'l Bloody and the Pullapart Boy steal candy, X-Ray Spence answers his fan mail, and Kid Medusa falls in love (twice!). Early critical attention, while overwhelmingly positive, often questioned what Weissman "was on" when he came up with these odd tales of young friendship. ReadMean and guess for yourself.
Steven Knight Weissman (born June 4, 1968, in California) is an alternative cartoonist. Weissman was the recipient of the Harvey Kurtzman Award for Best New Talent in 1998 and he is best known for his offbeat and bizarre explorations of childhood friendships. He is the author of a number of books, including Barack Hussein Obama (2012), Butter and Blood (2015) and the series of graphic novels Yikes! (1999-2008). His work has been published by Fantagraphics, Retrofit Comics, Nickelodeon, Vice, Mad Magazine and more. Weissman lives in Los Angeles, CA with his wife and son.
Ehhh...I really wanted to like this collection of Yikes! comics, but they are overall pretty bland and unfunny. How did you go so wrong!?! It's about child monsters! Also, some of the print was really tiny and hard to read. Dislike.
This is great stuff. There's some classic Yikes! in here. This has a lot of the stuff that made me really love Weissman, and generally, this stuff is way way better than his newest work.
My only real complaints about this collection would be that the selection process seems a bit random, so some stuff is left out that I personally would have included, and that the order the stories appear in the book is even more random, so older and newer stuff intermingle in a kind of weird way. It's a bit jarring when the art style changes abruptly between 2 stories, and you lose the sense of development and progression you'd get if the work appeared chronologically.
I'm not sure how I missed this when it came out, but it's a must have - I thought I had a pretty exhaustively complete Yikes! collection, and there's a TON of stuff in here I've never seen before. For me this is a must-have.