His nasty, negative misanthropic answer? "I can to be sweet, goddamn it!"
All joking aside, the book does perform a rather valuable service, making for a nice, safe entry point into the work of Crumb, one which is safe for readers of all ages (and/or moralities).
There are relatively few comics-comics in here, and the few included tend to be hastily sketched ones involving his then-young daughter Sophie saying something cute (Would you believe it's like The Family Circle, as drawn by Crumb?).
Instead, there are plenty of photo-realistic drawings of favorite musicians, scenes from France, location sketches and sketches of people, and several portraits of his wife posing (with dialogue bubbles of her telling him how to draw her included).
When you take out the words and panels, the context and stories of Crumb's cartoons, what you're left with is the work of a damn fine artist. It's nice to see a book devoted to making the case that Crumb, whatever else some may think of him, is a veritable magician when it comes to pen and ink.
Haunted House
Tokyopop
Sabato Obiga is a perfectly normal teenage boy, a fact that makes him a freak in his own home. His parents and twin sisters are all goth fashion plates, and something of a wannabe Addams Family. They spend their days dressed as vampires and zombies, and in their spare time, enjoy making voodoo dolls of Sabato and scaring away each and every potential girlfriend he brings home.
Artist Mitsukazu Mihara flips the script so that it's the child rather than the parent embarrassed by the outré fashion, and heightens the teen-embarassed-by-his-family plot to hilarious proportions.
Like all good cartoonists, Mihara manages to find innovative ways to essentially tell the same joke over and over, making it a little funnier each time, and is smart enough to quit before it ever gets to the point of beating a dead horse (which is actually something Sabato's family might enjoy).
Marvel Adventures Spider-Man Vol. 5: Monsters on the Prowl
Marvel
Writer Peter David has long been a fan-favorite in the arena of superhero comics. His decades-old run on The Incredible Hulk is still considered the definitive one, and his time chronicling X-Men spin-off team X-Factor featured some of the better X-people stories (which isn't really saying much, considering the quality of most X-people books).
Far too often David's superhero work is obscured in a cloud of intra-company continuity, however, and following it requires a great deal of knowledge about what's going on in, say, Marvel's other dozen Spider-Man stories.
Well this little $6 graphic novel doesn't suffer that problem. Contained within are four David-written Spider-Man stories created for the company's all-ages line. "All-ages" is the term Marvel and DC use to refer to their output that's geared toward kids, but it usually actually ends up referring to their most accessible, reader-friendly books.
All of the short stories in here feature high-schooler Peter Parker facing one of the many fun and under-used monsters in Marvel's stable of characters, like the Monster of Frankenstein, Werewolf By Night, Man-Thing (Seriously! That's his name!), and, my personal favorite Marvel character, the giant green talking Chinese dragon Fin Fang Foom.
It's pretty much a perfect Spider-Man comic.