No one walks away from a Close to Home cartoon unscathed. John McPherson's lumpy characters and bizarre situations are tailor-made for gut-splitting laughs. And then there are the cartoons that leave readers shaking their heads, sputtering, "Oh my gosh" as a guilty smile passes across their faces. The Scourge of Vinyl Car Seats delivers what fans expect from McPherson: jokes about everything from parenting to dating to car repairs. McPherson takes his readers on a journey that's very Close to Home.

As always, the more of Bill Amend's work you can get in one place, the merrier. And there's plenty to be merry about here. FoxTrot remains one of the best family strips around, filled with character comedy that becomes funnier the more time you spend with it." -Infodad.com: Family-focused reviews of books, software, music, and more.

Bill Amend does it better than anybody else. His ability to present middle-class family life in a way that's consistently fresh, irreverent, and downright wacky is unsurpassed.

In Who's Up for Some Bonding?, Amend's antics with the Fox family include the artist's invitingly skewed views of "normal" life: children who are light-years ahead of their parents when it comes to computers, siblings who could teach the CIA a thing or two about covert and "get-even" ops, and parents who stumble around in a slight daze as they deal with all the "amenities" of the modern world.

Jason, Peter, Paige, and their parents, Roger and Andy, deliver the laughs. They all bring their unique personalities and perspectives to the FoxTrot world, whether the subject is technology, tofu recipes . . . or a son convinced he could be the next zillionaire Martha Stewart. FoxTrot surprises. FoxTrot charms. FoxTrot always satisfies.Universal Press Syndicate newspaper feature:

*FoxTrot

Author's web site: www.foxtrot.com/

The National Cartoonists Society nominated Pearls Before Swine as one of the best comic strips of 2002.

Pearls Before Swine is an impressive comic strip success story. After only a few years of syndication, it appears in more than 150 newspapers worldwide, was nominated as Best Newspaper Comic Strip by the National Cartoonists Society in its debut year-an unprecedented achievement-and its first book collection, Pearls Before Swine, has sold through four printings.

This Little Piggy Stayed Home continues the adventures of Rat and Pig, two characters who couldn't be more different-or more surprising. Rat is your typical Every Rodent: scheming, self-centered, and more than occasionally manipulative. By contrast, Pig is sensitive, kind, and-even on his best days-just plain stupid. Together with Zebra and Goat, they confront the strange and wonderful world around them, a place that looks suspiciously like our own.

By turns thoughtful and subversive, silly and sophisticated, This Little Piggy Stayed Home is one of the funniest comic collections out there.

"Zits has been a smash since it was introduced in 1997. It's the story of Jeremy, a typical 15-year-old who rolls his eyes and sighs at his baby boomer parents but also loves and needs them. You may not laugh when your teenager acts that way toward you, but you'll laugh at Zits."Mention the comic strip Zits to teenagers or their parents and they'll eagerly launch into a long list of their favorite stories and strips that made it to the refrigerator door, making Zits the most effective form of communication between parents and their teens since the Post-it note. It's a phenomenon that takes place daily all over the world as teens and their parents thrust the latest exploits of Jeremy and his parents in front of each other and say, "This is so you! "

This latest collection contains the story of Jeremy and Hector's surefire moneymaking summer koi pond digging business, the e-mail breakup between Sara and Jeremy, and over 200 more of this "essence of adolescence" comic strip. Busted! marks the eighth collection of the strip, which now appears in more than 1,000 newspapers worldwide.