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.

The Fab Four of the funny pages come together again-this time in their first book treasury.

Rat, Pig, Zebra, and Goat, the central characters of Pearls Before Swine, are back in Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic, the first Pearls Before Swine treasury-supersized for your enjoyment.

But this is no ordinary cartoon treasury. Like the influential Beatles album that inspired the book's title, Sgt. Piggy is full of surprises. In addition to collecting all of the Pearls cartoons that appeared in BLTs Taste So Darn Good and This Little Piggy Stayed Home, cartoonist Stephan Pastis takes readers on a VIP backstage tour of one of the most successful comic strips in newspapers today.

In Sgt. Piggy, Pastis explains the genesis of Pearls (hint: it didn't begin at an artist's easel), why he was initially reluctant to show it to newspaper syndicates (and the surprising reason he changed his mind), the unexpected responses from readers to his work, and which Pearls strips worked and which ones didn't (and how he would have corrected the ones that didn't). The result is a rare and revealing glimpse into the world of Rat, Pig, Goat and Zebra. Full of humor and insight, sardonic asides and unexpected truths, Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic is a book that comics fans everywhere can enjoy anytime-even when they're 64!

You have to wonder what kind of pets cartoonist Darby Conley had as a child. If they were anything like Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch. . . well, life in the Conley house must have been interesting to say the least. The wacky triumvirate of Bucky, Satchel, and Rob are back in this Get Fuzzy collection,

Rob Wilco is the mild-mannered ad executive caretaker of Bucky and Satchel. Satchel is a sweet and naïve shar-pei-yellow-Lab cross, while Bucky is a Siamese with "cat-titude" to spare. Bucky and Satchel get along like, well, like cats and dogs. Like a beleaguered parent, Rob constantly must thwart Bucky's schemes and protect the unsuspecting Satchel. His pets' mischief continually disrupts his attempts to meet women. You try explaining to your date why your cat thinks he's a gangsta rapper and your dog is filming his ";crib" for MTV. Would anyone live with humans who behaved like this?

Bitingly funny with a wry sense of the absurdity of life with pets, Get Fuzzy appeals to everyone who has ever lived in a mixed-species household.

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/