The Big Book of Urban Legends (The Big book Series)

Urban legends–those apocryphal, happened-to-a-friend-of-a-friend stories of such outlandish incidents as "the microwaved pet" and "alligators in the sewer"–are inherently fun, but they've never been as entertainingly presented as in this collection of some 200 told in comic strip format by a stunning variety of artists drawn from the comics mainstream (e.g., Howard Chaykin, Keith Giffen, Dick Giordano), underground (e.g., Tina Robbins, Justin Green, Shary Flenniken), and everywhere in between. Although the contributors' work is of uniformly high quality, some of them relate the tales in realistic, deadpan fashion, whereas others take a cartoony approach that exaggerates the already outlandish nature of the yarns. An introduction and commentary by urban folklore scholar and entrepreneur Jan Harold Brunvand (The Vanishing Hitchhiker [1981] et seq.) legitimizes the project, but as Brunvand points out, comics are just another manifestation of the same popular culture that spawned the legends in the first place. All told, the big paperback is a promising, affordable launching of DC Comics' new Paradox Press imprint. Gordon Flagg