The 2016 GoComics Holiday Gift Guide: Awesome Comic Collections, Books, Calendars and Prints
by The GoComics Team'Tis the season for managing expectations and decking the halls with carefully considered gifts for people who have everything. No pressure, right? Actually, right! Allow us to answer that rhetorical question we just posed, because we've got nearly a score of righteous gift ideas for everyone on your list. Read on for our recommended comic collections, books, graphic novels and prints.
Comic Collections
Heart and Brain: Gut Instincts
Nick Seluk has created a fine body of work in his comic The Awkward Yeti. Literally. It's full of strips starring the personifications of body parts navigating the challenges of daily life while expressing their not-always-congrous points of view! Why do you think this collection is called "Heart and Brain"? Surely you had a gut instinct!
Starring anatomically incorrect anatomy characters, Gut Instincts may just help you listen to your own body. Like right now as your own heart and brain make the unanimous decision to buy this hilarious collection.
Lincoln Peirce has been making fans laugh with the schoolyard mirth of Big Nate going on 25 years, so a collection worthy of a quarter of a decade could only be captured in this epic collection. At 472 pages, it's not technically the "Longest Nate" but it certainly remains the "Biggest Nate," and one any giftee's shelves will proudly support.
100 Tricks to Appear Smarter in Meetings
We could supply you a list of actionable best practices to optimize your gifting, but all we really need to do to sell you on Sarah Cooper's illustrated corporate survival guide is to admit that we use it on each other here at the office when sanity demands it. No meeting required. Enjoy your lunch. You're welcome.
Adulthood is a Myth: A Sarah's Scribbles Collection
They say that the holidays are a time for children, as only pure hearts are capable of absorbing their wintery wonders. In that case, it's a good thing Adulthood is a Myth. Sarah Andersen's collection of Sarah's Scribbles comics is a jolly reminder that there's no firm start date when it comes to having your life perfectly together. As you face the daunting demands of this gift giving season, this is one collection primed to help with you and your giftee of choice's pre and post-holiday self care.
Dana Simpson introduced Phoebe to a Unicorn four years ago and the duo's world has never been the same since. The duo's adventures blend wonder and wryness. It's downright majestic. The collected series translates the original comic strip's magic into a digest-sized delight, packing hundreds of pages of Unipower into each full-color volume. The series begins with Phoebe and Her Unicorn and gallops on in Unicorn on a Roll: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure, Unicorn vs. Goblins: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure and the latest volume, Razzle Dazzle Unicorn: Another Phoebe and Her Unicorn Adventure. Did we mention it fits great in stockings?
These days most don't have a kind word to say about "The Media," but public sentiment would surely skew more positive if more people tuned into the ever-adorable Breaking Cat News. Based on creator Georgia Dunn's real life cats Lupin, Puck and Elvis, the CN news crew focuses on the issues that matter most with an unbiased look at making messes, investigative reports into birds flying into windows and getting cozy between a human's feet. Rest assured, this collection is not your average newscast.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
Available in both hardcover and paperback versions, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is the ultimate resource for C&H completionists and brand new fans alike. Containing each of Bill Watterson's beloved strips, book illustrations and more, these box sets will get any reader well through the winter (with sledding breaks aplenty, we suspect).
A decade of Far Side strips awaits in this handsome cow-patterned box set, which valuts readers into the furtherest recesses of Gary Larson's creativity banks and back. We could brag about its three volumes amassing 1278 total pages of comics, but in the case of this cartooning behemoth, it's equally impressive to note its weight of 11.6 lbs. You now have a unit of measurement for mirth: Complete Far Sides. A pug, for example, weighs about 1.2 Complete Far Sides. Not bad.
Fowl Language: Welcome to Parenting
For many adults, the holidays are a time to cherish with the youngest members of the family. Kids love presents! Kids love to play! But thank goodness kids are taken away by their parents after a few hours so you can get back to higher pursuits like Netflix and sleeping in until noon. For parents, such selfish catharsis is discouraged, however. It's so unfair. Find refuge from the suffocating demands of parental perfection instead with Brian Gordon's latest Fowl Language collection, which joyously sheds the suffocating sentimentality of parenting in favor of a wittier reality. Get it for the parents in your life.
When Bill Amend decided to release a collection of 20+ years of his FoxTrot strip, he didn't leave the curation to just anybody, he picked the comics himself! This season, you can return the favor by picking The Best of FoxTrot for your curated list of best gifts. It's not exactly a balanced comparison. You likely only have a few dozen gifts to buy, while Bill had to dig through thousands of strips spanning 1988-2010 for a book with nearly 1,600 selections on 248 pages across two volumes in one box set. See how easy it is to do right by Bill? Get somebody who likes funny family goodness The Best of FoxTrot.
Over 30 years of Doonesbury comics, Gary Trudeau crafted a fictional narrative that saw Donald Trump rise to the highest office in the United States of America. It turned out to be nothing short of prescient. It makes you want to buy a copy to see just what else he foretold... And no, we cannot confirm that the pages are loaded with subliminals hinting at winning lottery numbers for the year 2046.
Man, I Hate Cursive: Cartoons for People and Advanced Bears
Jim Benton's collection of hilarious strips work to understand the nature of reality. That's probably why the full title of this tome clarifies its intended audience of people and advanced bears. Reality is heady stuff. A lot of people can't quite wrap their heads around it. Bears are smart and all, but it should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched cartoons that they're generally better for stealing picnic baskets and mauling things than questioning their universe. What were we saying? This is a cool collection. Get it for the advanced bears on your list.
Graphic Novels
Best known for his Savage Chickens, cartoonist Doug Savage broke out this year to draw a moose and a rabbit -- a Laser Moose and a Rabbit Boy, to be precise. What's a moose to do with a sunny pal and laser vision? Battle aliens, chimeras, cyborgs and robots, of course. Evildoers likely will not enjoy all that this present has to offer. Everyone else, though? You're in fine, laser-y shape.
Books
When Gemma Correll isn't busy making our day with her Four Eyes comic, awesome calendars and pug art, she's... making even more goodness! This year the artist teamed with writer Hayley Long for Being a Girl, an illustrated guide -- well, more of a celebration -- to coming of age for young women. Funny, inspiring and full of practical, confidence-building information, Being a Girl is an empowering gift for the younger generation (and their parents).
Calendars
Heart and Brain 2017 Wall Calendar
Can't get enough Heart and Brain? Love the skin their in year-round with this 2017 wall calendar full of The Awkward Yeti's disembodied organs. They'll treat you right.
Pearls Before Swine 2017 Day-to-Day Calendar
The PBS 2017 Day-to-Day calendar doesn't just give you a daily dose of hilarious, hand-selected Pearls Before Swine weekly and weekend comic strips by creator Stephan Pastis -- it goes the extra mile to deliver bonus content on the back of every page. There's puzzles, jokes, lists, quotes, plus tips and trivia. You can also fold the tearable 5.5 x 6.2" pages into paper airplanes and throw them at family, friends, coworkers and other deserving humans in your life. Now there's a bonus!
Business Cat 2017 Wall Calendar: The Adventures of Business Cat
Tom Fonder's The Adventures of Business Cat comic has a strange power. It plays on the corporate world's many frustrations -- complete with incompetent corporate leadership -- but somehow instead of fostering work-related PTSD, it makes you laugh. It may have something to do with the fact that the titular lead is an anthropomorphic cat in a suit and tie, but we're hardly doctors, let alone veterinarians. Buy it for your home. Or business. Or scratching post.
The Worrier’s Guide to Live 2017 Wall Calendar
If you enjoy Gemma Correll's spin on the coming-of-age anxiety of early adulthood in her comic Four Eyes or her book The Worrier's Guide to Life, you'll find plenty to appreciate each month in this 2017 calendar. Plus it's guaranteed to help stop one particular worry in your life: whether or not you have a calendar. Don't say we never did anything for you!
Did you know you can order high-resolution prints of most comics on GoComics.com? You can even choose between five classy framing options! Most strips even have the option to be printed in black and white line art, or in full color. Not only do these prints on 11x17" archival paper look amazing and hold up better than snipping a strip from a newspaper and sticking it to your refrigerator, ordering one is also easier. Yes, really! All you have to do is click the shopping cart icon beneath your comic of choice, select "Buy Comic Art Prints" and make your art and framing choices. Just be sure to order framed prints by December 9 and plain prints by December 16 to make sure they're your way by December 25.
Happy holiday shopping from GoComics!
