From Booklist
Each new number of editor Beauchamp's cutting-edge comics anthology series looks more like an art book, less like a comic book. Number 14 has more full-page and two-page pieces sans text or narrative than ever before, and many seeming stories are just situations, incidents, or sequences. Camille Rose Garcia's "Pharmaceuticools" conveys a message about antidepressants, but it's ambiguous, unless her loopy figures against a blotted and dripped, linoleum-like backdrop imply skepticism. Walter Minus and Sylvia Despretz's "Lower Broadway Stash"--full-page cheesecakey depictions of a young lovely in dishabille--hints at a crime story, but all the action is elided. Mark Landman's Day-Glo-ing "Fetal Elvis" tale isn't as much fun as the one in New & Used Blab! [BKL N 15 03], but Matti Hagelberg's black-and-white Elvis adventure, "Hard-Boiled Kekkonen," weirdly--very weirdly--makes up for it. Peter Kuper's autobiographical "Dead Sea" and Doug Allen's "A Series of Small Fires" are the most conventional stories at hand. Everything, including Beauchamp's portfolio of enormously blown-up matchbook-cover art, does, however, look marvelous. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Print
With superior printing, an overwide magazine size, a perfect-bound spine, and eclectic content, BLAB! pushes the limits of the form.

Graphis
Work that crosses both boundaries into a new kind of pictorial art form.

Book Description
Welcome to the preeminent anthology of the graphic design and illustration arts. BLAB!'s list of contributors past and present reads like a Who's Who of the contemporary visual art world, and each volume is an eclectic mix of the world's most exciting artists from both the fine art world and commercial fields. Conceived, edited and designed by five-time New York Festival of Advertising award-winner Monte Beauchamp, BLAB! has grown from a digest-size b/w fanzine begun over 15 years ago to an annual coffee-table showcase that bridges the ever-narrowing divides between high and low art as well as abstract expressionism and representationalism. Simply put, BLAB! is an objet d'art that has become a standard-bearer in the world of the professional visual arts. Included in this volume: David Sandlin's "Slumburbia," a four-page color panorama depicting the temptations of the American family unit; Sue Coe's "WOMD" (weapons of mass destruction), which focuses on the weapons that affect the planet every day, from poverty and pollution to AIDS, globalization, factory farming, the criminal 'justice' system, and ignorance (featuring text by Judy Brody); Documentary filmmaker and award-winning children's book illustrator Laura Levine recounts the bizarre case of the Picolo Midgets, a vaudeville circus act that traveled throughout America during the early 1900s; Spain Rodriguez delivers an autobiographical view of the origins of Playboy and the sexual fervor it spawned during 1950s America; Editor Beauchamp contributes "Kilroy Was Here," a history of World War II's big-nosed, chrome-domed, graffiti cartoon icon crudely scrawled on surfaces everywhere by G.I.s who travelled throughout the world; Marc Rosenthal's "What's Dat?" is a surreal, philosophical and social critique centered around the travels of a small graphic shape as it moves around our world; Mark Landman returns with another adventure of "Fetal Elvis"; And much, much more, including BLAB! regulars Gary Baseman, The Clayton Brothers, Drew Friedman, Blanquet, and others, all wrapped under a gorgeous cover by BLAB! sophomore Camille Rose Garcia.

About the Author
Monte Beauchamp has also edited The Life & Times of R. Crumb: Comments from Contemporaries from St. Martin's Press. His work has appeared in Print, Communication Arts, American Illustration, and the New York Festival's Annual of Advertising. He lives in Chicago, IL.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Welcome to the preeminent anthology of the graphic design and illustration arts.BLAB!'s list of contributors past and present reads like a Who's Who of the contemporary visual art world, and each volume is an eclectic mix of the world's most exciting artists from both the fine art world and commercial fields. Conceived, edited and designed by five-time New York Festival of Advertising award-winner Monte Beauchamp, BLAB! has grown from a digest-size b/w fanzine begun over 15 years ago to an annual coffee-table showcase that bridges the ever-narrowing divides between high and low art as well as abstract expressionism and representationalism. Simply put, BLAB! is an objet d'art that has become a standard-bearer in the world of the professional visual arts. Included in this volume: David Sandlin's "Slumburbia," a four-page color panorama depicting the temptations of the American family unit; Sue Coe's "WOMD" (weapons of mass destruction), which focuses on the weapons that affect the planet every day, from poverty and pollution to AIDS, globalization, factory farming, the criminal 'justice' system, and ignorance (featuring text by Judy Brody); Documentary filmmaker and award-winning children's book illustrator Laura Levine recounts the bizarre case of the Picolo Midgets, a vaudeville circus act that traveled throughout America during the early 1900s; Spain Rodriguez delivers an autobiographical view of the origins of Playboy and the sexual fervor it spawned during 1950s America; Editor Beauchamp contributes "Kilroy Was Here," a history of World War II's big-nosed, chrome-domed, graffiti cartoon icon crudely scrawled on surfaces everywhere by G.I.s who travelled throughout the world; Marc Rosenthal's "What's Dat?" is a surreal, philosophical and social critique centered around the travels of a small graphic shape as it moves around our world; Mark Landman returns with another adventure of "Fetal Elvis"; And much, much more, including BLAB! regulars Gary Baseman, The Clayton Brothers, Drew Friedman, Blanquet, and others, all wrapped under a gorgeous cover by BLAB! sophomore Camille Rose Garcia.