Mark Alan Stamaty

The cult classic kids book in all its resplendent absurdity and subversiveness Sam's love of donuts takes him to the Big City where he makes friends with Mr. Bikferd, a world class collector of donuts. But when Mr. Bikferd falls in love with Pretzel Annie, the prophecy of an old woman comes true: "Who needs donuts when you've got love?" Mr. Bikferd bequeaths his donut collection to Sam, who uses it to save the old woman from drowning in a basement flooded with coffee. This is a reissue of Mark Alan Stamaty's masterpiece of the absurd, first published 50 years ago. With an illustration style that mixes a benign Hieronymus Bosch with an urban Where's Waldo?, Stamaty's off-the-wall humor is on target for little kids and big kids today.

Yellow Yellow is a charmingly simple story of a child whose playground is a gritty urban cityscape, written by Frank Asch and drawn by Mark Alan Stamaty. With no parent in sight, the boy wanders the sidewalks to find a yellow construction hat that quickly becomes his favorite belonging, earning him many compliments from strangers on nearby stoops. Eventually the boy meets the owner of the hat and must return it, leading the child to make his own yellow hat. Yet the story comes alive via the visual feast of urban oddities that the Who Needs Donuts? cartoonist Stamaty packs in the background of this rediscovered children s classic. As the boy innocently wears his yellow hard hat down city streets, he is oblivious to his surrealist fun-house surroundings filled with fantastical neighbors, such as an old lady on a unicycle and a punk with a head full of fish vacuuming the sidewalk. In scratchy black ink drawings, Stamaty builds a bygone city filled with small storefronts shoe stores, bookshops, delicatessens, and barbershops all packed with detail upon detail. Delightfully grotesque humor lurks in the scenery of Yellow Yellow from page to page, rewarding multiple readings. Stamaty s imagination to fill the space is as limitless as the world was to a young boy in 1970.

A collection of legendary absurdist comic strips about life in 1970s New York City, now available in print for the first time in over thirty years. Every week, from 1978 to 1980, The Village Voice brought a new installment of Mark Alan Stamaty's uproarious, endlessly inventive strip MacDoodle St. Centering more or less on Malcolm Frazzle, a blocked poet struggling to complete his latest lyric for Dishwasher Monthly, Stamaty's creation encompassed a dizzying array of characters, stories, jokes, and digressions. One week might feature the ongoing battle between irate businessmen and bearded beatniks for control of a Greenwich Village coffee shop, the next might reveal a dastardly plot involving a genetically engineered dishwashing monkey, or the frustrated dreams of an irascible, over-caffeinated painter, or the mysterious visions of a duffle-coated soothsayer on the bus. Not to mention the variable moods and longings of the comic strip itself.... And somehow, in the end, it all fits together. MacDoodle St. is more than just a hilarious weekly strip; it is a great comic novel, a thrilling, surprising, unexpectedly moving ode to art, life, and New York City. This new edition features a brand-new, twenty-page autobiographical comic by Stamaty explaining what happened next and why MacDoodle St. never returned, in a unique, funny, and poignant look at the struggles and joys of being an artist.

The inspiring story of an Iraqi librarian's courageous fight to save books from the Basra Central Library before it was destroyed in the war. It is 2003 and Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of the Central Library in Basra, Iraq, has grown worried given the increased likelihood of war in her country. Determined to preserve the irreplacable records of the culture and history of the land on which she lives from the destruction of the war, Alia undertakes a courageous and extremely dangerous task of spiriting away 30,000 books from the library to a safe place. Told in dramatic graphic-novel panels by acclaimed cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, Alia's Mission celebrates the importance of books and the freedom to read, while examining the impact of war on a country and its people.