The New York Times Review of Books on Sunday, September 14th, reviewed two titles of interest to pop culture retailers -- Mark Evanier's Mad Art from Watson Guptill and Craig Thompson's Blankets.  Mad Art gets a longer review; the Blankets review is in 'Books in Brief.'  Both books are worthy of some extra merchandising attention this week to take advantage of this positive exposure to the literati that read the NY Times Review of Books.   

Reviewer Maud Levin puts Mad Art in a personal context, talking about her early experiences with the satirical monthly.  She describes Evanier's book as 'a detail-rich collection of artists who have worked for Mad and an insider's look at the magazine's gag artists, political caricaturists and Alfred E. Neuman portraitists.'  While she feels that additional historical context could have been given, she is generally positive about the book and how it reveals details about the artists who worked for Mad while toiling for ad agencies, card companies, 'straight' magazines, and other parts of the establishment that they parodied in Mad. 

The Blankets review by Ken Tucker notes Thompson's    use of the term 'illustrated novel' as an indication that the work rises above much of what is produced in the graphic novel medium.  He describes the work, '[B]lack-and-white drawings of simple power, a technique of crosshatched realism that slips without melodrama into a vertiginous surrealism...possesses the artistic detail of a novel rendered in comic-book panels, omniscient-narrator description and word-balloon dialogue.'