Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at two more June releases of special interest.

Well turns out there's a couple more items in Diamond's June Previews that interest me, chief amongst them being those Phineas and Ferb comics I've been asking for, sort of.  Disney Press is releasing Phineas and Ferb Early Comic Reader #1: Nothing But Trouble and #2, The Chronicles of Meep, a pair of 32 page, full-color volumes which at $4.99 aren't any more expensive than what publishers are charging for similarly sized kids chapter books.

Of course it turns out these aren't the comics I'm looking for*; the story and art is credited solely to John Green, someone with substantial credits in the young adult fiction field but none as an artist.  So I'm just going to go ahead and assume the obvious; that these aren't comics, as such, but rather a collection of screen captures from the cartoon with dialogue balloons added; giving this theory credence is the fact each volume features adaptations of episodes from the animated series.

But you have to give Disney credit for making them seem like comics, from the trade dress (the covers feature word balloons and a left hand corner box that's reminiscent of old Marvel Comics) to actually putting the word 'comic' in the title.  That's significant because while doing online research (i.e. tooling around the Internet at random) I found these same titles listed on Amazon as 'junior graphic novels.'  Clearly someone at some point must have thought that (a) kids do like comics and (b) the books might have more kid appeal if they actually called 'comics' instead of 'graphic novels'.

So here's hoping at least some of you will give these a try; I know how hard it is to sell comics to kids in the direct sales market but it does happen and the rewards can be more than financial.  Just last Wednesday I saw a little girl carefully laying out her money at the check-out counter of Super-Fly Comics & Games in exchange for the latest Archie; it did my heart a world of good.

In my column of 4/29/2009 (see, "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Know It All Or Know Nothing") I wrote "I think it's about time some publisher collects Funnyman," the character Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created after Superman who briefly appeared in both comic books and strips.  But when I saw the entry for Funnyman under Feral Press, a publisher I wasn't familiar with, in Previews I wasn't so much pleased as disappointed to discover it wasn't a complete collection.  Rather the solicitation only promised "included are complete comic-book stories and daily and Sunday newspaper panels."

A week later I finally got around to rereading the item and found this book was a lot more than Golden Age reprints.  For one thing the book's title in its entirety is Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman: The First Jewish Superman From the Creators of Superman.  And according to the description on Amazon it's "a kaleidoscopic analysis of Jewish humor as seen through Funnyman" and that "all the turmoil and personal disasters in Siegel and Shuster's postwar life percolated into the comic strip.  This book tells the back story of the unsuccessful strip and Siegel and Shuster's ambition to have their funny Jewish superhero trump Superman."

It's co-written by Thomas Andrae who received a "with" credit on Batman and Me (the autobiography of Batman creator Bob Kane) and Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.  As you might expect from this eclectic combination of writers Feral Press (according to their web site) specializes in publishing "innovative and celebrated non-fiction books."

Now I've read the complete run of the Funnyman series and must confess I didn't find anything intrinsically Jewish about it, nor could I see anything reflective of the creators personal lives in the pedestrian characters and stories.  On the other hand I'm really curious to see how Andrae and Gordon back up their interpretation of the character so I've definitely ordered a copy of this one for myself.

I realize that something like this isn't what a lot of people consider 'entertainment,' but then I recall having absolutely zero interest in reading Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster by Craig Yoe.  And when I finally broke down and did I found it to be outstanding, an important piece of social history that's in every way the equal of Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow.

* But at least there's a chance they might exist one day; Phineas and Ferb creators Dan Povenmire and Jeff "Swampy" Marsh have, according to Wikipedia anyway (so I suppose that has to be taken into consideration) confirmed there is going to be a P&F comic book series supervised by writers of the show.  

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.