Happy Birthday, Lynda Barry and Naoki Urasawa!

According to Tom Spurgeon, two of my favorite cartoonists share a birthday today.  Lynda Barry is unquestionably one of our greatest living cartoonists, and Drawn & Quarterly has just released Blabber, Blabber, Blabber, the first in a series of volumes collecting all of her work.  I got a copy for Christmas and can't wait to read it!

Naoki Urasawa is the creator of the manga series Monster and the currently published 20th Century Boys, a complex thriller that I've fallen behind on reading and need to get caught up on.  My absolute favorite of Urasawa's works (and one of my all time favorite manga) is Pluto (shown above), a reimagining of a famous storyline from Osamu Tezuka's classic children's manga, Astro Boy.