RAW Talent

This is the way to publish sketchbooks.

More, please.

You publish the sketchbooks. Actually reproduce, as closely as possible, the same scale, paper, binding, and well, heft of these precious archives. Many artists carry a sketchbook wherever they go, each page, clean and bright with the promise of a new idea, a chance to capture a unique face, a juvenile cartoon, and, maybe most importantly, private failures of experimentation.

With his new sketchbook Be a Nose! (McSweeney's, $29), pioneering comics artist Art Spiegelman utilizes the same ace-in-the-hole design sense that made RAW Magazine the most important comic work of the 1980s.

He has re-created, in content and in form, three small sketchbooks from three different periods. The covers are printed to look as if they've been hand-drawn and painted, decorated with stickers, and used. As someone who has filled, and not filled, countless sketchbooks, I am pleased to no end to see this work presented in just this way. Looking at the books physically – their size, color, paper – informs the actual art in a very personal way. Props to McSweeney's for taking on what was surely a huge hassle to produce.

Spiegelman's sketchbook from 1979 is the thinnest and saddest (and so was Spiegelman, I'll wager), and shows only the seeds of what is to come in the book from 1983, when RAW magazine was in full swing. It's full of confident, bold, and entirely successful experiments with technique and layout. On graph paper! The 2007 book is the most playful and the most professional, the relaxed work of a seasoned cartoonist at his funniest.

Spiegelman acknowledges that his sketchbooks don't share the sheer volume of work presented in thick collections by fellow masters Robert Crumb and Chris Ware, but he has totally trumped them in terms of presentation. He also talks about the countless sketchbooks that he didn't fill out. If you're a lapsed sketchbook or diary-keeper, check out Be a Nose!. You might be inspired to keep one in your back pocket again.