The next stop in this never-ending chain of books should be Nicolas Verstappen's The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes (River Books, 2021), which I hope to get to soon. If you happen to have the 2021 expanded second edition of Cosmic Comics, the Hibernia Comics / Gosh! Comics / Treasury of British Comics collection of early O'Neill miscellany, you'll recall an anecdote in which Jan Shepheard, art editor of the weekly magazine Valiant, advises O'Neill in 1970 that it would be 10 years before he was good enough to be a proper comic book artist. I can only be referring to the great Kazuo Umezz, aged 85, who recently enjoyed an enormous art exhibition in Tokyo. These are children's comics from an era where the idea of "children's comics" was rapidly shifting to accommodate bleak and mean subjects - a situation Umezz narrates in a hysterical register, beyond the top of over-the-top, provoking a compulsive glee in the sympathetic reader.