It's never too early to get excited about anything related to Shepard Fairey, and so we're pleased to bring you word that come February, the man who made the world obedient to his mesmerizing Andre the Giant stencil will get his first solo museum exhibition—and at no less a venue than Boston's shimmering new Institute of Contemporary Art, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The exhibition, "Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand," is slated to run from February 6 through April 19 of next year and will include everything from early stenciled stickers and screenprints to works on wood and metal and fresh-from-the-studio pieces on paper and canvas. This all bodes very well for sales at the ICA gift shop.

If you've yet to experience the artist behind the bold, propaganda-flavored creations, here's an excerpt from Fairey's presentation at last fall's QBN Sessions event in which he explained the origin of the Andre stencil and "the Rorschach test facet" of his entire project.

We were sure that the iconic Strand tote bag had reached its design apex with the lovely toile de Jouy number we picked up on the way out of the bookstore's recent Richard Hell and Christopher Wool event, but Ron Hogan of our bookish brother blog, GalleyCat (and a tote bag expert if ever there was one), has the scoop on the newest version. Designed by cartoonist, illustrator, and graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (whose work you probably recognize from his outstanding, moody-hued New Yorker covers), the bag features Tomine's drawings of "the many faces of Strand customers, and there are different people depicted on each side," notes the Strand's website, where the tote sell for a cool $10.95 alongside those featuring illustrations by Art Spiegelman and David Hockney.

Tomine, a Strand regular, gave Hogan a peek into his process. "I am by nature a people watcher, but in the case of this project, the faces were mostly imagined by me while sitting in my studio," he wrote in an e-mail. "It's always a dicey thing trying to draw unsuspecting strangers in public, and I wouldn't have wanted to cause any commotion in one of my favorite New York book stores." Hogan reports that the Strand is now at work on bags featuring book covers drawn from a list of the store's all-time most popular titles. Here's hoping that Tintin In The Land Of the Soviets makes the cut.

Most Americans like to imagine the authors of children's books as cheery Mister Rogers types, endowed with primary-colored minds occupied only by the continuing adventures of their particular brand of talking rodent, wayward snowman, or scruffy but lovable youngster. And so, in the 1950s and '60s, the country struggled with Tomi Ungerer, who mixed creating children's books about such characters as an heroic octopus (Emile, pictured at right, in the bath) and a family of daring French pigs with work designed for an adult audience, including anti-Vietnam posters and erotica. In yesterday's New York Times, Randy Kennedy welcomed back "the most famous children's book author you have never heard of" as Phaidon prepares to republish his children's books in English.

Sure, Ungerer, now 76, once "made a habit of playing poker with the Cuban envoy to the United Nations" and published a book of "interviews with dominatrixes at a bordello in Hamburg; the title, roughly translated, is Guardian Angels of Hell," but he also wrote some extraordinary children's books. Having acquired the English-language rights to Ungerer's work from a Swiss publisher, Phaidon will this fall release the 1962 tale of The Three Robbers, "a darkly drawn tale of big-hatted brigands and the orphan girl who shows them the error of their ways." Among the book's virtues is its refusal to talk down to young readers. "I think children have to be respected," said Ungerer. "They understand the world, in their way. They understand adult language. There should not be a limit of vocabulary. In The Three Robbers I don't use the word 'gun.' I say 'blunderbuss.' My goodness, isn't it more poetic?"

We've always thought of artist and writer Steve Ditko as the Brit Hadden to Stan Lee's Henry Luce. Now a new book spotlights the reclusive co-creator of Spider-Man who abandoned Spidey, Doctor Strange, and mainstream success to chronicle the adventures of such characters as Mr. A, an Ayn Rand-inspired character of his own creation. Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics) is a coffee table book retrospective of Ditko's career in 14 chapters, from his youth in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and 1950 arrival in New York City through his time at Marvel and subsequent fallings out with both Marvel and DC Comics and ultimate dedication to work fueled by Objectivism.

Ken Tucker's review of Strange and Stranger in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly highlights the unique style Ditko established in the early 1960s with The Amazing Spider-Man: "expressive, shoebox-shaped faces; long, tapered fingers with meticulously penciled knuckles; rubbery arms and legs. These visual tics gave Spider-Man a distinctive look. Where other superheroes were chunks of muscle, Spidey was an elegantly elastic figure." And hard-core comics fans still can't get enough. Comic-Con International, which opened today in San Diego, on Saturday evening features both a "World of Steve Ditko" panel and a screening of the 2007 documentary In Search of Steve Ditko. Bell will be on hand to sign copies of his book at the Fantagraphics booth throughout the convention.

It's entitled "The Politics of Fear" and features a turbaned, robe-clad Barack Obama in an Oval Office fist bump with his wife, Michelle, who has swapped her usual sheath dress and pumps for camo fatigues and combat boots, accessorized not with gumball pearls but an AK-47 and a swath of bullets. In the fireplace beside them burns an American flag. This is the Barry Blitt illustration that adorns the cover of the July 21 issue of The New Yorker, and while it's only now winging its way to most subscribers' mailboxes, the cover is already generating a flurry of controversy, as our sister blog, FishbowlNY predicted yesterday in a post that began with the question: "Ironic or just nuts?" Meanwhile, today's Daily Heller helpfully provides both Merriam-Webster's definition of "satire" and a selection of past New Yorker covers designed to "make readers question social, political, and cultural assumptions." FishbowlNY has just posted Blitt's past New Yorker covers for you to print, cut out, collect, and trade. And over at the Huffington Post, New Yorker editor David Remnick tells Rachel Sklar, "The fact is, it's not a satire about Obama—it's a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama."

We're not ashamed to admit that today, nearly two decades after Pee Wee's Playhouse taped its final episode, we can name most of the characters that were embedded into the show's fantastical set (oh, how we coveted Magic Screen, to say nothing of plush, toothpaste-hued Chairry), the creation of which was helmed by illustrator, painter, and designer Gary Panter. And so we were thrilled to discover that Panter has a blog, and while only updated once every couple of months, it does not disappoint. Late last year, Brooklyn-based Panter wrote of his experience dropping off a cover design at the Manhattan offices of Marvel Comics, where he was directed to deposit his envelope at the end of a hall ("There on the floor, by the door, was a pile of packages, but also some thrown-out pizza boxes in the same pile....Is this any way to run a Death star?"). But we call your attention to Panter's most recent post, in which he weaves a wonderful tale-cum-thank you note to the employees of a Taco Bell he recently visited. An excerpt:

I can't chew gum and walk straight, so I can only vaguely imagine the fog one must enter; what psychic challenge it must be, trying to order ones senses while taking the order by earpiece, given all the contradictory sensorial input; running back and forth from the colorful branded zones of Baskin-Robbins/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/Dunkin Donuts—how many colors and smells can you intake per minute? You have to be as canny as a bartender, mixing subtle ratios of matter and flavor bits, into tasty Manhattans of 100% cheesefood, microwaved ground fried beef, frosty sour cream, gloopy russian dressing and so forth, soft or crispy?....I feel for you. All of you. You all. Not just all of you. All of you all.

Investor's Business Daily senior editor and editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez (pictured at right), winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning (he also won in 1994), has accepted that his work can't change people's minds, but it just might save the world, he told the New York Post's Kyle Smith in a recent interview.

"I'm not naive enough to think I'm gonna change people's minds," he says, but "editorial cartoons are a lot like advertising. You're selling an idea. Just like millions are invested in ads because they're effective I think editorial cartoons can be effective. We're trying to save the world incrementally."

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One of those things this writer missed telling you about while he was off lifting heavy boxes and gallivanting around the South was that our friend Stefan Bucher drew his last Daily Monster late last week. After setting a goal of thinking up, drawing, filming and editing, Bucher has now moved on to other things (Daily Unicorns?) and we wish him all the best. Here's the last:

If you find yourself suddenly missing Mr. Bucher after this viewing, we highly suggest going back and reading over our Seven Questions with him.

One of our favorite movie moments of all time is when Good Will Hunting's Will (Matt Damon) pulls out a historiographical can of whoop-ass on a snide young scholar looking for a scuffle. ("You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably....next year, you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about ya know, the Pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.") Although the film may have sold a few books for Wood, we suspect it was better at moving copies of another tome mentioned in the film: A People's History of the United States, written by Damon's childhood neighbor, Howard Zinn. Since its publication in 1980, the book has sold more than 1.7 million copies, but what about those who prefer comics to dense pages of text? Well, now they have their own version.

A People's History of American Empire is the classic told "in comic form," created by Zinn in collaboration with historian Paul Buhle and cartoonist Mike Konopacki. Published this month by Macmillan, the book "opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution," according to the publisher. And this being a comic book, there's an added hero angle:

The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians.

Ron Hogan of our sister blog, Galleycat, recently picked up on what we hope isn't a new trend in international publishing. A Hong Kong publisher has compiled years worth of blogger Darren Di Lieto's interviews with illustrators and hundreds of works by the interview subjects into a book--without the permission of the illustrators and without crediting Di Lieto or the blog (the illustration news portal The Little Chimp Society) as the source of the material. To make matters worse, the book includes a CD of all of the images in the book (with filenames that are identical to those on the LCS site), suggesting that they're without copyright and free to use.

Di Lieto learned of the plagiarized volume from Jonathan Edwards, one of the illustrators whose work is included in the book, and wrote about the horrific incident on his personal blog. "I'm currently in the process of contacting the included illustrators, to let them know they've been ripped-off," writes Di Lieto, who is working to track down the publishers, a company with the ironic moniker of "Great Creativity Organization." "I've been in contact with the [Association of Illustrators] to get legal advice, but I think at the end of the day I or the illustrators who have had their copy stolen will not be able to do much about this situation without major backing or support."