Is your face suffering from a lack of exercise? Readers rely on John McPherson's Close to Home cartoon to contort their facial muscles into an unstoppable grin each day. Not even Botox can stop you from smiling at this latest collection of Close to Home. How do you measure a cartoon's popularity? The true measure of a comic panel's popularity is how often it is posted on a refrigerator, cubicle, break room bulletin board, or office door. By that standard, Close to Home wins the comic panel popularity contest hands down. Close to Home captures the humor in all facets of life. From home to hospitals, from classrooms to courtrooms, from boardrooms to backyards-there's a Close to Home panel that hits us where we live and work and play. A Million Little Pieces of Close to Home features hilarious panels first published in newspapers in the year 2000, the year of the Y2K scare that never materialized. Of course, that's just the kind of thing you'd expect from a Close to Home world.

I think comic strips can enlighten as well as entertain. Adolescence is a very funny time, except when you're in it. Many teens feel alone in their struggles; I want to show them that adolescence may be scary but it isn't fatal. Finding the humor amid the horror is helpful." Luann DeGroot is a 16 year old girl who's full of spirited personality-and agonizing confusion. Like all teens, she's happy if she can stumble through a day without totally embarrassing herself. She lives with typical parents and an annoying older brother. Luann and her best buds, Bernice and Delta, along with a lively cast of characters from Pitts School, struggle with the euphoric highs and devastating lows that torment the life of a contemporary teen. From small events (a pop quiz) to large (a daring fire rescue), Luann 3 delivers the kind of poignant, honest, amusing stories that have made Luann a reader favorite for 21 years. Luann is featured in 400 newspapers worldwide, and LuannsRoom.com receives 80,000 hits a day. Luann consistently ranks in the top five in newspaper surveys and is often number one with female readers. Luann, the Musical, from Pioneer Drama, has been performed by hundreds of theater groups across the country.

It's an embarrassment of riches. I feel like an undertaker who just heard about a bus accident. It's tragic, but good for business. Maybe, just maybe, the reason Scott Adams is able to so completely and utterly skewer the absurdities of the modern workplace is that deep down he really enjoyed his many years as a cubicle dweller. Perhaps his comic strip Dilbert is nothing more than a cleverly disguised 17-year-long love letter to corporate America. And maybe, just maybe, monkeys will fly out of Donald Trump's butt. In Try Rebooting Yourself, AMP's 28th Dilbert collection, the world's most dysfunctional office family is back and doing what it does best. Wally adroitly steers clear of new assignments-and perfects his work grimace. The Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB) thinks of new ways to demoralize and disenfranchise his employees. (As part of a new strategy to make the pension plan solvent, he reminds employees Smoking is cool.) Dogbert continues his lucrative consulting business. And Dilbert, alas, he soldiers and smolders on, searching for intelligent life in the corporate universe-and maybe, just maybe, a little action. (Fat chance.) This time out, the gang is joined by a host of odd (but strangely familiar) guest characters including the clueless Hammerhead Bob, and Petricia, the PHB's fawning but ferocious sycophant. All office workers may now nod knowingly.

Gary and Glenn McCoy's delightfully absurd comic panel blends superheroes, office humor, huggable animals, and twisted relationships in a bizarre marriage of Gary Larson, the New Yorker, Conan O'Brien, and Mad Magazine. Put succinctly, the brothers McCoy present ''comics for a bold new world.'' Creating a world where greeting cards heal hospital patients, police officers pull over children driving bumper cars, babies use the patch to quell the pacifier habit, and nudists find out what constitutes a streaker in their colony, the St. Louis area natives alternate writing and drawing duties for the daily panel. The brothers each have been nominated for multiple National Cartoonists Society awards, and Glenn has won in three categories. Gary McCoy's past as a comedian (he won HBO's Stand-Up Stand-Off contest for the St. Louis area in 1995) also shines through in the strip's offbeat humor. Their impressive freelance client list reads like a who's who in cartooning: Disney, DreamWorks, and Hyperion, to name just a few.

Another Stereotype Bites the Dust is creator Darrin Bell's second Candorville collection. In this thought-provoking strip Bell uses a diverse group of friends to paint a real yet humorous portrait of inner-city America. An educated underachiever, Lemont Brown is an aspiring writer. Socially conscious, he wants to work at changing the world and infusing it with wisdom and justice-if only he could pay his rent. Lemont's childhood friend Susan Garcia is a book-smart and street savvy Mexican-American woman who won't let bigotry or any glass ceiling keep her down. And Lemont's friend Clyde (aka ''C-Dog'') is a streetwise thug and undiscovered rapper who'd rather mooch off his mother than get a job. Another Stereotype Bites the Dust deals with some tough issues-poverty, homelessness, racism, and personal responsibility-with knowing irony and incisive satire. Bell uses edgy dialogue and modern situations to jab everything from political correctness to political spinning, from political hindsight to office politics, making it a hit among socially aware 20- and 30-somethings. Syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, Candorville appears in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, and Al Dia (Dallas Morning News Spanish edition), and many other major newspapers.

The latest book in the Get Fuzzy series sees the return of Bucky, Satchel and Rob. Loserpaloozais the third treasury, collecting strips from New York Timesbest-sellers Say Cheesy and Scrum Bums. Loserpalooza is Darby Conley's latest look at the interspecies antics of his wildly popular characters Bucky, Satchel, and Rob. At the centre of this not-so-warm-and-fuzzy arrangement is Rob Wilco, a single, mild-mannered ad exec. Bucky is Rob's temperamental, buck-toothed Siamese cat with a penchant for mischief, a hatred of ferrets, and a love of rubber bands. Satchel is a sweet but naive shar-pei-yellow-Lab mix who haplessly ends up on the receiving end of Bucky's wayward schemes. An entertaining critique on popular culture and a bona fide hit, Get Fuzzywas named Best Comic Strip of the year in 2002 by the National Cartoonists Society and now appears in more than 400 newspapers worldwide.