silent these largely dialogue free toons certainly are, but deadly they're not. They neither caustic, different or funny enough. Silent but charming would be a duller but more accurate epithet. ( )

I received this book as part of the LT Early Reviewers' group. Before this, I hadn't heard of the comic strip Lio, nor the cartoonist Mark Tatulli.

Like so many of the best cartoonists, you need a little time and familiarity to get the vibe, and understand where Tatulli's sense of humour comes from. If you do that, the book does contain some gems.

That said, I'm not a total fan. The idea of the strip has a single conceit--that young boys delight in icky stuff, fooling adults and getting one-up on each other. Plenty of laughs to be had in this material, but they're quick, silly laughs. Not the kind of laughs that you get from a Charles Addams or a Gary Larson, where you're given pause to think.

Lio's jokes work when the monsters, ghouls and creepy-crawlies of a child's imagination somehow make their way into the real world. Jokes that rely on the real world alone (like where he jokes about his father) fall flat.

Funny: An innocent-looking kid playing Scrabble with Frankenstein, frustrated by the monster's inability to spell anything but "mmmmm".

Not funny: The child finds a tin-can-and-string telephone on the footpath. He picks it up to hear "I'm calling about an exciting offer..." Frankly, I would expect Charlie Brown to do that.

And the bits where Tatulli parodies other comic strips really grate on me, I'm afraid. Lio's world where monsters come alive is interesting. A world where other comic strips come alive--well, it wears thin very quickly. ( )

received under the librarything.com Early Reviewers Program

I've not encountered Lio previously. It took me a few strips to get a feel for the characters but once I did this book was a lot of fun, and far more entertaining than the syndicated comics which appear in my own daily newspaper.

I particularly enjoyed the strips in which Lio was inserted into other well-known comic worlds (Charles M. Schultz's "Peanuts" for example)

I'll be passing this copy on for others to enjoy, and I'll keep my eye out for more of Mark Tatulli's work to read in the future. ( )

I’d never heard of LiÓ or Mark Tatulli before receiving and reading Silent but Deadly, which is based on his syndicated comic strip. I was not very impressed when I began reading. I didn’t really get the humor. However, the more I read, the more I found myself laughing at the antics of a small boy whose friends consist of monsters, ghouls, and every conceivable type of bug. Mr. Tatulli has a consistent sense of dark humor. Imagine this: You see LiÓ wearing goggles putting dead bugs in an ice cube tray and the next box shows his dad freaking out when he accidently (or is it an accident?) sees that he’s used the ice in a drink. LiÓ is frequently pulling pranks on his dad and vice versa. Each trying to outdo the other. By the end of the book I found myself going back and re-reading from the beginning. I gave the book to my 17 year old nephew and he loved it. He can’t wait for it to come out in bookstores to get his own copy. ( )

What a delight. I was not familiar with Lio and his adventures before receiving this book. After the first few pages, I knew it was a book that must be shared with family and friends, particularly those who enjoy the works of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton.

I wasn’t familiar with Lio before reading Silent But Deadly. Our local paper doesn’t carry it (and I don’t actually read our local paper anyway, but it finds it’s way into the house and the comics are saved for me). I do have a Calvin and Hobbes collection and I’m fond of Pearls Before Swine, Non Sequitor, Dilbert, Bloom County and Farside to name a few.

Lio is a cross between Calvin and Hobbes and Farside. I’ll let you wrap your brain around that for a minute before I go on.

Instead of Hobbes, Lio has a pet squid. Lio is darker than Calvin and Hobbes: His father has no redeeming qualities and is generally unlikeable and Lio is a titch on the psychotic side. Like Farside and some of its descendants, there is very little dialogue in Lio, but the message is always clear and usually funny. I liked it.

My other half read it (a devout Calvin and Hobbes fan) and had this to say:

"Well that was funny, but not as funny as Calvin and Hobbes. The kid’s a bit of a psychopath and the humour is more on the sick side. An awful lot of innocents get eaten for the amusement of the kid with the misspelled name. The father comes off as a very unsympathetic character, unlikeable.

Every tenth one is really funny. Whereas half of the Calvin and Hobbes strips were funny."

If you pick this up, my favourite strip is on page 96: The Ultimate Fighter Competition (Classic Pooh vs. Disney Pooh). That pretty much tells you all you need to know about both my and Mark Tatulli’s sense of humour.

See more of my reviews at Booklorn.com ( )

http://youarewhatyouread2.blogspot.co... ( )

After reading this collection, I wish that Lio had been around during my childhood. While a few of the strips fell flat (the Freak Show comes to mind, not because it pokes fun at kids who enjoy homework - I was never among that crowd! - but because it's such an easy target and so cliched), the vast majority were a joy. And I think that Lio falls squarely under the kids-of-all-ages category; the monsters and "grossness" definitely appeal to kids, but there's also a clear adult side that brings to mind Calvin & Hobbes or Looney Tunes at their best. Tatulli clearly doesn't shy away from his influences - probably my favorite part of the colletion is the single panel where Lio is laying flowers at the graves of Fox Trot, Bloom County, The Far Side, and Calvin & Hobbes while the characters of the other major daily strips skip blithely past the cemetery - they've clearly missed something profound that Lio/Tatulli recognizes and knows is worthy of respect. And the parodies of other strips - For Worser or for Best was amazing - are priceless. ( )

This is just brilliant--delightfully twisted, dark and skewed, shamelessly bizarre, strangely sweet, sweetly strange. There's virtually no dialogue; while a menu of pantomime and sight gags could easily become wearying, though, Mark Tatulli keeps things balanced and fresh with a great mix of Addams-ish dark and Gorey-absurdist sweet. And every time you start to think that the Wattersonian echoes might be getting a bit loud, he throws in something from deep in the fang-ridden dark and changes up the balance again.

As a matter of fact, Tatulli balances many potentially difficult elements here: cute and horror, humor and doom, pseudo-invincible protagonist and occasional disaster, grade-school crushes and megalomania, innocence and cynicism, parental neglect and blessed freedom, on and on. His responses to the restrictions of newspaper-comics layout are creative and interesting; his crossovers with other comics are almost always full of the kind of snark that makes me wonder whether he gets hate-mail or mash notes from the artists whose work he skewers.

The strip's eponymous protagonist is a seriously inventive, surprisingly sensitive kid who may not be able to spell "caution" right, but can still whomp up a pretty mean experimental laser. Lio has a fondness for ghouls, ghosts, and monsters--which is a good thing, since they seem to be in great supply; they range from the predators under his bed and the tentacled horror in the lake at sleep-away camp to the motley crew that conspires to throw him a surprise birthday party. He's also a bit of a crusader for social justice, freeing lobsters from restaurant tanks, wreaking vengeance on obnoxious cellphone talkers and smokers, and coming up with inventions that help protect him (and other kids, for a price) from bullies and other mundane nightmares of childhood.

I'm a bit embarrassed to say that this is the first time I've seen this doom-y doom-y delight of a strip; I suppose that's what I get for not reading newspapers anymore. The previous Lio book is definitely at the top of my wishlist, though.

*Silent but Deadly* is highly recommended. ( )

It's Gahan Wilson meets Calvin and Hobbes with a dash of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey thrown in for good measure. A great strip for Goth parents to read with their kids. ( )

Garry Larson of Far Side fame has a worthy successor! I don't ordinarily collect these kinds of comic books, and had not seen any of Tatulli's work until I found the present book. Like Larson, Tatulli treasures humorous aspects of the bizarre and weird. Unlike Larson's Far Side Gallery works, in Silent but Deadly, Tatulli has created a consistently strange world around his main character, Lio.

Lio is a highly inventive and often happy kid, who seems to attract some very strange life forms. Lio clearly gets a kick from helping underdogs (including himself) win against the bullies. His very STRANGE friends often help and Lio invents (to the frequent bemusement of his father) some highly creative solutions to the kinds of problems little kids face around the world. The mean people and nasty monsters (like the one that lives under his bed) usually get their just deserts. However, sometimes the world wins (often as represented by the nasty neighbor girl next door he loves).

Tatulli's sight gags illustrating Lio's problems and his out of the world solutions had me lauging more than I can recall. I will clearly have to seek out Tatulli's other books! ( )

While I read lots of comics (relatively) I was unaware of this strip until I was lucky enough to get an early reviewers copy. Over all, this is a really good comic strip, especially compared to much of the stale fare found in newspapers these days. It is a bit to cute and sweet for my taste, but I understand why that has to be, and it does not go overboard in this respect. My only other complaint would be that some of the jokes are recycled from a number of internet memes and photoshops I've seen in the past, and also like many have noted there is a definite foundation on Calvin and Hobbes. None of this criticism should be considered too negative though. I loved the art, and some of the really clever uses of frame and layout. The strip is very endearing, and fun. Tatulli certainly knows his genre, and often makes good use of allusions to other classic strips. I haven't taken a daily paper for a number of years now (I know, I know, I'm part of the problem that is killing print journalism) but this book gives me hope that there are still new and creative comics popping up in the funny pages. ( )

If you read the quotations from enraged (middle-American newspaper?) readers on the back of the book you may expect a comic strip of great depravity; you might be relieved or disapointed, but it is not. It is sometimes gently macabre, sometimes filled with Wattersonian joie-de-vivre. Lio likes animals more than people, robots more than animals, and monsters more than just about anything.

The strip varies between hits (Lio's giant squid companion; Undead Bunny; Lio's comforting of monsters in general) and misses (the weirdly mean-spirited attacks on teachers). On balance, however, this is better than anything syndicated in the papers in my city.

It does feel a little derivative of Calvin & Hobbes at times; the way Lio plays off his dad, the school sequences, the madcap hijinx with fridge boxes and aliens - but it's much better when it strays into Charles Addams territory.

I recommend this to people with a liking for gentle humour and the intersection of cute and creepy. ( )

One of the many cool things LibraryThing has to offer is an early reviewers group where you put your hand up for advance copies in return for posting a review. Oh my, having to read something then talk about it, how shall I manage? *swoons dramatically*

My package arrived in the mail and I spent some happy time browsing through Silent But Deadly. I'm not a previous fan of Tatulli's work but it was pitched as a 'sweetly creepy' story about a kid with a wild imagination and love for the supernatural. I adore stories like Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Teh Naifeh's fabulous Courtney Crumrin series and of course Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson so I thought there might be some common ground.

Silent But Deadly turned out to be a mix of some jokes I found a bit mean and shallow and some really funny, off-key stuff. I loved Lio's pet squid and his enthusiasm for bugs, aliens, ghouls, bogeymen and things that go bump in the night. His crush on the girl that hates him is adorable, his mad science experiments and robots are great and the 'No Mo' Nose Gnomes' completely had me. I'd recommend persisting as the not so fun stuff was towards the front but I warmed up pretty quickly.

http://rtaw.blogspot.com/2008/08/war-...
There is a war going on in our newspapers, and it's not jumping off their front pages. If you do read them, though, it isn't at all hard to find. Those who have read them for a while know what truly is. They know that great comic strips nowadays are harder to find than oil—and they know that comics reprints can be just as costly. It's a regular war on paper, printed on recyclable paper, environmentally friendly but bitter nonetheless. Jumping off the funny pages like "a possum on a Pogo"—yet sometimes you really don't want to "stick around and see the show." Sometimes you get sick of comics. Avid comics-readers hating the artform as a whole (mostly due to a shortage in its creativity). A civil war. Dorothy Parker once read comics rampantly, and only when one strip came along (Crockett Johnson's Barnaby) did she fall in love.

It happened to me. It probably happened to you. You might hate the comics nowadays—but there's still a strip out there in your newspaper that you'll like. If you haven't been reading, of course you're at a loss for words as to what it is! So if you aren't reading the newspaper, or have stopped, again—open it up! I myself am not fond of the current state of comic strips, but there are many strips I enjoy seeing, that hadn't really been there before, and Liō is one of them. I don't enjoy it for nostalgia—it is relatively new in my paper, 'The Washington Post.' And up until now I was only granted the opportunity to read it on Sundays. This book served as a hearty introduction to me for the dailies.

Although the strips are in chronological order, there aren't many sequences. That is both a good and bad thing. The good thing is that you don't have to know what's going on to become immersed in it (yet you do have to know what's going on to get the joke). The bad thing is that new readers can be put on or off by that. Fans of Berkeley Breathed know how much was lost in the transfer from a daily, more sequential so to speak, Bloom County to a Sunday-only Outland. I don't think I was put off much by it in Liō's case. Sequences tend to establish familiarity quicker, so this likens Liō to more of an outcast. Plus, the Sundays are the strip's stronger point. In short, the strip might provoke civil wars (see: its comments on the back) but its malice really is "towards none." It's just trying to make you laugh, so feel free to (especially if you received an Early Reviewer copy). I did, and do recommend it to others. ( )

This is the first time I read any of the Lio strips. It is funny, geared more towards those who walk to the beat of their own drum. There's a Calvin and Hobbes influence to the strip, it's like the AP student's elementary school aged brother. At times the strips are funny, some can be very sweet and other can make a comment about other strips and there are a few that call attention to society. ( )

This was the second collection of – and my first introduction to – Lio comics and Mark Tatulli. It is the exploits – told mostly in illustrations, with little dialogue – of a strange little boy and his friends, including a squid and his Undead Bunny (think Uglydoll). Basically, imagine Calvin and Hobbes on drugs. And I mean that nicely.

I thought the illustrations, especially the full color Sunday strips, were well done. (My husband was less kind; he thought they were somewhat average.) My favorite strips were the one-off’s – Lio discovering a sunken ship at the bottom of his inflatable pool or setting a restaurant’s lobsters free. The longer storylines and arcs were just okay in comparison. I didn’t get Lio’s adoration of Eva Rose, the mean girl in his class, and the comics with his clueless father fell flat for me. In general, too, I would say that, for me, many of the strips were sweet or amusing but that very few of the strips were laugh out loud funny. I think, though, that fans of Emily the Strange will feel right at home in Lio’s world. ( )

The gags in these cartoons were cute, and I liked the wildly mischievous and imaginative boy getting into scrapes with octopuses, space men, monsters, and more. The artwork itself also reminded me of Mad magazine drawings that I enjoyed many years ago.

A few points in this book's favor:
* The cartoon panels varied in size and in number for each cartoon.
* There was a good variety of different perspectives and use of light/dark inking.
* My favorite cartoons were of the hostile little girl responding to his amorous advances and the fearless Lio's response to the ghosts.

On the negative side, the humor never quite reached the laugh-out-loud level, and I quickly tired of the same vacant grin on the main character's face in almost every cartoon. I'm also used to more actual writing in a cartoon, and I think these mostly visual gags suffered a bit from lack of wordplay.

Recommended as a pleasant read, but I wouldn't buy unless it were on the bargain table. ( )

A very funny comic strip! Reminds me of a twisted Calvin and Hobbes. I enjoyed reading through the strips and pointed out some really funny ones to people I know. Many laugh out loud moments. ( )

This is the second book of Lio comic strips. Mostly wordless, these strips follow the macabre adventures of Lio, whose world is populated by monsters, magic and mayhem. Lio displays a remarkable savoir faire, even when he is the one being eaten by the monster.

Tatulli's first book was good, and this one is even better. Many of the comics made me laugh (or snort) out loud. Although they are stylistically at opposite ends of the spectrum, Lio is reminiscent of Charles Addams' world. Both artists interweave the ordinary and the macabre with a matter-of-factness that enhances the humor.

I'd recommend this book unreservedly to just about any reader old enough to get the jokes, though it should not be mistaken for a children's book because the protagonist is a child. Some of the images might be frightening for a younger child. ( )

I don't know how I missed this comic strip up until now, but I am so happy that I have found it. This is some of the funniest stuff I have seen in a long time. It's dark but endearing, quirky and odd with a dash of mischief. Is Lio the little child who grows up to be Dr. Horrible and his sing-along blog? There are monsters and creepy things galore, a pet giant squid, and a father who is constantly terrorized by the machines his son Lio devises. And the take-offs of other comic strips are genius. If the smarmy-sweet stuff that's the general fair of today's funny pages is getting you down, pick up this book and laugh knowing that there are still subversively funny people out there. ( )