Fans of Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Ook and Glook and Patricia Reilly Giff's ZigZag Kids will flock to this chapter-book mystery series full of slapstick humor and silly situations by the wildly popular Tony Abbott, author of the Secrets of Droon series. Jeff, Mara, Brian, and Kelly are Goofballs and proud of it. Goofball private eyes. Together, they solve mysteries. How do they discover the truth? They use funny disguises (dressing up in aluminum foil), nutty inventions (dropped notes the bad guys must stop to read), and their secret weapon: Sparky the Goofdog! When super-rich kid Randall Crandall asks the Goofballs to help him protect his world-famous collection from a notorious thief, they can’t wait to get started. Randall’s hosting a superhero party, and the detectives will have to blend in to sniff out the criminal. Crazy costumes and off-the-wall schemes mean this is going to be the Goofballs' goofiest mystery yet.

"The Goofballs are invited to a superhero masquerade to stop a mysterious figure from stealing a priceless collection"--

"The Goofballs are invited to a superhero masquerade to stop a mysterious figure from stealing a priceless collection"--Provided by publisher.

Draw fearless heroes and ruthless villains! Awesome aliens, warriors, martial artists, monsters, robots and more are waiting for you to bring them to life on the pages of your sketchbook! Create creatures and characters that explode with energy and power! Let Superhero Madness show you: • Drawing basics such as shading, poses and 3-D effects • Penciling, inking and coloring techniques • Character ideas, page design tips and secrets for great storytelling Draw one cool character or an entire army of good and bad guys and gals. Invent other worlds, costumes, weapons and more. Hundreds of action-packed illustrations and over 45 easy step-by-step lessons show you how!

Whoosh! A SUPERHERO has landed in YOUR book! Get ready for another lively, interactive read-aloud in the Who's In Your Book series! Use the power of your imagination to unlock this adorable Superhero's powers. But you'd better act fast before The Scribbler ruins your book completely! Readers will enjoy interactively tapping, stretching, and whizzing this book around as they help Superhero defeat the villain and save the day--while discovering the real power of kindness. Bestselling author and musician Tom Fletcher and illustrator Greg Abbott have once again created a creature that readers will fall in love with--and want to play with--again and again! Don't miss a single story in the Who's In Your Book series! • There's a Monster In Your Book • There's a Dragon In Your Book • There's an Elf In Your Book • There's an Alien in Your Book ...and more books to come!

With contributions from Will Brooker, Jeffrey A. Brown, Scott Bukatman, John G. Cawelti, Peter Coogan, Jules Feiffer, Charles Hatfield, Henry Jenkins, Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Gerard Jones, Geoff Klock, Karin Kukkonen, Andy Medhurst, Adilifu Nama, Walter Ong, Lorrie Palmer, Richard Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Lillian Robinson, Roger B. Rollin, Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Stuller, Fredric Wertham, and Philip Wylie Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture. While superhero comics are a distinct and sometimes disdained branch of comics creation, they are integral to the development of the North American comic book and the history of the medium. For the past half-century, they have also been the one overwhelmingly dominant market genre. The sheer volume of superhero comics that have been published over the years is staggering. Major superhero universes constitute one of the most expansive storytelling canvases ever fashioned. Moreover, characters inhabiting these fictional universes are immensely influential, having achieved iconic recognition around the globe. Their images and adventures have shaped many other media, such as film, videogames, and even prose fiction. The primary aim of this reader is twofold: first, to collect in a single volume a sampling of the most sophisticated commentary on superheroes, and second, to bring into sharper focus the ways in which superheroes connect with larger social, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and historical themes that are of interest to a great many readers both in the academy and beyond.