Because I was trapped in Texas at the time, I needed to believe that the broken tractor out back was a car of the future. Japanese, I’ll say, because of the exotic far-awayness of Japan from Texas, and because of the Japanese monster movies and woodblock prints that reached out to me in Texas. Japanese monster movies are part of the fabric of Texas.”In 1983, Panter finally got a chance to fully explore this world, and share it with an audience, when the L.A. Reader published the first 63 strips. A few years later, the Japanese reggae magazine Riddim picked up the strip, and Panter continued the saga of Dal Tokyo in monthly installments for over a decade.But none of these conceptual descriptions will prepare the reader for the confounding visual and verbal richness of Dal Tokyo, as Panter’s famous “ratty line” collides and colludes with near-Joycean wordplay, veering from more or less intelligible jokes to dizzying non-sequiturs to surreal eruptions that can engulf the entire panel in scribbles. One doesn't read Dal Tokyo; one is absorbed into it and spit out the other side.

    (Among other things, three major cast members—Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus—initially show up as infants and only "grow" into their final "mature" selves as the months go by. Even Snoopy debuts as a puppy!) Thus The Complete Peanuts offers a unique chance to see a master of the art form refine his skills and solidify his universe, day by day, week by week, month by month.This volume is rounded out with Garrison Keillor's introduction, a biographical essay by David Michaelis (Schulz and Peanuts) and an in-depth interview with Schulz conducted in 1987 by Gary Groth and Rick Marschall, all wrapped in a gorgeous design by award-winning cartoonist Seth.

    The human drama, the psychological insight -- Eisner captures the soul of the city and its troubled inhabitants with pen and ink. The comics medium was altered forever with the publication of this seminal work.

    Jim Woodring's captivating and enigmatic body of "Frank" stories is an astonishing work of imaginative splendor.Included in Volume 1 is the complete, award-winning masterpiece "Frank in the River" -- 32 pages of breathtaking painted color -- as well as 60 pages of crisply beguiling black-and-white pen-and-inkwork.

    Living in a cheap hotel, consorting with the debased and downtrodden, searching for that golden idea that will rocket him to the success he yearns for as the great American novelist, and to get respect from his father once and for all. But, there’s just one problem: Fante Bukowski has no talent for writing.

    The Moomins try to hibernate in the fashion of their ancestors but insomnia places them smack-dab into a winter carnival with the winter-sports-loving Mr. Brisk. The fickle and eternally lovestruck Mymble and Snorkmaiden find themselves in competition over a thrilling new man. Moominmamma meets her new neighbor, the Fillyjonk, causing her to hire the depressed and secretive Misabel as her new maid. Mymble's mother arrives on the Moomin family's doorstep with her seventeen new children. Finally, a prophet arrives on the scene declaring that the happy Moomins are in fact not happy at all and need to get back to nature and be free. Moomin, of course, becomes more and more miserable the freer he gets.Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children's authors of the twentieth centry for her illustrated Moomin chapter books. The Drawn & Quarterly reprint series collects, for the first time in North America, Jansson's internationally syndicated Moomin comic strip that debuted in the London Evening News in 1954.

    As always, Gorey's painstakingly cross-hatched pen and ink drawings are perfectly suited to his oddball verse and prose. The first book of 15, "The Unstrung Harp," describes the writing process of novelist Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel." In "The Listing Attic," you'll find a set of quirky limericks such as "A certain young man, it was noted, / Went about in the heat thickly coated; / He said, 'You may scoff, / But I shan't take it off; / Underneath I am horribly bloated.' "Many of Gorey's tales involve untimely deaths and dreadful mishaps, but much like tragic Irish ballads with their perky rhythms and melodies, they come off as strangely lighthearted. "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," for example, begins like this: "A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL assaulted by bears," and so on. An eccentric, funny book for either the uninitiated or diehard Gorey fans.Contains: The Unstrung Harp, The Listing Attic, The Doubtful Guest, The Object Lesson, The Bug Book, The Fatal Lozenge, The Hapless Child, The Curious Sofa, The Willowdale Handcar, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Insect God, The West Wing, The Wuggly Ump, The Sinking Spell, and The Remembered Visit.

    weekly newspapers, including the L.A. New Times and Seattle Stranger. This first collection, designed by Chip Kidd and Millionaire, reprints every strip from its 1994 inception through early 2000. Maakies features the nautical adventures of an alcoholic crow and suicidal ape, and includes an introduction by Andy Dick.

    The events forming the patchwork of George’s life are pieced together from the tenuous memories of several informants, who often have contradictory impressions. His estranged daughter describes the man as an unforgivable lout, whereas his niece remembers him fondly. His former assistant recalls a trip to the Arctic during which George abandoned him for two months, while George himself remembers that trip as the time he began writing letters to a former love, from whom he never received replies.Invoking a sense of both memory and its loss, George Sprott is heavy with the charming, melancholic nostalgia that distinguishes Seth’s work. Characters lamenting societal progression in general share the pages with images of antiquated objects—proof of events and individuals rarely documented and barely remembered. Likewise, George’s own opinions are embedded with regret and a sense of the injustice of aging in this bleak reminder of the inevitable slipping away of lives, along with the fading culture of their days.

    The setting: the Fontaine Talking Fables animation studio. Teddy Mishkin–definitely alcoholic, possibly insane–is hard at work on the latest cartoon short for Waldo the Cat, the "star" of Fontaine's stable of animated characters. But little does anyone (except Teddy) realize that Waldo is real–and that he is Teddy's insidiously helpful assistant.From the Hardcover edition.

    Carré’s elegant short stories read like the gothic, family narratives of Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers, but told visually. Poetic rhythms — a coin flip, a circling ferris wheel — are punctuated by elements of melancholy fantasy pushed forward by character-driven, naturalistic dialogue. The stories in Heads Or Tails display a virtuosic breadth of visual styles and color palettes, each in perfect service of the story, and range from experimental one-pagers to short masterpieces like The Thing About Madeline (featured in The Best American Comics 2008), to graphic novellas like The Carnival (featured in David Sedaris and Dave Eggers’ 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading, originally published in MOME).

    but then Angina gets a call from the Netherworld. It's her aborted fetus: he's drunk and he's pissed off. So begins Pixy, which Neil Gaiman calls "the best comic I've read this year" — a 65-page journey into a nightmare world unlike any you've ever seen before. The rest of the book follows Alka's attempts to infiltrate the Kingdom of the Dead (where time runs backwards and is sold by the pint to time-addicts), in order to track down the malevolent Pixy and kill him for good. Shedding bodies and identities with some regularity (Pixy himself blows one to smithereens), Alka finds his own sense of reality eroding further and further during his sojourn down under — and it doesn't help at all when Pixy, now his best friend, accompanies him back up to the Land of the Living, where the gun-happy undead sprite wreaks unspeakable havoc. Pixy is the first major work by Swedish cartoonist Max Andersson, and it combines the freewheeling-yet-obsessive graphic and narrative weirdness of such contemporary North American cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Kaz and Charles Burns with a bizarre yet coherent story that mixes coal black humor, barbed satire, wild surrealism, and stark horror in a totally new way — a feast for the (preferably deranged) mind and the (preferably diseased) eye.

    It collects seven short stories, each a headspinning display of craft and storytelling that mixes early twentieth-century comics influences like Winsor McCay with a thoroughly contemporary voice that provokes and entertains with subversively surreal humor and subtle criticism of twentieth-century tropes and images. The stories themselves, though each stands alone, are intertwined thematically, offering peeks into the minds of semi-autistic, achingly isolated men and their feverish inner worlds and how they interact and contrast with their real environment. Though Schrauwen taps ‘surrealist’ or ‘absurdist’ impulses in his work, you will not read a more careful and precise collection of stories this year.The stories included are: “Hair Types,” a hilarious piece that on the surface explores the pseudoscientific classification of personality as a function of hair but becomes something more akin to a fable about self-fulfilling prophecy; “Chromo Congo,” a silent story about two men on safari who meet a corpulent and obnoxious hunter; as well as “The Task,” “The Man Who Grew His Beard,” “The Lock,” “The Cave,” and “The Imaginist.”Though this is Schrauwen’s first U.S. edition of comics, he has wowed American fans with his appearances in the anthology MOME over the last few years, and one of his MOME stories was one of three comics selected for the 2009 edition of Dave Eggers’ influential Best American Nonrequired Reading.

    Each volume in this series reprints two full years of Sunday strips, or 104 full-page, black-and-white Sunday strips (Herriman did not incorporate color into the strip until 1935). Krazy Kat is a love story, focusing on the relationship of its three main characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz Mouse hated Krazy Kat, the expression of which was in throwing bricks at Krazy's head. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect "her" (Herriman always maintained that Krazy was genderless), mostly by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the other's true motivations. This simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions, building thematic depth that led critics like Gilbert Seldes and E. E. Cummings to recognize Herriman's genius almost immediately. Each of Fantagraphics' Krazy Ignatz volumes is designed by Chris Ware, creator of the wildly successful ACME Novelty Library series. This beautiful volume includes material never collected before.

    Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city--an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor's signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago.In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first books of the contemporary graphic novel golden age, and it set the stage for Katchor to become regarded as a modern-day cartooning genius. Drawn & Quarterly's twenty-fifth anniversary edition is a deluxe hardcover.