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How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less


Sarah Glidden - 2010
    Her experience clashes with her preconceived notions again and again, particularly when she tries to take a non-chaperoned excursion into the West Bank. As she struggles to "understand Israel," Sarah is forced to question first her beliefs, then ultimately her own identity.Sarah Glidden won the prestigious Ignatz Award for "Most Promising New Talent" as well as the Masie Kukoc Award for Comics Inspiration. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies.

A Child's Life: Other Stories


Phoebe Gloeckner - 1998
    This edition includes eight pages of new material.Long respected as one of the finest and most original of today's underground comics artists, Gloeckner shows both technical artistry and tremendous range—from her sly, lurid, and brilliantly colored posters for rock groups to her textbook-quality medical illustrations; from her sharp naturalistic juxtapositions for The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard) to the signature comics for which she is best known.Pages include both black and white and color comics, some that were published before in obscure comic books, and some of her classics in addition to new stories. In detailed, nuanced panels, these strips depict the isolation, horror, and disappointment—but also the revolutionary, transformative power—of young women trapped in circumstances ringed with drugs and sexual abuse. Gloeckner continues as a major literary and visual artist.

Fax from Sarajevo


Joe Kubert - 1996
    That was the year the war broke out in Sarajevo, Bosnia, the year that genocide revisited the planet. It was the year that Ervin Rustemagic - an international businessman whose clients included author Joe Kubert - found himself and his family trapped in a city under siege. Ervin's only means of communication to the outside world was via his fax machine. As Joe began to receive these messages from Ervin, he did what he had done for years - he put the story to paper. Renowned comics creator Joe Kubert has been writing and illustrating comic books since the 1940s, including Batman, Superman, Tarzan, Enemy Ace, and Sgt. Rock. Fax from Sarajevo is by far one of the highest achievements of one of comics' greatest living masters.

Drinking at the Movies


Julia Wertz - 2010
    Don’t worry—this isn’t the typical redemptive coming-of-age tale of a young woman and her glorious triumph over tragedy or any such nonsense. It’s simply a hilarious—occasionally poignant—book filled with interesting art, absurd humor and plenty of amusing self-deprecation. Box by box, Wertz chronicles four sketchy apartments, seven terrible jobs, family drama, traveling fiascos, and too many whiskey bottles to count.

Pretending Is Lying


Dominique Goblet - 2007
    In a series of dazzling fragments-skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black and white-Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents. The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma-a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.

The Customer is Always Wrong


Mimi Pond - 2017
    Oakland in the late seventies is a cheap and quirky haven for eccentrics, and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the fascinating sleazeball characters that surround young Madge into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Madge's life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not.Employing the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond's storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic, standalone graphic novel. Madge is right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for her adopted greasy-spoon family while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.

We Are On Our Own


Miriam Katin - 2006
    With her father off fighting for the Hungarian army and the German troops quickly approaching, Katin and her mother are forced to flee to the countryside after faking their deaths. Leaving behind all of their belongings and loved ones, andunable to tell anyone of their whereabouts, they disguise themselves as a Russian servant and illegitimate child, while literally staying a few steps ahead of the German soldiers.We Are on Our Own is a woman's attempt to rebuild her earliest childhood trauma in order to come to an understanding of her lifelong questioning of faith. Katin's faith is shaken as she wonders how God could create and tolerate such a wretched world, a world of fear and hiding, bargaining and theft, betrayal and abuse. The complex and horrific experiences on the run are difficult for a child to understand, and as a child, Katin saw them with the simple longing, sadness, andcuriosity she felt when her dog ran away or a stranger made her mother cry. Katin's ensuing lifelong struggle with faith is depicted throughout the book in beautiful full-color sequences.We Are on Our Own is the first full-length graphic novel by Katin, at the age of sixty-three.

A Drifting Life


Yoshihiro Tatsumi - 2008
    A Drifting Life is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences as a child in Osaka, growing up as part of a country burdened by the shadows of World War II.Spanning fifteen years from August 1945 to June 1960, Tatsumi’s stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father’s financial burdens and his parents’ failing marriage, his jealous brother’s deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, the manga artist Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Apollo’s Song, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha)—with whom Tatsumi eventually became a peer and, at times, a stylistic rival. As with his short-story collection, A Drifting Life is designed by Adrian Tomine.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama


Alison Bechdel - 2012
    Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

Jamilti and Other Stories


Rutu Modan - 2008
    Jamilti and Other Stories collects the cartoonist’s short works, which lead the reader through unexpected turns of plot and unusual character portraits. Some are darkly fantastical and unsettling, such as the unraveling of a serial-killer murder mystery, or her accounts of an infatuated plastic surgeon and his sanitarium, and a mother back from the dead with dubious healing powers. Others are more attuned to surprising discoveries that shape personal identity, as in the story of a tragic past that lies within a family’s theme hotel, or that of a struggling musician who hopes an upcoming gig will be his big break. In “Jamilti,” Modan addresses political violence with a suicide bombing that shakes up a day in the lives of a young couple.

The Frank Book


Jim Woodring - 2003
    All the Frank stories in one massive and deluxe tome. Between its handsome cloth covers are 344 pages of Frank comics, drawings and oddities. A fancy dust jacket, swoon-inducing end papers and ribbon bookmark make this book a decorative object as well as a repository of storytelling genius. Frank is a unique, visionary comic, exquisitely drawn and so fully realized that readers find themselves drawn deeply into Woodring's hallucinatory mindscape. The stories, almost entirely wordless, are told with brilliant, candy colors that people of all ages find alluring. This beautiful collection contains new material and lots of rare and previously-unpublished material (including the very first Frank story, not seen in over 10 years). Plus, this book includes an introduction from prominent Jim Woodring fan and acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola! This definitive collection is the very best way to give, receive, and experience one of the great cartoon achievements of the 20th century.

King-Cat Classix


John Porcellino - 2007
    His spare approach with words and pictures focuses on the smallest of details, revealing a wealth of meaning and emotion in everyday events that most of us overlook in our daily hustle and bustle. Since 1989, he has released more than sixty-five issues of his self-published comic King-Cat Comics and Stories. This large collection focuses on the first fifty issues, with extensive endnotes and an index, along with selections of all the extra ephemera that makes an individual issue of King-Cat its own unique experience—essays, articles, stories, and letters from friends. Included are more than two hundred and fifty pages of comics, ranging from Porcellino's earliest scrawls to his later, perfectly minimalist delineations. The comics range through all of his concerns—family, family pets, the natural world, work, music, romance. This book presents an artist who always knew what he wanted to do. King-Cat Classics shows Porcellino's confidence and skill as it grows steadily through the past fifteen years.

Best Of American Splendor


Harvey Pekar - 2005
    But how did a former file clerk from Cleveland and up with an Oscar nomination? The story begins in 1976, when Harvey began publishing his autobiographical, slice-of-downtrodden-life comic book, illustrated by a who's who of underground comic artists, including R. Crumb, Frank Stack, Gary Dumm and Joe Sacco. Titan is proud to present our third book from Harvey, an all-new compilation of his best work, featuring 100 per cent previously uncollected material.

American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries, Vol. 1


James Kochalka - 1999
    Drawn with relaxed and beautiful brushwork, these strips perfectly capture the rhythm of daily life. From the hilarious to the sad, from the poetic to the drunken, these strips offer a direct and intimate portrait of the life of one of America's most important alternative cartoonists. This ambitious and deluxe, perfect-bound volume collect the first five years of Kochalka's diary. Contains a full-color section.

Pussey!


Daniel Clowes - 1995
    Clowesnot only parodies the superhero genre (notably Stan "The Man" Lee), butalso his own peers, from his publishers and fellow authors atFantagraphics to artistic heavyweights like Art Spiegelman (seen hereas "Gummo Bubbleman"). Through it all, Pussey dreams endlessly abouthaving sex with a woman, but even those fantasies degenerate intosuperhero scenarios.