Snowpiercer: The Escape


Jacques Lob - 1982
    Originally published in French, this marks the first time that Snowpiercer will be available in English. In a harsh, uncompromisingly cold future where Earth has succumbed to treacherously low temperatures, the last remaining members of humanity travel on a train while the outside world remains encased in ice. The surviving community are not without a social hierarchy; those that travel at the front of the train live in relative luxury whilst those unfortunate enough to be at the rear remain clustered like cattle in claustrophobic darkness. Yet, things are about to change aboard the train as passengers become disgruntled... The movie Snowpiercer, due for release in 2014, is directed by Joon-ho Bong (The Host) and is already causing a stir with parallels to 1984 and Animal Farm.

Glacial Period


Nicolas de Crécy - 2005
    There will be four and each will be a vision of this great museum by a different artist. De Crécy, at the sight of the incredible richness of the museum’s collection was overwhelmed and felt small and ignorant. The result is a story set thousands of years hence in a glacial period where all human history has been forgotten and a small group of archeologists fall upon the Louvre, buried in age-old snow. They cannot begin to explain all the artifacts they see. What could they have meant? Their interpretations are nonsense, absurd, farcical.

Incidents in the Night, Book One


David B. - 1999
    sets out to explore the uncharted territories of overflowing and dusty shelves of Paris' legendary book shops. His journey quickly turns into an obsessive vision quest in pursuit of a mysterious nineteenth-century journal: Incidents In the Night. Mountains of books become sites of archeological digs as the author excavates layers of myth, fact and fiction in search of the elusive thread that links them all. Along the way he stumbles on fanatical Bonapartists, occult conspiracies and the angel of death. Incidents in the Night is an intricate, ever-expanding web of dream and reality exquisitely translated by Brian Evenson.David B. is one of France's finest cartoonists and one of the co-founders of the legendary L'Association collective. He is the author a many books: The Armed Garden and Noctural Conspiracies, among many others. Epileptic was was awarded Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Scenario and the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist.Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He is the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

The Making Of


Brecht Evens - 2011
    With lush watercolors and his characteristic wit, Evens details the fumbling, amateurish foibles of the participants of a small art festival in the Flemish countryside. Pieterjan is invited to the festival as an honored guest. From the moment he arrives, things start going wrong, and since no one seems ready to step in, Pieterjan takes over the show. He decides to build a giant garden gnome as a symbol of Flemish identity, but the construction process brings buried tensions to the surface as the other artists become jealous of Pieterjan’s authority. In The Making Of, Evens delves deep into the petty tensions, small misunderstandings, and deadpan humor that pervade modern relationships. With a keen eye for the subtleties of body language, Evens’s The Making Of builds on the iconic visual style showcased in The Wrong Place. Sweeping watercolors jump off the page, surrealist scenery intermingles with crowds of people, and small suburban plot homes have never looked so lovely.

Grandville


Bryan Talbot - 2005
    Gaining independence after decades of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings, the Socialist Republic of Britain is now a small, unimportant backwater connected by a railway bridge, steampowered dirigible, and mutual suspicion to France. When a British diplomat's murder is made to look like suicide, ferocious DetectiveInspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard stalks a ruthless murder squad through the heart of a Belle Epoque Paris, the center of the greatest empire in a world of steamdriven hansom cabs, automatons, and flying machines. LeBrock's relentless quest can lead only to death, truth... or war.* Following on the heels of his internationally acclaimed graphic novels The Tale of One Bad Rat and Alice in Sunderland, Grandville is a fantastical and audacious rollercoaster ride, visually stunning and rich in memorable detail.

Alack Sinner: The Age of Innocence


Carlos Sampayo - 1984
    For this collection, Munoz has painstakingly reviewed every page -- every panel -- making clarifications, adding invaluable insight to this provacative story. Sinner is a hard-boiled private detective whose adventures are played out to a jazz soundtrack in a noir New York from 1975 through the 2000s. The stories are imbued with a deep political conscience and present a scathing critique of corruption in society, juxtaposed with meditations on the nature of violence and exile. The authhors have also rearranged the stories in chronological order of the characters and events, rather than dates of first publication, providing a novel reading experience for both new fans and old. The Age of Innocence collects eleven stories, including "Talkin' with Joe," "The Webster Case," "The Fillmore Case," "Viet Blues," "Life Ain't a Comic Book, Baby," "Twinkle, Twinkle," and "Dark City." Alack Sinner is an international bestseller and between them Munoz and Sampayo are winners of Europe's top comics awards.

Beta Testing the Apocalypse


Tom Kaczynski - 2012
    Ballard of comics. Like Ballard, Kaczynski s comics riff on dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.Yet while Kaczynski shares many of Ballard s obsessions, he processes them in unique ways. His visual storytelling adds an architectural dimension that the written word alone lacks.Kaczynski takes abstract ideas capitalism, communism, or utopianism and makes them tangible. He depicts and meditates on the immense political and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define the limits of who we are and the freedom we as Americans presume to enjoy. Society and the individual, in perpetual tension. Once you've read Kaczynski s comics, it should come as no surprise to learn that he studied architecture before embarking on a career as a cartoonist.Beta Testing includes approximately 10 short stories, most notably The New, a brand new story created expressly for this book. It s Kaczynski s longest story to date. The New is set in an un-named third-world megalopolis. It could be Dhaka, Lagos or Mumbai. The city creaks under the pressure of explosive growth. Whole districts are built in a week. The story follows an internationally renowned starchitect as he struggles to impose his vision on the metropolis. A vision threatened by the massive dispossessed slum-proletariat inhabiting the slums and favelas on the edges of the city. From the fetid ferment of garbage dumps and shanties emerges a new feral architecture.

A.L.I.E.E.E.N.: Archives of Lost Issues and Earthly Editions of Extraterrestrial Novelties


Lewis Trondheim - 2004
    The language and even the alphabet are alien, but as human readers will soon discover, the themes and stories are universal. These interwoven stories and vignettes start out quite simply, but a darker, more complex side is gradually revealed as alien characters act out very human problems, from peer pressure to intolerance to the challenges of friendship. Beneath its apparently childlike and cartoony style, A.L.I.E.E.E.N. explores human nature, cruelty, and kindness with surprising depth and loads of humor.A.L.I.E.E.E.N. is a nominee for the 2007 Eisner Awards for Best U.S. Edition of International Material and Best Writer/Artist - Humor.

Here


Richard McGuire - 2014
    Here is Richard McGuire's unique graphic novel based on the legendary 1989 comic strip of the same name.Richard McGuire's groundbreaking comic strip Here was published under Art Spiegelman's editorship at RAW in 1989.Built in six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it collapsed time and space to tell the story of the corner of a room - and its inhabitants - between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2313 AD.The strip remains one of the most influential and widely discussed contributions to the medium, and it has now been developed, expanded and reimagined by the artist into this full-length, full-colour graphic novel - a must for any fan of the genre.

Three Shadows


Cyril Pedrosa - 2007
    The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the smell of the river... That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills—sheltered from storms, ignorant of the world, as though on an island, peaceful and untroubled.And then...And then everything changed.Can you ever escape your fate?Three shadows stand outside the house—and Louis and Lise know why the spectral figures are there. The shadows have come for Louis and Lise’s son, and nothing anyone can do will stop them. Louis cannot let his son die without trying to prevent it, so the family embarks on a journey to the ends of the earth, fleeing death.Poignant and suspenseful, Three Shadows is a haunting story of love and grief, told in moving text and sweeping black and white artwork by Cyril Pedrosa.

Silver Surfer: Parable


Stan Lee - 1988
    This miniseries won the Eisner Award for "Best Finite/Limited Series" in 1989.

Castle in the Stars: The Space Race of 1869


Alex Alice - 2014
    It’s the space race in 1869 in a kind of alternate past. … When you see the book itself, it’s this big, oversized object with this incredible watercolor comics style, and it’s this really big, epic, sweeping story of a boy following in his mother’s discovery and then opening up the solar system, but in the age of the 1800s. It’s got a kind of steampunk but also a kind of young, classic children’s story feel to it.”

Arsène Schrauwen


Olivier Schrauwen - 2014
    Together they would build something deemed impossible: a modern utopia in the wilderness but not before Arsene falls in love with his cousin s wife, Marieke. Whether delirious from love or a fever-inducing jungle virus, Arsene s loosening grip on reality is mirrored by the graphic novel reader s uncertainty of what is imagined or real by Arsene. This first full-length graphic novel from the critically-acclaimed Olivier Schrauwen is an engrossing, sometimes funny, slightly surreal and often beautiful narrative."

Aama, Vol. 1: The Smell of Warm Dust


Frederik Peeters - 2011
    He remembers nothing of his former life. But when Verloc is handed his diary by a robot-ape called Churchill, he is able to revisit his past. His life, he discovers, has been a miserable one. He lost his business, his family, and his friends because he refused the technological advancements of society - the eye implants, the pharyngeal filters, the genetic modifications — he went without all these. He was astray in a society he deeply resented until his brother, Conrad, took him to another planet to retrieve a mysterious substance called aama. Full of action, adventure, and strange characters, Aama is a unique exploration of society’s dangerous relationship with technology.

Paradox


Richard Marazano - 2007
    Helen Friedman is in charge of interrogating the two survivors, who are none other than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Who, then, are the men who came back from the 1969 Apollo XI mission?