Wally Gropius


Tim Hensley - 2010
    When the elder Thaddeus Gropius confronts Wally with the boilerplate plot ultimatum that he must marry "the saddest girl in the world" or be disinherited, a yarn unravels that is part screwball comedy and part unhinged parable on the lucrativeness of changing your identity.Hensley's dialogue is witty, lyrical, sampled, dada, and elliptical--all in the service of a very bizarre mystery. There's sex, violence, rock and roll, intrigue, and betrayal--all brought home in Hensley's truly inimitable style.Created during an era when another well-off "W" was stuffing the coffers of the morbidly solvent, Wally Gropius transforms futile daydreams and nightmares into the absurdity of capital.

Bradley of Him


Connor Willumsen - 2019
    The lines between character and actor are blurring under the verisimilitude of the Vegas strip, the desert sun and the impossibly shiny surface of Bradley’s shades.

The Manly World of Lloyd Llewellyn


Daniel Clowes - 1994
    The 31 stories collected here combine Dragnet with The Twilight Zone with Tales from the Crypt in a world filled with aliens, good-time girls, and cocktail-bar nihilism. The stories are hip and funny, with a good dose of wacky 1950s paranoia and the kind of tongue-in-cheek morality that characterized the old E.C. horror comics. The Lloyd Llewellyn stories also trace the development of Clowes's style as a comic artist, from the angular early pieces that show the influence of 1950s advertising style to the grotesque Robert Crumb-inspired style of the more recent work in Eightball. Clowes is one of the most gifted comic-book artists around, and the retro-chic world of Lloyd Llewellyn deserves to be seen by a new generation of readers.

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.

Dungeon: Parade - Vol. 2: Day of the Toads


Joann Sfar - 2002
    The Dungeon is attacked by a swarm of flying venomous toads so large it almost succumbs as the perpetrators look to get free rein inside! In the second story, Herbert is sent on a mission to… clear out the septic tank where a whole beautiful ecology has evolved.

Crawl to Me


Alan Robert - 2012
    It is only after a series of violent events occur that Ryan realizes he must set aside all he believes to be true in order to face his shocking and inevitable reality.

Love & Rockets: Heartbreak Soup


Gilbert Hernández - 1986
    Love and Rockets is a body of work routinely praised for its realism, complexity, subtlety and ethnic authenticity. It was the first comic series to give a voice to minorities and women in the medium's then 50-year history. One of the hidden treasures of our impoverished culture. --The Nation

Preacher vol. 1-9


Garth Ennis - 1996
    The entire run has been collected in nine trade paperback editions. The final monthly issue, number 66, was published in July 2000.Preacher follows the story of Preacher Jesse Custer, his best friend, and his girlfriend, as they explore a world that fuses Southern culture and supernatural elements, especially religious ones, in a way that is highly provocative, exploratory, and controversial.Preacher draws on movies, particularly Westerns, for many of its stylistic elements.

Total Jazz


Blutch - 2004
    Drawn in a range of styles asimprovisational as Coltrane and Mingus — everything from loose lineworkto tight pen and ink to gestural pencils — Blutch captures the excitement oflive performance, the lovelorn, and the Great Jazz Detective, who is out butnot down.

Vague Tales


Eric Haven - 2017
    His inky, rubbery drawings buttress his black humor.Psylicon --Ruin --Pulsar --Sorceress

Borb


Jason Little - 2015
    Borb is a downtrodden urban Candide whose misfortunes pile up at an alarming rate. The narrative is presented as a series of daily newspaper strips as the author draws on the long and complex tradition of the comic strip slapstick vagabond archetype. At once hilarious, horrifying, and full or heart, Borb depicts the real horrors specific to present-day urban homelessness. Borb is Little's most complex and challenging work.Jason Little studied photography at Oberlin College, and now resides in Brooklyn with writer Myla Goldberg and their daughter Zelie Goldberg-Little. He has been drawing cartoons since he was a child. In addition to acclaimed Shutterbug Follies and Motel Art Improvement Service, he also created the Xeric Award–winning Jack's Luck Runs Out, as well as a number of short works for various cartoon anthologies.

GLEEM


Freddy Carrasco - 2019
    It blinds and reveals, hurts and heals.Brace yourself for what you’ll find on the other side of. . . GLEEM!

Stunt


Michael DeForge - 2019
    Hiring a professional double, an actor spurs on his own demise as he and his double explore the depths of degradation and self-destruction.

Jimbo's Inferno


Gary Panter - 2006
    "It won't work. Even though the comic is engorged with Dante's Hell and though Jimbo mouths a super-condensed version of what happens in The Inferno, canto by canto, characters are fused, actions inverted, parodied, subject to mutation by my odd memories and obsessions and whims…"That said, Jimbo's Inferno is the hugely anticipated sequel (or prequel, as it was actually completed first) to Jimbo In Purgatory. In this oversize hardcover cloth-and-gold-finished volume, produced to the same exacting standards as 2004's Purgatory, Jimbo, accompanied by his trusty guide and ride Valise, visits Hell (here envisioned as a gigantic subterranean shopping mall called Focky Bocky), and in so doing runs across minotaurs, drug-addled punkettes, UFOs, giant robots, and more, leading him to such profound questions as, "Why do so many recreational activities involve smoke and heat?"Panter's wild Albrecht-Dürer-meets-Jack-Kirby graphics are wilder and more hallucinatory than ever, and given the full, expansive treatment they so richly deserve.

Dear Julia


Brian Biggs - 2000
    Dear Julia, is the story of how he got there. Boyd's vivid memory of the past and shaky comprehension of the present give clues to the events that lead him to the edge: his childhood, his parents, and a particular trip to Tucson, Arizona where everything began to go terribly awry. Brian Biggs tells the tale with deft wit and a sharp eye, leaving crumbs both verbal and visual along the reader's path to the climactic end. Also available is the Dear Julia, short film directed by Alistair Banks Griffin.