This distinctively drawn work chronicles the rise and reign of Chairman Mao Zedong, and his sweeping, often cataclysmic vision for the most populated country on the planet.Though the storyline is epic, the storytelling is intimate, reflecting the real life of the book’s artist. Li Kunwu spent more than 30 years as a state artist for the Communist Party. He saw firsthand what was happening to his family, his neighbors, and his homeland during this extraordinary time. Working with Philippe Ôtié, the artist has created a memoir of self and state, a rich, very human account of a major historical moment with contemporary consequences. Mao said, “The masses are the real heroes,” but A Chinese Life shows those masses as real people.Praise for A Chinese Life:“This is an absorbing book—all 700 pages of it—reminiscent at times of Zhang Yimou’s epic Chinese history film To Live, and reminiscent at others of George Orwell’s 1984, recast as non-fiction.” —The Onion’s A.V. Club

    This is her journey.Nick Abadzis blends fiction and fact in the intertwined stories of three compelling lives. Along with Laika, there is Korolev, once a political prisoner, now a driven engineer at the top of the Soviet space program, and Yelena, the lab technician responsible for Laika's health and life.

    Her designs define the look of the wildly popular Netflix animated series Bojack Horseman. Her culinary-focused comics and illustrated essays in Lucky Peach magazine won her a James Beard Award.Now, Hot Dog Taste Test collects Hanawalt's devastatingly funny comics, gorgeous art, and screwball lists as she tucks into the pomposities of the foodie subculture. Hanawalt dismantles the notion of breakfast; says goodbye to New York through a street food smorgasbord; shadows chef Wylie Dufresne, samples all-you-can-eat buffets in Vegas; and crafts an eerie comic about being a horse lover yet an avid carnivore.Hot Dog Taste Test explodes with color, hilarity, charm, and, occasionally, reproductive organs. Lush full-spread paintings of birds getting their silly feet all over a kitchen, a fully imagined hot dog show (think Best in Show but with hot dogs), and a holiday feast gone awry are the creamy icing on this imaginative rainbow-colored cake. But Hanawalt's wit and heart extend far beyond gags--her insightful musings on popular culture, relationships, and the animal in all of us are as keen and funny as her watercolors are exquisite.

    With masterful economy worthy of Charles Schultz, Lat recounts the life of Mat, a Muslim boy growing up in rural Malaysia in the 1950s: his adventures and mischief-making, fishing trips, religious study, and work on his family's rubber plantation. Meanwhile, the traditional way of life in his village (or kampung) is steadily disappearing, with tin mines and factory jobs gradually replacing family farms and rubber small-holders. When Mat himself leaves for boarding school, he can only hope that his familiar kampung will still be there when he returns. Kampung Boy is hilarious and affectionate, with brilliant, super-expressive artwork that opens a window into a world that has now nearly vanished.

    This brilliant radio personality now bursts onto the page as an illustrated character in vivid comics drawn by acclaimed artist Josh Neufeld. The cartoon of Brooke conducts the reader through two millennia of history-from the newspapers in Caesar's Rome to the penny press of the American Revolution and the manipulations of contemporary journalism. Gladstone's manifesto debunks the notion that "The Media" is an external force, outside of our control, since we've begun directly constructing, filtering, and responding to what we watch and read. With fascinating digressions, sobering anecdotes, and brave analytical wit, The Influencing Machine equips us to be smart, savvy, informed consumers and shapers of the media. It shows that we have met the media and it is us. So now what?

    With the uncanny ability to perform complex math problems in his head, Joel endeared himself to audiences across the country and later became the basis of several characters in fiction. Following a childhood spent in the public eye, Joel deliberately spent the remainder of his life removed from popular scrutiny.In All the Answers, his first graphic novel, Michael recounts the struggle to fully understand his distant father and his complex past, even as the onset of Alzheimer’s threatens to take away his present. With wit and heart, Michael presents a fascinating account of mid-century radio and early television history, the pro-Jewish propaganda the Allies used to counteract the Nazis, and the early age of modern celebrity culture.Filled with wisdom and insight, All the Answers is both a powerful father-son story and an engaging portrayal of what identity came to mean at this turning point in American history. Perfect for fans of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

    Now, Vertigo and DC Comics are proud to present the first of four definitive Absolute Editions collecting this groundbreaking series in its entirety. The Absolute Sandman, Volume One reprints issues 1-20 of The Sandman , and features all-new coloring on issues 1-18, commissioned especially for this edition. This volume also includes a full reproduction of Gaiman's original proposal for the series and the complete script and pencils by Gaiman and Charles Vess for the World Fantasy Award-winning story "A Midsummer Night's Dream" from The Sandman 19. Finally, a gallery of character design sketches show the evolution of Dream of the Endless.

    The next morning, he said goodbye to his 7½-months-pregnant wife, Alissa, and headed out the door.In an instant, Alissa's world was thrown into chaos. Forced to deal with unimaginable challenges, Alissa suddenly found herself cast into the role of 9/11 widow, tossed into a storm of bureaucracy, politics, patriotism, mourning, consolation, and, soon enough, motherhood.Beautifully and thoughtfully illustrated, American Widow is the affecting account of one woman's journey through shock, pain, birth, and rebirth in the aftermath of a great tragedy. It is also the story of a young couple's love affair: how a Colombian immigrant and a strong-minded New Yorker met, fell in love, and struggled to fulfill their dreams. Above all, American Widow is a tribute to the resilience of the human heart and the very personal story of how one woman endured a very public tragedy.

    Hellboy is one of the most celebrated comics series in recent years. The ultimate artists' artist and a great storyteller whose work is in turns haunting, hilarious, and spellbinding. Mike Mignola has won numerous awards in the comics industry and beyond. When strangeness threatens to engulf the world, a strange man will come to save it. Sent to investigate a mystery with supernatural overtones, Hellboy discovers the secrets of his own origins, and his link to the Nazi occultists who promised Hitler a final solution in the form of a demonic avatar." ... Hellboy is a brilliant example of how to elevate the comic of the future to a higher literary level while achieving a higher pitch of excitement." --Robert Bloch, from his introduction

    She'd sit at the table in silent protest, hide uneaten toast in her bedroom, listen to parental threats that she'd have to eat it for breakfast.But in any life a set of circumstance can collide, and normal behavior might soon shade into something sinister, something deadly.Lighter Than My Shadow is a hand-drawn story of struggle and recovery, a trip into the black heart of a taboo illness, an exposure of those who are so weak as to prey on the vulnerable, and an inspiration to anybody who believes in the human power to endure towards happiness.

    Honest, unflinching, and sometimes humorous, it is a look at the practical and emotional effect that serious illness can have on patients and their families. In the end, it is a story of hope--uniquely told in words and illustrations.

    Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"—with predictable results—the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies—an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades—the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.

    These encounters and many more make up a tale of comic and cosmic proportions that has Difool fighting for not only his very survival, but also the survival of the entire universe.

    I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness." So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescence, unsupervised and unguided, defenseless, and yet fearless.The story unfolds in the libertine atmosphere of the 1970s San Francisco, but the significance of Minnie's effort to understand herself and her world is universal. This is the story of an adolescent troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a searing comment on adult society as seen though the eyes of a young woman on the verge of joining it.In this unusual novel, artist and writer Phoebe Gloeckner presents a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form.

    Most women carry some form of mental load--about their work, household responsibilities, financial obligations, and personal life, but what makes up that burden and how it's distributed within households and understood in offices is not always equal or fair. In her strips, Emma deals with themes ranging from maternity leave (it is not a vacation!), domestic violence, the clitoris, the violence of the medical world on women during childbirth, and other feminist issues, and she does so in a straightforward way that is both hilarious and deadly serious. Her comics also address the everyday outrages and absurdities of immigrant rights, income equality, and police violence.