Her simple, unadorned drawing style, heavy narration, and biting wit chronicle transient roommates who communicate only through Post-it notes; aspiring artists who sublet tiny rooms in leaky, greasy broken-down border-house loft apartments crawling with bugs, cats, and bad art. Bell tackles a string of forgettable, unrelated jobs--including nude modeling, artist's assistant, art teacher, and jewelry maker--that only serve to bolster her despair, boredom, and discomfort in her own skin.Bell's self-scrutiny leads her to dream sequences that allow her to rise above her banal actuality and hyperawareness. She fantasizes about her vision of a perfect world as she becomes the accomplished artist and world traveler she longs to be. Bell's daily comics allow her to escape the harsh, judgmental gaze of the world and the monotony of daily life. Her unpolished art speaks to a desire to record all the messy details while the pain and confusion are still fresh.Coming of age amid the zine revolution, cartoonist Gabrielle Bell has been creating her comics to much acclaim, even winning an Ignatz Award for the self-published serialization of Lucky.

    In a dazzling work of graphic fiction, a surreal journey through a wonderland eerily like real life, The Book of Leviathan chronicles an infant's investigations into life's great mysteries. Endowed with a preternatural interest in metaphysics and philosophy, yet as confused as any innocent by the vagaries of adult behavior, little Levi bears the added burden of living in a world that can literally change at the stroke of a pen.Aided by a wise pet ("Cat") and a favorite toy ("Bunny"), Levi encounters a frothing ectoplasmic Hegel and a woefully off-the-mark Freud. In less heady adventures, Levi contemplates why his parents disappear at night (and whether he is wholeheartedly pleased when they return each morning); the regrettable liberties taken with the English language; and the relationship between Bennetton and Pablo Neruda.Peter Blegvad's Book of Leviathan assembles the cream from Levi and Cat's adventures, published in The Independent on Sunday newspaper in the twilight years of the old Millennium. Blegvad's darkly humorous work has been described by Matt Groening as "one of the weirdest things I've ever stared at". Quirky and referential, dark and droll by turn, it follows the faceless baby Levi's journeys into and out of the world. They are escapes, but as some sage once observed, only a jailer would consider the term "escapist" pejorative.

    The year is 1933, and New York City is not-so-secretly run by corrupt politicians, crooked cops, big businesses... and suave gangland bosses like New York's worst, the Goblin. But when a fateful spider-bite gives the young rabble-rouser Peter Parker the power to fight the mobster who killed his Uncle Ben, will even that be enough? It's a tangled web of Great Depression pulp, with familiar faces like you've never seen them before! By "Hardboiled" David Hine, Fabrice "The Spider" Sapolsky, and Carmine "Carbine" Di Giandomenico! Collects Spider-Man Noir #1-4.

    In the time of Lewis Carroll it was the greatest shipbuilding port in the world. To this city that gave the world the electric light bulb, the stars and stripes, the millennium, the Liberty Ships and the greatest British dragon legend came Carroll in the years preceding his most famous book, Alice in Wonderland, and here are buried the roots of his surreal masterpiece. Enter the famous Edwardian palace of varieties, The Sunderland Empire, for a unique experience: an entertaining and epic meditation on myth, history and storytelling and decide for yourself - does Sunderland really exist?

    It's a platform for short fiction, experimentation, and for showcasing diversity in the comics field. The only common denominator to each piece is an exemplary use of the comics form, with a lineup of established and up-and-coming talent from around the globe. The first issue includes new work from acclaimed creators such as Noah Van Sciver (Fante Bukowski), Gabrielle Bell (Lucky), Dash Shaw (Cosplayers), Sammy Harkham (Crickets), and Malachi Ward (Ancestor), as well as international stars such as J.C. Menu, Conxita Herrerro, Tobias Schalken, and Antoine Cosse. Plus strips from Tommi Parrish, Sara Corbett, Daria Tessler, and Kaela Graham, as well as a gorgeous painted cover by Rebecca Morgan.

    This volume also includes stories from Gotham Knights #23 and #33, and Solo #1 and #5. Older teens.

    Volumes 1-6 of Kurt Busiek's Astro City are collected in this volume that also includes a sketchbook showing the development of Astro City a cover gallery of cover paintings.

    Read the whole story of "Life in Hell "RM" ," from early prehistory to late last night.

    Author Alisa Kwitney explores its beginnings and chronicles the comic's emergence as a unique and undeniable force in the literary world. Richly illustrated, this history shows how Gaiman and The Sandman's gifted artists, such as Dave McKean and Yoshitaka Amano, create a haunting (and haunted) main character who wields immense power. With illustrations never before published, behind-the-scenes stories, handwritten notes, and interviews with Gaiman himself, this volume is a true testament to the dream king and his creator.

    These crisply rendered images reflect his life-long obsession with hidden worlds, alternate realities and the inexplicable resonance of the unprecedented and irrational in lucid art.Seeing Things collects the most toothsome of these drawings and arranges them in four sections. "Lazy Robinson" is a series of portraits of forms taken by a cognizant object during the course of a specific and identifiable stream of thought. "Frogs" celebrates the tender proclivities of the most noble of all animals, by placing them in situations that would dismay a horde of saints. "The Visible World" is a roundup of appalling scenes of sub-rational political activity involving catalytic entities with a high ratio of motivation to altruism. And "The Portfolio in Color" appears like a rainbow at the end of all this exalted storminess to send readers out into the world whistling with delight. Many of these images were created for "Mysterio Sympatico," Woodring's multimedia stage collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell. There is plenty of echoless, glowing furniture to add to that already crowded storeroom which is briefly, but brilliantly, illuminated in the pages of this stately book.

    The first four were self-xeroxed efforts, and led to a prestigious Xeric Grant in 1996, enabling her to publish a more professionally packaged fifth issue. This volume presents the best of these five comic books, as well as other short strips, to a larger audience for the first time. Abel's stories are peppered with hipsters, fashion, and trendy locales - all of which have contributed to her considerable appeal - but don't let the generational trappings fool you. Her intuitive ear for dialogue and characterization have made Artbabe a hit amongst people of all ages, especially women. TP, 120pg, b&w

    where master chefs rule the town like crime lords and people literally kill for a seat at the best restaurants, a bloody culinary war is raging.On one side, the Internationalists, who blend foods from all over the world into exotic delights. On the other, the "Vertical Farm," who prepare nothing but organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic dishes. Into this maelstrom steps Jiro, a renegade and ruthless sushi chef, known to decapitate patrons who dare request a California Roll, or who stir wasabi into their soy sauce. Both sides want Jiro to join their factions. Jiro, however has bigger ideas, and in the end, no chef may be left alive!Anthony Bourdain, top chef, acclaimed writer (Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw) and star of the hit travel show, No Reservations, co-writes with Joel Rose (Kill Kill Faster Faster, The Blackest Bird) this stylized send-up of food culture and society, with detailed and dynamic art by Langdon Foss.

    Tezuka evidences his profound grasp of the subject by contextualizing the Buddha’s ideas; the emphasis is on movement, action, emotion, and conflict as the prince Siddhartha runs away from home, travels across India, and questions Hindu practices such as ascetic self-mutilation and caste oppression. Rather than recommend resignation and impassivity, Tezuka’s Buddha predicates enlightenment upon recognizing the interconnectedness of life, having compassion for the suffering, and ordering one’s life sensibly. Philosophical segments are threaded into interpersonal situations with ground-breaking visual dynamism by an artist who makes sure never to lose his readers’ attention.Tezuka himself was a humanist rather than a Buddhist, and his magnum opus is not an attempt at propaganda. Hermann Hesse’s novel or Bertolucci’s film is comparable in this regard; in fact, Tezuka’s approach is slightly irreverent in that it incorporates something that Western commentators often eschew, namely, humor.

    Within its pages, he serialized the groundbreaking Ed the Happy Clown, revealing a macabre universe of parallel dimensions. Thanks to its wholly original yet disturbing story lines, Ed set the stage for Brown to become a world-renowned cartoonist. Ed the Happy Clown is a hallucinatory tale that functions simultaneously as a dark roller-coaster ride of criminal activity and a scathing condemnation of religious and political charlatanism. As the world around him devolves into madness, the eponymous Ed escapes variously from a jealous boyfriend, sewer monsters, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a janitor with a Jesus complex. Brown leaves us wondering, with every twist of the plot, just how Ed will get out of this scrape. The intimate, tangled world of Ed the Happy Clown is definitively presented here, repackaged with a new foreword by the author and an extensive notes section, and is, like every Brown book, astonishingly perceptive about the zeitgeist of its time.

    Parrish’s emotionally loaded, painted graphic novel is is a visual tour de force, always in the service of the author’s themes: navigating queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the ever-in-flux state of friendships.