In Waves


A.J. Dungo - 2019
    With his passion for surfing uniting many narratives, he intertwines his own story with those of some of the great heroes of surf.

The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus


Duncan Hamilton - 2019
    Between two world wars, he became the laureate of cricket by doing the same with words.In The Great Romantic, award-winning author Duncan Hamilton demonstrates how Cardus changed sports journalism for ever. While popularising cricket – while appealing, in Cardus’ words to people who ‘didn’t know a leg-break from the pavilion cat at Lord’s’- he became a star in his own right with exquisite phrase-making, disdain for statistics and a penchant for literary and musical allusions.Among those who venerated Cardus were PG Wodehouse, John Arlott, Harold Pinter, JB Priestley and Don Bradman. However, behind the rhapsody in blue skies, green grass and colourful characters, this richly evocative biography finds that Cardus’ mother was a prostitute, he never knew his father and he received negligible education. Infatuations with younger women ran parallel to a decidedly unromantic marriage. And, astonishingly, the supreme stylist’s aversion to factual accuracy led to his reporting on matches he never attended.Yet Cardus also belied his impoverished origins to prosper in a second class-conscious profession, becoming a music critic of international renown. The Great Romantic uncovers the dark enigma within a golden age.

Arab in America


Toufic El Rassi - 2007
    Using the graphic novel as his medium, Lebanon-born Toufic El Rassi chronicles his experience growing up Arab in America. Keen observations, clever insights and painful honesty make El Rassi's work shine as a critical 21st century memoir. From childhood through adolescence, and as an adult, El Rassi illustrates the prejudice and discrimination Arabs and Muslims experience in American society. He contends with ignorant teachers, racist neighbors, bullying classmates, and a growing sense of alienation. El Rassi recounts his personal experiences after the 9/11 attacks and during the implementation of new security and immigration laws that followed. El Rassi gives context to current world events, providing readers with an overview of the modern history of the Middle East, including the Gulf wars. He also examines the roles American films and news media play in creating negative stereotypes of Arab-Americans, showing how difficult it is to have an Arab identity in a society saturated with anti-Arab images and messages.

Be Gay, Do Comics


Matt BorsDelta Vasquez - 2020
    The life of a gay and Jewish Nazi-fighter. A gender reveal party that tears apart reality. These are the just some of the comics you'll find in this massive queer comics anthology from The Nib.Be Gay, Do Comics is filled with dozens of comics about LGBTQIA experiences, ranging from personal stories to queer history to cutting satire about pronoun panic and brands desperate to co-opt pride. Brimming with resilience, inspiration, and humor, an incredible lineup of top indie cartoonists takes you from the American Revolution through Stonewall to today's fights for equality and representation.Featuring more than 30 cartoonists including Hazel Newlevant, Joey Alison Sayers, Maia Kobabe, Matt Lubchansky, Breena Nuñez, Sasha Velour, Shing Yin Khor, Levi Hastings, Mady G, Bianca Xunise, Kazimir Lee, and many, many more!

Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir


Liz Prince - 2014
    But she wasn't exactly one of the guys, either. She was somewhere in between. But with the forces of middle school, high school, parents, friendship, and romance pulling her this way and that, "the middle" wasn't exactly an easy place to be.Tomboy follows award-winning author and artist Liz Prince through her early years and explores—with humor, honesty, and poignancy—what it means to "be a girl."

In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot


Graham Roumieu - 2003
    Learn the hairy one's brave struggles with eating disorders, casual cannibalism, pop culture, and philosophical quandaries. In this crazed mutant graphic novel, Graham Roumieu gives us a portrait of the artist as a young ape that will leave the reader howling with laughter.

Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us: A Johnny Wander Collection


Ananth Hirsh - 2017
    Eight years, four cats, and three moves are chronicled in this gorgeous hardcover omnibus, which includes a foreword by Raina Telgemeier (Smile, Ghosts). Hirsh and Ota's charming reverie about new adulthood will appeal to fans of Kate Beaton, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and Jeffrey Brown along with anyone who's just winging it."

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.

Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide


Kate Charlesworth - 2019
    Peopled by a cast of gay icons such as Dusty Springfield, Billie Jean King, Dirk Bogarde and Alan Turing, and featuring key moments such as Stonewall, Gay Pride and Section 28, Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide, is the first graphic history documenting lesbian life from 1950 to the present. It is a stunning, personal, graphic memoir and a milestone itself in LGBTQI+ history.In 1950, when Kate was born, male homosexuality carried a custodial sentence. But female homosexuality had never been an offence in the UK, effectively rendering lesbians even more invisible than they already were—often to themselves. Growing up in Yorkshire, the young Kate had to find role models wherever she could, in real life, books, film and TV.Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide is a fascinating history of how post-war Britain transformed from a country hostile towards ‘queer’ lives to the LGBQTI+ universe of today, recording the political gains and challenges against a backdrop of personal experience: realising her own sexuality, coming out to her parents, embracing lesbian and gay culture, losing friends to AIDS. Kate’s ex-navy dad said to her: ‘You shouldn’t have told her, love… you should have just told me.’ But it turned out her mother might have known a bit more about life, too.

Dr. Seuss and Co. Go to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of America's Leading Comic Artists


André Schiffrin - 2009
    --ART SPIEGELMAN, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF MAUS ON DR. SEUSS GOES TO WAR Hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "a provocative history of wartime politics," Dr. Seuss Goes to War, published nearly a decade ago, sold over one hundred thousand copies and introduced readers to the World War II-era political cartoons of Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss. Published to great acclaim, the collection included over two hundred cartoons from Geisel's years working for the New York daily newspaper PM. Now Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War presents a new trove of close to four hundred discoveries from the PM World War II archives, including over one hundred cartoons by Seuss, fifty cartoons by the New Yorker's Saul Steinberg, and works by the leading cartoonists of the time, such as Al Hirschfeld, caricaturist for the New York Times; Polish-born American artist Arthur Szyk; and future New Yorker cartoonists Carl Rose and Mischa Richter. The cartoons and commentary in this handsome volume (to be published in the same format as the original Dr. Seuss Goes to War) cover the five years of the war, illustrating changing attitudes and providing a complex picture of the issues that concerned Americans.

Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History


Trevor R. Getz - 2011
    The book is a microhistory that does much more than simply depict an event in the past; it uses the power of illustration to convey important themes in world history and to reveal the processes by which history is made.The story of Abina Mansah--a woman without history who was wrongfully enslaved, escaped to British-controlled territory, and then took her former master to court--takes place in the complex world of the Gold Coast at the onset of late nineteenth-century colonialism. Slavery becomes a contested ground, as cultural practices collide with an emerging wage economy and British officials turn a blind eye to the presence of underpaid domestic workers in the households of African merchants. The main scenes of the story take place in the courtroom, where Abina strives to convince a series of important men--a British judge, two Euro-African attorneys, a wealthy African country gentleman, and a jury of local leaders--that her rights matter. Am I free? Abina inquires. Throughout both the court case and the flashbacks that dramatically depict her life in servitude, these men strive to silence Abina and to impose their own understandings and meanings upon her. The story seems to conclude with the short-term success of the important men, as Abina loses her case. But it doesn't end there: Abina is eventually redeemed. Her testimony is uncovered in the dusty archives by Trevor Getz and, through Liz Clarke's illustrations, becomes a graphic history read by people around the world. In this way, the reader takes an active part in the story along with the illustrator, the author, and Abina herself.Following the graphic history in Part I, Parts II-V provide detailed historical context for the story, a reading guide that reconstructs and deconstructs the methods used to interpret the story, and strategies for using Abina in various classroom settings.

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier


Thad Carhart - 2000
    Intrigued by its simple sign—Desforges Pianos—he enters, only to have his way barred by the shop's imperious owner.Unable to stifle his curiosity, he finally lands the proper introduction, and a world previously hidden is brought into view. Luc, the atelier's master, proves an indispensable guide to the history and art of the piano. Intertwined with the story of a musical friendship are reflections on how pianos work, their glorious history, and stories of the people who care for them, from amateur pianists to the craftsmen who make the mechanism sing. The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is at once a beguiling portrait of a Paris not found on any map and a tender account of the awakening of a lost childhood passion.

The Beatles Graphic


Hervé Bourhis - 2010
    Hervé Bourhis, creator of The Little Book of Rock, turns his unique graphic talents to the legend of The Beatles, told from the very beginning. Bourhis’ visual imagination illuminates the individual lives of each band member from their pre-Beatles youth to what would become a rock band of phenomenal worldwide fame. All of the epic details of their story are vividly evoked: the triumphs, the quarrels, the supreme musical creativity and of course the inevitable break-up. The story then goes on to follow the personal destinies of John, Paul, George and Ringo, four Liverpool lads who were by turns ambitious, clever, facetious, arrogant, down-to-earth and supremely talented. Theirs was the ultimate rock band story and Hervé Bourhis has done it —and them — full justice in this superb and exuberant graphic biography.

Almost American Girl


Robin Ha - 2020
    Growing up in the 1990s as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn’t always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together.So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation—following her mother’s announcement that she’s getting married—Robin is devastated. Overnight, her life changes. She is dropped into a new school where she doesn’t understand the language and struggles to keep up. She is completely cut off from her friends at home and has no access to her beloved comics. At home, she doesn’t fit in with her new stepfamily. And worst of all, she is furious with the one person she is closest to—her mother.Then one day Robin’s mother enrolls her in a local comic drawing class, which opens the window to a future Robin could never have imagined.

Conversations with Marilyn: Portrait of Marilyn Monroe


Marilyn Monroe - 1977