Very Casual


Michael DeForge - 2013
    Included are stories about litter gangs, meat-filled snowmen, righteous cops, beagle/human hybrids, and forest-bound drag queens.

Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles


Mark Russell - 2018
    While the United States is locked in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, the gay Southern playwright known as Snagglepuss is the toast of Broadway. But success has made him a target. As he plans for his next hit play, Snagglepuss becomes the focus of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And when powerful forces align to purge show business of its most subversive voices, no one is safe!Written by Mark Russell, the critically acclaimed mastermind behind the award-winning PREZ VOL. 1 and THE FLINTSTONES, EXIT STAGE LEFT: THE SNAGGLEPUSS CHRONICLES, enters the Hanna-Barbera reimagined universe! Collects issues #1-6

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.

The Complete Okko


Hub - 2016
    While most warriors shed blood on the battlefield for one clan or another, Okko the Ronin travels elsewhere on a more personal mission, hunting demons across the land. In his company are Noburo, an enigmatic giant who hides his face behind a red mask; Noshin, a whimsical monk and lover of saké with the power to commune with the spirits of nature; and the young fisherman Tikku, learning his way in the world.  From master storyteller Hub, The Complete Okko contains all five volumes of his ambitious fantasy series that explores one ronin’s journey of redemption across a world that is as beautful as it is violent. In addition, this completed collection includes over 120 pages of previously unreleased Okko story material.

The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture


Glen Weldon - 2016
    For more than three quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he’s a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How we perceive Batman’s character, whether he’s delivering dire threats in a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin on the comics page, speaks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It’s this endlessly mutable quality that has made him so enduring.And it’s Batman’s fundamental nerdiness—his gadgets, his obsession, his oath, even his lack of superpowers—that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective love for the character. Today, fueled by the internet, that breed of passion for elements of popular culture is everywhere. Which is what makes Batman the perfect lens through which to understand geek culture, its current popularity, and social significance.In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman’s seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.

Satania


Fabien Vehlmann - 2016
    The young scientist, who disappeared underground several months ago, claimed, to everyone’s astonishment, to be able to prove the existence of Hell by using Darwin’s theory of evolution. The little group, led by Charlie, plunge underground in his pursuit. The deeper they progress into the entrails of our planet, the more they enter another world that hides other forms of life heretofore never experienced. The discovery changes them gradually in a way they cannot at first perceive…

The crying giant


Joann Sfar - 2001
    In this volume, Alcibiades the wizard’s giant eye cannot stop crying, flooding the entire dungeon. They must find the Giant who gave his eye to remedy this rather wet situation. We also discover the origin of John-John the Terrible, the monster split into two living halves.

Puke Force


Brian Chippendale - 2013
    . . obsessively detailed [comics] feel like [they've] been shot straight from his brain onto the page." - Village Voice Puke Force is social satire written dark and dense across Brian Chippendale's deconstructed multiverse of walking, talking M&Ms, hamsters, and cycloptic-yet-glamorous trivia hosts. In scathingly funny single-page strips that build and build, he takes on social media narcissism, governmental propaganda, racism, and a culture of violence, skewering the malice of the right and the hypocrisies of the left. A bomb explodes in a coffee shop: the incident is played out over and over again from the perspective of each table in the shop, revisiting moments from ten and twenty years before. We see the inevitable as the characters bicker or celebrate, unaware of what's coming. Throughout this dystopic graphic novel, Chippendale uses humor and a frantic drawing style to show how the insidious nature of corporate greed and the commodification of everything have warped society into a killing machine. Sardonic and self-aware, Puke Force asks all the right questions, providing a startling and on-point take on contemporary social issues. Chippendale's artwork makes each panel a masterpiece of thrumming linework and lo-fi magic, as his storytelling wends and winds its way to a fascinating conclusion.

Dork Volume 2: Circling the Drain


Evan Dorkin - 2003
    The second collection from Evan Dorkin's award-winning humor anthology Dork includes all the non-Eltingville material from issues #7-10, plus extras, with 16 pages in color! Highlighted by the acclaimed "Cluttered Like My Head" autobiographical tour de force.

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.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama


Alison Bechdel - 2012
    Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

Everybody Loves Tank Girl


Alan C. Martin - 2012
    Everyone's favorite outback anarchist is back to blow things up, swear profusely and offend the elderly in your household! This time, Monsieur Alan Martin teams up with wunderkind Jim Mahfood to bring you Tank Girl as you've never seen her: wild, raw, foul-mouthed and forever rockin' but rendered in a style that will bring pleasure to thine eyes.

Displacement: A Travelogue


Lucy Knisley - 2015
    In the next installment of her graphic travelogue series, Displacement, Knisley volunteers to watch over her ailing grandparents on a cruise. (The book s watercolors evoke the ocean that surrounds them.) In a book that is part graphic memoir, part travelogue, and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their younger and older selves. She is aided in her quest by her grandfather s WWII memoir, which is excerpted. Readers will identify with Knisley s frustration, her fears, her compassion, and her attempts to come to terms with mortality, as she copes with the stress of travel complicated by her grandparents frailty."

Luba


Gilbert Hernández - 2009
    But he soon picked up the story of Luba: The hammer-wielding matriarch had emigrated to the U. S. where she contended not only with an unwelcoming new culture but also her extended family. These "America" stories - over 80 of them, ranging from quick one-page blackout sketches to graphic novellas—were originally published in a number of different comics and reprinted in a trilogy of oversized paperbacks. Luba collects in one compact, affordable hardcover the entirety of these tales, showcasing Gilbert Hernandez's wicked wit, great compassion, and uncanny understanding of how human beings love, squabble, and ultimately find a way to make it through this life.

Unreal City


D.J. Bryant - 2017
    Bryant’s characters sometimes feel like they are navigating their way through the darkness in an attempt to make sense of love, sex, art, and life. Existential and elliptical, the stories play beautifully against Bryant’s precise and fully-realized artwork, which echoes such masters as Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes. In Unreal City, characters cannot walk into a room without their world turning inside out. Readers will be similarly upended by the discovery of this major new talent.