But not a very good one. Now a chain-smoking, self destructive alcoholic who is the owner and sole employee of a private investigations firm specialising in superhuman cases. When she exposes one hero's identity her life becomes expendable.

    When the parents announce their divorce, the family comes together at their beach house for a week. Dennis, the eldest son, is having marriage troubles of his own, and searches for clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother with a troubled 16-year-old daughter, Jill. The youngest child, Peter, is a hack filmmaker suffering from paralyzing insecurities who establishes an unorthodox romance with a mysterious day care counselor at the beach.

    The place where he first rebelled against his given destiny and imagined that he could be more -that he could be a man. There, he builds them. A wife, Virginia. Two teenage twins, Viv and Vin. They look like him. They have his powers. They share his grandest ambition (or is that obsession?) the unrelenting need to be ordinary.Behold the Visions! They’re the family next door, and they have the power to kill us all. What could possibly go wrong? Artificial hearts will be broken, bodies will not stay buried, the truth will not remain hidden, and the Vision will never be the same.Collecting: The Vision 1-6

    Designing a suit for himself and taking the name "Kick-Ass," Dave decides to make his dreary existence more exciting - and maybe even help some people in the process. But with no special powers and outmatched by New York City's most hardened criminals, Kick-Ass might be in for a little more than he bargained for. With his super-hero secret identity gaining fans due to a popular viral video, and other masked vigilantes beginning to make their presence felt in the city, Dave knows that his extracurricular activity is dangerous, maybe even stupid - but he's got the itch, and it ain't going away.COLLECTING: Kick-Ass 1-8

    Discovered in the Archives of the The Jim Henson Company, A Tale of Sand is an original graphic novel adaptation of an unproduced, feature-length screenplay written by Jim Henson and his frequent writing partner, Jerry Juhl. A Tale of Sand follows scruffy everyman, Mac, who wakes up in an unfamiliar town, and is chased across the desert of the American Southwest by all manners of man and beast of unimaginable proportions. Produced with the complete blessing of Lisa Henson, A Tale of Sand will allow Henson fans to recognize some of the inspirations and set pieces that appeared in later Henson Company productions.

    "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." In 1945, George Orwell, called "the conscience of his generation," created an enduring, devastating story of new tyranny replacing old, and power corrupting even the noblest of causes. Today it is all too clear that Orwell's masterpiece is still fiercely relevant wherever cults of personality thrive, truths are twisted by those in power, and freedom is under attack. Now, in this fully authorized edition, the artist Odyr translates the world and message of Animal Farm into a gorgeously imagined graphic novel. Old Major, Napoleon, Squealer, Snowball, Boxer, and all the animals of Animal Farm come to life in this newly envisaged classic. From his individual brushstrokes to the freedom of his page design, Odyr's adaptation seamlessly moves between satire and fable and will appeal to all ages, just as Orwell intended.

    While Jack dives deeper and deeper, he seems to pull further and further away from his young wife and their unborn son. Then one night, deep in the icy solitude of the ocean floor, Jack has a mysterious and supernatural encounter that will change the course of his life forever.Equal parts blue-collar character study and mind-bending mystery, The Underwater Welder is a graphic novel about fathers and sons, birth and death, memory and reality, and the treasures we all bury deep below the surface.

    It marked the birth of the modern graphic novel and the beginning of an era when serious cartoonists could be liberated from their stultifying comic-book format.More than a quarter-century after the initial publication of A Contract With God, and in the last few months of his life, Eisner chose to combine the three fictional works he had set on Dropsie Avenue, the mythical street of his youth in Depression-era New York City.As the dramas unfold in A Contract With God, the first book in this new trilogy, it is at 55 Dropsie Avenue where Frimme Hersh, the pious Jew, first loses his beloved daughter, then breaks his contract with his maker, and ends up as a slumlord; it is on Dropsie Avenue where a street singer, befriended by an aging diva, is so beholden to the bottle that he fails to grasp his chance for stardom; and it is there that a scheming little girl named Rosie poisons a depraved super’s dog before doing in the super as well.In the second book, A Life Force, declared by R. Crumb to be "a masterpiece," Eisner re-creates himself in his protagonist, Jacob Shtarkah, whose existential search reflected Eisner’s own lifelong struggle. Chronicling not only the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression but also the rise of Nazism and the spread of left-wing politics, Eisner combined the miniaturist sensibility of Henry Roth with the grand social themes of novelists such as Dos Passos and Steinbeck.Finally, in Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, Eisner graphically traces the social trajectory of this mythic avenue over four centuries, creating a sweeping panorama of the city and its waves of new residents—the Dutch, English, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans—whose faces changed yet whose lives presented an unending "story of life, death, and resurrection."The Contract With God Trilogy is a mesmerizing, fictional chronicle of a universal American experience and Eisner’' most poignant and enduring literary legacy.

    It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize.It is the tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody in Chicago who one day meets the father who abandoned him as a child. With a subtle, complex and moving story and the drawings that are as simple and original as they are strikingly beautiful, Jimmy Corrigan is a book unlike any other and certainly not to be missed.**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

    One day she meets Jon and it turns out he has the same ability. And sooner or later they get around to using their gifts to do what we’d ALL do: rob a couple banks. A bawdy and brazen sex comedy for comics begins here!Collecting: Sex Criminals 1-5

    An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait. Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about? As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.

    His life's crowning achievement, his greatest film, would have told the story of a European village as the last hour of 999 A.D. approached - the midnight that the villagers were convinced would bring with it Armageddon. Now that story will never be told. But he's still working it out in his head, making a film that no one will ever see. No one but us.Serialized in The Face in 1989, expanded and revised into a graphic novel in 1992, and adapted for radio in 2000, Signal to Noise has never stopped evolving. The bonus material in this first-time hardcover edition captures every leg of the journey, including three related short stories unseen in nearly two decades, an additional chapter created for the CD release of the radio drama, and a new introduction by Dave McKean along with the original by Jonathan Carrol and the radio drama introduction by Neil Gaiman.

    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.

    When Kansas farm girl Dorothy flies away to the magical Land of Oz, she fatally flattens a wicked witch, liberates a living scarecrow and is hailed by the Munchkin people as a great sorceress but all she really wants to know is: how does she get home?

    (Among other things, three major cast members—Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus—initially show up as infants and only "grow" into their final "mature" selves as the months go by. Even Snoopy debuts as a puppy!) Thus The Complete Peanuts offers a unique chance to see a master of the art form refine his skills and solidify his universe, day by day, week by week, month by month.This volume is rounded out with Garrison Keillor's introduction, a biographical essay by David Michaelis (Schulz and Peanuts) and an in-depth interview with Schulz conducted in 1987 by Gary Groth and Rick Marschall, all wrapped in a gorgeous design by award-winning cartoonist Seth.