The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics


Denis Kitchen - 2008
    Terry Gilliam also started at his side, met an unknown John Cleese in the process, and the genesis of Monty Python was formed. Art Spiegelman has stated on record that he owes his career to him. And he's one of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's favorite artists.Harvey Kurtzman had a Midas touch for talent, but was himself an astonishingly talented and influential artist, writer, editor, and satirist. The creator of MAD and Playboy's "Little Annie Fanny" was called, "One of the most important figures in postwar America" by the New York Times. Kurtzman's groundbreaking "realistic" war comics of the early '50s and various satirical publications (MAD, Trump, Humbug, and Help!) had an immense impact on popular culture, inspiring a generation of underground cartoonists. Without Kurtzman, it's unlikely we'd have had Airplane, SNL, or National Lampoon.The Art of Harvey Kurtzman is the first and only authorized celebration of this "Master of American Comics." This definitive book includes hundreds of never-before-seen illustrations, paintings, pencil sketches, newly discovered lost E.C. Comics layouts, color compositions, illustrated correspondence, and vintage photos from the rich Kurtzman archives

Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes from Inspirational Folks


Gavin Aung Than - 2014
    From icons like Confucius, Marie Curie, and Henry David Thoreau, to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, to contemporary notables like Ira Glass, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Neil Gaiman---their words are turned into sometimes heartwarming, sometimes sobering stories by cartoonist Gavin Aung Than. Be inspired, motivated, educated, and laugh as you read famous words as never before!

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage


Sydney Padua - 2015
    . . in which Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious series of adventures. Meet Victorian London’s most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage’s plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines. But do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime—for the sake of both London and science. Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible.(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

Baby's in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles


Arne Bellstorf - 2010
    . . right at the beginning of their careers. This gorgeous, high-energy graphic novel is an intimate peek into the early years of the world's greatest rock band.The heart of Baby's In Black is a love story. The "fifth Beatle," Stuart Sutcliffe, falls in love with the beautiful Astrid Kirchherr when she recruits the Beatles for a sensational (and famous) photography session during their time in Hamburg. When the band returns to the UK, Sutcliffe quits, becomes engaged to Kirchherr, and stays in Hamburg. A year later, his meteoric career as a modern artist is cut short when he dies unexpectedly.The book ends as it begins, with Astrid, alone and adrift; but with a note of hope: her life is incomparably richer and more directed thanks to her friendship with the Beatles and her love affair with Sutcliffe. This tender story is rendered in lush, romantic black-and-white artwork.Baby's In Black is based on a true story.

Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue


Bill Watterson - 2015
    Includes an in-depth, original,and lengthy interview with Bill Watterson.Exploring Calvin and Hobbes is the catalogue for an exhibition by the same name at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University that ran in 2014. The exhibit is Bill Watterson's personal exploration of how the wonder of Calvin and Hobbes came to be. It includes original art of Calvin and Hobbes, along with Watterson's original commentary. The show also includes art from cartoons and cartoonists that Watterson has identified as influential in the development of his art, including Peanuts, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Doonesbury, Pat Oliphant, Jim Borgman, Flash Gordon, Bloom County, and Steadman. The book also includes an extensive, original interview with Watterson by Jenny Robb, the exhibition's curator.The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is the repository of the Bill Watterson Deposit Collection (including the entirety of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes artwork).

Comics and Sequential Art


Will Eisner - 1985
    Readers will learn the basic anatomy, fundamentals of storycraft and how the medium works as a means of expression.

The Beats: A Graphic History


Paul M. BuhlePeter Kuper - 2009
    Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists and writers, including the feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and the Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper, The Beats takes us on a wild tour of a generation that, in the face of mainstream American conformity and conservatism, became known for its determined uprootedness, aggressive addictions, and startling creativity and experimentation.What began among a small circle of friends in New York and San Francisco during the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the groundwork for a literary explosion, and this striking anthology captures the storied era in all its incarnations—from the Benzedrine-fueled antics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to the painting sessions of Jay DeFeo’s disheveled studio, from the jazz hipsters to the beatnik chicks, from Chicago’s College of Complexes to San Francisco’s famed City Lights bookstore. Snapshots of lesser-known poets and writers sit alongside frank and compelling looks at the Beats’ most recognizable faces. What emerges is a brilliant collage of—and tribute to—a generation, in a form and style that is as original as its subject.

Showa, 1926-1939: A History of Japan


水木しげる - 2013
    This volume deals with the period leading up to World War II, a time of high unemployment and other economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. Mizuki's photo-realist style effortlessly brings to life the Japan of the 1920s and 1930s, depicting bustling city streets and abandoned graveyards with equal ease. When the Showa era began, Mizuki himself was just a few years old, so his earliest memories coincide with the earliest events of the time. With his trusty narrator Nezumi Otoko (Rat Man), Mizuki brings history into the realm of the personal, making it palatable, and indeed compelling, for young audiences as well as more mature readers. As he describes the militarization that leads up to World War II, Mizuki's stance toward war is thoughtful and often downright critical--his portrayal of the Nanjing Massacre clearly paints the incident (a disputed topic within Japan) as an atrocity. Mizuki's "Showa 1926-1939" is a beautifully told history that tracks how technological developments and the country's shifting economic stability had a role in shaping Japan's foreign policy in the early twentieth century.

Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey


G.B. Tran - 2011
    Born and raised in South Carolina as a son of immigrants, he knew that his parents had fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. But even as they struggled to adapt to life in America, they preferred to forget the past—and to focus on their children’s future. It was only in his late twenties that GB began to learn their extraordinary story. When his last surviving grandparents die within months of each other, GB visits Vietnam for the first time and begins to learn the tragic history of his family, and of the homeland they left behind. In this family saga played out in the shadow of history, GB uncovers the root of his father’s remoteness and why his mother had remained in an often fractious marriage; why his grandfather had abandoned his own family to fight for the Viet Cong; why his grandmother had had an affair with a French soldier. GB learns that his parents had taken harrowing flight from Saigon during the final hours of the war not because they thought America was better but because they were afraid of what would happen if they stayed. They entered America—a foreign land they couldn’t even imagine—where family connections dissolved and shared history was lost within a span of a single generation.In telling his family’s story, GB finds his own place in this saga of hardship and heroism. Vietnamerica is a visually stunning portrait of survival, escape, and reinvention—and of the gift of the American immigrants’ dream, passed on to their children. Vietnamerica is an unforgettable story of family revelation and reconnection—and a new graphic-memoir classic.

I Saw You...: Comics Inspired by Real Life Missed Connections


Julia WertzJoey Sayers - 2009
    Lonely hearts, romantics, and even cynics pore over missed connection ads in search of love, to gawk and giggle, or out of curiosity. These posted stranger sightings and chance encounters lay bare the truths and oddities of real-life loneliness and attractions and bring out the voyeur in the best of us. I Saw You takes this phenomenon and makes it even better. Julia Wertz has gathered the stars and soon-to-be-stars of the graphic art world, including Peter Bagge, Jesse Reklaw, Tom Hart, Sam Henderson, Laura Park, Emily Flake, Keith Knight, Janelle Hessig, Gabrielle Bell, Aaron Renier, Austin English, Corinne Mucha, Jeffrey Brown, Alec Longstreth, Minty Lewis, Joey Sayers, David Malki, Kazimir Strzepek, Ken Dahl, Shannon Wheeler, Shaenon Garrity, Rodd Perry, Abby Denson, Damien Jay, Sarah Glidden, and dozens more, to interpret these plaintive, hopeful postings in drawings that range from laugh-out-loud funny to disarmingly strange.

The Hunting Accident


David L. Carlson - 2015
    "The Hunting Accident" is the true life story of a Chicago gangster who is blinded during a shootout and is sent to Stateville Prison where he learns to navigate life under the tutelage of real life thrill killer Nathan Leopold.

Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout


Lauren Redniss - 2010
    A brilliant visual storyteller, Redniss has hand-designed more than 100 color collages to tell Curie’s story, fascinating in its scientific significance and its sometimes whimsical, sometimes haunting mix of romance and intrigue. Bringing together archival photos, images, and clippings with dazzling line drawings and a compelling narrative, Radioactive is far more than just an art book or a graphic novel: It is a stunning visual biography and a true work of art.

Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know


Paul Gravett - 2005
    over the last four years. This modern renaissance of comics has produced a library of substantial works, whose subjects are not confined to superheroes or fantasy but are as varied and sophisticated as the best films and literature.Graphic Novels presents an accessible, entertaining, and highly illustrated guide to the diversity of contemporary comics in book form. Featuring striking graphics and explanatory extracts from a wide range of graphic novels, the book examines the specific language of the comics medium; the history and pioneers of the form; recent masterpieces from Art Spiegelman's Maus to Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan; the impact of Japanese manga and European albums translated into English; how artists have overcome prejudices towards the genre; and the ambitious range of themes and issues artists are addressing, including childhood, war and survival, politics, the future, sexuality, and the supernatural.

And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir


Margaret Kimball - 2021
    As she searches for answers nearly thirty years later, Kimball embarks on a journey into the secrets her family has kept for decades. Using old diary entries, hospital records, home videos, and other archives, Margaret pieces together a narrative map of her childhood—her mother's bipolar disorder, her grandmother's institutionalization, and her brother's increasing struggles—in an attempt to understand what no one likes to talk about: the fractures in her family.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth


Apostolos Doxiadis - 2009
     This graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, he crosses paths with thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert & Kurt Gödel, & finds a passionate student in Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Thru love & hate, peace & war, he persists in the mission threatening to claim both his career & happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity. This story is at the same time a historical novel & an accessible explication of some of the biggest ideas of mathematics & modern philosophy. With rich characterizations & atmospheric artwork, it spins the pursuit of such ideas into a satisfying tale. Probing, layered, the book throws light on Russell’s inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless questions he tried to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between ideal rationality & the flawed fabric of reality.