All Lucius wants is to recapture the Rome of earlier days, when one could enjoy a relaxing bath without the pressure of merchants and roughhousing patrons. Slipping deeper into the warm water, Lucius is suddenly caught in the suction and dragged through the drainage at the bottom of the bath! He emerges coughing and sputtering amid a group of strange-looking foreigners with the most peculiar bathhouse customs...over 1,500 years in the future in modern-day Japan! His contemporaries wanted him to modernize, and so, borrowing the customs of these mysterious bath-loving people, Lucius opens what quickly becomes the most popular new bathhouse in Rome-Thermae Romae!

    He's still alienated from his closest friend, Karrin Murphy, and on exceedingly poor terms with Chicago's number one gangster, John Marcone. And that's just the small stuff — the creatures of the Nevernever don't take vacations and aren't particularly worried about Harry's friendships or love life

    Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, the X-Men, Daredevil—these superheroes quickly won children's hearts and sparked the imaginations of pop artists, public intellectuals, and campus radicals. Over the course of a half century, Marvel's epic universe would become the most elaborate fictional narrative in history and serve as a modern American mythology for millions of readers.Throughout this decades-long journey to becoming a multibillion-dollar enterprise, Marvel's identity has continually shifted, careening between scrappy underdog and corporate behemoth. As the company has weathered Wall Street machinations, Hollywood failures, and the collapse of the comic book market, its characters have been passed along among generations of editors, artists, and writers—also known as the celebrated Marvel "Bullpen." Entrusted to carry on tradition, Marvel's contributors—impoverished child prodigies, hallucinating peaceniks, and mercenary careerists among them—struggled with commercial mandates, a fickle audience, and, over matters of credit and control, one another.For the first time, Marvel Comics reveals the outsized personalities behind the scenes, including Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939; Stan Lee, the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick and thin for decades; and Jack Kirby, the World War II veteran who'd co-created Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company's marquee characters in a three-year frenzy of creativity that would be the grounds for future legal battles and endless debates.Drawing on more than one hundred original interviews with Marvel insiders then and now, Marvel Comics is a story of fertile imaginations, lifelong friendships, action-packed fistfights, reformed criminals, unlikely alliances, and third-act betrayals— a narrative of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and beleaguered pop cultural entities in America's history.

     However, it seems the great detective cannot resist the lure of the game for very long. When the Crippen murder case, in which Harvey Crippen is believed to have murdered his wife, Belle Elmore, comes to a brutal end with the hanging of Crippen, Holmes returns to London. He believes there is more to the story than the papers and the jury found and is determined to get to the bottom of the matter. The plot thickens as the duo, joined by the also retired Detective Inspector Lestrade, join forces to uncover what really happened in house 39 Hilldrop Crescent. As Watson uncovers more and more clues that corroborate Holmes’ belief that Crippen was innocent, Holmes takes it upon himself to investigate the happenings of the local homeless community, where people have been disappearing for months. Though seemingly unrelated, the two intertwine in a shocking turn of events. From ghosts and cannibals to faked deaths and homeless alcoholics, Sherlock Holmes and the Hilldrop Crescent Mystery carries on the pounding crescendo until the very end. ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Hilldrop Crescent Mystery’ is a gripping thriller by Val Andrews. Val Andrews (15 February 1926 – 12 December 2006) was a music hall artist, ventriloquist and writer. Andrews was a prolific writer on magic, having published over 1000 books and booklets from 1952. He also authored Sherlock Holmes pastiches and Houdini's novels.

    - A new quarterly anthology of the best new talent in the sequential arts- In color, part-color, and black-and-white- The regular roster of artists gives the series a concrete identity- Quarterly schedule allows readers to look forward to favorite artists on a regular basis- Created for a general audience of literature fans, with a focus on contemporary fiction and narrative

    "This history of the birth of superhero comics highlights three pivotal figures. The story begins early in the last century, on the Lower East Side, where Harry Donenfeld rises from the streets to become the king of the 'smooshes'-soft-core magazines with titles like French Humor and Hot Tales. Later, two high school friends in Cleveland, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, become avid fans of 'scientifiction,' the new kind of literature promoted by their favorite pulp magazines. The disparate worlds of the wise guy and the geeks collide in 1938, and the result is Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman. For Donenfeld, the comics were a way to sidestep the censors. For Shuster and Siegel, they were both a calling and an eventual source of misery: the pair waged a lifelong campaign for credit and appropriate compensation." -The New Yorker

    We flashback to a pair of butchers who arrive at work one morning to find not only that there is no meat in their shop but also that they have forgotten completely how to do their job. As customers arrive, they are too fearful for their livelihood to admit their dilemma, leading to increasingly disastrous events. But what has caused their strange amnesia? This often hilarious, enigmatic and uncomfortable book will establish Stechschulte as an exciting new talent."