The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For


Alison Bechdel - 2008
    Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before published in book form.Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis.Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends -- academics, social workers, bookstore clerks -- fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents.Bechdel fuses high and low culture -- from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory -- in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”

Trashed


Derf Backderf - 2015
    Trashed, Derf Backderf's follow-up to the critically acclaimed, award-winning international bestseller My Friend Dahmer, is an ode to the crap job of all crap jobs--garbage collector. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a soul-sucking gig will relate to this tale. Trashed follows the raucous escapades of three 20-something friends as they clean the streets of pile after pile of stinking garbage, while battling annoying small-town bureaucrats, bizarre townfolk, sweltering summer heat, and frigid winter storms. Trashed is fiction, but is inspired by Derf's own experiences as a garbage­man. Interspersed are nonfiction pages that detail what our garbage is and where it goes. The answers will stun you. Hop on the garbage truck named Betty and ride along with Derf on a journey into the vast, secret world of garbage. Trashed is a hilarious, stomach-churning tale that will leave you laughing and wincing in disbelief.

Feynman


Jim Ottaviani - 2011
    . . Nobel winner . . . bestselling author . . . safe-cracker. In this substantial graphic novel biography, First Second presents the larger-than-life exploits of Nobel-winning quantum physicist, adventurer, musician, world-class raconteur, and one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century: Richard Feynman. Written by nonfiction comics mainstay Jim Ottaviani and brilliantly illustrated by First Second author Leland Myrick, Feynman tells the story of the great man's life from his childhood in Long Island to his work on the Manhattan Project and the Challenger disaster. Ottaviani tackles the bad with the good, leaving the reader delighted by Feynman's exuberant life and staggered at the loss humanity suffered with his death. Anyone who ever wanted to know more about Richard P. Feynman, quantum electrodynamics, the fine art of the bongo drums, the outrageously obscure nation of Tuva, or the development and popularization of the field of physics in the United States need look no further than this rich and joyful work.• One of School Library Journal's Best Adult Books 4 Teens titles of 2011 • One of Horn Book's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011

The Boys Omnibus Vol. 1


Garth Ennis - 2006
    And someone will! Billy Butcher, Wee Hughie, Mother's Milk, The Frenchman, and The Female are The Boys: A CIA-backed team of very dangerous people, each one dedicated to the struggle against the most dangerous force on Earth - superpower! Some superheroes have to be watched. Some have to be controlled. And some of them - sometimes - need to be taken out of the picture. That's when you call in The Boys! After the opening story arc introducing Hughie to the team (issues 1-6), Dark avenger Tek-Knight and his ex-partner Swingwing are in trouble (issues 7-14). Big trouble. One has lost control of his terrifyingly overactive sex-drive, and the other might just be a murderer. It's up to Hughie and Butcher to work out which is which, in Get Some. Then, in Glorious Five-Year Plan, The Boys travel to Russia - where their corporate opponents are working with the mob, in a super-conspiracy that threatens to spiral lethally out of control. Good thing our heroes have Love Sausage on their side. Featuring some ever-so-slight tweaks the creators have meticulously restored, The Boys Omniobus Volume 1 also features bonus art materials, the script to issue #1 by Garth Ennis, a complete cover gallery, and more!

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.

Toothpaste for Dinner


Drew - 2005
    This unique title:*Is based on the wildly popular toothpastefordinner.com Web site, which averages 19 million hits*Speaks to the popularity of edgy humor titles like The Bunny Suicides and Get Your War On*Provides a completely original world view paired up with simple line drawings that will appeal to 20- and 30-something creative typesWhat Dilbert did for office workers in the early 90s, this revolutionary and hilarious book will do for wage slaves of the twenty-first century.

A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics


Michael Barrier - 1982
    

Jasotron: 2012: A FoxTrot Collection


Bill Amend - 2012
    Peter, Paige, and Jason, along with parents Roger and Andy, comment on the latest Hollywood fads, gaming fixations, and familial fascinations. As the 27th FoxTrot comic collection, Jasontron: 2012 features all full-color Sunday strips published from September 2009 to Spring 2012. Jason continues to craft exploits at Paige’s expense, while Peter suits up for the next big game. Parents Roger and Andy keep up with their children’s antics, as Roger vigilantly monitors his hairline and his burrito intake, along with Andy’s attempts to create Peeps from tofu and saffron. With appearances in the New York Times crossword puzzle and on television’s Jeopardy! and The Sopranos, FoxTrot frequently finds itself an integral part of the popular culture that it so often critiques.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea


Guy Delisle - 2003
    In early 2001 cartoonist Guy Delisle became one of the few Westerners to be allowed access to the fortress-like country. While living in the nation's capital for two months on a work visa for a French film animation company, Delisle observed what he was allowed to see of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered; his findings form the basis of this graphic novel.Guy Delisle was born in Quebec City in 1966 and has spent the last decade living and working in the South of France with his wife and son. Delisle has spent ten years, mostly in Europe, working in animation, an experience that taught him about movement and drawing. He is now currently focusing on his cartooning. Delisle has written and drawn six graphic novels, including "Pyongyang," his first graphic novel in English.

All My Friends Are Dead


Avery Monsen - 2010
    In other words, perfect." - The Huffington PostAn amusing and captivating tale that's a delightful primer for laughing at the inevitable: If you're a dinosaur, all of your friends are dead. If you're a pirate, all of your friends have scurvy. If you're a tree, all of your friends are end tables. Each page of this laugh-out-loud, illustrated humor book showcases the downside of being everything from a clown to a cassette tape to a zombie. Cute and dark all at once, this hilarious children's book for adults teaches valuable lessons about life.From the sock whose only friends have gone missing to the houseplant whose friends are being slowly killed by irresponsible plant owners (like you), All My Friends Are Dead presents hilariously entertaining stories about life and existential predicaments.The simple yet effective imagery, the personification of inanimate objects, and short, hilarious quips come together to create an amusing adventure through each character's unique grievance and wide-eyed dilemmas.Written by Avery Monsen, an actor, artist, and writer and Jory John, a writer, editor, and journalist. They are friends, and neither is dead. Yet.All My Friends Are Dead is both the saddest funny book and the funniest sad book you'll ever read.Children's book written for adults Displayed in an accessible cartoon form

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.

The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker


Matthew Diffee - 2011
    "The Rejection Collection" brings together some of "The New Yorker's "brightest talents--Roz Chast, Gahan Wilson, Sam Gross, Jack Zeigler, David Sipress, and more--and reveals their other side. Their dark side. Their juvenile side. Their sick side. Their naughty side. Their outrageous side.And what a treat. Ventriloquist dummy cartoons. Operating room cartoons. Bring your daughter to work day cartoons (the stripper, the prison guard on death row). Lots of couples in bed, quite a few coffins, wise-cracking animals--an obsessive's plumbing of the weird, the scary, the off-the-wall, and done so without restraint.Every week "The New Yorker" receives 500 cartoon submissions, and rejects a great majority--mostly, of course, for not being funny enough. There's no question why these were rejected, and it's not for lack of laughs. One can almost hear Eustace Tilley sniffing, "We are not amused."

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 1


Tove Jansson - 1977
    The Moomins saw life in many forms but debuted to its biggest audience ever on the pages of world's largest newspaper the London Evening News, in 1954. The strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world with millions of readers in 40 countries.Moomin Book One is the first volume of Drawn & Quarterly publishing plan to reprint the entire strip drawn by Jansson before she handed over the reigns to her brother Lars in 1960. This is the first time the strip will be published in any form in North America and will deservedly place Jansson among the international cartooning greats of the last century.The Moomins are a tight-knit family — hippo-shaped creatures with easygoing and adventurous outlooks. Jansson's art is pared down and precise, yet able to compose beautiful portraits of ambling creatures in fields of flowers or rock-strewn beaches that recall Jansson's Nordic roots. The comic strip reached out to adults with its gentle and droll sense of humor. Whimsical but with biting undertones, Jansson's observations of everyday life, including guests who overstay their welcome, modern art, movie stars, and high society, easily caught the attention of an international audience and still resonate today.

Buddha, Vol. 1: Kapilavastu


Osamu Tezuka - 1972
    Tezuka evidences his profound grasp of the subject by contextualizing the Buddha’s ideas; the emphasis is on movement, action, emotion, and conflict as the prince Siddhartha runs away from home, travels across India, and questions Hindu practices such as ascetic self-mutilation and caste oppression. Rather than recommend resignation and impassivity, Tezuka’s Buddha predicates enlightenment upon recognizing the interconnectedness of life, having compassion for the suffering, and ordering one’s life sensibly. Philosophical segments are threaded into interpersonal situations with ground-breaking visual dynamism by an artist who makes sure never to lose his readers’ attention.Tezuka himself was a humanist rather than a Buddhist, and his magnum opus is not an attempt at propaganda. Hermann Hesse’s novel or Bertolucci’s film is comparable in this regard; in fact, Tezuka’s approach is slightly irreverent in that it incorporates something that Western commentators often eschew, namely, humor.

Waltz With Bashir: A Lebanon War Story


Ari Folman - 2008
    Extraordinary." —Variety One night in Beirut in September 1982, while Israeli soldiers secured the area, Christian militia members entered the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and began to massacre hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians. Ari Folman was one of those Israeli soldiers, but for more than twenty years he remembered nothing of that night or of the weeks leading up to it. Then came a friend's disturbing dream, and with it Folman's need to excavate the truth of the war in Lebanon and answer the crucial question: what was he doing during the hours of slaughter? Challenging the collective amnesia of friends and fellow soldiers, Folman painfully, candidly pieces together the war and his place in it. Gradually, the blankness of his mind is filled in by scenes of combat and patrol, misery and carnage, as well as dreams and hallucinations. Soldiers are haunted by inexplicable nightmares and flashbacks - snapping, growling dogs with teeth bared and eyes glowing orange; a recurring image of three young men rising naked out of the sea to drift into the Beirut battlefield. Tanks crush cars and buildings with lethal indifference; snipers pick off men on donkeys, men in cars, men drinking coffee; a soldier waltzes through a storm of bullets; rock songs fill the air, and then yellow flares. The recollections accumulate until Ari Folman arrives at Sabra and Shatila and his investigation reaches its terrible end. The result is a gripping reconstruction, a probing inquiry into the unreliable quality of memory, and, above all, a powerful denunciation of the senselessness of all wars. Profoundly original in form and approach, Waltz with Bashir will take its place as one of the great works of wartime testimony.