Mary is the first convict married in Australia, Mary learns from aboriginal friends how to survive. Eventually, she and her husband Will escape. Her daring run up the coast and all the way to Timor is yet unequaled for traveling in an open boat 3,000 miles without navigational equipment. Mary's capture, return to England and the trial that determines whether she will live or die -- all this is compelling reading. Her lawyer is none other than James Boswell and this too is a fascinating complement to a page-turning saga.

    In this book, originally published in France in 1999, Groensteen explains clearly the subtle, complex workings of the medium and its unique way of combining visual, verbal, spatial, and chronological expressions. The author explores the nineteenth-century pioneer Rodolphe Topffer, contemporary Japanese creators, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and modern American autobiographical comics.The System of Comics uses examples from a wide variety of countries including the United States, England, Japan, France, and Argentina. It describes and analyzes the properties and functions of speech and thought balloons, panels, strips, and pages to examine methodically and insightfully the medium's fundamental processes.From this, Groensteen develops his own coherent, overarching theory of comics, a "system" that both builds on existing studies of the "word and image" paradigm and adds innovative approaches of his own. Examining both meaning and appreciation, the book provides a wealth of ideas that will challenge the way scholars approach the study of comics. By emphasizing not simply "storytelling techniques" but also the qualities of the printed page and the reader's engagement, the book's approach is broadly applicable to all forms of interpreting this evolving art.Thierry Groensteen is a comics scholar and translator in Brussels, Belgium. He is the author of "La bande dessinee: Une litterature graphique" and "La construction de la cage," among other books. Bart Beaty is associate professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary. Nick Nguyen is an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario.

    Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.