Oh, and it also has a lot of sex.

    But in the fraught realm of adolescence, can friendship survive the appeal of the surreal?Jesse Jacobs was born in Moncton, NB, and now draws comics and things from his home in Hamilton, ON. In 2009, his books Small Victories and Blue Winter were short listed at the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning. He received the Gene Day Award for Canadian Comic Book Self-Publisher of 2008. Even the Giants (AdHouse, 2011) marked his major publishing debut after several award-winning, self-published titles, and his work has appeared in the acclaimed Latvian comics anthology š!, as well as the 2012 edition The Best American Comics edited by Françoise Mouly and published Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He made his debut with Koyama Press in 2012 with the psychedelic creation myth By This Shall You Know Him, which was followed by the trippy take on nature versus nurture, Safari Honeymoon in 2014.

    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.

    Crossing genres as it crosses the country, LOCAL examines Megan McKeenan, a young woman who sets off from Portland, OR with nothing but a backpack and a bad case of wanderlust. Each emotional vignette is a self-contained story that represents one year in the life of this young vagabond as she struggles to find a place to call home, both physically and spiritually.

    The taste of cherries, the cool shade, the smell of the river... That was how we lived, in a vale among the hills—sheltered from storms, ignorant of the world, as though on an island, peaceful and untroubled.And then...And then everything changed.Can you ever escape your fate?Three shadows stand outside the house—and Louis and Lise know why the spectral figures are there. The shadows have come for Louis and Lise’s son, and nothing anyone can do will stop them. Louis cannot let his son die without trying to prevent it, so the family embarks on a journey to the ends of the earth, fleeing death.Poignant and suspenseful, Three Shadows is a haunting story of love and grief, told in moving text and sweeping black and white artwork by Cyril Pedrosa.

    Consisting of three xeroxed sheets of paper, and with a print run of twenty-five, it was a less-than-auspicious, largely unnoticed debut. In the following three years, though, Optic Nerve developed at a startlingly rapid pace: the artwork and writing evolved with each story, production quality improved, page counts increased, and by issue seven, sales had reached 6,000. In 1994, Drawn & Quarterly took over the publishing duties of Optic Nerve, and the original seven issues sold out and were left out of print. 32 stories presents these rare, early editions, collected for the first time in a single volume.

    A Drifting Life is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences as a child in Osaka, growing up as part of a country burdened by the shadows of World War II.Spanning fifteen years from August 1945 to June 1960, Tatsumi’s stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father’s financial burdens and his parents’ failing marriage, his jealous brother’s deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, the manga artist Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Apollo’s Song, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha)—with whom Tatsumi eventually became a peer and, at times, a stylistic rival. As with his short-story collection, A Drifting Life is designed by Adrian Tomine.

    But now Grant and his team are trapped in the folds of infinity, the Pillar sending them careening through a million universes of unimaginable adventure, sanity-flaying danger and no way home...Presenting the first mind-warping chapter of the critically acclaimed sci-fi epic by superstar creative team of writer RICK REMENDER (Uncanny Avengers, Captain America) and artist MATTEO SCALERA (Secret Avengers).Collects BLACK SCIENCE #1-6.

    The first is of Little Bao, a Chinese peasant boy whose village is abused and plundered by Westerners claiming the role of missionaries. Little Bao, inspired by visions of the Chinese gods, joins a violent uprising against the Western interlopers. Against all odds, their grass-roots rebellion is successful. But in the second volume, Yang lays out the opposite side of the conflict. A girl whose village has no place for her is taken in by Christian missionaries and finds, for the first time, a home with them. As the Boxer Rebellion gains momentum, Vibiana must decide whether to abandon her Christian friends or to commit herself fully to Christianity.Boxers & Saints is one of the most ambitious graphic novels First Second has ever published. It offers a penetrating insight into not only one of the most controversial episodes of modern Chinese history, but into the very core of our human nature. Gene Luen Yang is rightly called a master of the comics form, and this book will cement that reputation. This boxed set includes the trade paperback Boxers as well as the trade paperback Saints, packaged together in one slipcase.

    All the Frank stories in one massive and deluxe tome. Between its handsome cloth covers are 344 pages of Frank comics, drawings and oddities. A fancy dust jacket, swoon-inducing end papers and ribbon bookmark make this book a decorative object as well as a repository of storytelling genius. Frank is a unique, visionary comic, exquisitely drawn and so fully realized that readers find themselves drawn deeply into Woodring's hallucinatory mindscape. The stories, almost entirely wordless, are told with brilliant, candy colors that people of all ages find alluring. This beautiful collection contains new material and lots of rare and previously-unpublished material (including the very first Frank story, not seen in over 10 years). Plus, this book includes an introduction from prominent Jim Woodring fan and acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola! This definitive collection is the very best way to give, receive, and experience one of the great cartoon achievements of the 20th century.

    Each installment features its own cast of strange characters, dealing with their own special sundae of suffering. And on the periphery of all of them, like the twinkly music of his colorful truck, is the Ice Cream Man—a weaver of stories, a purveyor of sweet treats. Friend. Foe. God. Demon. The man who with a snap of his fingers—lickety split!—can change the course of your life forever.

    The very first graphic storytelling collaboration between two masters of the medium, Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius.In a desolate dreamscape world, a man, a bird, and a cat interact in a unique apocalyptic yet poetic fashion…

    At the same time, while preparing for the Sandman 10th anniversary, he met Yoshitaka Amano, his artist for the 11th Sandman book. Amano is the famed designer of the Final Fantasy game series. The product of Gaiman's immersion in Japanese art, culture, and history, Sandman: Dream Hunters is a classic Japanese tale (adapted from "The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming") that he has subtly morphed into his Sandman universe.Like most fables, the story begins with a wager between two jealous animals, a fox and a badger: which of them can drive a young monk from his solitary temple? The winner will make the temple into a new fox or badger home. But as the fox adopts the form of a woman to woo the monk from his hermitage, she falls in love with him. Meanwhile, in far away Kyoto, the wealthy Master of Yin-Yang, the onmyoji, is plagued by his fears and seeks tranquility in his command of sorcery. He learns of the monk and his inner peace; he dispatches demons to plague the monk in his dreams and eventually kill him to bring his peace to the onmyoji. The fox overhears the demons on their way to the monk and begins her struggle to save the man whom at first she so envied.Dream Hunters is a beautiful package. From the ink-brush painted endpapers to the luminous page layouts--including Amano's gate-fold painting of Morpheus in a sea of reds, oranges, and violets--this book has been crafted for a sensuous reading experience. Gaiman has developed as a prose stylist in the last several years with novels and stories such as Neverwhere and Stardust, and his narrative rings with a sense of timelessness and magic that gently sustains this adult fairy tale. The only disappointment here is that the book is so brief. One could imagine this creative team being even better suited to a longer story of more epic proportions. On the final page of Dream Hunters, in fact, Amano suggest that he will collaborate further with Mr. Gaiman in the future. Readers of Dream Hunters will hope that Amano's dream comes true. --Patrick O'Kelley

    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.

    Don’t worry—this isn’t the typical redemptive coming-of-age tale of a young woman and her glorious triumph over tragedy or any such nonsense. It’s simply a hilarious—occasionally poignant—book filled with interesting art, absurd humor and plenty of amusing self-deprecation. Box by box, Wertz chronicles four sketchy apartments, seven terrible jobs, family drama, traveling fiascos, and too many whiskey bottles to count.