When the elder Thaddeus Gropius confronts Wally with the boilerplate plot ultimatum that he must marry "the saddest girl in the world" or be disinherited, a yarn unravels that is part screwball comedy and part unhinged parable on the lucrativeness of changing your identity.Hensley's dialogue is witty, lyrical, sampled, dada, and elliptical--all in the service of a very bizarre mystery. There's sex, violence, rock and roll, intrigue, and betrayal--all brought home in Hensley's truly inimitable style.Created during an era when another well-off "W" was stuffing the coffers of the morbidly solvent, Wally Gropius transforms futile daydreams and nightmares into the absurdity of capital.

    This beautiful minimalist story, collected here for the first time, is the culmination of ten years and more than six hundred pages of work that details the metaphysical quandaries of the occupants of an endless plain, existing somewhere between a dream and a Russian steppe. A downed plane is thought to be a bird and the unexploded bomb that came from it is mistaken for a giant egg by the group of birds whose lives the story follows. The indifferent, stranded pilot is of great interest to the birds—some doggedly seek his approval, while others do quite the opposite, leading to tensions in the group. Nilsen seamlessly moves from humor to heartbreak. His distinctive, detailed line work is paired with plentiful white space and large, often frameless panels, conveying an ineffable sense of vulnerability and openness.Big Questions has roots in classic fables—the birds and snakes have more to say than their human counterparts, and there are hints of the hero’s journey, but here the easy moral that closes most fables is left open and ambiguous. Rather than lending its world meaning, Nilsen’s parable lets the questions wander where they will.

    With the help of the entire creative collective, Gordon-Levitt culled, edited and curated over 8,500 contributions into this finely tuned collection of original art from 67 contributors. Reminiscent of the 6-Word Memoir series, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1 brings together art and voices from around the world to unite and tell stories that defy size.

    It was winnning a Harvey Award, no less. It documentates the once upon a time in our fishing village town and a short turtle lad name of Chunky, last name Rice.Mister Chunky Rice be living in the same rooming house likewise myself, only that boy be restless. Looking for something. And he puts hisself on my brother Chuck's ship and boats out to sea to find it. Only he be departin' from his bestest of all friends, his deer mouse, I mean, mouse deer chum Dandel.Now why in a whirl would someone leave beyond a buddy? Just what be that turtle lad searchings for? I said you best read the book to find out. Merle said, "Doot doot."

    Each volume in the collection contains about 100 illustrations.

    He haunts lookalike fussy, silly, coffee shops, listens to old Joni Mitchell albums too loudly, and stares at his navel in the hope that he will find it in there. But it isn’t until he learns to speak from the heart that he begins to find authentic human connections and is let in—to the worlds of the people he meets. Nick’s journey occurs alongside the beginnings of a relationship with Wren, a wry, spirited oncologist at a nearby hospital, whose work and life becomes painfully tangled with Nick’s. Illustrated in both color and black-and-white in McPhail’s instantly recognizable style, In elevates the graphic novel genre; it captures his trademark humor and compassion with a semi-autobiographical tale that is equal parts hilarious and heart-wrenching—uncannily appropriate for our isolated times.

    For many years, Ernie Bushmiller 's Nancy, with its odd-looking, squat heroine, nearly abstract art, and often super-corny gags, was perceived as the stodgiest, squarest comic strip in the world. Popular with newspaper readers, true but definitely not a strip embraced by comic-strip connoisseurs, like Krazy Kat, Dick Tracy or Terry and the Pirates. But then those connoisseurs took a closer look, and began to realize that Bushmiller 's art approached its own kind of cartoon perfection, and those corny gags often achieved a striking zen quality. In its own way, it turned out Nancy was in fact the most iconic comic strip of all. (The American Heritage Dictionary actually uses a Nancy strip to illustrate its entry on comic strip. ) Charter members of the Nancy revival include Art Spiegelman, who published Mark Newgarden 's famous Love 's Savage Fury (featuring Nancy and Bazooka Joe) in an early issue of RAW; Fletcher Hanks anthologist Paul Karasik; Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith; underground publisher Denis Kitchen, who released several volumes of Nancy collections in the 1980s; Understanding Comics Scott McCloud, who created the Five-Card Nancy card game; Joe Brainard, who produced an entire Nancy book of paintings in 2008; and Andy Warhol, who produced a painting based on Nancy. Beginning in the Winter of 2011, fans will be dancing with joy as Fantagraphics unveils an ongoing Nancy reprint project. Each volume contain a whopping full four years of daily Nancy strips (a Sunday Nancy project looms in the future), collected in a fat, square (what else, for the squarest strip in the world?) package designed by Jacob (Popeye, Beasts , Willie and Joe) Covey. This first volume will collect every daily strip from 1943 to 1946. (Fantagraphics will eventually release Nancy 's first five years, 1938-1942, but given the scarcity of archival material for these years we are giving ourselves some extra time to collate it all.) This first Nancy volume will feature an introduction by another stellar Bushmiller fan, Daniel Clowes (from whose collection most of the strips in this volume were scanned), a biography of the artist, and much more.

    Unpredictable, darkly funny, and deeply moving, they display an exceptional range of focus and technique. The Village Voice called Tomine "one of the most masterful cartoonists of his generation," and this is his most ambitious and empathetic work to date.

    Carré’s elegant short stories read like the gothic, family narratives of Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers, but told visually. Poetic rhythms — a coin flip, a circling ferris wheel — are punctuated by elements of melancholy fantasy pushed forward by character-driven, naturalistic dialogue. The stories in Heads Or Tails display a virtuosic breadth of visual styles and color palettes, each in perfect service of the story, and range from experimental one-pagers to short masterpieces like The Thing About Madeline (featured in The Best American Comics 2008), to graphic novellas like The Carnival (featured in David Sedaris and Dave Eggers’ 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading, originally published in MOME).

    by Evan Dorkin The first-ever collection from the acclaimed humor anthology Dork, "Who's Laughing Now?" features 112 pages of densely-packed comic book craziness from Dork #1-5, all wrapped up in a sweet little package co-designed by Dorkin and his partner-in-crime, Sarah Dyer!

    Only Skin is a grim exploration of the hallucinatory and tragic landscape of modern rural America, as seen through the eyes of a pair of orphaned siblings, searching for answers in a world filled with terrible, terrible questions.

    To me, he is unquestionably one of ‘the greats.'" —Chris WareSkibber Bee ByeRon Regé, Jr., creates his own visual poetry that sets him apart from other cartoonists as one of the most original artists to enter the medium in the past decade. His storytelling is neither linear nor altogether accessible; however, his recognizable thin line and cute characters draw you into a dreamlike, sensitive fantasy world that, as odd as it seems, is entirely realistic.

    Armed only with insecurity, doubt, and a seemingly inadvisable tenacity, Lev trudges through his days furiously analyzing himself and the world around him, desperately trying to figure out where he fits in. If you have ever felt like a perpetual square peg in a world of round holes, you have found a kindred spirit.

    Mark Beyer was breathing delirious, heartbreaking, otherworldly life into it by means of Amy and Jordan. Obviously, you weren’t reading New York Press. But I sure was. Voraciously. Back in 1989, when I discovered that Beyer’s strips were appearing regularly in this new “alternative weekly” paper, I quickly became hooked, and a thought seized me: I had to clip and save them–they were exquisite poems of urban despair, dreamy and nightmarish. I was already a fan of Beyer’s talent based on his book Agony (Pantheon, 1988), but these new strips revealed, week by week, a whole new dimension to his work–an ingenious reinvention of panel-design that redefined what a comic strip could be. As with Peanuts, it helps to try and picture these in the context which they first appeared in order to appreciate just how profoundly they emerged from anything else on the newspaper page. Even the “outré” NYP ads and listings which often ran alongside them were hopelessly dull by comparison. One of its most impressive aspects was the way Form served the Content–no matter how eccentric the layout got, it somehow never confused the narrative. And what narrative: it was as if Candide had been transported to the East Village and split in two like an amoeba and holed up in a squat on Avenue C. Along with giant bugs from outer space. So I did clip and save them, and put them into an envelope, which was then placed in a shoebox with a lot of other envelopes (receipts, receipts!), which was shoved to the back of the closet of my sixth-floor walk-up studio apartment, which I moved out of three years later and in the process I unwittingly threw them all away. Which frankly is just the sort of thing that Amy and Jordan would do. Drat. “Oh well,” I thought, once I’d realized it, “at some point someone will collect and publish them, and I’ll get them back that way.” And that was that. Fast forward more than ten years, to the spring of 2002. During a panel of cartoonists I was chairing in Philadelphia, a member of the audience asked what Mark was working on and where he was. No one seemed to know. The discussion was transcribed and published in The Comics Journal that summer, and in the fall Mark contacted me with the best possible news: He’d read the panel transcript and wanted to publish again. And the Amy and Jordan strips had never been comprehensively collected. So now, as an editor, I was able to grant my own wish. Amy and Jordan ran from 1988 through early 1996. After that, Beyer put cartooning aside to pursue other projects. This book signals his return to the realm of comics, which he says he wants to start making again. We can only hope he does. For now, I’m just thankful I finally have my Amy and Jordan collection back. –Chip Kidd, NYC, 10/03

    But as Olivia gets closer to Calix, she realizes that he is not exactly who he says he is; Olivia soon recognizes that she may be in too deep, and that they may no longer be playing her game.