Webber adroitly uses the comics medium to convey the practical hurdles she faced as well as the fear and dread that accompanied her increasingly lonely journey to regain her life. Her raw cartooning style, occasionally devolving into chaotic scribbles, splotches of ink, and overlapping montages, perfectly captures her frustration and anxiety. But her ordeal ultimately becomes a hopeful story. Throughout, she learns to lean on the support of her close friends, finds self-expression in creating comics, and comes to understand and appreciate how deeply her voice and identity are intertwined.

    As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, cartoonist Spiegelman presents a highly personalized, political, and confessional diary of his experience of September 11 and its aftermath. In 10 large-scale pages of original, hard-hitting material (composed from September 11, 2001 to August 31, 2003), two essays, and 10 old comic strip reproductions from the early 20th century, Spiegelman expresses his feelings of dislocation, grief, anxiety, and outrage over the horror of the attacks—and the subsequent "hijacking" of the event by the Bush administration to serve what he believes is a misguided and immoral political agenda. Readers who agree with Spiegelman's point of view will marvel at the brilliance of his images and the wit and accuracy of his commentary. Others, no doubt, will be jolted by his candor and, perhaps, be challenged to reexamine their position.The central image in the sequence of original broadsides, which returns as a leitmotif in each strip, is Spiegelman's Impressionistic "vision of disintegration," of the North Tower, its "glowing bones...just before it vaporized." (As downtown New Yorkers, Spiegelman and his family experienced the event firsthand.) But the images and styles in the book are as fragmentary and ever-shifting as Spiegelman's reflections and reactions. The author's closing comment that "The towers have come to loom far larger than life...but they seem to get smaller every day" reflects a larger and more chilling irony that permeates In the Shadow of No Towers. Despite the ephemeral nature of the comic strip form, the old comics at the back of the book have outlasted the seemingly indestructible towers. In the same way, Spiegelman's heartfelt impressions have immortalized the towers that, imponderably, have now vanished. —Silvana Tropea

    Literature is long. Comics are short.Does Proust get you down?  Do you find The Unbearable Lightness of Being simply unbearable?Is The Inferno your own private hell?Do you long to be conversant about classics like Moby Dick, the Bhagavad Gita, Madame Bovary, and, um, Twilight?Illustrator Lisa Brown (The Airport Book; Baby, Mix Me a Drink) did her homework. Long Story Short offers 100 three-panel literary summaries, from curriculum classics like Don Quixote,Lord of the Flies, and Jane Eyre to modern favorites like Beloved, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Atonement, conveniently organized by subjects including “Love,” “Sex,” “Death,” and “Female Trouble.”

    The 31 stories collected here combine Dragnet with The Twilight Zone with Tales from the Crypt in a world filled with aliens, good-time girls, and cocktail-bar nihilism. The stories are hip and funny, with a good dose of wacky 1950s paranoia and the kind of tongue-in-cheek morality that characterized the old E.C. horror comics. The Lloyd Llewellyn stories also trace the development of Clowes's style as a comic artist, from the angular early pieces that show the influence of 1950s advertising style to the grotesque Robert Crumb-inspired style of the more recent work in Eightball. Clowes is one of the most gifted comic-book artists around, and the retro-chic world of Lloyd Llewellyn deserves to be seen by a new generation of readers.

    Other kids are into punk or ska, but Una is learning to play "Mull of Kintyre" by Wings on the guitar, and she thinks it’s a really good song. There's another song, chanted on the terraces by Leeds United fans. It might not have made it on to Top of the Pops, but the boys all sing it on the walk home from school: "One Yorkshire Ripper . . . There’s only one Yorkshire Ripper . . . One Yorkshire Ri-pper . . ."  A serial murderer is at large in West Yorkshire and the police—despite spending more than two million man-hours hunting the killer and interviewing the man himself no less than nine times—are struggling to solve the case. As this national news story unfolds around her, Una finds herself on the receiving end of a series of violent acts for which she feels she is to blame. Unbecoming explores gender violence, blame, shame, and social responsibility. Through image and text Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned. With the benefit of hindsight Una explores her experience, wonders if anything has really changed and challenges a global culture that demands that the victims of violence pay its cost.

    From grinding on storyboard test after storyboard test to getting a job at a major studio to searching for an apartment in...the Valley...this autobiographical how-to graphic novel explores the highest highs and lowest lows of pursuing a dream in animation. Brushed with a dose of humor and illustrated advice about salaries, studio culture, and everything in between, I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation is the unique insider experience you won’t find anywhere else.

    As these things go, the first volume was so successful, there was a second volume. Both are now out of print, but Museum of Mistakes collects them into one book, plus numerous pages of Julia's early comic work, unpublished and/or previously uncollected comics, short stories, illustrations, process pages, hate mail, sketchbook pages, tear stains and more.

    With his passion for surfing uniting many narratives, he intertwines his own story with those of some of the great heroes of surf.

    I think I am in friend-love with you. What’s friend-love? It’s that super-awesome bond you share with someone who makes you happy every time you text each other, or meet up for an epic outing. It’s not love-love. You don’t want to swap saliva; you want to swap favorite books. But it’s just as intense and just as amazing. And it’s this search for that connection that comic-book artist Yumi Sakugawa captures in I Think I Am in Friend-Love with You. It’s perfect if you've ever fallen in friend-love and want to show that person how much you love them...in a platonic way, of course.

    For Glenn Head, his two years spent at the now-defunct Mendham, NJ, boarding school — run by a serial sexual and emotional abuser of young boys in the early 1970s — left emotional scars in ways that he continues to process. This graphic memoir — a book almost 50 years in the making — tells the story of that experience, and then delves with even greater detail into the reverberations of that experience in adulthood, including addiction and other self-destructive behavior. Head tells his story with unsparing honesty, depicting himself as a deeply flawed human struggling to make sense of the childhood he was given.

    Embrace it.A bear flies through space. A hamster suffers a breakdown. Elsewhere, a garden snake is arrested by animal control and jailed for home invasion, while a child marvels at the wonder of nature as worms emerge from the ground and begin looking for vodka (as they always have). These are common occurrences in the world of Reza Farazmand’s wildly popular webcomic, Poorly Drawn Lines. Traveling from deep space to alternate realities to the bottom of the ocean, this eponymous collection brings together fan favorites with new comics and original essays to share Farazmand’s inimitable take on love, nature, social acceptance, and robots.

    Caroline Preston, author of the New York Times Notable Book Jackie by Josie, uses a kaleidoscopic array of vintage memorabilia—postcards, letters, magazine ads, ticket stubs, catalog pages, fabric swatches, candy wrappers, fashion spreads, menus and more—to tell the tale of spirited and ambitious Frankie’s remarkable odyssey from Vassar to Greenwich Village to Paris, in a manner that will delight crafters, historical fiction fans, and anyone who loves a good coming-of-age story ingeniously told.

    I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness." So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. Minnie hates school and she wants to be an artist, or maybe a speleologist, or a bartender. She sleeps with her mother's boyfriend, and yet is too shy to talk with boys at school. She forges her way through adolescence, unsupervised and unguided, defenseless, and yet fearless.The story unfolds in the libertine atmosphere of the 1970s San Francisco, but the significance of Minnie's effort to understand herself and her world is universal. This is the story of an adolescent troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a searing comment on adult society as seen though the eyes of a young woman on the verge of joining it.In this unusual novel, artist and writer Phoebe Gloeckner presents a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form.

    Lumped into the burgeoning alt-country movement, the band soon landed a major label deal and recorded an instant classic: Strangers Almanac. That's when tour manager Thomas O'Keefe met the young musician.For the next three years, Thomas was at Ryan's side: on the tour bus, in the hotels, backstage at the venues. Whiskeytown built a reputation for being, as the Detroit Free Press put it, "half band, half soap opera," and Thomas discovered that young Ryan was equal parts songwriting prodigy and drunken buffoon. Ninety percent of the time, Thomas could talk Ryan into doing the right thing. Five percent of the time, he could cover up whatever idiotic thing Ryan had done. But the final five percent? Whiskeytown was screwed.Twenty-plus years later, accounts of Ryan's legendary antics are still passed around in music circles. But only three people on the planet witnessed every Whiskeytown show from the release of Strangers Almanac to the band's eventual breakup: Ryan, fiddle player Caitlin Cary, and Thomas O'Keefe.

    Shivering in a cave beneath Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia, artist and rock climber Jeremy Collins had an intense and anxious vision, "both geographic and artistic," about his life and what he was doing with it. As a result, he left Argentina and commenced on a four-year journey that took him in the four cardinal directions from his home in Kansas City, north, south, east, west, to create art in the wild, climb new routes, and "live out his own map." Drawn: The Art of Ascent shares his exploits, his art, and what he discovered about balancing wilderness adventure with peace and home.