Featuring an introduction by American Vampire, The Wake, and Severed scribe, Scott Snyder, and a frightful feature on the history of horror comics, through their rotten rise and dreadful decline, by comic book historian, Mike Howlett!

    and how it formed him!This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son.The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story Ace Hole-Midget Detective.Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

    might be the best choice." This first book by C.F. (also known in the East Coast underground music scene as Kites) is perhaps the most anticipated graphic novel debut of the year. Coming out of the fabled Providence, Rhode Island, art and noise scene, "Powr Mastrs" is an intense fantasy story projected to run to 10 volumes. In it, C.F. narrates the story of a tribe of mystical warriors whose power relations are constantly in flux. As power shifts, so do physical and psychological identities. In this first volume, we are introduced to the central characters and the complex geographies in which they wander. Overflowing with graphic ideas, from the intricately designed costumes each character wears to C.F.'s exacting architectural detail, "Powr Mastrs" is rendered in a distinctive pencil line that has already attracted much attention in sources like the groundbreaking comics anthology, "Kramers Ergot,"

    It began as a response to the publication of a short story, Message from the Fortress, written by the author's father, Geert van Istendael. In this her father gave vent to his feelings about the relationship. At first angry with her father, the author publicly responded by reclaiming the story in this, what she terms, "semi-autobiographical" story.While the first part of the graphic novel is told from her father's perspective, the second part is told in flashback by the protagonist, Sophie, to her young daughter.This is a beautiful, unexpected tale, told from the heart, which reachers far beyond the story that originally inspired it. It tells of a young woman who is madly in love, and a father who, in spite of his prejudice, stands up for her love. More than that, it is about families, growing up, heartbreak and real life.