Cartoonist Sam Zabel hasn t drawn a comic in years. Stuck in a nightmare of creative block and despair, Sam spends his days writing superhero stories for a large American comics publisher and staring at a blank piece of paper, unable to draw a single line. Then one day he finds a mysterious old comic book set on Mars and is suddenly thrown headlong into a wild, fantastic journey through centuries of comics, stories, and imaginary worlds. Accompanied by a young webcomic creator named Alice and an enigmatic schoolgirl with rocket boots and a bag full of comics, Sam goes in search of the Magic Pen, encountering sex-crazed aliens, medieval monks, pirates, pixies and of course cartoonists. Funny, erotic, and thoughtful, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen explores the pleasures, dangers, and moral consequences of fantasy."

    Combining innovative comic book art, hand lettering, and graphic design, Ware’s uniquely appealing work is characterized by ceaseless experimentation with narrative and graphic forms. The publication of his novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth in2000 inspired a near avalanche of praise from critics and general readers alike. This book is the first to explore the life and work of Chris Ware. Daniel Raeburn looks closely at Ware’s career, work methods, and artistic innovations. Born in Omaha in 1967, Ware introduced the character Jimmy Corrigan in a full-page strip he began writing for the Chicago tabloid New City. Combining six years’ worth of the strips, Ware created the best-selling novel named after Jimmy that spans an Irish-American family’s life in Chicago from the Civil War to the present. For its experiments in graphic form—including pull-out, three-dimensional inserts—and its non-chronological narrative, the novel earned numerous honors, among them the Guardian First Book Award, presented for the first time to a comic book. For this volume Raeburn interviewed Chris Ware for many hours to make fascinating connections between Jimmy Corrigan’s fictional life and the life of his creator. Raeburn discusses the scope of Ware’s career, including his drawings for New City, the New Yorker, and his own comic book, The Acme Novelty Library. AsRaeburn shows, Ware’s unique art form extends beyond the world of graphic novels into the broader worlds of literature, graphic art, and popular culture, and challenges traditional definitions of all three.

    One day she meets Jon and it turns out he has the same ability. And sooner or later they get around to using their gifts to do what we’d ALL do: rob a couple banks. A bawdy and brazen sex comedy for comics begins here!Collecting: Sex Criminals 1-5

    He's 23 years old, he's in a rockband, he's "between jobs" and he's dating a cute high school girl. Nothing could possibly go wrong, unless a seriously mind-blowing, dangerously fashionable, rollerblading delivery girl named Ramona Flowers starts cruising through his dreams and sailing by him at parties. Will Scott's awesome life get turned upside-down? Will he have to face Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends in battle? The short answer is yes. The long answer is Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

    As always, Gorey's painstakingly cross-hatched pen and ink drawings are perfectly suited to his oddball verse and prose. The first book of 15, "The Unstrung Harp," describes the writing process of novelist Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel." In "The Listing Attic," you'll find a set of quirky limericks such as "A certain young man, it was noted, / Went about in the heat thickly coated; / He said, 'You may scoff, / But I shan't take it off; / Underneath I am horribly bloated.' "Many of Gorey's tales involve untimely deaths and dreadful mishaps, but much like tragic Irish ballads with their perky rhythms and melodies, they come off as strangely lighthearted. "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," for example, begins like this: "A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL assaulted by bears," and so on. An eccentric, funny book for either the uninitiated or diehard Gorey fans.Contains: The Unstrung Harp, The Listing Attic, The Doubtful Guest, The Object Lesson, The Bug Book, The Fatal Lozenge, The Hapless Child, The Curious Sofa, The Willowdale Handcar, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Insect God, The West Wing, The Wuggly Ump, The Sinking Spell, and The Remembered Visit.

    He runs into a rich Captain who is taken by his abilities and hires him with a handsome stipend to come along in his voyages. It turns out he's a pirate. Isaac went to make some quick money and come back and marry the love of his life but has embarked upon a series of at turns hilarious and dark adventures on the high seas from the Caribbean to the icy North, with apparently no end in sight. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is getting attention from another.

    She works long hours for little pay, no insurance, and worst of all, no respect. Her co-workers are jerks and her boss doesn't appreciate her. He's also a supervillain. And her parents... well, they're the most famous superhero couple in Crepe City, along with her sister. Cursed with a conscience, Mary would give anything to be something other than a Henchgirl, but no matter what she does her plans always seem to go awry. "There's a lot of humor in Henchgirl which is its strong suit."--Comic Bastards "Henchgirl is not about delivering slam-bang super-hero action, but it is a perfect comic for people who are familiar with standard super-hero tropes and like seeing those turned around and examined from some new angles for comedic effect."--Comic Spectrum "Henchgirl is lovely and endearing but funny and clever and the same time."-Girls Like Comics "It's a terribly fun read."--io9 "Gudsnuk is a bold storyteller."--Comic Bastards

    As they peruse covers, read stories and fragments of stories, they begin to suspect that the comics contain hidden messages and… a threat. Fiction and reality blur; sanity and madness become increasingly intertwined as the reader becomes convinced the key to their predicament is to be found between the panels of the strange books. With a dizzying array of inventive visual and narrative styles, Ex Libris continues the line of exploration and play that Madden initiated with 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Ex Libris is a tribute to the meta-fictional tradition of writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino (whose novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, was the inspiration).

    Twain s own introduction says it all: GREETINGS, STRANGER OF THE FUTURE. If you are reading this, it means the written word has survived, that the world of tomorrow still exists, and that for some reason my ramblings are still considered worth reading. My name is Mark Twain, and I write these words to you in the good old days of August 2010. What s that, you say, didn t you die a hundred years ago, you old coot? I hear your memoirs have just been published, right now in 2010, because they had to wait a century after your death, blah blah blah and so on. The truth is I never died, but the same old rumors got exaggerated and then the Great War happened, so people forgot I was still alive. And I ve kept alive, due to a magic spell cast upon me by a wizard but I ve promised not to tell that tale until 1,000 years have passed. I let them do the century book because otherwise I might have to pay the advance back again, and I couldn t afford it. I suppose by now you all know how I was Jack the Ripper, and why it was in a good cause that I committed those foul murders. Also that I was directly responsible for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Hopefully you ve forgiven me these indiscretions Readers eager to see how Twain hunted the Yeti ( Come out here and face me, you snow-covered coward ), met the Six Million Dollar Man, had a love affair with Mamie Eisenhower ( Boy oh boy, this lady was one hot dish ), and accidentally became involved in X-rated films, will devour this tome, which of course is augmented with Kupperman s hilariously deadpan illustrations.

    When six brilliant but troubled new students arrive, they find themselves trapped and desperately seeking answers...and escape from a place where nothing is what it seems to be!

    This initial volume collects the first two years of stories from Dave Sim's 300-issue magnum opus. Don't be discouraged by the initially crude artwork or the silliness of the stories. It gets better--even noticeably within this volume. This first installment is the most valuable in preparing for the larger stories ahead.When we first meet Cerebus--a small, gray, and chronically ill-tempered aardvark--he is making his living as a barbarian. In 1977, when the Cerebus comic book series began, Sim initially conceived of it as a parody of such popular series as Conan, Red Sonja, and Elric but quickly mined that material and transformed the scope of the series into much more. Even by the end of this volume, the Cerebus story begins to transform beyond "funny animal" humor into something much more complex and interesting. High points in Cerebus include the introduction of Lord Julius, the dictator of Palnu, who looks, acts, and talks just like a certain cigar-smoking, mustachioed comedian; Jaka, Cerebus's one true love; Elrod the Albino, an innept swordsman; and the Cockroach, the-mother-of-all-superhero-parodies and "inspiration" for the much-later TV and comic character--the Tick. All of these characters appear later on in the series as part of a constantly present ensemble of supporting figures.Even if Cerebus doesn't knock your socks off, give its successor, High Society a try, as this is where the plot really gets going.

    The tale is a unique mix of science fiction, anxiety, humor, and strangeness from Europe's premier comics creator, Enki Bilal.This hardcover volume presents The Carnival of Immortals, The Woman Trap, and Equator Cold, three of Europe's best-selling graphic novels of all time.

    Foreman on a deconstruction ship that specializes in demolishing belief outbreaks, Nul is prodded out of his complacency by a false murder charge, and sets off on a journey that takes him to the very brink of hope. A 232-page concoction of fiction and intrigue that delves into the bleak and bitter philosophical brew of Nihilist chic.

    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.

    An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait. Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about? As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.