Book picks similar to
Maggots by Brian Chippendale


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graphic-novel

100 Months: The End of All Things


Johnny Hicklenton - 2010
    His final graphic novel is a parable of environmental devastation, depicting the quest of Mara, Warrior and Earth Goddess, as she seeks revenge against the Longpig: a Satanic personification of capitalism, red in tooth and claw, whose followers, a legion of the damned, look quite a lot like us. The world of the Longpig is rich in killing fields and scenes of mass crucifixion that recall Goya, Blake, and Bacon, and represents a true crossover of the graphic novel form with fine art. John took his own life with the help of an assisted dying group, following a heroic struggle with multiple sclerosis. This book was drawn and written in foreknowledge of his imminent death, and its insight into universal themes of life, death, salvation, and damnation seems to come from a place between worlds. Its words those of a prophet, its artwork transcending the comic book form, 100 Months will redefine the adult graphic novel.

One More Year


Simon Hanselmann - 2017
    One More Year continues to give substance to the characters and personalities of its protagonists in ways that never fail to surprise, delight, and horrify.

Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies, 1943–1945


Ernie Bushmiller - 2012
    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.

Why My Cat Is More Impressive Than Your Baby


Matthew Inman - 2019
    Matthew Inman, Eisner Award-winning creator of The Oatmeal and #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, presents a must-have collection of comics for cat lovers!Why My Cat Is More Impressive Than Your Baby is chockfull of comics about cats, babies, dogs, lasers, selfies, and pigeons!  This book contains a vast wealth of never-before-seen comics, including informative guides, such as:How to comfortably sleep next to your cat10 ways to befriend a misanthropic catHow to hold a baby when you are not used to holding babiesA dog’s guide to walking a human beingHow to cuddle like you mean it Includes a pull-out poster of:  How to tell if your cat thinks you’re not that big of a deal.

Epileptic


David B. - 2002
    has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes of the internationally acclaimed graphic work.David B. was born Pierre-François Beauchard in a small town near Orléans, France. He spent an idyllic early childhood playing with the neighborhood kids and, along with his older brother, Jean-Christophe, ganging up on his little sister, Florence. But their lives changed abruptly when Jean-Christophe was struck with epilepsy at age eleven. In search of a cure, their parents dragged the family to acupuncturists and magnetic therapists, to mediums and macrobiotic communes. But every new cure ended in disappointment as Jean-Christophe, after brief periods of remission, would only get worse.Angry at his brother for abandoning him and at all the quacks who offered them false hope, Pierre-François learned to cope by drawing fantastically elaborate battle scenes, creating images that provide a fascinating window into his interior life. An honest and horrifying portrait of the disease and of the pain and fear it sowed in the family, Epileptic is also a moving depiction of one family’s intricate history. Through flashbacks, we are introduced to the stories of Pierre-François’s grandparents and we relive his grandfathers’ experiences in both World Wars. We follow Pierre-François through his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, all the while charting his complicated relationship with his brother and Jean-Christophe”s losing battle with epilepsy. Illustrated with beautiful and striking black-and-white images, Epileptic is as astonishing, intimate, and heartbreaking as the best literary memoir.From the Hardcover edition.

There's a Hair in My Dirt!: A Worm's Story


Gary Larson - 1998
    It was a cartoon that appeared for many years in daily newspapers and was loved by millions. (And was confusing to millions more.) But one day he stopped.Gary went into hiding. He made a couple short films. He played his guitar. He threw sticks for his dogs. They threw some back.Yet Gary was restless. He couldn't sleep nights. Something haunted him. (Besides Gramps.) Something that would return him to his roots in biology, drawing and dementia--a tale called There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story.It begins a few inches underground, when a young worm, during a typical family dinner, discovers there's a hair in his plate of dirt. He becomes rather upset, not just about his tainted meal but about his entire miserable, wormy life. This, in turn, spurs his father to tell him a story--a story to inspire the children of invertebrates everywhere.And so Father Worm describes the saga of a fair young maiden and her adventuresome stroll through her favorite forest, a perambulator's paradise. It is a journey filled with mystery and magic. Or so she thinks.Which is all we'll say for now.What exactly does the maiden encounter?Does Son Worm learn a lesson?More important, does he eat his plate of fresh dirt?Well, you'll have to read to find out, but let's just say the answers are right under your feet.Written and illustrated in a children's storybook style, There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story is a twisted take on the difference between our idealized view of Nature and the sometimes cold, hard reality of life for the birds and the bees and the worms (not to mention our own species).Told with his trademark off-kilter humor, this first original non--Far Side book is the unique work of a comic master.Now Larson can finally sleep at night.Question is, will you?(from the back cover)

Hark! A Vagrant


Kate Beaton - 2011
    No era or tome emerges unscathbed as Beaton rightly skewers the Western world's revolutionaries, leaders, sycophants, and suffragists while equally honing her wit on the hapless heroes, heroines, and villains of the best-loved fiction. She deftly points out what really happened when Brahms fell asleep listening to Liszt, that the world's first hipsters were obviously the Incroyables and the Merveilleuses from eighteenth-century France, that Susan B. Anthony is, of course, a "Samantha," and that the polite banality of Canadian culture never gets old. Hark! A Vagrant features sexy Batman, the true stories behind classic Nancy Drew covers, and Queen Elizabeth doing the albatross. As the 5600.000 unique monthly visitors to harkavagrant.com already know, no one turns the ironic absurdities of history and literature into comedic fodder as hilarious as Beaton.

Radiator Days


Lucy Knisley - 2008
    The comics in this book were made over a two-year period that seems to consist of constant winter. They were drawn to the tune of the radiator's hum.

In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot


Graham Roumieu - 2003
    Learn the hairy one's brave struggles with eating disorders, casual cannibalism, pop culture, and philosophical quandaries. In this crazed mutant graphic novel, Graham Roumieu gives us a portrait of the artist as a young ape that will leave the reader howling with laughter.

Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue


Bill Watterson - 2015
    Includes an in-depth, original,and lengthy interview with Bill Watterson.Exploring Calvin and Hobbes is the catalogue for an exhibition by the same name at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University that ran in 2014. The exhibit is Bill Watterson's personal exploration of how the wonder of Calvin and Hobbes came to be. It includes original art of Calvin and Hobbes, along with Watterson's original commentary. The show also includes art from cartoons and cartoonists that Watterson has identified as influential in the development of his art, including Peanuts, Pogo, Krazy Kat, Doonesbury, Pat Oliphant, Jim Borgman, Flash Gordon, Bloom County, and Steadman. The book also includes an extensive, original interview with Watterson by Jenny Robb, the exhibition's curator.The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is the repository of the Bill Watterson Deposit Collection (including the entirety of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes artwork).

The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue


Will Eisner - 2005
    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.

Interiorae


Gabriella Giandelli - 2012
    Its inhabitants come and go, meet each other, talk, dream, regret, hope... in short, live. A ghostly, shape-shifting anthropomorphic white rabbit roams from apartment to apartment, surveying and keeping track of all this humanity... and at the end of every night, he floats down to the basement where he delivers his report to the “great dark one.”Lushly delineated in penciled halftones, this moody graphic novel was originally serialized in Fantagraphics’ acclaimed “Ignatz” series of upscale saddle-stitched booklets in duotone form, but this complete edition restores the artist’s original striking full-color treatment.

Stray Toasters


Bill Sienkiewicz - 1988
    Stray Toasters is the seminal graphic novel written and painted by one of the world's most innovative and influential comic book artists, Bill Sienkiewicz. This dark, scary critically acclaimed tale mixes the sci-fi, noir, mystery and monster genres and sets them in a Blade Runner-like City of the Future. In this full-color definitive annotated volume, Sienkiewicz is at the top of his game. Contains new cover, cover gallery and a few surprises.

Flood!: A Novel in Pictures


Eric Drooker - 1992
    Flood! is a modern novel written in the ancient language of pictures, with an expressionist, film noir edge. This "definitive edition" of Flood! is a unique record of our country's turbulent past - and corporate present - and a must-read for students of graphic storytelling. This third edition also features a new cover by Drooker and a complete re-design. Flood! A Novel in Pictures, was followed by Drooker's acclaimed book, Blood Song: A Silent Ballad.

Death Vigil, Vol. 1


Stjepan Šejić - 2015
    Become a corporeal immortal Death Knight and obtain reality-altering weaponry in the never-ending battle between good and evil.Collects DEATH VIGIL #1-8.