Usagi faces all these and more when a desperate woman begs for his help in finding her kidnapped daughter. Tracing the abducted girl deep into the forest, Usagi finds it haunted by creatures of Japanese legend and discovers that they are amassing for a great raid on the countryside! Fortunately, Usagi is joined by Sasuke the Demon Queller, who is also fighting to prevent the invasion, but things aren't always as they seem — especially when dealing with the supernatural!* The rabbit ronin turned twenty-five, and Dark Horse celebrated with the first-ever Usagi Yojimbo original graphic novel, fully hand-painted, written, and lettered by creator Stan Sakai!* Completely self-contained story.* Usagi Yojimbo is a 2009 Eisner Award nominee for Best Continuing Series.First ever, full color, original story!

    But you never really get away from war. So it feels inevitable when his old army buddy Jason comes calling, with a lucrative military contract for a mining job in an obscure South-East Asian country called Quanlom. They'll have to operate under the radar--Quanlom is being torn apart by civil war, and the US military isn't strictly supposed to be there.With no career prospects and a baby on the way, Mark finds himself making the worst mistake of his life and signing on with Jason. What awaits him in Quanlom is going to change everything. What awaits him in Quanlom is weirdness of the highest order: a civil war led by ten-year-old twins wielding something that looks a lot like magic, leading an army of warriors who look a lot like gods.What awaits him in Quanlom is an actual goddamn dragon.From world-renowned artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka (twins, whose magic powers are strictly confined to pen and paper) and Boaz Lavie, The Divine is a fast-paced, brutal, and breathlessly beautiful portrait of a world where ancient powers vie with modern warfare and nobody escapes unscathed.

    but then Angina gets a call from the Netherworld. It's her aborted fetus: he's drunk and he's pissed off. So begins Pixy, which Neil Gaiman calls "the best comic I've read this year" — a 65-page journey into a nightmare world unlike any you've ever seen before. The rest of the book follows Alka's attempts to infiltrate the Kingdom of the Dead (where time runs backwards and is sold by the pint to time-addicts), in order to track down the malevolent Pixy and kill him for good. Shedding bodies and identities with some regularity (Pixy himself blows one to smithereens), Alka finds his own sense of reality eroding further and further during his sojourn down under — and it doesn't help at all when Pixy, now his best friend, accompanies him back up to the Land of the Living, where the gun-happy undead sprite wreaks unspeakable havoc. Pixy is the first major work by Swedish cartoonist Max Andersson, and it combines the freewheeling-yet-obsessive graphic and narrative weirdness of such contemporary North American cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Kaz and Charles Burns with a bizarre yet coherent story that mixes coal black humor, barbed satire, wild surrealism, and stark horror in a totally new way — a feast for the (preferably deranged) mind and the (preferably diseased) eye.

    Consisting of three xeroxed sheets of paper, and with a print run of twenty-five, it was a less-than-auspicious, largely unnoticed debut. In the following three years, though, Optic Nerve developed at a startlingly rapid pace: the artwork and writing evolved with each story, production quality improved, page counts increased, and by issue seven, sales had reached 6,000. In 1994, Drawn & Quarterly took over the publishing duties of Optic Nerve, and the original seven issues sold out and were left out of print. 32 stories presents these rare, early editions, collected for the first time in a single volume.

    Cebulski, Nikki Cook, Hope Larson, John Ney Reiber, Ryan Kelly, and many, many others, Comic Book Tattoo encapsulates the breadth, depth, and beauty of modern comics in this coffee table format book.

    When he gets shanghaied aboard a clipper bound for Hong Kong, he finds the sailor’s life a bit rougher than his romantic nautical fantasies. He helps rebuff a pirate assault, survives a gunshot to the eye, and learns to live—and love—a Conradian life on the sea, all the while writing poetry about pirates, bad food, unceremonial funerals, foreign ports, and unexpected epiphanies. By the end of his life, he’s found satisfaction in living a life of adventure and finding a receptive and appreciative readership. What more could one ask for?This is Drew Weing’s debut graphic novel, after honing his craft with numerous, lovingly produced self-published comic stories. Drawn in an elaborate crosshatched style that falls somewhere between Gustave Doré engravings and E. C. Segar’s Popeye, Set to Sea is part rollicking adventure, part maritime ballad told in visual rhyme. Every page is a single panel, every panel is a stunning illustration, every illustration a part of a larger whole that tells a story in the deft language of cartooning.

    The story is one of mystery and action, as Rufo, an ex boxer, must deliver the goods while promising to NEVER open or inspect his cargo. Mayhem ensues as the precious cargo becomes the goal of others. Wizard calls it "Convoy meets The Twilight Zone."

    The Washington Post has described him as a “post-existentialist private eye.” An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster’s groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.

    Huizenga fuses the most banal aspects of modern culture with its most looming questions in a consistently genial style. Lighthearted, but with a healthy dose of nineteenth-century spine tingling, the narratives presented in Curses are insightful portrayals of reality. Huizenga's central character in his comics is Glenn Ganges, a seemingly middle-class man living in the suburbs whose blank-eyed wonderment at everyday experiences brings together such diverse aspects of our world as golf, theology, late-night diners, parenthood, politics, Sudanese refugees, and hallucinatory vision, into a complete experience as multifaceted as our own lives.Huizenga is regarded by many as one of the most promising young cartoonists of his generation, whose artistic talent, singular writing, and studied substance prove the versatility of his skill. Curses collects his work from Kramer's Ergot and The Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, his award-winning and nominated comic-book series Or Else, and Time magazine; it is the most extensive selection of his comics to date in a single volume.

    It's run down, and Hippo hardly ever gets any visitors. So he decides to set off for the outside with his friend Red Panda. To make it in the human world, Hippo will have to become a Hippopotamister: he'll have to act like a human, get a job, and wear a hat as a disguise. He's a good employee, whether he's a construction worker, a hair stylist, or a sous chef. But what he really needs is a job where he can be himself.

    Thriller. Gripping historical fiction. This artful, sparely told graphic novel — a tale of a boy in Dust Bowl America — will resonate with young readers today.In Kansas in the year 1937, eleven-year-old Jack Clark faces his share of ordinary challenges: local bullies, his father’s failed expectations, a little sister with an eye for trouble. But he also has to deal with the effects of the Dust Bowl, including rising tensions in his small town and the spread of a shadowy illness. Certainly a case of "dust dementia" would explain who (or what) Jack has glimpsed in the Talbot’s abandoned barn — a sinister figure with a face like rain. In a land where it never rains, it’s hard to trust what you see with your own eyes — and harder still to take heart and be a hero when the time comes. With phenomenal pacing, sensitivity, and a sure command of suspense, Matt Phelan ushers us into a world where desperation is transformed by unexpected courage.

    Collecting over a decade s worth of artifacts, excavations, comic strips, animation stills, storybook covers, and much more, this broken jigsaw puzzle of a book tells the story of Pim & Francie, a pair of childlike, male and female imps whose irresponsible antics get them into horrific, fantastic trouble. Their loosely defined relationship only contributes to the existential fear that lingers underneath the various perils they are subjected to. Columbia s brilliant, fairytale-like backdrops hint at further layers of reality lurking under every gingerbread house or behind every sunny afternoon. Never have such colorful, imaginative vistas instilled such an atmosphere of dread, and with such a wicked sense of humor. This is a comprehensive collection of Columbia s Pim & Francie work, including paintings, comics, character designs, and much more, all woven into something greater than the sum of its parts, with Pim & Francie careening from danger to danger, threaded together through text and notes by the artist. This is the first book collection by Columbia, a well-regarded talent amongst longtime fans of the alternative comic book scene, and one who will thrill an entirely new audience with the singular, inspired, fully-realized fantasies within Pim & Francie.

    In need of firewood, the young son ventures into the forest to grab what sticks he can carry and crosses paths with a tall and peculiar bird wearing a singular top hat. Making quick friends, the bird helps the young fox bring wood to his father and upon seeing the state of their house and their health, the bird decides to stay and help them with the winter. A beautiful and deeply touching story about friendship, selflessness, and death that shows us the true power of community and working together for a better place. Written and illustrated by Gustavo Borges and colored by Cris Peter, this wonderful tale is brought to life with vivid imagination and artwork that is accessible to all readers!

    We'll never quite know why, but sometimes they decide they've just had enough of this world- and that's when they start getting inventive. The Book of Bunny Suicides follows over one hundred bunnies as they find ever more outlandish ways to do themselves in. From an encounter with the business end of Darth Vader's lightsaber, to supergluing themselves to a diving submarine, to hanging around underneath a loose stalactite, these bunnies are serious about suicide. Illustrated in a stark and simple style, The Book of Bunny Suicides is a collection of hilarious and outrageous cartoons that will appeal to anyone in touch with their evil side.

    But the concept falls under such an absurdly large umbrella and can manifest in so many different ways. Art can be self indulgent, goofy, serious, altruistic, evil, or expressive, or any number of other things. But how can it truly make lasting, positive change? In Why Art?, acclaimed graphic novelist Eleanor Davis (How To Be Happy) unpacks some of these concepts in ways both critical and positive, in an attempt to illuminate the highest possible potential an artwork might hope to achieve. A work of art unto itself, Davis leavens her exploration with a sense of humor and a thirst for challenging preconceptions of art worth of Magritte, instantly drawing the reader in as a willing accomplice in her quest.