Opus


Satoshi Kon - 2011
    But before he became a director, he was a manga artist, and Dark Horse is honored to remember Kon with the release of Satoshi Kon’s OPUS,an omnibus collection of a two-volume manga from 1996, created by Kon on the eve of his first film. OPUS contains the mastery of both realism and surrealism that would make Kon famous in Perfect Blue,as a manga artist planning a shocking surprise ending to his story gets literally pulled into his own work—to face for himself what he had planned for his characters!OPUS is Kon's metafictional tale of Chikara Nagai, a creator under pressure to finish his latest graphic novel, Resonance, who finds that the harshest critic of the shock ending he's got planned is the character who'll have to die in it! Nagai's stregths and weaknesses as a creator are tested beyond their limits as his present and his past, and the worlds of the manga and of reality, become the levels of a maze he may never escape... let alone get a chance to resolve the story!

Footnotes in Gaza


Joe Sacco - 2009
    Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah—cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake—reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheikhs, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy. As in Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, Sacco’s unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into an intimate and immediate experience.

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel


Hope Larson - 2012
    Murry, who has gone missing while doing top-secret work for the government. They travel via tesseract — a wrinkle that transports one across space and time — to the planet Camazotz, where Mr. Murry is being held captive. There they discover a dark force that threatens not only Mr. Murry but the safety of the whole universe.Never before illustrated, A Wrinkle in Time is now available in a spellbinding graphic novel adaptation. Hope Larson takes the classic story to a new level with her vividly imagined interpretations of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, the Happy Medium, Aunt Beast, and the many other characters that readers have loved for the past fifty years. Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet.

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories


Moto Hagio - 1971
    Here now, in English for the very first time, as the debut release in Fantagraphics Books' ambitious manga line of graphic novels, are ten of the very best of these tales.The work in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories spans Hagio's entire career, from 1970's "Bianca" to 2007's "The Willow Tree," and includes the mind-bending, full-color title story; the famously heartbreaking "Iguana Girl"; and the haunting "The Child Who Comes Home"–as well as "Autumn Journey," "Girl on Porch With Puppy," the eerie conjoined-twins shocker "Hanshin: Half-God," "Angel Mimic," and one of the saddest of all romance stories, "Marié, Ten Years Later." A Drunken Dream and Other Stories is supplemented with a feature-length interview with Hagio, where discusses her art, her career, and her life with the same combination of wit, candor, and warmth that radiates from every panel of her comics.

Glacial Period


Nicolas de Crécy - 2005
    There will be four and each will be a vision of this great museum by a different artist. De Crécy, at the sight of the incredible richness of the museum’s collection was overwhelmed and felt small and ignorant. The result is a story set thousands of years hence in a glacial period where all human history has been forgotten and a small group of archeologists fall upon the Louvre, buried in age-old snow. They cannot begin to explain all the artifacts they see. What could they have meant? Their interpretations are nonsense, absurd, farcical.

Kafka


David Zane Mairowitz - 1994
    Crumb's Kafka is a vibrant biography that examines this Czech writer and his works in a way that a bland texbook never could! R. Crumb's Kafka goes far beyond being explication or popularization or survey. It's a work of art in its own right, a very rare example of what happens when one very idiosyncratic artist absorbs another into his worldview without obliterating the individuality of the absorbed one. Crumb's art is filled with Kafka's insurmountable neuroses. They are all there: Gregor Samsa's sister, the luscious Milena Jesenska, the Advacate's "nurse" Leni, Olda and Frieda, and the ravishing Dora Diamant-drawn in that mixture of self-commandtantalizing knowingness, and sly sexuality, that amazonian randines and thick-limbed physicality that is Crumb.Crumb's idiosyncratic illustrations add a new dimension to the already idiosyncratic world of Kafka. Includes adaptations of "The Judgment," "The Trial," "The Castle," "A Hunger Artist," and "The Metamorphosis."

Strange Planet


Nathan W. Pyle - 2019
    Pyle comes an adorable and profound universe in pink, blue, green, and purple. Based on the phenomenally popular Instagram of the same name, Strange Planet covers a full life cycle of the planet’s inhabitants, including milestones such as:The Emergence DayBeing Gains a SiblingThe Being Family Attains a BeastThe Formal Education of a BeingCelebration of Special DaysBeing Begins a VocationThe Beings at HomeHealth Status of a BeingThe Hobbies of a BeingThe Extended Family of the BeingThe Being Reflects on Life While Watching the Planet RotateWith dozens of never-before-seen illustrations in addition to old favorites, this book offers a sweet and hilarious look at a distant world not all that unlike our own.

Astro City, Vol. 1: Life in the Big City


Kurt Busiek - 1996
    Volumes 1-6 of Kurt Busiek's Astro City are collected in this volume that also includes a sketchbook showing the development of Astro City a cover gallery of cover paintings.

The Book of Leviathan


Peter Blegvad - 2000
    In a dazzling work of graphic fiction, a surreal journey through a wonderland eerily like real life, The Book of Leviathan chronicles an infant's investigations into life's great mysteries. Endowed with a preternatural interest in metaphysics and philosophy, yet as confused as any innocent by the vagaries of adult behavior, little Levi bears the added burden of living in a world that can literally change at the stroke of a pen.Aided by a wise pet ("Cat") and a favorite toy ("Bunny"), Levi encounters a frothing ectoplasmic Hegel and a woefully off-the-mark Freud. In less heady adventures, Levi contemplates why his parents disappear at night (and whether he is wholeheartedly pleased when they return each morning); the regrettable liberties taken with the English language; and the relationship between Bennetton and Pablo Neruda.Peter Blegvad's Book of Leviathan assembles the cream from Levi and Cat's adventures, published in The Independent on Sunday newspaper in the twilight years of the old Millennium. Blegvad's darkly humorous work has been described by Matt Groening as "one of the weirdest things I've ever stared at". Quirky and referential, dark and droll by turn, it follows the faceless baby Levi's journeys into and out of the world. They are escapes, but as some sage once observed, only a jailer would consider the term "escapist" pejorative.

It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken: A Picture Novella


Seth - 1998
    While trying to understand his dissatisfaction with the present, Seth discovers the life and work of Kalo, a forgotten New Yorker cartoonist from the 1940s. But his obsession blinds him to the needs of his lover and the quiet desperation of his family. Wry self-reflection and moody colours characterize Seth's style in this tale about learning lessons from nostalgia. His playful and sophisticated experiment with memoir provoked a furious debate among cartoon historians and archivists about the existence of Kalo, and prompted a Details feature about Seth's "hoax".

Nailbiter, Vol. 1: There Will Be Blood


Joshua Williamson - 2014
    Joshua Williamson and Mike Henderson deliver a mystery that mixes Twin Peaks with the horror of Se7en! Collects: Nailbiter #1-5.

Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites


Evan Dorkin - 2010
    With the human residents unaware of the danger, it's up to a determined crew of dogs (and one cat) to keep their community safe.Horror, adventure, mystery, and humor thrive on every page of Beasts of Burden, which promises to capture readers' hearts and haunt their dreams.Award-winning comics creators Evan Dorkin (Milk & Cheese) and Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother) come together to share the lives of some unlucky heroes, first introduced in The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings, for which Dorkin and Thompson won coveted Eisner awards for Best Short Story and Best Painter. Animal Rites collects those earliest tales, along with the four-issue comic series Beats of Burden.

Copperhead, Vol. 1: A New Sheriff in Town


Jay Faerber - 2015
    Vaughan (Saga, Y: The Last Man)Welcome to Copperhead, a grimy mining town on the edge of a backwater planet. Single mom Clara Bronson is the new sheriff, and on her first day she'll have to contend with a resentful deputy, a shady mining tycoon, and a family of alien hillbillies. And did we mention the massacre?Collecting: Copperhead 1-5