Book picks similar to
Teratoid Heights by Mat Brinkman


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Pride of Baghdad


Brian K. Vaughan - 2006
    In his award-winning work on Y THE LAST MAN and EX MACHINA (one of Entertainment Weekly’s 2005 Ten Best Fiction titles), writer Brian K. Vaughan has displayed an understanding of both the cost of survival and the political nuances of the modern world. Now, in this provocative graphic novel, Vaughan examines life on the streets of war-torn Iraq. In the spring of 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad zoo during an American bombing raid. Lost and confused, hungry but finally free, the four lions roamed the decimated streets of Baghdad in a desperate struggle for their lives. In documenting the plight of the lions, PRIDE OF BAGHDAD raises questions about the true meaning of liberation – can it be given or is it earned only through self-determination and sacrifice? And in the end, is it truly better to die free than to live life in captivity? Based on a true story, VAUGHAN and artist NIKO HENRICHON (Barnum!) have created a unique and heartbreaking window into the nature of life during wartime, illuminating this struggle as only the graphic novel can.

Arsène Schrauwen


Olivier Schrauwen - 2014
    Together they would build something deemed impossible: a modern utopia in the wilderness but not before Arsene falls in love with his cousin s wife, Marieke. Whether delirious from love or a fever-inducing jungle virus, Arsene s loosening grip on reality is mirrored by the graphic novel reader s uncertainty of what is imagined or real by Arsene. This first full-length graphic novel from the critically-acclaimed Olivier Schrauwen is an engrossing, sometimes funny, slightly surreal and often beautiful narrative."

Fox Bunny Funny


Andy Hartzell - 2007
    Foxes oppress and devour, bunnies suffer and die. Everyone knows their place. Everyone's satisfied. So what happens when a secret desire puts you at odds with your society? Starting from a simple premise -- and without using a single word -- Fox Bunny Funny leads the reader on a zigzag chase in and out of rabbit holes, and through increasingly strange landscapes where funny animals have serious identity problems. The tale swerves from slapstick to horror and back again before landing at the inevitable climax, in which all the old rules are shattered. When you emerge, you'll find yourself gazing at our own fragmenting society with new eyes.

Welcome to the Dahl House: Alienation, Incarceration, and Inebriation in the New American Rome


Ken Dahl - 2008
    "Gordon Smalls Goes to Jail", "No!", and "Blind Fart"! 2006 Ignatz Winner!

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar


Harvey PekarVal Mayerik - 1987
    For over 25 years he's been writing comic books about his life, chronicling the ordinary and everyday in stories both funny and moving.This 320 page collection was issued on the heels of the film "American Splendor," and it includes material previously published in the first two collected volumes in the American Splendor series.

Head Lopper, Vol. 1: The Island or A Plague of Beasts


Andrew MacLean - 2016
    When Queen Abigail hires Norgal and Agatha to slay the Sorcerer, our heroes trek across the island relieving the horrors of their heads - and playing right into the hands of a master manipulator.Collects issues 1 through 4.

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.

Beverly


Nick Drnaso - 2016
    Connected by a series of gossipy teens, the modern lost souls of Beverly struggle with sexual anxieties that are just barely repressed and social insecurities that undermine every word they speak.A group of teenagers pick up trash on the side of the highway--flirting, preening, and ignoring a potentially violent loner in their midst. A college student brings her sort-of boyfriend to a disastrous house party with her high-school acquaintances. A young woman experiences a traumatic incident at the pizza shop where she works and the fallout reveals the racial tensions simmering below the surface. Again and again, the civilized façade of Drnaso's pitch-perfect surburban sprawl and pasty Midwestern protagonists cracks in the face of violence and quiet brutality.Drnaso's bleak social satire in Beverly reveals a brilliant command of the social milieu of twenty-first-century existence, echoing the black comic work of Todd Solondz, Sam Lipsyte, and Daniel Clowes. Precisely and hauntingly recounted, each chapter of Beverly reveals something new--and yet familiar--about the world in which we live.

Beartato and the Secret of the Mystery


Anthony Clark - 2010
    

Hot Dog Taste Test


Lisa Hanawalt - 2016
    Her designs define the look of the wildly popular Netflix animated series Bojack Horseman. Her culinary-focused comics and illustrated essays in Lucky Peach magazine won her a James Beard Award.Now, Hot Dog Taste Test collects Hanawalt's devastatingly funny comics, gorgeous art, and screwball lists as she tucks into the pomposities of the foodie subculture. Hanawalt dismantles the notion of breakfast; says goodbye to New York through a street food smorgasbord; shadows chef Wylie Dufresne, samples all-you-can-eat buffets in Vegas; and crafts an eerie comic about being a horse lover yet an avid carnivore.Hot Dog Taste Test explodes with color, hilarity, charm, and, occasionally, reproductive organs. Lush full-spread paintings of birds getting their silly feet all over a kitchen, a fully imagined hot dog show (think Best in Show but with hot dogs), and a holiday feast gone awry are the creamy icing on this imaginative rainbow-colored cake. But Hanawalt's wit and heart extend far beyond gags--her insightful musings on popular culture, relationships, and the animal in all of us are as keen and funny as her watercolors are exquisite.

1-800-MICE


Matthew Thurber - 2006
    Tolkien. Over the course of the story we meet Peace Punk, a punker on the verge of a bourgeois lifestyle; Tom Chief, a beat cop with an identity crisis; and Groomfiend, a daffy creature who leads the narrative. The serial has earned Thurber rave reviews from, among others, cartoonist Ben Katchor, who writes: "Matthew Thurber has singlehandedly revived the Surrealist program of revolutionary politics through dreamwork. What more can you ask for in a comic-book?" This edition collects five issues of "1-800-MICE," plus 48 pages of new material.

Almost Silent


Jason - 2010
    (As the title indicates, this volume favors Jason's pantomime works.) You Can't Get There From Here, the longest story of the book (and the only one to be printed in color well, a color), tells the tale of a love triangle involving Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Monster, and The Monster's Bride: Jason cleverly alternates between totally silent sequences involving the three characters and scenes in which Frankenstein's hunchbacked assistant discusses the day s events with a fellow hunchbacked assistant to another mad scientist. (You didn't know they had a union?) Tell Me Something is a brisk (271 panels), near-totally-silent (just a few intertitles) graphic novelette about love lost and found again, told with a tricky mixture of forward- and back-flashing narrative. Meow, Baby is a collection of Jason's short stories and gags, and finally, The Living and the Dead is a hilariously deadpan (and gory) take on the traditional Romero-style zombie thriller. All of these yarns star Jason's patented cast of tight-lipped (or -beaked) bird-, dog-, cat- and wolf-people, and show off his compassion and wry wit. Almost Silent is a perfect starting point for a new reader wanting to know what the fuss is all about, and a handsome, handy, inexpensive collection for the committed Jason fan.

Drinking at the Movies


Julia Wertz - 2010
    Don’t worry—this isn’t the typical redemptive coming-of-age tale of a young woman and her glorious triumph over tragedy or any such nonsense. It’s simply a hilarious—occasionally poignant—book filled with interesting art, absurd humor and plenty of amusing self-deprecation. Box by box, Wertz chronicles four sketchy apartments, seven terrible jobs, family drama, traveling fiascos, and too many whiskey bottles to count.

In the Sounds and Seas


Marnie Galloway - 2016
    In the style of epic poems of myth and monsters, IN THE SOUNDS AND SEAS opens with a creation myth: three figures sit around a fire in the woods and burst in to song, and their voices weave and blend together to make the ocean and the world. Within this new world the boundary between truth and fiction, fantasy and reality, are blurred. The protagonist lives in this sung landscape where she builds a ship to sail and find the legendary singers of their world, with the help of two others who are less haunted by her mission. It is a story about obsessive creative production, the search for creative community and meaning through art, and what happens when dreams we invest our whole selves in to fail."

The Hard Goodbye


Frank Miller - 1991
    But Marv doesn't care. There's an angel in the room. She says her name is Goldie. A few hours later, Goldie's dead without a mark on her perfect body, and the cops are coming before anyone but Marv could know she's been killed. Somebody paid good money for this frame . . . With a new look generating more excitement than ever before, this third edition is the perfect way to attract a whole new generation of readers to Frank Miller's masterpiece!