Poorly Drawn Lines: Good Ideas and Amazing Stories


Reza Farazmand - 2015
    Embrace it.A bear flies through space. A hamster suffers a breakdown. Elsewhere, a garden snake is arrested by animal control and jailed for home invasion, while a child marvels at the wonder of nature as worms emerge from the ground and begin looking for vodka (as they always have). These are common occurrences in the world of Reza Farazmand’s wildly popular webcomic, Poorly Drawn Lines. Traveling from deep space to alternate realities to the bottom of the ocean, this eponymous collection brings together fan favorites with new comics and original essays to share Farazmand’s inimitable take on love, nature, social acceptance, and robots.

Blackest Night Saga


Geoff Johns - 2019
    The incredible saga from #1 New York Times bestselling writer Geoff Johns is collected here in its entirety for the first time ever in paperback in this new DC Essential Edition!A war has been brewing between the different colored Lantern Corps--the Green fighting the Yellow, the Red trying to destroy all, the Blue attempting to broker peace between the tribes. However, the real battle is yet to come: the undead Black Lanterns are coming and seemingly nothing can stop them. Putting aside old vendettas, it's up to Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps to lead DC's greatest champions as well as their deadliest foes in a battle to save the Universe from an army of the dead.The DC Essential Edition series of graphic novels highlights the best standalone stories the medium has to offer featuring comics' greatest characters. These trade paperback editions focus on the easiest entry points DC has in its vast library, with seminal, groundbreaking tales that transcend the printed page. Start with the Essentials.This collects GREEN LANTERN #43, BLACKEST NIGHT #0-8, and two stories from UNTOLD TALES OF THE BLACKEST NIGHT #1.

Mystery Science Theater 3000


Joel Hodgson - 2019
    Robot, and Tom Servo find themselves thrust into the 2-D world of public domain comics, with riffing as their only defense!From its humble beginnings on a tiny mid-west TV station in 1988, through its years as a mainstay on The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central and the SciFi Channel all through the '90s, to its spectacular resurrection on Netflix in 2017, Mystery Science Theater 3000 has had a transformative effect on television, comedy, and the way old, cheesy movies are viewed. Now creator Joel Hodgson has set his sights on the comics medium, and the four-color pamphlets will never be the same!

Nine Ways to Disappear


Lilli Carré - 2009
    Skillfully drawn single panels explore a rich imagined world where actions have unexpected consequences and loneliness pervades, but not without a sense of the absurd. The stories read like vignettes that can span a day or decades, all drawn within a bordered page in intimate detail.Each story unfolds quickly and features characters that run the gamut: joke-writing sisters gone awry, a wandering sleepwalker, a pearl with curious properties, an elusive coughing neighbor, a wide-eyed girl of questionable appeal, even a storm drain. Whether animate or inanimate, sweet or monstrous, Lilli has the ability to infuse them all with pathos, humanity, and humor.

The Blot


Tom Neely - 2007
    That’s something of the premise behind The Blot by Tom Neely, one of the most bizarre and original graphic novels I’ve read this year. In a crisp, clean, yet utterly surreal drawing style, Neely depicts the odd adventures of an Average Joe whose face is periodically ravaged by a giant ink blot. The man tries to escape the blot, control the blot, even meets a woman who helps him understand the blot. [...] What starts out as semi-humorous and absurdist gains depth and poignancy -- a luminous quality, a quality of something pulled whole out of the subconscious, permeates the latter portions of The Blot. -Bookslut.com

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.


Dash Shaw - 2009
    The latter three-quarters will collect his acclaimed short stories from MOME, as well as several little-seen stories from elsewhere, and a new 20-page story.The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is Shaw’s first book since his breakthrough graphic novel of 2008, Bottomless Belly Button, which was named Publishers Weekly’s best graphic novel of 2008, one of Entertainment Weekly’s top ten books of 2008, and one of Amazon.com’s top ten graphic novels of the year, amongst numerous other accolades.The book also collects Shaw’s acclaimed, genre-bending short stories from MOME, including “Look Forward, First Son of Terra Two,” a remarkable story of two lovers traveling in opposite directions… in time. Also featured: “Galactic Funnels,” the 2008 Ignatz Award nominee for “Outstanding Story,” about the parasitic relationship between an artist and his lover/mentor; “Satellite CMYK,” a sci-fi mindwarp that ingeniously drives the narrative through Shaw’s masterful control of color, and “Making the Abyss,” a fictionalized story of a surreal film set filled with nuclear tanks, hot tubs, and blind ambition.“Like the very best illustrated fiction, Shaw’s work moves between pathos and humor, between the fantastic and the familiar.”—The Christian Science Monitor“Shaw’s style deftly combines cartoon drawings with a slavish attention to detail…Masterfully using the comics medium to juggle all the different characters, weaving their stories together seamlessly.”—Publishers Weekly