Book picks similar to
White Cube by Brecht Vandenbroucke
comics
graphic-novels
art
graphic-novel
Deep Dark Fears
Fran Krause - 2015
Based on the wildly popular eponymous Tumblr, Deep Dark Fears explores our odd, creepy, and hilariously singular fears. Animator, illustrator, and cartoonist Fran Krause brings these fears to life in vividly illustrated comics based on real fears submitted by readers (plus a few of his own). These "deep dark fears" run the gamut from unlikely but plausible to completely ridiculous, highlighting both our deeply human similarities and our peculiar uniquenesses.
Amphigorey
Edward Gorey - 1972
As always, Gorey's painstakingly cross-hatched pen and ink drawings are perfectly suited to his oddball verse and prose. The first book of 15, "The Unstrung Harp," describes the writing process of novelist Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel." In "The Listing Attic," you'll find a set of quirky limericks such as "A certain young man, it was noted, / Went about in the heat thickly coated; / He said, 'You may scoff, / But I shan't take it off; / Underneath I am horribly bloated.' "Many of Gorey's tales involve untimely deaths and dreadful mishaps, but much like tragic Irish ballads with their perky rhythms and melodies, they come off as strangely lighthearted. "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," for example, begins like this: "A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL assaulted by bears," and so on. An eccentric, funny book for either the uninitiated or diehard Gorey fans.Contains: The Unstrung Harp, The Listing Attic, The Doubtful Guest, The Object Lesson, The Bug Book, The Fatal Lozenge, The Hapless Child, The Curious Sofa, The Willowdale Handcar, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Insect God, The West Wing, The Wuggly Ump, The Sinking Spell, and The Remembered Visit.
The Squirrel Machine
Hans Rickheit - 2009
What is the squirrel machine? Is it a rodent ensnarement device? A mechanism for concealing one’s guarded harvest? An anachronistic fable? A meaningless diversion? Set in a fictional 19th Century New England town, the narrative initially details the relationship and maturation of Edmund and William Torpor. But the two brothers quickly elicit the scorn and recrimination of an unamused public when they reveal their musical creations built from strange technologies and scavenged animal carcasses. Driven to seek a concealment for their aberrant activities, they make a startling discovery. Perhaps they will divine the mystery of the squirrel machine. What is The Squirrel Machine? An immutably strange and haunting narrative that transcends known logics and presumptive dream-barriers; A distillation of subconscious beauty and inspired madness; A dangerous object for the incautious; A revelation for the undernourished crypto-seeker; The virgin caress of unconsummated apocalypse; The unspeakable thing that you always knew. It’s also the longest and most ambitious graphic novel by legendary obscurantist cartoonist Hans Rickheit, 200 pages of exquisitely rendered pictorial narrative. Meticulous, strange, and hauntingly beautiful, this enigmatic work will ensure the inquisitive reader a spleenful of cerebral serenity that will take exposure to vast quantities of mediocrity to dispel. 192 b&w illustrations.
Here
Richard McGuire - 2014
Here is Richard McGuire's unique graphic novel based on the legendary 1989 comic strip of the same name.Richard McGuire's groundbreaking comic strip Here was published under Art Spiegelman's editorship at RAW in 1989.Built in six pages of interlocking panels, dated by year, it collapsed time and space to tell the story of the corner of a room - and its inhabitants - between the years 500,957,406,073 BC and 2313 AD.The strip remains one of the most influential and widely discussed contributions to the medium, and it has now been developed, expanded and reimagined by the artist into this full-length, full-colour graphic novel - a must for any fan of the genre.
Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli - 2009
An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait. Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about? As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.
The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book
Joe Daly - 2009
Set in sun-drenched Cape Town, South Africa, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book — featuring two full-length stories, “The Leaking Cello Case” and “John Wesley Harding” — is stuffed to the gills with mystery, suspense, action, adventure, conspiracy theories, cool cars, and excellent weed as Dave and his freeloading pal Paul, well-meaning stoners in the tradition of Cheech & Chong and Harold & Kumar, thwart criminal malfeasance even as they ponder the larger questions, such as, “What steps can I personally take to help protect the Earth and the species that inhabit it?” (though most people’s answers to these questions don’t involve sword fights and hovercrafts).Joe Daly brings a refreshingly original—and utterly hilarious—voice to the comics medium, a dry, deadpan wit anchored in everyday reality combined with unnervingly deranged plots, rendered with a hyper-detailed, half-realistic and half-cartoony Tintin-style crispness.
The Property
Rutu Modan - 2013
As they get to know modern Warsaw, Regina is forced to recall difficult things about her past, and Mica begins to wonder if maybe their reasons for coming aren’t a little different than what her grandmother led her to believe.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home
Joss Whedon - 2007
But not everything's fun and firearms, as an old enemy reappears and Dawn experiences some serious growing pains. Meanwhile, one of the "Buffy" decoy slayers is going through major pain of her own.Buffy creator Joss Whedon brings Buffy back to Dark Horse in this direct follow-up to season seven of the smash-hit TV series. The bestselling and critically acclaimed issues 1-5 are collected here for the first time, as are their covers by Jo Chen and Georges Jeanty.
Big Hard Sex Criminals: Volume One
Matt Fraction - 2015
Collecting the first ten issues of the Eisner and Harvey awardwinning, TIME Magazine Best Comic of the year of our lord 2013, SEX CRIMINALS, in an oversized hardcover format guaranteed to embarrass you to order.
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
Black Science, Vol. 1: How to Fall Forever
Rick Remender - 2014
But now Grant and his team are trapped in the folds of infinity, the Pillar sending them careening through a million universes of unimaginable adventure, sanity-flaying danger and no way home...Presenting the first mind-warping chapter of the critically acclaimed sci-fi epic by superstar creative team of writer RICK REMENDER (Uncanny Avengers, Captain America) and artist MATTEO SCALERA (Secret Avengers).Collects BLACK SCIENCE #1-6.
Cat vs Human
Yasmine Surovec - 2011
The hugely successful blog catvshuman.com receives over 6,000 page views per day, and many of its cartoons have gone viral. 40% new material unpublished on the website.Yasmine Surovec began sketching her clever and sarcastic Cat Versus Human cartoons as a way to relax and unwind. Soon, her popular blog at catversushuman.blogspot.com began receiving as many as 12,000 hits per day, with a number of posts going viral and appearing on popular Web sites such as The Huffington Post and I Can Has Cheezburger. Now, a selection of 100 Cat Versus Human strips--many never previously published--can be found inside this inaugural collection of Cat Versus Human.Proud owners of Felis domesticus will instantly recognize Surovec's keen insights into cat behavior and all of the characteristic intricacies of the cat-human relationship, such as the allure of an empty cardboard box trumping an expensive battery-operated toy or how a cat's favorite nap spot might as easily be inside a litter box, on top of clean laundry, or directly on top of a human face. Cat Versus Human also encourages an affectionate look at your once-was-in-mint-condition midcentury modern sofa that is now being unstuffed one cat claw at a time.
Exquisite Corpse
Pénélope Bagieu - 2010
It's also why she doesn't know that Rocher is supposed to be dead. Turns out, Rocher faked his death years ago to escape his critics, and has been making a killing releasing his new work as "lost manuscripts," in cahoots with his editor/ex-wife Agathe. Neither of them would have invited a crass party girl like Zoe into their literary conspiracy of two, but now that she's there anyway. . . . Zoe doesn't know Balzac from Batman, but she's going to have to wise up fast... because she's sitting on the literary scandal of the century!
Garfield at Large: His First Book
Jim Davis - 1980
He weighed five pounds, six ounces at birth—that's big for a kitten!—and right from the start showed a passion for Italian food. The restaurant owner, forced to choose between Garfield and closing his doors for lack of pasta, sold Garfield to a pet store. Garfield thought he was a goner until Jon Arbuckle walked in the door. The rest is history.
Habibi
Craig Thompson - 2011
We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world (not unlike our own) fueled by fear, lust, and greed; and as they discover the extraordinary depth—and frailty—of their connection. At once contemporary and timeless, Habibi gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.