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Gloriana


Kevin Huizenga - 2012
    His protagonist, Glenn Ganges, has conversations about dish soap and library visits that are both faithful depictions of the mundane interactions we all have and so much more: existential dissections of the units that construct our lives. Huizenga has an understated, quiet approach to story writing that allows his characters (and his readers) the self-awareness to recognize the humor and tragedy of every moment.Huizenga's much-lauded work is finely detailed, and in its innovative use of form, it explores the boundaries of the comic medium, deconstructing and reconstructing panels to express temporality and lived experience more fully. Presented in this expanded edition, Gloriana employs familiar settings and thorough, sometimes scientific explanations to reach thoughtful conclusions.

Distance Mover


Patrick Kyle - 2014
    Earth can move incredible distances in his improbable Distance Mover, a wondrous vehicle that reflects the fantastic world it traverses. He, and his young art-star protégée Mendel, explore culture-rich crystalline cities, challenge the mighty Council of the Misters, try to overcome the all-conquering Ooze, and much more!Patrick Kyle lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He is the co-founder and editor of Wowee Zonk, a contemporary comic book anthology featuring up-and-coming international artists. He has been previously nominated for Doug Wright and Ignatz awards for his comic book series Black Mass and Distance Mover.

The Cabbie: Book One


Martí - 1987
    Sometimes it takes Europeans to make gold of tuckered-out American tropes.Add to those instances of inspired global cross-pollination the Spanish cartoonist Martí’s eye-popping The Cabbie, which spins off Martin Scorsese’s sordid urban-justice drama Taxi Driver with a graphic style that unapologetically appropriates and even refines the brutal slabs of black, squashed perspectives, and grotesque approach to human physiognomy (and its ability to withstand punishment) that define Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy.And as Art Spiegelman (who was the first to publish Martí’s work in English, in RAW magazine) notes in his introduction, while “Gould’s graphic black and white precision and his diagrammatic clarity live on in Martí’s work,” he points out that “more interestingly, perhaps, so does Gould’s depravity.” Indeed, if anything, The Cabbie is even more savage than the legendarily brutal Dick Tracy, with its pimps, whores, petty thieves, corrupt businessmen, all swirling around the ingenuously violent “Cabbie” whose self-administered “upstanding citizen” status entitles him — in his view — to even more shocking acts of violence — especially on his quest for the stolen coffin of his father, which he’s told includes his entire inheritance!

Pure Trance


Junko Mizuno - 1998
    A serious social problem emerged in this new society: hyperorexia, or severe overeating, a side effect of the Pure Trance life-sustaining pill. This dreamy science fiction fantasy -- a sexy story of catfights, alien safari adventures, evil experimentation, and a girl who dreams of becoming a pop idol singer -- is the long-awaited debut graphic novel of famous Japanese manga artist Junko Mizuno. Pure Trance breaks every stereotype of shojo manga (girls' comics).

Tantrum


Jules Feiffer - 1979
    Having been two before, Leo demands his rights as a toddler: cuddling, cooing, tummy rubbing, and, most importantly, piggyback rides. In Leo's case, youth is definitely not wasted on the young. Feiffer has the uncanny ability to capture the frustrations of everyday life, while showing the lengths we'll go to escape from it.

Amy and Jordan


Mark Beyer - 2004
    Mark Beyer was breathing delirious, heartbreaking, otherworldly life into it by means of Amy and Jordan. Obviously, you weren’t reading New York Press. But I sure was. Voraciously. Back in 1989, when I discovered that Beyer’s strips were appearing regularly in this new “alternative weekly” paper, I quickly became hooked, and a thought seized me: I had to clip and save them–they were exquisite poems of urban despair, dreamy and nightmarish. I was already a fan of Beyer’s talent based on his book Agony (Pantheon, 1988), but these new strips revealed, week by week, a whole new dimension to his work–an ingenious reinvention of panel-design that redefined what a comic strip could be. As with Peanuts, it helps to try and picture these in the context which they first appeared in order to appreciate just how profoundly they emerged from anything else on the newspaper page. Even the “outré” NYP ads and listings which often ran alongside them were hopelessly dull by comparison. One of its most impressive aspects was the way Form served the Content–no matter how eccentric the layout got, it somehow never confused the narrative. And what narrative: it was as if Candide had been transported to the East Village and split in two like an amoeba and holed up in a squat on Avenue C. Along with giant bugs from outer space. So I did clip and save them, and put them into an envelope, which was then placed in a shoebox with a lot of other envelopes (receipts, receipts!), which was shoved to the back of the closet of my sixth-floor walk-up studio apartment, which I moved out of three years later and in the process I unwittingly threw them all away. Which frankly is just the sort of thing that Amy and Jordan would do. Drat. “Oh well,” I thought, once I’d realized it, “at some point someone will collect and publish them, and I’ll get them back that way.” And that was that. Fast forward more than ten years, to the spring of 2002. During a panel of cartoonists I was chairing in Philadelphia, a member of the audience asked what Mark was working on and where he was. No one seemed to know. The discussion was transcribed and published in The Comics Journal that summer, and in the fall Mark contacted me with the best possible news: He’d read the panel transcript and wanted to publish again. And the Amy and Jordan strips had never been comprehensively collected. So now, as an editor, I was able to grant my own wish. Amy and Jordan ran from 1988 through early 1996. After that, Beyer put cartooning aside to pursue other projects. This book signals his return to the realm of comics, which he says he wants to start making again. We can only hope he does. For now, I’m just thankful I finally have my Amy and Jordan collection back. –Chip Kidd, NYC, 10/03

In Pieces


Marion Fayolle - 2011
    A few pages later, a couple fight for the custody of their daughter until she's cut in two. In Pieces is a beautiful book of visual poetry, in which all common metaphors are explained through images only.

Big Ideas: Explanations, True Stories, Love, Nutrition, Advice, and More


Lynda Barry - 1983
    Like Girls and Boys, Big Ideas features many of her greatest cartoons, including her menacing "Poodle with a Mohawk". Line drawings throughout.

Roly Poly


Daniel Semanas - 2018
    A young fighter has a fiercely competitive relationship with her brother. In her effort to top his internet popularity, she gets more than she bargained for.

The Manly World of Lloyd Llewellyn


Daniel Clowes - 1994
    The 31 stories collected here combine Dragnet with The Twilight Zone with Tales from the Crypt in a world filled with aliens, good-time girls, and cocktail-bar nihilism. The stories are hip and funny, with a good dose of wacky 1950s paranoia and the kind of tongue-in-cheek morality that characterized the old E.C. horror comics. The Lloyd Llewellyn stories also trace the development of Clowes's style as a comic artist, from the angular early pieces that show the influence of 1950s advertising style to the grotesque Robert Crumb-inspired style of the more recent work in Eightball. Clowes is one of the most gifted comic-book artists around, and the retro-chic world of Lloyd Llewellyn deserves to be seen by a new generation of readers.

Basewood


Alec Longstreth - 2014
    Along the way he meets an old hermit who lives in a treehouse with his loyal dog, a young woman who fights for what she believes and a giant wolf-dragon who threatens their survival.

Gaylord Phoenix


Edie Fake - 2007
    Edie Fake confronts the reader with violent and unexpected manifestations of sexual connection and romantic possession as the Gaylord Phoenix searches for his lost love, his origins and his place in the world.

Dante's Inferno: The Graphic Novel


Joseph Lanzara - 2012
    Now you can experience this major work of world literature in a simplified adaptation. This graphic novel pulls no punches. Dante’s harrowing journey through Hell is not for the squeamish. It is a powerful, but ultimately inspiring story of sin, punishment, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

The Amateurs


Conor Stechschulte - 2014
    We flashback to a pair of butchers who arrive at work one morning to find not only that there is no meat in their shop but also that they have forgotten completely how to do their job. As customers arrive, they are too fearful for their livelihood to admit their dilemma, leading to increasingly disastrous events. But what has caused their strange amnesia? This often hilarious, enigmatic and uncomfortable book will establish Stechschulte as an exciting new talent."

The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski


Noah Van Sciver - 2020
    Van Sciver has created a scathing, hilarious, and empathetic character study of a self-styled author determined that he's just one more poem (or drink) away from success.This expanded edition includes a foreword by novelist Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife), a facsimile reproduction of Bukowski's literary debut, 6 Poems (thought lost to time in the wake of a motel fire that destroyed the entire original print run), a "Works Cited" section, and a selection of "visual tributes" by over two dozen cartoonists including Nina Bunjevac, Simon Hanselmann, Jesse Jacobs, Ed Piskor, Leslie Stein, and others.