The Christians have broken the truce and the Fifth Crusade has begun, the irate Saracens are expelling Christians and Jews from their lands, and desperate refugees are pouring into Jerusalem's port city of Acre which is expected to fall. There are coins to be earned carrying those most favoured by God to safety, meaning those with the most coins to pay for a place on one of the company's galleys. And the French governor of Acre wants to leave his young wife behind and flee with the chests of coins he collected from the city's Saracen merchants before he expelled them despite the bribes they paid him. It is a rollicking good story and a very good read.

     Nico goes silent, and the group at the table looks at him. “I am,” he says, “but I was planning on sending her into a school that has hidden supers, not on a drug bust. She has a very specific goal in mind, you know.” “Yes, I am aware,” Mastermental says. “And if you really wish to ignore this—” “I didn’t say that,” Nico says, as Morgan jerks in silent protest. “But it’s not what she’s planning on going into.” “Yes, but she is the perfect person to infiltrate a track and field group, as well as see who else is affected. There is a possibility that it goes much higher than that, Lauren has fractured memories of even teachers acting strangely, as well,” Mastermental says. “But as much as I dislike stereotyping—” “I look like a normal, high school jock, right?” Morgan offers.

    His story blends harmoniously with the magnificent background. It is always coloured in beautiful shades of blue, giving everything a dreamy touch.

    Don’t miss a moment in the brutal adventures of Marcus Fenix and Delta Squad’s battle against the Locust.From the Hardcover edition.

    Mother of three, Sarah Glen, loses her life under unusual circumstances when her car is forced from the road in what appears to be a random act of road rage.What follows is a breathtaking story of adventure and excitement as Sarah explores the limitless wonder of her new home, Paradise.The Throne Room, New Jerusalem, departed loved ones, all these and more are unveiled in this thought provoking tale.While Sarah's remaining family and friends struggle to come to terms with the passing of the popular mom, angels, good and evil, fight for supremacy in the age-old battle between the kingdoms of darkness and light.

    But Kyle Baker's comic book version of King David renders that classic confrontation in 17 wordless pages, comprising one of the freshest, most suspenseful and thrilling descriptions of its subject that you are likely to find. King David is a biblically accurate, freewheeling, color-saturated biography of the boy who rose to become king of Israel. David begins the book as a scruffyDennis-the-Menace-like kid and ends the book as a vain, hunky womanizer; King Saul is a glam-rock tyrant; his son Jonathan is a skinny punk rebel. (When he asks to borrow Saul's chariot and the king asks, "Where are you going, Jonathan?" he shoots back, "Out.") Many parents will deem the book's bloody battle scenes inappropriate for young readers. King David's candor, however, is a virtue. This is real religious literature: it describes David's relationship with God in a style that's fully alive for readers today. --Paul Power

    Phonomancer David Kohl hadn't spared his old patron a thought for almost as long... at which point his mind starts to unravel. Can he discover what's happened to the Mod-Goddess of Britpop while there's still something of himself left? Dark modern-fantasy in a world where music is magic, where a song can save your life or end it.Collects Phonogram: Rue Britannia #1-6.

    He daydreams about the day when his band records its first monster hit single and he and his bandmates all pile into his van for their cross-country, sold-out concert tour. Between naps, study hall, and band practice, Jeremy still manages to find time to be the star of this hugely popular comic strip.Jeremy is a good kid. He is intelligent and kind, yet he still has the attitude that one would expect from a teenager. His unpredictable mood swings and monosyllabic answers to his parents’ mild-mannered questions often leave them baffled and bemused.Zits was created in 1997 by Pulitzer Prize– and Reuben Award–winning editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman and Reuben Award–winning cartoonist/writer Jerry Scott. The creators, who are parents themselves, have a keen insight into the many physical and emotional changes that teens go through during adolescence, and they have the gift of addressing these common dilemmas with compassion and humor.

    After the release of three startling, award-winning movies that have played around the world and been added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, S. Craig Zahler wanted to return to his first artistic passion―illustration.With tools that he had developed as a director, screenwriter, cinematographer, novelist, and songwriter, he committed himself to writing, drawing, inking, and lettering his graphic novel debut, a full-length work of noir horror entitled, Forbidden Surgeries of the Hideous Dr. Divinus.Here’s the setup…Homeless people are disappearing in New Bastion, and occasionally, a dismantled corpse turns up in a dumpster. These crimes are left alone, until the day a comatose woman named Lillian Driscoll is kidnapped from the hospital. Her brothers―a grumpy detective named Leo and a slick mobster named Tommy―seek answers that lead them to darkness, arcane medicine, and pain.Fans of Bone Tomahawk (recently named best film of the decade by Conan O’Brien) will enjoy Zahler’s return to the supernatural, and the idiosyncratic, tough guy dialogue found in his crime pictures Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl in Cell Block 99 (both of which premiered at the Venice Film Festival) is also present in this starkly rendered, black-and-white graphic novel, a stylistic confluence of pre-code horror, vintage comic strip, and modern indie art styles.

    But behind his rapid rise to success, there lies a dark and terrible secret, as biographer Leonard Batts discovers when he visits Burger's hometown in remote New Zealand. For Hicksville is no ordinary small town. In Hicksville sheep-farmers and fishermen argue the relative merits of early newspaper strips, while in the local bookshop & lending library, obscure Mongolian minicomics share the shelves with a complete run of ACTION COMICS. But why does everyone there seem to hate Dick Burger? And what is the secret of the lighthouse? HICKSVILLE collects the main storyline from the ignatz-award nominated comic book PICKLE, and includes some 40 or so pages of new or revised material.

    Set in an exotic atmosphere of a by-gone era, Pistolwhip is a marvelous tale crafted with a crime noir feel and an artistic style reminiscent of the best European graphic novelists.

    Purported to be the actual blueprints by Jewish leaders to take over the world, the Protocols, first published in 1902, have become gospel truth to international millions. Presenting a pageant of historical figures from nineteenth-century Russia to today's ideologues, including Tsar Nicholas II, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler, Will Eisner unravels and dispels one of the most devastating hoaxes of the twentieth century.

    Line drawings.

    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

    Jenkins is the author of many books including the New York Times bestseller Out of the Blue with Orel Hershiser.