Untreated, they fester and grow into the diseases of fear, uncertainty and hopelessness. Unaided, the law is blinded by bureaucracy and bound to a justice bent toward the protection even of the criminal. The face of a kinder and gentler nation is destroyed, carved into a harlequin's mask; a grim skull. And the wielders of the scythe laugh, secure in the knowledge that their crimes will go without punishment.They are wrong. In the urban jungle, there is one who stands alone and apart; one who lives not for the law, but only to see justice done. The Punisher reaps a different harvest.Once, he was Frank Castle, loving husband and father. A tour in Vietnam had shown him what war was. Part of him died there, but a precious part stayed alive, determined to return to the family he loved, and the peace and freedom that was his America. Part of him held on to live, until his family died in a hail of mob gunfire, victims of the wrong place and wrong time.Daily, criminals greedily cut their portions from the souls of the weak and weary, the foolish and the frightened. One man senses how the guilty feed like parasites on the heart of the American Dream. One man hears when evil laughs at the law. One man sees clearly that the most powerful criminals have placed themselves above the law. One man has become their judge, their jury.One man has become their Punisher.

    The first issue, #0, was released in October 1994 by Fantagraphics Books, and a second issue, #1, was released the following January. A third issue (#2) was announced in the pages of other Fantagraphics publications and solicited in Previews but was never published. "I Was Killing When Killing Wasn't Cool", a color short story with a markedly different art style originally intended for issue #2, appeared instead in the anthology Zero Zero. In a 2010 interview, Columbia recalled that the unfinished issue "looked so different that it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look consistent, and it didn’t feel right to keep putting out that same comic book, to try to tell a story where the style is mutating."[1] The series' title is taken from a passage in the William S. Burroughs book Exterminator! (in the chapter "Short Trip Home"). The passage in question is quoted briefly in a story from issue #0, also titled "The Biologic Show".Each issue of The Biologic Show contains several short stories and illustrated poems. Many of the pieces deal with disturbing subject matter such as mutilation, incest, and the occult. Issue #0 introduces three of Columbia's recurring characters: the hapless, Koko the Clown-like Seymour Sunshine in the opening story "No Tomorrow If I Must Return", and the sibling duo Pim and Francie in "Tar Frogs". (Both "Tar Frogs" and the aforementioned "The Biologic Show" had originally appeared in the British comics magazine Deadline but were partially redrawn for Columbia's solo book.) Issue #1 is dominated by the 16-page Pim and Francie story "Peloria: Part One", intended as the start of an ongoing serial. It includes another character, Knishkebibble the Monkey-Boy, who reappears in Columbia's later work. Upon the demise of The Biologic Show Fantagraphics announced that Peloria would be released as a stand-alone graphic novel,[2] but this plan was also abandoned.

    Published bi-monthly for over ten years, the pages of "AX "contain the most creative and cutting-edge works of independent comics in the world's largest comics industry. Now, Top Shelf presents this collection of stories from ten years of AX history, and features work by such visionaries as Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Akino Kondoh, Kazuichi Hanawa, and Shinichi Abe.

    No one will be able to withstand his rage, as the Hulk takes on nearly the entire Marvel Universe in his quest for justice!

    By which we mean: orderly, neat, contained and, moreover, beardless.Or at least it is until one famous day, when Dave, bald but for a single hair, finds himself assailed by a terrifying, unstoppable... monster*!Where did it come from? How should the islanders deal with it? And what, most importantly, are they going to do with Dave?The first book from a new leading light of UK comics, The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil is an off-beat fable worthy of Roald Dahl. It is about life, death and the meaning of beards.(*We mean a gigantic beard, basically.)

    The breakout graphic novel series from MIND MGMT creator Matt Kindt and Beware the Creeper writer Jason Hall returns, in color for the first time and collected in its entirety! The edition includes both Pistolwhip books for the first time in hardcover, along with the Mephisto and the Empty Box one-shot and a story from Dark Horse Maverick: Happy Endings! Thrill to the twisty, interconnected tales of Mitch Pistolwhip, Charlie Minks, Jack Peril, Captain January, the Human Pretzel, and a monkey!

    Chased by a crazed mob and mysterious characters neither friend nor foe, the Human takes an unexpected journey that will lead to his salvation… or damnation. Collects the four-issue miniseries.* Inspired by the Stone Sour album House of Gold & Bones Parts 1 and 2.* Includes variant covers by Frank Quitely, Kylz Hotz, Steve Morris, and Richard Clark." House of Gold and Bones #1 explores the fear of the unknown in interesting ways. Though the issue leaves a lot of unanswered questions, I look forward to reading how Taylor will develop the mystery." - Bloody Disgusting

    Ambellina believes she and The Crowing can save Heaven’s Fence rather than destroying it. But with Ryan and a new, even bigger threat looming—will they succeed? Coheed and Cambria frontman Claudio Sanchez (Translucid) and Chondra Echert team up with best-selling artist Rags Morales (Identity Crisis, Action Comics) for the long-awaited third installment of The New York Times bestselling series, The Amory Wars!

    Join creator Dan Mendoza for the all new adventures of the cult hit series featuring his undead anti-hero, Zombie Tramp, now brought to life by the amazing talents of new superstar artist, TMChu.It's kinky supernatural fun as Zombie Tramp hits the road, starting in... Sin City of course!

    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 people who roamed Early Earth were much like us: curious, emotional, funny, ambitious, and vulnerable. In this series of illustrated and linked tales, Isabel Greenberg chronicles the explorations of a young man as he paddles from his home in the North Pole to the South Pole. There, he meets his true love, but their romance is ill-fated. Early Earth's unusual and finicky polarity means the lovers can never touch.      As intricate and richly imagined as the work of Chris Ware, and leavened with a dry wit that rivals Kate Beaton's in Hark! A Vagrant, Isabel Greenberg's debut will be a welcome addition to the thriving graphic novel genre.

    If that's not enough to make you scream with delight, we're also adding a special color section featuring the two Creepy stories that helped re-launch Dark Horse Presents on MySpace You'll get all of this tantalizing terror for under twenty bucks - it's a killer deal

    Deep within this savage and untamed land, a darkness builds at that must be stopped at all costs. To do so, the Imperials assemble six of its most despicable prisoners—a turncoat, a skin eater, a sorcerer and his bodyguard, a serial killer, and the Devil’s Son—the only ones who can stop the end of the new world. They are Hell’s Half-Dozen. Join JUSTIN JORDAN (LUTHER STRODE) and REBEKAH ISAACS (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for REAVER—a dark, grim fantasy for a post-Game of Thrones world.

    They have already ravaged his home planet, and now he has traveled to Earth to try and stop them once and for all. Once here, however, he finds that this world's inhabitants aren't all sweetness and light themselves. Some of them are busy creating freakish mutations out of their fellow man, and others are helping the invaders in their quest for domination. An outcast, Doc Horror is forced to live by the dark of night, and there he finds compatriots who must also shun the light of day. Polychrome, The Gunwitch, Starfish, Firelion, Komodo, and The Raccoon have all their share of knocks from humanity, but they want to save their homeworld anyway, and they don't care how many monsters stand in their way.

    Perfectly Clear brings back into print stories that Hornschemeier published prior to his Three Paradoxes Fantagraphics debut from a variety of sources—his own self-published Forlorn Funnies, as well as strips that originally appeared in independent magazines and papers—none of which has been available to the book trade.The book is designed as a "flip book" in the tradition of the old Ace paperbacks, with one side featuring comedic work (or as comedic as Hornschemeier's mind allows), and the other decidedly more morose. With almost every page, we see a new style, a new direction; with the resultant effect being that of an anthology by creators of vastly contrasting sensibilities.On the "funny" menu, we are treated to Dr. Rodentia (an unfortunate-looking fellow with only apathy as his weapon), a detailed artist's catalogue exploring such modern masterpieces as "Accidental Late-Night Sex With a Radiator," musings on the cancerous nature of civilization as observed by a deceased cat and a cotton-based airbus, the scatological "Feelings Check," the ever pathetic Vanderbilt Millions and his fantasies of self-worth, and the multi-narrative story that started the Forlorn Funnies comics series: "The Men and Women of the Television."Clearly, there is a fine line in the Hornschemeier lexicon between funny and morose.On our "forlorn" plate we are served the cold examination of the dyslexic narcoleptic and his bungled plans of murder, a sea creature's balancing of morality and sustenance, the Western romance "Wanted," a metal man's self-destructive search for meaning, and the story the alternative website Ain't It Cool News describes as delivering "a complicated mixture of disgust and pity."Let Us Be Perfectly Clear demonstrates Paul Hornschemeier's versatility and breadth in an elegantly produced book that will appeal to connoisseurs of contemporary, cutting-edge cartoons and graphic novels.