and how it formed him!This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son.The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story Ace Hole-Midget Detective.Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

    But how did a former file clerk from Cleveland and up with an Oscar nomination? The story begins in 1976, when Harvey began publishing his autobiographical, slice-of-downtrodden-life comic book, illustrated by a who's who of underground comic artists, including R. Crumb, Frank Stack, Gary Dumm and Joe Sacco. Titan is proud to present our third book from Harvey, an all-new compilation of his best work, featuring 100 per cent previously uncollected material.

    A proud artisan, he takes his donkey-drawn cart to the market only to be turned away when the distinctive shop he once sold to now stocks only cheaply manufactured merchandise. As the realities of the marketplace sink in, Mendleman unravels. James Sturm draws a quiet, reflective, and beautiful portrait of eastern Europe in the early 1900s–bringing to life the hustle and bustle of an Old World marketplace on the brink of industrialization. Market Day is an ageless tale of how economic and social forces can affect a single life. An award-winning cartoonist of the books Golem’s Mighty Swing, James Sturm’s America, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, and Adventures in Cartooning, Sturm is a true visionary, having cofounded the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger and the Center for Cartoon Studies, the country’s premier cartooning school.

    with cats and rabbits! Rabbits are fighting in the Vietnam War?! That's right-the characters of this pseudo-historical account of Vietnam War are rabbits, cats, and other animals representing various nationalities involved in the war. It's the story of the life and adventures of the Special Operations unit lead by Sergeant "Perky" Perkins. The reader will experience and feel the danger and life or death excitement of the battlefield alongside Perky and his rabbits as they face terrible battles in the jungles of Vietnam. A remarkable synthesis of gritty realism and fable-like characters. Apocalypse Meow is a unique masterpiece!

    Monty, a Canadian comic-and-toy-shop owner and a pathetic 39-year-old virgin, expects his Asian mail-order bride Kyung Soo to fulfil his female Asian fantasy stereotypes: obedient, hardworking and loyal. Tall and accentless, Kyung turns out to be much more complex than Monte is willing to accept. This sharp and affecting look at their prickly relationship is told over 264 elegant, touching pages in this original graphic novel by Disney animator Mark Kalesniko. Kalesniko adroitly juxtaposes Monty's non-sexual, juvenile obsessions with his objectification of his bride, drawing a direct line between loneliness, consumerism, and how the need for order in one's life compromises the approach to matters of the heart.

    In this collection, while Porcellino is living in isolation and experiencing the pain of divorce, he crafts a melancholic, tender graphic ballad of heartbreak and reflection.Known for his sad, quiet honesty rendered in his signature deceptively minimalist style, Porcellino has a command of graphic storytelling as sophisticated as the medium's more visually intricate masters. Few other artists are able to so expertly contemplate the sadness, beauty, and wonder of life in so few lines.

    These rare Batman tales were known by relatively few outside of Japan until award-winning designer Chipp Kidd's 2008 book, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan (Pantheon Books), introduced them to a whole new generation of Batman fans.In BATMAN: THE JIRO KUWATA BATMANGA VOL. 1, see The Dark Knight and his sidekick Robin fight against some of his strangest villains, including Dr. Faceless and the Human Ball! DC Comics is proud to publish the complete Jiro Kuwata penned Batman Manga adventures in three painstakingly restored and translated volumes. This collection is not to be missed by both Batman and Manga fans alike!BATMAN: THE JIRO KUWATA BATMANGA VOL. 1 collects the first twenty chapters.

    It is the hilariously observed and empathetic comic strip about childhood ever drawn - with asly humor that kids identify with and parents nod knowingly - and ruefully - at.This first volume publishes every single panel strip from 1951-1952 in one handsome, thick volume.Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace: 1951-1952 is the inaugural volume in a series collecting for the first time every Dennis the Menace cartoon panel over the life of the strip.Join Dennis and his cast of tortured victims and comrades-in-arms - Dennis' Mom and Dad, Henry and Alice Mitchell, poor Mr Wilson, and his pals Joey and Margaret, not to mention boy's best friend Ruff - for over 600 pages of heart-warming mayhem.

    The kid's small size makes him the ideal prey to crocodiles, the Pygmies' hostage, and in brief, the victim of numerous traps. Strongly reminiscent of early American colour comic strips (as as Feininger's), Olivier Schrauwen's work oozes a crazy humour that brings out the father's love to his son.

    is a Superman story that doesn't feature Superman at all. Rather, this unique graphic novel explores what the icon of Superman means to the world. Told from the perspective of an author who has written tales about Superman, this book explores the overwhelming effect that the Man of Steel has had on society. A compelling narrative told in a variety of experimental styles, It's a Bird... weaves two interlocking stories: one that ultimately explores our own mortality and another that dissects the symbolic and cultural elements which make up Superman's mythicimportance.

    

    Set in southern Los Angeles (which makes for a terrifying sequence as blind Rachel and ailing Lars are trapped in their home without power during the 1992 Rodney King riots), backgrounds and props are lovingly detailed: these objects serve as memory triggers for Lars and Rachel, even as they eventually overwhelm them and their home, which the couple is loathe to leave. Special Exits is laid out in an eight-panel grid, which creates a leisurely storytelling pace that not only helps to convey the slow, inexorable decline in Lars' and Rachel's health, but perfectly captures the timbre of the exchanges between a long-married couple: the affectionate bickering; their gallows humor; their querulousness as their bodies break down.Though Lars and Rachel are the protagonists of Special Exits, Farmer makes her voice known through creative visual metaphors and in her indictment of the careless treatment of the elderly in nursing homes. Special Exits gracefully deals with the hard reality of caring for aging loved ones: those who are or who have been in similar situations might find comfort in it, and those who haven't will find much to admire in the bravery and good humor of Lars and Rachel. Joyce Farmer, best known for co-creating the Tits 'n Clits comics anthology in the 1970s, a feminist response to the rampant misogyny in underground comix, spent 11 years crafting Special Exits, a graphic memoir in the vein of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home or Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, and Frank Stack's Our Cancer Year, about caring for her dying father and stepmother.