When the parents announce their divorce, the family comes together at their beach house for a week. Dennis, the eldest son, is having marriage troubles of his own, and searches for clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother with a troubled 16-year-old daughter, Jill. The youngest child, Peter, is a hack filmmaker suffering from paralyzing insecurities who establishes an unorthodox romance with a mysterious day care counselor at the beach.

    Comic-book retailers, auctioneers, and conventioneers from around North America, as well as Green's collecting rivals, weigh in on the man and his vast collection of comic books. Are Green's intentions honorable? Does he truly love comics or is he driven by the need to conquer? Lastly, is he really even Wimbledon Green?A charming and amusing caper where comic-book collecting is a world of intrigue and high finance. Part riotous chase, part whimsical character sketch, Wimbledon Green looks at the need to collect and the need to reinvent oneself.

    Consisting of three xeroxed sheets of paper, and with a print run of twenty-five, it was a less-than-auspicious, largely unnoticed debut. In the following three years, though, Optic Nerve developed at a startlingly rapid pace: the artwork and writing evolved with each story, production quality improved, page counts increased, and by issue seven, sales had reached 6,000. In 1994, Drawn & Quarterly took over the publishing duties of Optic Nerve, and the original seven issues sold out and were left out of print. 32 stories presents these rare, early editions, collected for the first time in a single volume.

    This is the first time these hilarious stories, starring the hapless Buddy Bradley and his cast of loser cohorts, have ever been available under one cover, and never have they been available at such a low price (it would have cost at least three times as much to read all of these classic stories in any previous editions). Bagge's riotous tales of the early 1990s subculture are more hilarious now than ever, find out why he has been praised by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, John Kricfalusi, Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly and many more. Comedy genius.

    C. Ware returns to the book trade with "The ACME Novelty Library," a hardcover distillation of all his surviving one-page cartoon jokes with which he tuckpointed the holes of his regular comic book periodical over the past decade.Sometimes claimed to be his "best work" by those who really don't know any better, this definitive congestion of stories of the future, the old west, and even of modern life nonetheless tries to stay interesting by including a luminescent map of the heavens, a chart of the general structure of the universe, assorted cut-out activitites, and a complete history of The ACME Novelty Company itself, decorated by rare photographs, early business ventures, not to mention the smallest example of a Comic Strip ever before offered to the general public. All in all, it will likely prove a rather mild disappointment, but at least it catches the light in a nice way and may force a smile here and there before being shelved for the next generation's ultimate disregard and/or disposal.

    When the elder Thaddeus Gropius confronts Wally with the boilerplate plot ultimatum that he must marry "the saddest girl in the world" or be disinherited, a yarn unravels that is part screwball comedy and part unhinged parable on the lucrativeness of changing your identity.Hensley's dialogue is witty, lyrical, sampled, dada, and elliptical--all in the service of a very bizarre mystery. There's sex, violence, rock and roll, intrigue, and betrayal--all brought home in Hensley's truly inimitable style.Created during an era when another well-off "W" was stuffing the coffers of the morbidly solvent, Wally Gropius transforms futile daydreams and nightmares into the absurdity of capital.

    Within its pages, he serialized the groundbreaking Ed the Happy Clown, revealing a macabre universe of parallel dimensions. Thanks to its wholly original yet disturbing story lines, Ed set the stage for Brown to become a world-renowned cartoonist. Ed the Happy Clown is a hallucinatory tale that functions simultaneously as a dark roller-coaster ride of criminal activity and a scathing condemnation of religious and political charlatanism. As the world around him devolves into madness, the eponymous Ed escapes variously from a jealous boyfriend, sewer monsters, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a janitor with a Jesus complex. Brown leaves us wondering, with every twist of the plot, just how Ed will get out of this scrape. The intimate, tangled world of Ed the Happy Clown is definitively presented here, repackaged with a new foreword by the author and an extensive notes section, and is, like every Brown book, astonishingly perceptive about the zeitgeist of its time.

    In this tale of a legendary warrior, the Ronin, a dishonored, masterless 13th Century samurai, is mystically given a second chance to avenge his master's death.Suddenly finding himself reborn in a futuristic and corrupt 21st Century New York City, the samurai discovers he has one last chance to regain his honor: he must defeat the reincarnation of his master's killer, the ancient demon Agat. In a time and place foreign and unfathomable to him, the Ronin stands against his greatest enemy with his life and, more importantly, his soul at stake.

    What is she plotting? No one quite knows, but by manipulating both Batman and his enemies Killer Croc and Catwoman tensions are high and no one is to be trusted in Gotham City tonight!Originally published in BATMAN #608-612.

    Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce walk into a Parisian bar... no, it's not the beginning of a joke, but the premise of Jason's unique new graphic novel.Set in 1920s Paris, The Left Bank Gang is a deliciously inventive re-imagining of these four literary figures as not only typical Jason anthropomorphics, but... graphic novelists! Yes, in Jason's warped world, cartooning is the dominant form of fiction, and not only do these four literary giants work in the comics medium but they get together to discuss pen vs. brush, chat about the latest graphic novels from Dostoevsky ("I can't tell any of his characters apart!") to Faulkner ("Hasn't he heard of white space? His panels are too crowded!"), and bemoan their erratic careers.Add in a hilarious sequence where Hemingway is lectured by an overbearing Gertrude Stein ("What kind of pencil are you using? You should be using a blue pencil, that way you don't have to erase, all right? Avoid captions. Don't ever write 'A little later.' You don't need that. The reader will figure it out."), guest appearances by Zelda Fitzgerald and Jean-Paul Sartre, and a few remarkable twists and turns along the way, and you've got one of the funniest and most playful graphic novels of the year.Like Jason's acclaimed Why Are You Doing This?, The Left Bank Gang is rendered in full spectacular color. This is Jason's eighth graphic novel in six years for Fantagraphics, and his audience continues to grow with every acclaimed release.2007 Eisner Award winner, Best U.S. Edition of International Material; 2007 Eisner Award nominee: Best Coloring (Hubert).

    Huizenga fuses the most banal aspects of modern culture with its most looming questions in a consistently genial style. Lighthearted, but with a healthy dose of nineteenth-century spine tingling, the narratives presented in Curses are insightful portrayals of reality. Huizenga's central character in his comics is Glenn Ganges, a seemingly middle-class man living in the suburbs whose blank-eyed wonderment at everyday experiences brings together such diverse aspects of our world as golf, theology, late-night diners, parenthood, politics, Sudanese refugees, and hallucinatory vision, into a complete experience as multifaceted as our own lives.Huizenga is regarded by many as one of the most promising young cartoonists of his generation, whose artistic talent, singular writing, and studied substance prove the versatility of his skill. Curses collects his work from Kramer's Ergot and The Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, his award-winning and nominated comic-book series Or Else, and Time magazine; it is the most extensive selection of his comics to date in a single volume.

    Designing a suit for himself and taking the name "Kick-Ass," Dave decides to make his dreary existence more exciting - and maybe even help some people in the process. But with no special powers and outmatched by New York City's most hardened criminals, Kick-Ass might be in for a little more than he bargained for. With his super-hero secret identity gaining fans due to a popular viral video, and other masked vigilantes beginning to make their presence felt in the city, Dave knows that his extracurricular activity is dangerous, maybe even stupid - but he's got the itch, and it ain't going away.COLLECTING: Kick-Ass 1-8

    Offering his clients an attaché case containing proof of the deed and a gun, he guarantees his "clients" full immunity for all of their actions, including murder. In these opening chapters, Dizzy Cordova, a Latina gangbanger who has just finished a prison sentence, is given the chance to avenge her family's murders, and a downtrodden bartender receives the opportunity to exact revenge against the woman that ruined his life.Collecting 100 BULLETS #1-5

    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.

    Mogg is her black cat. Their friend, Owl, is an anthropomorphized owl. They hang out a lot with Werewolf Jones. This may sound like a pure stoner comedy, but it transcends the genre: these characters struggle unsuccessfully to come to grips with their depression, drug use, sexuality, poverty, lack of work, lack of ambition, and their complex feelings about each other in ways that have made Megg and Mogg sensations on Hanselmann's GirlMountain tumblr. This is the first collection of Hanselmann's work, freed from its cumbersome Internet prison, and sure to be one of the most talked about graphic novels of 2014, featuring all of the "classic" Megg and Mogg episodes from the past five years as well as over 70 pages of all-new material.