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 a dazzling work of graphic fiction, a surreal journey through a wonderland eerily like real life, The Book of Leviathan chronicles an infant's investigations into life's great mysteries. Endowed with a preternatural interest in metaphysics and philosophy, yet as confused as any innocent by the vagaries of adult behavior, little Levi bears the added burden of living in a world that can literally change at the stroke of a pen.Aided by a wise pet ("Cat") and a favorite toy ("Bunny"), Levi encounters a frothing ectoplasmic Hegel and a woefully off-the-mark Freud. In less heady adventures, Levi contemplates why his parents disappear at night (and whether he is wholeheartedly pleased when they return each morning); the regrettable liberties taken with the English language; and the relationship between Bennetton and Pablo Neruda.Peter Blegvad's Book of Leviathan assembles the cream from Levi and Cat's adventures, published in The Independent on Sunday newspaper in the twilight years of the old Millennium. Blegvad's darkly humorous work has been described by Matt Groening as "one of the weirdest things I've ever stared at". Quirky and referential, dark and droll by turn, it follows the faceless baby Levi's journeys into and out of the world. They are escapes, but as some sage once observed, only a jailer would consider the term "escapist" pejorative.

    Savor the smell of a phone booth, circa 1961. Sign up for a guided tour of the oldest continually vacant storefront in America. Attend a championship grave-digging competition, or, should you feel you've wasted yet another day, you can check in for help at a local Misspent Youth Center.In "The Beauty Supply District," a new twenty-four-page story, Knipl attends an evening concert and unwittingly enters the world of wholesale empathizers and chiaroscuro brokers who make the decisions critical to the production of aesthetic pleasure in all its forms -- from the shape of an olive jar to the score of a string quartet.From the Hardcover edition.

    Whether blasting Bush for his “Bring ’em on!” speech, spanking pedophile priests, questioning capital punishment, debating the disputed 2000 election, or just mocking baseball mascots, they learned that newspapers and magazines increasingly play it safe by suppressing satire.With censored cartoons, many unpublished, by the likes of Garry Trudeau, Doug Marlette, Paul Conrad, Mike Luckovich, Matt Davies, and Ted Rall (all Pulitzer Prize winners or finalists), as well as unearthed editorial illustrations by Norman Rockwell, Edward Sorel, Anita Kunz, Marshall Arisman, and Steve Brodner, you will find yourself surprised and often shocked by the images themselves—and outraged by the fact that a fearful editor kept you from seeing them. Needed now more than ever because of a neutered press that’s more lapdog than watchdog, Killed Cartoons will make you laugh, make you angry, and make you think.

    And it's Lydia Lopez's first night behind the front desk. Every guest's got a story to tell and a lesson to learn... Co-written by film and music superstar Machine Gun Kelly with Eliot Rahal (Archie Comics) and Ryan Cady (DC Comics). Art by Martin Morazzo (Ice Cream Man) and a host of talented illustrators.

    Now, for the first time, the hilarious cartoons of Nicholas Gurewitch are being collected in this handsome hardcover edition.

    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.

    It’s a laff riot! Megg and Mogg decide to take a trip to Amsterdam for some quality couple time, although the trip gets off to a rocky start when they forget their antidepressants. They need Owl to come and help them save their relationship. But why does he have a suitcase full of glass dildos? And what will they do when they realize that the housesitting Werewolf Jones has turned their apartment into a “f#@k zone”? Megg & Mogg in Amsterdam collects all of Simon Hanselmann’s contributions to Vice.com, the Ignatz Award-nominated short story “St. Owl’s Bay,” and other surprises that will add additional color and background for fans of Megahex.

    where master chefs rule the town like crime lords and people literally kill for a seat at the best restaurants, a bloody culinary war is raging.On one side, the Internationalists, who blend foods from all over the world into exotic delights. On the other, the "Vertical Farm," who prepare nothing but organic, vegetarian, macrobiotic dishes. Into this maelstrom steps Jiro, a renegade and ruthless sushi chef, known to decapitate patrons who dare request a California Roll, or who stir wasabi into their soy sauce. Both sides want Jiro to join their factions. Jiro, however has bigger ideas, and in the end, no chef may be left alive!Anthony Bourdain, top chef, acclaimed writer (Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw) and star of the hit travel show, No Reservations, co-writes with Joel Rose (Kill Kill Faster Faster, The Blackest Bird) this stylized send-up of food culture and society, with detailed and dynamic art by Langdon Foss.

    For over 40 years he contributed strips to The Village Voice, and has long been a regular contributor to the London Observer and Playboy. An animated cartoon based on his story Munro received an Academy Award in 1961. In the '60s, he branched into theater, writing several plays now regarded as classics: Little Murders; Knock, Knock; The White House Murder Case; Elliot Loves; and The Grown-Ups, to name a few. Originally conceived for the stage, his Carnal Knowledge became one of the landmark films of the '70s. He has written two prose novels, Harry the Rat with Women and Ackroyd, as well as a cartoon novel, Tantrum. In the 1990s, Feiffer embarked on yet another career, this time as a children's book author. He has over a half-dozen to his credit, including modern classics like The Man and the Ceiling.Passionella and Other Stories collects Feiffer's finest extended graphic narratives of the late '50s and early '60s. It opens in full-color with "Excalibur and Rose," the fable of a village comedian who embarks on a crusade in search of his serious side, which he finds in spades when he encounters his true love, the pathologically depressed Rose. The volume's centerpiece, "Passionella," a retelling of Cinderella set in modern Hollywood, concerns a chimney sweep whose fairy godmother transforms her into the "mysterious exotic bewitching temptress"and movie starPassionella. Other stories include "The Lonely Machine," an account of one man's attempt to find the perfect relationship through robot love, and "Harold Swerg," the predicament of the world's greatest athlete who'd rather stay at his mundane job than compete against others, despite his country's desperate pleas to enter the Olympics. Three more classic graphic tales and several entertaining one-act plays round out this handsomely designed hardcover edition.

    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

    That must be why so many accountants are buying Groo collections This trade paperback collects the latest and greatest adventures of Groo, the world's stupidest barbarian. In a savage land of another era, a goodly segment of the world has long been under the heavy thumb of the evil, power-mad despot known as Pipil Khan. The tyrant wants nothing more than to name an heir and shuck his mortal coil, but one thing stands in his way: Groo It seems Khan just can't rest easy until Groo is out of the way. He'll give his kingdom to the one of his sons who can accomplish this. One of them has a foolproof plan how to do it. Unfortunately for him, it may be that no plan is foolproof enough to thwart Groo. Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Sergio Aragones and "World's Greatest Soccer Mom" Award-winning wordsmith Mark Evanier bring you more moronic mayhem from the barbarian who made "mulch" a household word.