Astro City, Vol. 1: Life in the Big City


Kurt Busiek - 1996
    Volumes 1-6 of Kurt Busiek's Astro City are collected in this volume that also includes a sketchbook showing the development of Astro City a cover gallery of cover paintings.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery": The Authorized Graphic Adaptation


Miles Hyman - 2016
    By turns puzzling and harrowing, it raises troubling questions about conformity, tradition, and the specter of ritualized violence that haunts even the most bucolic, peaceful village.This graphic adaptation, published in time for Jackson's centennial, allows readers to experience "The Lottery" as never before, or discover it anew. The visual artist—and Jackson's grandson—Miles Hyman has crafted an eerie vision of the hamlet where the tale unfolds, its inhabitants, and the unforgettable ritual they set into motion. His four-color, meticulously detailed panels create a noirish atmosphere that adds a new dimension of dread to the original tale.Perfectly timed to the current resurgence of interest in Jackson and her work, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery": The Authorized Graphic Adaptation masterfully reimagines her iconic story with a striking visual narrative.

Shade, the Changing Girl, Volume 1: Earth Girl Made Easy


Cecil Castellucci - 2017
    She's dropped out of school, dumped her boyfriend and is bored out of her mind. She longs to feel things. That's where her idol, the lunatic poet Rac Shade, and his infamous madness coat come in. Loma steals the garment and makes a break across galaxies to take up residence in a new body: Earth girl Megan Boyer.Surely everything will be better on this passionate, primitive planet with a dash of madness on her side and this human girl's easy life. Only now that she's here, Loma discovers being a teenaged Earth girl comes with its own challenges and Earth may not be everything she thought it'd be. Megan Boyer was a bully who everyone was glad was almost dead, and now Loma has to survive high school and navigate the consequences of the life she didn't live with the ever-growing and uncontrollable madness at her side. Not to mention that there are people back on her homeworld who might just want Shade's coat back.Written by Cecil Castellucci (The Plain Janes), drawn by Marley Zarcone (Effigy) and overseen by Gerard Way, Shade, the Changing Girl starts a whole new chapter in the story of one of comics' most unique series.Collecting: Shade, the Changing Girl 1-6

My Dirty Dumb Eyes


Lisa Hanawalt - 2013
    Her world vision is intricately rendered in a full spectrum of color, unapologetically gorgeous and intensely bizarre.  With movie reviews, tips for her readers, laugh-out-loud lists and short pieces such as “Rumors I’ve Heard About Anna Wintour,” and “The Secret Lives of Chefs,”  Hanawalt’s comedy shines, making the quotidian silly and surreal, flatulent and facetious.

Dressing


Michael DeForge - 2015
    This collection of the cartoonist's mini-comics, zines, anthology work, and more, is a follow up to the award-winning Very Casual, and shows the artist at the height of his occasionally fever-induced powers.A prolific artist who is constantly producing work in a variety of media, DeForge is a designer and storyboard artist on the Emmy Award-winning show Adventure Time. One can see hints of that show's house style filtered through the Lynchian landscapes and otherworldly vistas of DeForge's vision.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen


Dylan Horrocks - 2014
    Cartoonist Sam Zabel hasn t drawn a comic in years. Stuck in a nightmare of creative block and despair, Sam spends his days writing superhero stories for a large American comics publisher and staring at a blank piece of paper, unable to draw a single line. Then one day he finds a mysterious old comic book set on Mars and is suddenly thrown headlong into a wild, fantastic journey through centuries of comics, stories, and imaginary worlds. Accompanied by a young webcomic creator named Alice and an enigmatic schoolgirl with rocket boots and a bag full of comics, Sam goes in search of the Magic Pen, encountering sex-crazed aliens, medieval monks, pirates, pixies and of course cartoonists. Funny, erotic, and thoughtful, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen explores the pleasures, dangers, and moral consequences of fantasy."

City of Glass


Paul Karasik - 1994
    The Washington Post has described him as a “post-existentialist private eye.” An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster’s groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.

Asterios Polyp


David Mazzucchelli - 2009
    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.

Sex Criminals: Volume One: One Weird Trick


Matt Fraction - 2014
    One day she meets Jon and it turns out he has the same ability. And sooner or later they get around to using their gifts to do what we’d ALL do: rob a couple banks. A bawdy and brazen sex comedy for comics begins here!Collecting: Sex Criminals 1-5

The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil


Stephen Collins - 2013
    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.)

ApocalyptiGirl: An Aria for the End Times


Andrew MacLean - 2015
    But when a run in with a creepy savage sets her on a path to complete her quest, she'll face death head on in the hopes of claiming her prize and, if all goes according to plan, finally returning home.

Palestine


Joe Sacco - 1996
    Like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine has been favorably compared to Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter within the confines of the comic book medium.Sacco has often been called the first comic book journalist, and he is certainly the best. This edition of Palestine also features an introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said (Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine), one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict.

Beta Testing the Apocalypse


Tom Kaczynski - 2012
    Ballard of comics. Like Ballard, Kaczynski s comics riff on dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.Yet while Kaczynski shares many of Ballard s obsessions, he processes them in unique ways. His visual storytelling adds an architectural dimension that the written word alone lacks.Kaczynski takes abstract ideas capitalism, communism, or utopianism and makes them tangible. He depicts and meditates on the immense political and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define the limits of who we are and the freedom we as Americans presume to enjoy. Society and the individual, in perpetual tension. Once you've read Kaczynski s comics, it should come as no surprise to learn that he studied architecture before embarking on a career as a cartoonist.Beta Testing includes approximately 10 short stories, most notably The New, a brand new story created expressly for this book. It s Kaczynski s longest story to date. The New is set in an un-named third-world megalopolis. It could be Dhaka, Lagos or Mumbai. The city creaks under the pressure of explosive growth. Whole districts are built in a week. The story follows an internationally renowned starchitect as he struggles to impose his vision on the metropolis. A vision threatened by the massive dispossessed slum-proletariat inhabiting the slums and favelas on the edges of the city. From the fetid ferment of garbage dumps and shanties emerges a new feral architecture.

X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga


Chris Claremont - 1983
    One of their own members, Jean Grey, has gained power beyond all comprehension, and that power has corrupted her absolutely Now they must decide if the life of the woman they cherish is worth the existence of the entire universe.Collects X-Men #129-137.

The Sculptor


Scott McCloud - 2015
    Thanks to a deal with Death, the young sculptor gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with his bare hands. But now that he only has 200 days to live, deciding  what  to create is harder than he thought, and discovering the love of his life at the 11th hour isn't making it any easier! This is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond; of the frantic, clumsy dance steps of young love; and a gorgeous, street-level portrait of the world's greatest city. It's about the small, warm, human moments of everyday life…and the great surging forces that lie just under the surface. Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work; now he vaults into great fiction with a breathtaking, funny, and unforgettable new work.