Cinema Panopticum


Thomas Ott - 2005
    Ott plunges into the darkness with five new graphic horror novelettes: "The Prophet," "The Wonder Pill," "La Lucha," "The Hotel," and the title story, each executed in his hallucinatory and hyper-detailed scratchboard style and running between 16 to 20 pages. The first story in the book introduces the other four: A little girl visits an amusement park. She looks fascinated, but finds everything too expensive. Finally, behind the rollercoaster she eyeballs a small booth with "CINEMA PANOPTICUM" written on it. Inside there are boxes with screens. Every box contains a movie; the title of each appears on each screen. Each costs only a dime, so the price is right for the little girl. She puts her money in the first box: "The Prophet" begins. In the film, a vagrant foresees the end of the world and tries to warn people, but nobody believes him. They will soon enough. In the second film, "The Wonderpill," a short-sighted man initially goes blind from some pills his doctor gave him, but soon the blindness wears off and he finds they accord quite a view. "La Lucha," the third story, introduces a Mexican wrestler who fights against death himself. In a typical Ott twist, he wins and loses at the same time. The final story, "The Hotel," depicts a traveler who goes to sleep in what seems to be an otherwise empty hotel. His awakening is the stuff of nightmares... Ott's O. Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Crypt, or modern efforts like M. Night Shamalayan's films; his artwork will haunt you long after you've put the book down.

Sabrina


Nick Drnaso - 2018
    Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and the boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina’s grieving sister, Sandra, struggles to fill her days as she waits in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation shown through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. Presenting an indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake-news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.

Age of Reptiles Omnibus, Vol. 1


Ricardo Delgado - 2011
    Forget the Silver Age, and bag the Golden Age - this is the Age of Reptiles! Ricardo Delgado, winner of the Eisner Award for Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, and a prolific development and storyboard artist (Men in Black, The Incredibles, WALL-E, X-Men Origins, Wolverine, and The Matrix series) has crafted epic tales about the most unlikely cast of characters, dinosaurs!This volume collects long-out-of-print Age of Reptiles miniseries Age of Reptiles and Age of Reptiles: The Hunt, the never-before-collected third series, Age of Reptiles: The Journey, and a wide assortment of bonus material, including supplementary text pieces, a cover-art gallery, and sketchbook material.

Basewood


Alec Longstreth - 2014
    Along the way he meets an old hermit who lives in a treehouse with his loyal dog, a young woman who fights for what she believes and a giant wolf-dragon who threatens their survival.

Ojingogo


Matthew Forsythe - 2009
    The otherworldly pantomime about a girl, her squid, and the creatures and calamities they experience together, is inspired by Forsythe's time spent as an ex-pat living in South Korea.

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.

Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street


Warren Ellis - 1998
    Working as an investigative reporter for the newspaper The Word, Spider attacks the injustices of his surreal 23rd Century surroundings. Combining black humor, life-threatening situations, and moral ambiguity, this book is the first look into the mind of an outlaw journalist and the world he seeks to destroy.

Big Ideas: Explanations, True Stories, Love, Nutrition, Advice, and More


Lynda Barry - 1983
    Like Girls and Boys, Big Ideas features many of her greatest cartoons, including her menacing "Poodle with a Mohawk". Line drawings throughout.

Akira, Vol. 1


Katsuhiro Otomo - 1984
    The science fiction tale set in 2019 in Tokyo after the city was destroyed by World War III, follows the lives of two teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, who have a consuming fear of a monstrous power known as Akira.

Strange Planet


Nathan W. Pyle - 2019
    Pyle comes an adorable and profound universe in pink, blue, green, and purple. Based on the phenomenally popular Instagram of the same name, Strange Planet covers a full life cycle of the planet’s inhabitants, including milestones such as:The Emergence DayBeing Gains a SiblingThe Being Family Attains a BeastThe Formal Education of a BeingCelebration of Special DaysBeing Begins a VocationThe Beings at HomeHealth Status of a BeingThe Hobbies of a BeingThe Extended Family of the BeingThe Being Reflects on Life While Watching the Planet RotateWith dozens of never-before-seen illustrations in addition to old favorites, this book offers a sweet and hilarious look at a distant world not all that unlike our own.

The Property


Rutu Modan - 2013
    As they get to know modern Warsaw, Regina is forced to recall difficult things about her past, and Mica begins to wonder if maybe their reasons for coming aren’t a little different than what her grandmother led her to believe.

Cats are Weird and More Observations


Jeffrey Brown - 2010
    Following the success of Cat Getting Out of a Bag, this all-new collection of color and black-and-white comic strips loosely follows the adventures of a pair of cats as they explore the world around them, indoors and out. Adventures include taking a nap, licking a shoe, attacking dust particles, hiding in cabinets, pouncing on fallen leaves, confronting the vacuum cleaner, patrolling the yard, and purring up a stormall adorably rendered in Brown's immediate and irresistible style. Sure to delight anyone who lives with cats and appreciates their sweet and batty behavior, this beautifully packaged gift book is the cat's meow.

The Adventuress


Audrey Niffenegger - 2006
    The Adventuress follows the dreamlike journey of an alchemist’s daughter. After she is kidnapped by a lascivious baron, she turns herself into a moth and flees to the garden of a charming butterfly collector named Napoleon Bonaparte. The story of how the two become lovers, and how their affair ends in tragedy and transcendence, is told through Niffenegger’s spare prose and haunting aquatint etchings. With a stunning and distinctive visual style reminiscent of the work of Edward Gorey, this gothic romance packs the emotional heft of the world’s great fairy tales. It will delight fans of the author’s previous works and enchant an entirely new legion of readers.

The Cage


Martin Vaughn-James - 1975
    Considered an early masterpiece of the genre, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken).Cryptic and disturbing, like Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) illustrating a film by Ozu, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes, tracking a stuttering and circling time and a sequence of objects: headphones, inky stains, bedsheets. It's not about where we're going but how – if – we get there.

Buddha, Vol. 1: Kapilavastu


Osamu Tezuka - 1972
    Tezuka evidences his profound grasp of the subject by contextualizing the Buddha’s ideas; the emphasis is on movement, action, emotion, and conflict as the prince Siddhartha runs away from home, travels across India, and questions Hindu practices such as ascetic self-mutilation and caste oppression. Rather than recommend resignation and impassivity, Tezuka’s Buddha predicates enlightenment upon recognizing the interconnectedness of life, having compassion for the suffering, and ordering one’s life sensibly. Philosophical segments are threaded into interpersonal situations with ground-breaking visual dynamism by an artist who makes sure never to lose his readers’ attention.Tezuka himself was a humanist rather than a Buddhist, and his magnum opus is not an attempt at propaganda. Hermann Hesse’s novel or Bertolucci’s film is comparable in this regard; in fact, Tezuka’s approach is slightly irreverent in that it incorporates something that Western commentators often eschew, namely, humor.