It's hard to know where to begin with a work as remarkable as this. Originally published in six chapters in Love and Rockets: New Stories 3 & 4 in 2010 and 2011, it includes a flashback chapter titled "Browntown" that, in comic book parlance, could be said to be the – or, at least, a – "Secret Origin of Maggie", as readers are finally made privy to heretofore undisclosed primal scenes at the root of significant swaths of Maggie's personality and character. While it may be a commonplace to state that character is forged in the crucible of family, it is rare indeed to be given the opportunity of witnessing an incidence of this that has...

Mister Baker, perhaps the funniest cartoonist alive, steps out of his clown shoes and puts on his severest suit and tie to deliver this sermon of repression and defiance, violence and vengeance, and struggle and sacrifice, in this synecdochical story of slavery in these United States. Reading this book, in which the narrative is advanced almost entirely in images (pantomime style) interspersed with excerpts from The Confessions of Nat Turner, it is impossible not to marvel at the strength of Baker's storytelling. And, there is a method to the madness of attempting to relate so complex a tale entirely in images. It captures the forced...

Supermag is a 56 page full color (with some black & white, where called for) magazine, saddle-stapled to a heavy duty glossy cardstock wraparound cover. It boldly sports endorsement quotes on the front cover as well as back – by a wide-ranging mix including an art director, a publisher, a comics artist anda couple of designers,that points to the equally wide-ranging variety of works contained therein – in such a way that their appearance is organically incorporated into the cover's design in the manner in which readers normally expect to see a magazine's contents displayed. This bold assertion of the work's quality in place of the...

The greatness continues! 1950 was the year of Carl Barks. Along with the title track this volume includes the mega-classics, "In Ancient Persia," "The Magic Hour Glass," "Big-Top Bedlam," the lessser know but nonetheless classic Christmas tale, "You Can't Guess," and perhaps the greatest summer vaction comic book story ever penned, "Vacation Time." Also on hand are a lone ten-pager from WDC&S #117 and three low-profile tales that accompanied "Vacation Time" in the pages of Vacation Parade #1: a one-page written but not drawn by Barks, and two tales that are drawn but, unusually,not written by Barks; one featuring Grandma Duck, and one...

Hailing from the UK (Manchester), but currently residing – and making comics in – the US (St. Louis), Sacha Mardou, who, as a comics creator, goes simply by Mardou, has been dilligently and unobtrusively producing insightful and entertaining comics that have been gradually accreting into a small but significant body of work. Long a Copacetic favorite, her comics have been steady sellers at our shop and it has been been our intention to bring them to the attention of our online custmers for quite some time. Now, at last, with the release of The Sky in Stereo, the first installment of what looks to be by far her most ambitious project yet,...

Dan Z has done it again! The mega-master of industrial art comics has given us a perfect blend of form and content in Tel-Tales. This pint-sized wonder is based on a story by Dan's dad, Don "Toots" Zettwoch that tells the tale of the good ol' days of telephone call switching that involved actual human beings – as well as the "ancient & mysterious 8-Board" – that existed before the days of fully automated digital switching, not to mention cell phones, FOIP and Skype, which are putting the entire infrastructure of plain old telephone calling into the dumpster. And that's just where the Bell System punched cards that are used here as the...

The follow up to last year's It Never Happened, New Construction features two new comics novellas, "Backyard" and "Household."Each is tautly rendered in Alden's forceful pencil line. New Construction is aptly titled in that it is put together diferently. It is a bifurcated edition, with the first tale, "Backyard," being both tightly rendered and printed on a (relatively) bright cream colored stock, while the second, "Household" is far more loose and expressionistic in its rendering and is printed on a dull light gray newsprint. It is worth noting here that the reproduction quality in New Construction is significantly superior to that of It...

What came to be know as "The Marvel Age of Comics" begins HEREin the "pre-superhero" Marvel comics created, primarilyby Jack Kirby and secondarily by Steve Ditko (and tertiarily by Don Heck), with the inking assists of Dick Ayers, George Bell and others, andwith Stan Lee and Larry Leiber filling out the scripts. These comics provided form and color to the unconsciouscold war anxieties that lurked benearth the surface of every sentient American during the years – 1957 - 1962 –that led up to the Cuban Missle Crisis, allowing readers to finally face their fears, and, eventually, after getting to know them through the comics collected here, at...

Wow! Ethan Rilly just keeps getting better. Anyone interested in deftly delineated character driven narratives in the tradition founded by Xaime and Beto Hernandez needs to be aware of this series. Rilly is a relative youngster and his work – set in what we are assuming is Toronto (Rilly is a native), but could be Seattle, or any other major north American metropolis, for that matter – is closer in register to the work of Adrian Tomine, as it is largely set in a world of office towers and upward striving. Anyone unfamiliar with this series can get some idea of what's in store by checking out the short 2010 piece, "Ex Montreal", hosted in...

Yes! Here's an archival manga collection done right. Publisher, PictureBox and Series Editor, Ryan Holmberg have teamed up to produce a exemplary edition thatsets a new standard which we can only hopeothers will heed. Art and editorial direction mesh perfectly as paper stock, reproduction, layout, introduction, editorial essays and overall book design all come together to deliver an æsthetically sumptuous, editorially excellent and academically rigorous 176 page hardcover volume focusing on the life and work of manga auteur, Seiichi Hayashi. PictureBox states, "Seiichi Hayashi (b. 1945) was a leading figure in Tokyo's hotbed of avant-garde...