This ia a softcover 3-in-1 omnibus of the three hardback Aya graphic novels previously released by Drawn & Quarterly over the last five years or so:Aya, Aya of Yop City,andAya, the Secrets Come Out. It also additionally contains a healthy portion (32 pages or so) of bonus support materials not found in the original volumes. Priced at barely more than one of the originals, this is a bargain! More than that, it is well over 300 pages of beautifully drawn and lushly colored comics depicting late 1970s life in thethe west African republic,Côte d'Ivoire (the Ivory Coast to us Anglophones). These comics will immerse readers in this far off...

(Book Six in the New Edition of the collected Love and Rockets) Wow! Fantagraphics isn't wasting any time in getting out the newly formatted editions collecting that classic among classics, the original first volume of Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez. Beyond Palomar contains all the twists and turns of "Poison River," perhaps the most complex – as well as violent –of Gilbert's epics. "Poison River" originally cascaded through 12 issues of Love and Rockets (#29 - #40) over the course of close to fouryears (1989 - 1992), providing a portrait of Luba's mother, Maria – along with what could be construed as Luba's origin story– that does...

Break out the bongs, Blessed Be has arrived! Rick Altergott has been producing his unique (but definitely inspired by and to a degree derived from the classic Mad) brand of comics – at a painstakingly slow pace – for over three decades now. He's been working on Blessed Be in one form or another for something in the neighborhood of twenty years – but you can't rush quality, and we're here to tell you that it was worth the wait! Longtime readers will recognize some classic earlier Altergott-penned episodes from his and Ariel Bordeaux's early-aughts, two-person anthology series, Raisin Pie, reworked and repurposed here, all in the service of...

It's here! Five years in the making – by the team that brought you the Certified Copacetic Classic, This One Summer – Roaming is a triune portrait of youthful awakening into the dawning of adulthood. Over the course of its over 400 pages, the Tamakis weave layer upon layer of exuberence, curiosity and experience onto a ground of adolescent innocence. The entire tale takes place during a brief visit to New York City by the trio of Canadians at the center of this work (although there is a wonderful flashback shared by a pair of them that serves to illuminate the ground from which they are emerging). Roaming is a highly engaging work, the...

In 2017, after having lived in Amsterdam for coming up on a decade, the ex-pat native of Cleveland, OH, Chad Bilyeu wasn’t sure what to do next. After a meaningful encounter with Harvey Pekar’s original, self-published run of American Splendor, he decided: comics. And so he embarked on the journey that became the comic book series, Chad in Amsterdam, which has to date yielded six issues, all entirely written, edited, art-directed and self-published by Chad. These six issues have now all been collected in a spiffy hardcover volume from Scratch Books, along with a forward –well actually, a voorward – by EI-P of alt-hip-hop fame, and an all...

Final Cut presents – for the first time in English – Burns's latest major work, that had up to now only been available in the French language editions published by Cornelius under the title Dédales. All three Cornelius volumes are collected here in an elegantly designed and produced, 224 page, full color, clothbound hardcover volume by Pantheon Books. Very Nice.

Anyone familiar with the work of Charles Burns will not be surprised to learn that Final Cut is a multi-levelled work; that there are layers within layers. Even the title, which has an obvious first level meaning, is open to multiple readings. The action is set, as per usual with...

What can you say about a book that opens with a Galactus quote from Fantastic Four #49, drops more comics references -- particularly to the classics of the 1980s -- than any novel we've ever read, clearly shows the influence of Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar and, especially, Luba stories, AND won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel of 2007? We'd say, "This is a must read! Particularly suitable for fans of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and Michael Chabon's (also Pulitzer Prize winning) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." And then we'd add: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a gigantic meditation on the inner life of the...

Back in print at last, this classic memoir of Chester's high school obsession with Playboy Magazine disabused Hugh Hefner of his notion that Playboy was just good clean fun - but only for the five minutes or so it took him to put it out of his mind. Other, more engaged thinkers will hold onto this impression a bit longer. It's hard for most to realize in this day and age when the high school memoir is a major staple of the comics – or should we say, graphic novel – market, but when the comics that make up this volume, and its companion piece, I Never Liked You, were first serialized in the pages of Yummy Fur, they were like nothing anyone...

There's no point in trying to compete with Chris Ware's own description of his latest project, so we won't. Here it is:

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Written by Chris Ware, Preface by Ira Glass, Introduction by Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman

A flabbergasting experiment in publishing hubris,Monographcharts the art and literary world's increasing tolerance for the language of the empathetic doodle directly through the work of one of its most esthetically constipated practitioners.

For thirty years, writer and artist (i.e. cartoonist) Chris Ware (b. 1967) has been testing the patience of readers and fine art fans with his complicated and...

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John P. has this to say about his latest creation: "This All-Animals Issue features stories on possums, dogs, cats, Midwestern mountain lions, moths, horses, frogs, toads, and more! Plus Catcalls and Top 40 etc etc. A winner. 40 digest pages, black and white throughout."

The All-Animals Issue! Don't miss it!