Anyone on the lookout for intellectually stimulating, æsthetically challenging work – regardless of the form it takes – should be sure to investigate the comics of Dash Shaw. Shaw is a sophisticated visual thinker and natural experimenter unconstrained by generic conventions or audience expectations. In Doctors, soap operatic melodrama mixes freely with science fiction concepts (Philip Jose Farmer / Philip K Dick) and both are together presented to the reader with a bold decisive formalism that simultaneously brings to mind painters such as Hans Hoffman and filmmakers like Jean Luc Godard. The final product is in intriguing investigation...

We were so focused on promoting M.S. Harkness's October 12 visit to Copacetic celebrating the release of this book... that we forgot to list it here on the site! Sorry about that.

So, Time Under Tension is: A) at 260 pages, by far the most substantial work yet from M.S. Harkness; B) her first solo work published by Fantagraphics; C) her most ambitious – and successful – work to date, wherein she manages to integrate the themes reflecting the far ranging aspects of her life that populated her earlier works – hook-up culture, weight lifting, sex work, comics making, family history including traumatizing childhood sexual abuse, art school,...

With the arrival of this, the second issueof the series, it becomes clear that the first was but a prologue. Here, in the 88 full color pages ofUnsmooth #2: BUM, E.S. Glenn opens up new portals and reveals previouslyunseen dimensions of what will henceforth be known as the Unsmooth Multiverse. Enmeshed within an encompassing framework of ligne claire bande dessinée, readers will encounter mechamanga (along with a snatch of horror hentai)– plus sub-titled anime videos – New Yorker cartoons (and anold school Penguin paperback), cartooned modern art (along with some graffiti),some classical, newspaper Sunday-pagestrips,photobooth strips,and...

OK, this is not just the perfect gift book for the jazz fan on your list, it is also makes for an ideal gift to give to anyone -- of any age -- who has a love of words and pictures. This sumptuous hardcover volume has the potential to turn the squarest square into the heppest cat. Everyone is a jazz fan in the making: this is just the ticket to inspire them to take a closer look. Jazz ABZ is a pæn to jazz in art and poetry that simply has to be seen to be believed. The essence of jazz -- collaboration, composition, and improvisation -- is embodied in this singular tribute to the form. The overall package is designed to resemble the...

Salt Green Death takes its title from a line in James Joyce's Ulysses, further excerpts from which are interwoven throughout and seem to provide something of a template for the meandering stream of consciousness form of the narrative structure of the work, while the expressive distortions of the British painter, Francis Bacon provide a point of reference for the stunning and haunting visuals created by Thorsen to bring you into the maelstrom. While the primary focus is on Joseph O'Dwyer, child number four in the O'Dwyer family – who was institutionalized for most of his adult life, during which period the treatment regimes he was subjected...

Gilbert's long awaited return to the multi-generational saga form that he made his own in Palomar is here, and we are happy to report that it is a book that is as rewarding as it was long in coming. We are given a 20th century spanning tale of five generations of the Reyes clan that centers on the titular Julio and precisely matches the span of his life. Taking place in a nameless rural town that is presumably located somewhere in southern California,Julio's Daytakes its readers through five wars and generation defining events like the Great Depression and The Sixties as they are experienced at the fringes.Julio's Dayis most notable,...

Before cracking open The Hard Tomorrow, it might be a good idea to mentally buckle up. Eleanor Davis's new graphic novellives up to its title. It is indeed ahard hitting look at how the here andnow could play out in what'scoming tomorrow – but certainly not one without hope, and that is, ultimately, the point. Beautifully drawn, dramatically paced, and overflowingwith empathy for its fully realized cast of characters, The Hard Tomorrow is vibrantly alive to being in the world in America in our time. Davis's choice to set the work a few years in the future (apparently2022 [which, of course, is now in the past - ed.]) givesher leeway to ramp...

Yes, here it is: the most talked about book in comics. Five years at the drawing board hath wrought Crumb's own pen & ink rendering of the West's origin myth. Crumb, as he warned and as we would naturally expect, hasn't pulled any punches and has illustrated this tale as written, warts and all. Crumb says it best himself in his introduction: "I, R. Crumb, the illustrator of this book, have, to the best of my ability, faithfully reproduced every word of the original text... Every other comic book version of The Bible that I've seen contains passages of completely made-up narrative and dialogue, in an attempt to streamline and...

The second issue of the latest incarnation of The World's Greatest Comics Magazinehas arrived!

The fabulous Fantagraphics project to collect the complete classic Carl Barks comics featuring the "Disney" Ducks – which could more accurately be described as the Barks Ducks – continues with this volume devoted to Barks's most famous creation, Uncle Scrooge. "Only a Poor Man" collects the entirety of the first six issues of Uncle Scrooge that were originally published between 1952 and 1954. Not only are the classic Scrooge epics that form the bulk of each of the six issues collected here (for the record: "Only a Poor Old Man", "Back to the Klondike", "The Horse Radish Treasure", "The Menehune Mystery", "The Secret of Atlantis" and...