It took us a minute to get this one in, due to screwball comedy hi-jinx. At long last, Saul Steinberg's first book, from way back in 1947 (?) is back in print in this luxe oversize hardcover edition fro NYRB, who have this to say about it:

"To escape fascist Europe, the artist Saul Steinberg drew his way to America. He made it to New York in 1942 already in contract with The New Yorker, but was soon called up to serve in the US Naval Reserve in World War II. This book, All In Line, is a memoir-via-drawing of this key time in Steinberg’s life, when he began to find his line and his way as an American.

In works for The New Yorker and...

Beginning with the first impression – the juxtaposition of the book’s title, “Black Arms to Hold You Up” and its accompanying cover illustration of large, looming black arm(ament)s against a background of skeletons, between which the human actors are running in fear – it is clear right from the start that we are being presented with a multivalent and irony-rich agitprop work. It will be equally clear by the end that it is also a work capable of constructing new meaning through a masterful synthesis of image and text.

The phrase “to hold you up” in the title can have (at least) three possible meanings: 1) to physically hold you up, as in to...

It is rare indeed when our opinion completely agrees with that of publisher provided cover hype, but in this case it does. The material that Will Eisner produced over a period of 20 years (!!!) for P*S Magazine is indeed, "the missing link between The Spirit and A Contract with God" as the cover states. The work contained in this 272 page hardcover volume has the highest critical-importance to critical-awareness ratio of any work we can think of. It represents the single largest unified body of work of one of the most admired creators in the history of comics, yet very few have read much – if any – of it. Now, thanks to Denis Kitchen, Ann...

(Book Two of the New Edition of the collected Love and Rockets) Most frequenters of this space are hep to the wonder of Love and Rockets. However, there are still those who have yet to see the light. Are you someone who still hasn't managed to get around to reading the greatest comics ever produced? If so, all we've got to say is: if you haven't read the original run of Love and Rockets (in any one of its extant formats) and you are trawling the web looking for exciting new releases and looking through back issue bins at your friendly neighborhood comics shop for classics of the days of yore, then you are simply wasting your time -- the...

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,...

Gilbert's follow up to 2013'sMarble Season,Bumperheadis another full-size, hardcover graphic novel fromDrawn & Quarterly, but it is much more than just a follow up. It's not going too far out on a limb to proclaimBumperheadGilbert's most fully realized work outside of theLove and Rocketscontinuity. He is in the zone here, playing to his strengths as a storyteller and artist as he relates life events, group dynamics and family to character formation and the Hernandezian Arc of Life. It's almost magic the wayBumperhead's players are broughtso vibrantly to lifethatthe reader comes away feeling that theyknowthe pen & ink people that...

Maestro Van Sciver enters middle-age and hits his stride here in the ninth issue of his auteurist anthology, Blammo. This issue is packed cover to cover with comics tightly corsetted bya requisite inclusion of those ancillary aspects associated with the traditional comic book form. Starting with the enigmatic clown in the woods cover image that is backed with an inside front cover full of pæans of praise to his work from top comics professtionals, the issue then plunges straight into 44 consecutive pages of solid comics storytelling that brings readers a dazzling dozen distinct pieces woven together into crazy-quilt whole. The issue is...

An epic, hallucinatory journey that while physically set in South Africa, embarks from a place of alienation and detachment and travels throughdark and confusing psychological spaces – often viathe useof various psychoactive drugs – to arrive at an unexpected series of destinations, Highbone Theaterprovidesa comics trip like no other to anyreader adventurous enough to climb aboard.Imagine, if you will, a very Charles Burnsian narrative in which dream and reality, imagination and perception, delusion and conception, fiction, fantasy and rumination are all inextricably bound together into an irreducible mass. Then imagine it featuring a cast...

LIGHTNING OVER BRADDOCK AND COLLECTED SHORTS: THE FILMS OF TONY BUBA

AT LAST! Here, on two full-lengthdiscs, are the collected films of Tony Buba! For coming up on fifty years, Tony Buba has been documenting (and romanticizing) his hometown of Braddock, PA right here on the Monogahela River, just outside of Pittsburgh proper. Anyone who hasn't seen these is in for a real treat.And, all of those, like us here at Copacetic, who already havebut have been yearning for another chance to revisit them after all these years, are likely in for an even bigger treat. Finally!

Featuring Tony Buba,Sal Carollo,Stephen Pellegrino,Jimmy Roy,Richard...

We've been big fans of the work of Mr. Hankiewicz for quite some time, and are thrilled to be able to offer Sparkplug Comic Books' massive new 108-page, 8 1/2" x 11" collection of his totally unique, perplexingly obscure, abstrusely enigmatic, elegantly rendered pen and ink parables and small tales. This work is frustratingly difficult to describe, and we're not going to try at this juncture. (OK, we'll give it a lame whirl: think of the precise, detail driven work of Charles Sheeler (got it?) and then add to this a blend of David Lynch, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Franz Kafka, and then convert the whole shebang into a pen-and-ink graphic...