Unstable Molecules is one of the best graphic novels Marvel has produced... well, possibly, ever, but, to hedge our bets, let’s say, "in quite awhile." In any event, it is like nothing Marvel has ever produced in the past. It is a textual analysis of comics done in comics, and it is one of the finest ever produced -- certainly the finest ever produced by Marvel! It should be considered in the context of Understanding Comics and Hicksville as much as the Fantastic Four. Telling the "true" story of the "real people" that the Fantastic Four were based on, this book is a work of metacomics and a dream come true for students of narrative theory...

In the full color pages of Inappropriate, her latest hardcover collection from Uncivilized Books, Gabrielle Bell delves into the porous borderland between fact and fantasy, a land populated by daydreams,conjectures, anxieties, obsessions, recollections, ruminations, self-doubts,self-incriminations and much more, all clearly communicated in her ever more confidently created comics.And then there is the collection's standout piece, "The original, true, biographical versionof Little Red Riding Hood," which sets the tale in an ahistorical New York City. Inappropriate isBell's best collection to date. Here, she has broken through to a more...

Tillie Walden's long in the works and hotly anticipated coming of age story has arrived. In the pages of Spinning, Tillie Walden provides a first person window into the world of competitive figure skating. One of the western world's many subcultures,figure skating is like the proverbial iceberg which is carried alongbythe ocean of the dominant culture:all that most of ussee is the tippy top that appears on television during national and international competitions, while9/10 is submerged and hidden from site to all but those directly involved – until now. It is a world populated largely by girls.Manyof whom, as revealed here, enterit at the...

Believe it or not, it's been over twenty years since the publication of Understanding Comics, which established the breakthrough realization that the most effective way to truly explain how comics work is in comics form. Now, at last, we have the next iteration of this understanding: that the most effective way to explain how comics -- presented here as consciously thinking and writing - and, of course, reading - in a free flowing combination of images and text -- are changing the way we represent our world and understand ourselves is also in comics form. Unflattening, just published by Harvard University Press, is the book form of...

Bill Griffith, widlely heralded as a founding father of underground comics and late-20th century pop counter culture, primarily for his star creation, Zippy the Pinhead, but also for his pioneering editorial contributions to the important comix anthologiesYoung Lustand, with Art Spiegelman,Arcade,has here, in the pages of this200 page graphic memoir, told the story that he has been keeping to himself all these many decades. This one's got a title -- well, subtitle, anyway -- that pretty much doesn't hold back the punch line; what was the big surprise for the author isfait accomplifor all readers going in. The reason for this is that there...

The complete set of the first seven volumes of the updated editions of the Collected Love and Rockets is now available once again. Together, these contain the entirety of the first volume of Love and Rockets that originally appeared in the 50 issue run that was published between 1982 and 1996.

Here it is, at last: a cosmic consciousness primer for kids. Inthese pages, Crane has stripped down his æsthetic to its core, crafting bold,optic nerve stimulating illustrations thatleapscales from the macroscopic to microscopic and back again, in dynamic andwildly colorfulimages that arestraight forward andimmediately,intuitively comprehensible.Taken together with the accompanyingsimple blocks of text, the series ofsequential combinations of images that make up We Are All Me unlock a latent power strong enough tolightup dormantneurons, leadingto new connections, and stimulatingspeculations, revealinga sense of wonder at creation capable...

edited by Ivan Brunetti Published by Yale University Press, this awesome anthology is a worthy successor to McSweeney's 13 as the must have comics collection of the foreseeable future. Editor, Brunetti goes all out to offer us a (OK, well, his) canonical assemblage with the 400 pages of comics here on display, where it is the form itself that is always at the heart of the work represented. The work we find here -- while, of course, being comics -- is also, at some level, telling us something about comics, and this latter value-added feature can be attributed in no small part to Brunetti's editorial approach in assembling this work, which...