One of the best – perhaps the best, and almost without doubt, the most painfully sad – graphic memoir ever penned. The urtext of adolescent alienation. An undisputed masterpiece. Recommended to all serious comics readers as well as anyone who needs help in facing up to painful and unhappy memories.

Now back in iprint!

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 Sousanis's...

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...

With Jack's Book, Gifford and Lee launched the oral biography as a valid form(there'd be no Please Kill Me without it), and arguably created what remains its gold standard. Here you have a portrait in the round of the central figure of "the beat generation" (who hated that label) provided by all the other players who were in his circle during the two decades of his writing career. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Felinghetti, Gary Snyder and many more herein provide thoughtful, forthright recollections of Kerouac, his scene and the times in which they mixed. Gifford and Lee weave them together...

FROM THE ARCHIVES

You want funny? Look no further: This book will make you laugh. Like Peter Bagge's Hate, but smarter and more brutal in its judgments on this dysfunctional society of ours, and with a distinctive flavor all its own, this is a comic for people who see past the façade as a matter of course. Hey, Mister takes sarcasm to new heights. It makes us think of the Monty Python episode, the "Piranha Brothers," in which a fearful and trembling thug played by Michael Palin relates how Doug Piranha was the most terrifying gangster he had ever encountered because of the deft manner in which, "he used... sarcasm." And the bitterness, oh,...

When we learned that New York Review Comics was planning a new edition of two of Vaughn-James's other major works from the 1970s (Elephant and The Projector), we felt it was high time to bring this work, which we've been selling the shop for quite awhile(whenever we can get our hands on some copies!),to the attention of our online customers. Originally published in 1975, asa hardcover edition of 1500 copies by Toronto'sCoach House Press, The Cage was reissued in 2013, againby Coach House, in a softcover edition. Vaughn-James had a unique approach to, as well asa clearly prescientvision of, long form visually-centered narrative. Among his...

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...

back in print, at last! Originally published in 1994, City of Glass was ahead of the comics history curve in many respects, with its "serious" literary concerns and dazzling formal inventiveness. It was the most requested out-of-print volume in the history of the Copacetic Comics Company before being brought back in print in this 2004 edition. This edition remains faithful to the original, but has been updated with a new cover as well as a new introduction by Art Spiegelman (see above) that lays out the genesis of this particular work, helping to place it in the proper historical context. Recommended!

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...