edited by Ivan Brunetti It's too early to say for certain, but this follow-up to Brunetti's already classic 2006 anthology, also published by Yale University Press, might just be even better than its precursor. One thing's for certain: Brunetti has held onto -- and further refined -- his editorial vision of arranging the work contained in this volume in an organic sequence, deftly managing to map out the similarities between artists so that each piece flows smoothly into into the other, creating an amazing sense of an innate connectivity between all areas of comics here on display. This book is a powerful ally in the struggle to bring the...

by Anneli Furmark, Amanda Vähämäki, and T. Edward Bak We listed this last month, but in our haste neglected to write it up, a gross oversight on our part, as you will see... This volume has a special Scandinavian focus, with two of the three comics works originating in the somber lands of the midnight sun. A melancholy northern mood pervades the entire collection, including its centerpiece, the contribution of the lone North American, T. Edward Bak. The Partisan -- his first fully developed work since Service Industry, the work for which he is best known -- is a complex multi-layered work that (or, at least, so it seems to us) seeks to...

Lynda Barry's classichybrid illustrated novel (that was successfully adapted to a play) at last returns to print in its first hardcover (and nicest yet!) edition, from Drawn & Quarterly (natch'). Set in the Seattle of the late 1960s,The Good Times Are Killing Me presents a bittersweet portrait of an adolescence in whichexposure to the toxic effects of racism occurs simultaneously with a revelation of the redemptive uplift ofmusic; music oftencreated by those who suffer the most from those toxiceffects...

Check out this excerpt on Rookie Mag.

MORE Gilbert H. comics – close to 300 pages! Thecomics collected here were originally publishedinthe early-to-mid aughts, appearing in thesecond volume of Love and Rockets as well as theconcurrently publishedLuba's Comics & Stories. Some of these comics have already been previously collected in Luba: Three Daughters and High Soft Lisp as well as thehardcover Lubaomnibus. Now, here, they at last find their permanent home as the fourteenth volume in the affordable and attractive Fantagraphics uniform edition of Love and Rockets. Luba, Fritz, Pipo, Doralis, Milaand the rest havemore than their fair shareof ups and downs in thisheartbreak...

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...

WOW!It's clear that Simon Hanselmann is intent on taking it to the next level, and withBad Gateway, hehas. It is a real beauty of a book, hisfirst in the larger, A4 (roughly, magazine) size.Prepare yourself for a sumptuous package, expertly designed by Mr. Hanselmann himself, with assists from Keeli McCarthy and production by the ever able PaulBaresh. Simon shows off his art (and arthistory) chops in theevocativecovers and series of endpapers and double page spreads, all fully painted. Once you get to the story itself, its page after page ofa relentless, unforgiving 12-panelgrid depictingnon-stop desperation andmayhem. Here, in Bad Gateway...

We heard only hours before starting to write up the arrival of the softcover edition of this classic work by two of the all-time greats of bande dessinee, that Moebius, perhaps the greatest of them all, had passed away. While Madwoman does not contain the type of cosmic science fiction imagery most closely associated with Moebius, it is second only to The Incal as his most important collaboration withAlejandro Jodorowsky, and it is a work that clearly demonstrates his seemingly effortless mastery of the form and that is certainly one of his most mature and sophisticated works from a narrative standpoint. On the one hand Madwoman is a...

OK, here's a treat: the complete run of Krazy Kat dailies from 1934, reproduced full size, on high quality newsprint, in a chunky, horizontally formatted hardcover volume from IDW's Library of American Comics Essentials series. This is the same format as the two Baron Bean collections that IDW released over the last couple years, that we know at least a few Copacetic customers picked up. Recommended!

HC • B&W • 328 pages • 12″ x 4.25″

And while we're talking about learning more about the world around us, here's a book of historical reportage in comics that helps us come to understand how things got to be the way they are. The ever-fascinating David B. takes his readers on an unexpected voyage through the waters of history in this informative, educational and timely volume co-piloted by Jean-Pierre Filiu. As readers of B.'s breakthrough masterpiece, Epileptic already know, he is quite adept at depicting scenes of warfare, and, what's more, in doing so in a way that reveals otherwise hidden forces at work below the surface of the battlefield. David B. masterfully employs...

Clowes has delivered his long threatened science fiction graphic novel. Within the 178 pages of Patience readers will encounter the arduous travails of a time-traveling drug abuser coming to terms with mortality and the meaning of life as only a time-traveling drug abuser can. Clowes has, with Patience, taken an approach in crafting its narrativesomewhat akin to that of Michael Chabon's inThe Yiddish Policeman's Union-- although to entirely different ends -- by starting with the hook and basic plot structure of a whodunnit murder mystery, and then gradually incorporating layer upon layer of interlocking themes, spinning it out into...