
Originally published in 1960 and out of print for many years, The Labyrinth is Saul Steinberg's most significant single volume collection. It has now at long last been reissued in a this superb hardcover edition from New York Review of Books, whichfeaturesa new introduction by Nicholson Baker, along with anafterword by Harold Rosenbergandnew notes on the artwork from by Sheila Schwartz, the Research and Archives Director of The Saul Steinberg Foundation. Steinberg's oeuvre is unique, straddling the worlds of comics, illustration and gallery art whileproviding a window on the process ofcreative thought in line.

Summerland is a unique piece of comics work, one which turns the typical creative hierarchy on its head, with the coloring in the dominant position, followed by the inking, then pencilling, and with the scripting tacked on almost an afterthought. The boldly inked lines are minimal yet effective in delineating the scene, and to brace the colors and let them do their stuff, and what they do here is something new. In the pages ofSummerland, Ms. Dawkins has improvised an innovative approach to color, one in which she "plays" the color scheme using tone clusters and chords, rather than the normative approach of hitting single notes and then...

IT'SHERE! The sixth and (maybe? maybe not??) final issue of Kevin Huizenga's revelatory exploration of andmeditation on time and space:Ganges. This issue focuses on some of the effects of technology on our temporal experience. As always, Huizenga takes the opportunity to explore the unique properties of comics; searching for new, untried and/or under-appreciated approaches to what the medium has to offer by way of communicating concepts and states – of mind as well as of being.
While all of us employing the latest gadgetry, apps, platforms, etc. have no shortage of anecdotes pertaining to our experience, Huizenga isn't satisfied with...

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...

Dauntless Dames is the latest in the series of beautiful mega-sized (13" x 17") hardcover collections of classic newspaper comicstrips from Sunday Press. Edited by Trina Robbins and Sunday Press publisher, Peter Maresca, Dauntless Dames is a feast for the eyes. An amazing amalgamation of classic Sunday pages featuring women protagonists, many of which were also created by women, including Pittsburgh's own Jackie Ormes, including some super rare strips from The Pittsburgh Courier!
We'll provide a bit more info soon, but suffice it to say that this volume includes page after oversize page – 160 in all – of classic full color (and along with...

This is a moment we've been waiting for for quite awhile. In our opinion, the least appreciated and most misunderstood science fiction writer of modern times, James Tiptree, Jr. (the nom de plume of Alice Sheldon) is a writer of breathtaking originality who is still ahead of her time, nearly twenty years after her death. That all of her work -- with the exception of a single "loose ends" collection that was published three years ago -- has been out of print for years is, in our opinion, a negligence that borders on the criminal. Thankfully ("Thank you, Tachyon Publications, thank you."), this situation has now come to an end with the...

It's time for comics connoisseurs to crank up their cogitation once again, as a new issue of Ganges is in stock and on sale here at The Copacetic Comics Company. And the verdict? Kevin Huizenga once again delivers the goods! This time around we have the inner workings of an agitated mind – that of Glenn Ganges, to answer your question – at the edge of sleep, visually embodied as its own cartoon being, distinct and separate from – if in many respects identical to – the body housing this mind. All readers who have ever had a rough time falling asleep and have had their mind wander to and fro seemingly of its "own" accord will have plenty to...

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...

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...

What more can be said about the genius of Carl Barks? It towers over the landscape of comics history like the statue of Duckburg's founder, Cornelius Coot (erected by Uncle Scrooge in "Statuesque Spendthrifts" fromWalt Disney's Comics and Stories#138; collected inA Christmas for Shacktown),towers over that fair city. The title tale of this latest volume in the 15 year project to collect the entirety of Barks's Disney oeuvre, "The Old Castle's Secret" is a classic book-length tale of eerie mystery that was originally presented inFour Color#189, published in the summer of 1948, that provides the first fleshed out iteration of Uncle Scrooge...
We are currnetly one month away from a particularly consequential slate of mid-term elections. To anyone who has been sitting on the sidelines, this is a good time to pay attention, find out what elections you’re eligible to vote in, read up on the issues important to you and pick your candidates. If you’re not registered to vote – or not sure whether you are (or whether you’re registered at the correct address) – there’s still time (in many/most states – but, sadly, not all) to register and/or update your address (HERE is a list of the registration deadlines for each state). You can get to the information you need through the voter portal, vote.org .
(Also: we recommend using only vote.org. Some other voter portals – most notably the cynically named “VoteSafe" dot org, which was created by the Elon Musk-funded America PAC – collect, sell and otherwise exploit any information you enter; talk about irony...)
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