WOW!!! It's here and it's a dream come true. Founding editor of Comic Art magazine, Todd Hignite has given us an elegant, oversize, beautifully produced, 320 page hardcover book that takes you into the studio and collections of today's top independent cartoonists. Featuring tons (499, to be exact) of reproductions of the highest quality, depicting the original art, personal collections and physical environs of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Charles Burns, Jaime Hernandez, Dan Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti side by side with extensive interviews with the creators themselves, this is a book to savor. Todd Hignite is a...

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...

The tale Blankets tells is in most respects a classic coming of age story, but the place -- emotional as well as geographical -- that it is coming from may not be familiar territory for many readers: an abnegating Christianity built on self-denial ensconced in the harsh northern environs of Wisconsin and Michigan. Yet there can be no doubt that the core questions and values dealt with in Blankets are certainly universal ones. Craig Thompson has clearly devoted himself to a serious study of Will Eisner's late work -- from A Contract With God to the present -- and this study has really paid off here. The pacing, the placement of blacks,...

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 and Franz Kafka, and then convert the whole shebang into a pen-and-ink graphic narrative,...

In case you wondering, we thought we'd take this moment to let you know that Love and Rockets is still going strong, with new issues appearing at a steady clip. And the work continues to be of the highest caliber, building, issue by issue, the most signifigant narrative structure on the contemporary comics landscape, as our in-depth look at "Saturday is Shatterday" from #15 amply testifies (click on image at left to read).

Well. At long last, after all these years, it's finally here. This one's been in the works for what seems like forever (it was originally scheduled for Spring 2010 release), but the wait is finally over. Nancy and Sluggo are the sine qua non of comics archetypes. As rendered by the inimitable (though many have tried!) Ernie Bushmiller, they have entertained, mesmerized and fascinated generations of comics readers, from the most humble of lonely lunchers to the most erudite of intellectual aficionados. Nancy collapses the cultural divide in a work that is a multiverse unto itself, existing simultaneously on as many planes as there are...

Yes! Here's an archival manga collection done right. Publisher, PictureBox and Series Editor, Ryan Holmberg have teamed up to produce a exemplary edition thatsets a new standard which we can only hopeothers will heed. Art and editorial direction mesh perfectly as paper stock, reproduction, layout, introduction, editorial essays and overall book design all come together to deliver an æsthetically sumptuous, editorially excellent and academically rigorous 176 page hardcover volume focusing on the life and work of manga auteur, Seiichi Hayashi. PictureBox states, "Seiichi Hayashi (b. 1945) was a leading figure in Tokyo's hotbed of avant-garde...

Paprika is a truly trippy, one-of-a-kind animé classic that we can guarantee you will want to watch more than once, both in order to fully appreciate what it is trying to say and simply to revel in its tour de force animation. Paprika seamlessly splices hand-painted cel animation with CGI to create a world of the not too distant future in which dreams and technology merge – with frightening and intellectually intriguing consequences. Taking Raymond Chandler's classic hard-boiled detective novel, The Big Sleep as his point of departure, director Kan adapts Yasutaka Tsutsui's original novel and weaves its intriguing tale of the merging of...