Well, if you're only going to read one comic book this year... then you are going to have to steer clear of this one! That's becauseBuilding Storiesis a box set offourteenseparate comics pieces, including two hardcover books, pamphlet style comics, accordion fold-outs, newspapers, flip books,a gameboard-esque piece,and more (check out the accompanying illustrations to get an idea). In his relentless quest to up the ante of what comics are capable of pulling off, Mr. Ware has pulled out the stops, called in the reserves, and put the Acme Novelty Company on a wartime footing to forge thismassive meditation on the parallelsbetween the...

McNaught's contribution to the aforementioned A Graphic Cosmogony, "Pilgrims," was one of the real standouts, and his Birchfield Close is a masterpiece in miniature. There is a lot going on in this slim, 5" x 7" hardcover. First and foremost, there is a wholly successful evocation of the modern condition that reveals a heretofore unrecognized potential for visual poetry in suburban tract housing. This is no small achievement. It is accomplished through a highly disciplined use of the two-color palette in combination with a real tour de force in layout. Connoisseurs of the comics grid will find themselves returning to this work over and...

This One Summer is a finely nuanced portrait of pubescents at the dawning of their age of sexuality that will have readers slowing down if not stopping in their tracks to pause and soak up every line ofstunningly good work. The Tamaki cousins enter Hernandez brothers territory here, with their deftly characterized and deeply empathic portraits of each pen & ink participant in the drama that unfolds on these pages. There are echoes, too, of Charles Burns’s Black Hole, in the presentation of the protagonists' stumbling upon detritus strewn outdoor settings that stand as a synecdoche forinnocence’s discoveringthe mysteries of sexual...

Poetry Is Useless has arrived!Anders Nilsen's new 200+ page hardcover is chock-a-block with plenty of beautiful sketchbook scans mixed together with miscellanea in this sumptuous æsthetic free-for-all. We've only just taken our copies out of the box, and so don't have much to say yet besides, "Wow, nice!", but want to let people know that it's here.

We put together a quick preview, iuncluding eight full spreads, HERE. Take a moment to feast your eyes...

It's hard to know where to begin with a work as remarkable as this. Originally published in six chapters in Love and Rockets: New Stories 3 & 4 in 2010 and 2011, it includes a flashback chapter titled "Browntown" that, in comic book parlance, could be said to be the – or, at least, a – "Secret Origin of Maggie", as readers are finally made privy to heretofore undisclosed primal scenes at the root of significant swaths of Maggie's personality and character. While it may be a commonplace to state that character is forged in the crucible of family, it is rare indeed to be given the opportunity of witnessing an incidence of this that has...

Santoro returns to the newspaper format he used to shake up the comics world in 1995 with his vastly influential newspaper comic, Storeyville. Santoro has spent most of the 21st century painting, but has been lured back to comics by a conspiracy of circumstance to produce this unique tri-tone newspaper edition. Anyone interested in seeing comics put to new uses will want to take a look at this piece. With Chimera, we have a work that is striving to achieve a poetics of comics. Drawing on the insights into the symbolic quality of images that he has gained through his years spent concentrating on the practice and study of painting, Santoro...

A long time coming, Collier's Popular Press is a hefty softcover volume just released by Conundrum Press. It starts off with an introduction by noted Canadian comics scholar, Jeet Heer, who situates Collier's work here squarely in the tradition of "observational cartooning," for which he provides a concise history before ushering in a whoppin' 200 pages of Collier comics, originally published over three decades in a variety of Canadian newspapers and magazines – few, if any, of which have previously reached the straining eyeballs of stateside comics readers. In addition, a series of Collier's essays and personal recollections are mixed...