FROM THE ARCHIVES

Here's ONE, like newcopy of the FIRST PRINT of the original 2009 edition of this just-reissued classic. Here's our write-up from back then:

OK, this is the one you've been waiting for! Eleven years in the making, a whopping 840 pages in length, A Drifting Life is the graphic memoir of one of the all-time manga greats. Over the last several years, Drawn and Quarterly has been assiduously releasing Tatsumi's classic gekiga, in which he pioneered a street savvy, morally ambiguous form of comics that thrived on grittier material and was more ambivalent about the post-war boom in Japan. A Drifting Life chronicles the years...

While Darwyn Cooke originally planned for a two-year stint on The Spirit, circumstances conspired to cut his run short at the halfway mark. The evidence of this final issue -- an exigetical adaptation of Eisner's original Sand Saref story (the same story Frank Miller's upcoming movie is also using as it's core text) -- bears out that this is all it took for Cooke to bore right to the core of not just the character of The Spirit but of the spirit of the noir sensibility itself. Through his masterful employment of Eisner's late style (which Eisner himself used to portray the past; i.e. his own childhood during the depression out of which so...

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...

It's been almost 40 years, but worth the wait.Mark Alan Stamaty's legendary,Village Voicestrip,MacDoodle St. is back! The looooong out of print(paperbackonly)collection has now been reissued by New York Review Comicsin a spiffy hardcover edition that includes seven installations of theprecursor strip, "Garble Dee Goo" alongwith an all new,18 page addendum, to boot!

Mark Alan Stamaty's comics evince adistractibility that borders on anarchy and leads to mayhem and even chaos, yes, but attention deficit, no! Stamaty focuses on the details at the same time as his mind wanders all over creation (well, all over New York City) producing some...

The plot thickens, the mystery deepens, the pace is picked up and no holds are barred in this, the third issue of the most innovative comic book series in America. While other comic books tout their "new" plot twists and "new" characters and "new" concepts, the comics they produce are, formally, all the same, maintaining the tried and tired industry status quo. Cold Heat is authentically different. Creators, BJ and Santoro understand the conventions under girding the standard comic book format and deftly undercut them, subverting the implicit conservatism of these conventions by exogamously marrying them to an entirely different, diverse...

Break out the bongs, Blessed Be has arrived! Rick Altergott has been producing his unique (but definitely inspired by and to a degree derived from the classic Mad) brand of comics – at a painstakingly slow pace – for over three decades now. He's been working on Blessed Be in one form or another for something in the neighborhood of twenty years – but you can't rush quality, and we're here to tell you that it was worth the wait! Longtime readers will recognize some classic earlier Altergott-penned episodes from his and Ariel Bordeaux's early-aughts, two-person anthology series, Raisin Pie, reworked and repurposed here, all in the service of...

This 320 page, full color, 8 1/2" x 12" hardcover volume is a fantastic collection of some of the finest prints ever produced. It presents full-page, full color reproductions of all 118 of Hiroshige's Edo prints, along with copious notes, supporting illustrations and an appendix of reduced-size, "thumbnail" reproductions of the numerous variations among the different versions of the print editions; hundreds in all.

Amazing! Recommended! Deal!

Here's from the publisher:

A landmark book presenting the early "deluxe" versions of Hiroshige's Edo prints for the first time!

Utagawa Hiroshige's unique landscape series One Hundred Famous Views...