Here is a one of a kind item. It is a real challenge to describe just how different it is. Ronald Wimberly has long been a student of Japanese culture and æsthetics – among much else – and has leveraged that experience into this multi-levelled, ultimately unclassifiable work (and that unclassifiability is very much part of its significance). Wimberly has the chops to code switch between a host of stylistic practices both visual and linguistic, encompassing classical Japanese forms and practices, European high culture, American academia (which is represented here by several essays by recognized scholars writing on Wimberly's work that are...

We were so focused on promoting M.S. Harkness's October 12 visit to Copacetic celebrating the release of this book... that we forgot to list it here on the site! Sorry about that.

So, Time Under Tension is: A) at 260 pages, by far the most substantial work yet from M.S. Harkness; B) her first solo work published by Fantagraphics; C) her most ambitious – and successful – work to date, wherein she manages to integrate the themes reflecting the far ranging aspects of her life that populated her earlier works – hook-up culture, weight lifting, sex work, comics making, family history including traumatizing childhood sexual abuse, art school,...

Prepare to have your socks knocked off. Originally published in France in 2014, Jean-Michel Dupont and Mezzo's Love in Vain is the comics biography of this blues founding father that you've been dreaming of. Clearly drawing on R. Crumb's comics bios of blues greats such asCharley Patton, and inspired by the inking ofCharles Burns, this senusally produced, horizontally formatted graphic novelis a work befitting thelegend of Robert Johnson, perhaps the most storied bluesman of them all.

Check out this Google image search for a peek at what's in store... Amazing, right?

A one-of-a-kind classic of the early years turn-of-the-century*, independent, creator-owned comics, Pop Gun War presents a fullembodiement ofthe imaginative capacities of the comics medium created by a natural-born comics maker.

*Pop Gun War was originally created and published between 1997 and 2003. It has now (in 2016) been reissued to prepare the ground for its forthcoming sequel.

Recommended!

Finally, the work that first brought Brecht Evens to the attention of North American comics readers is back in print, after years in the wilderness – and, in a deluxe hardocver edition that it richly deserves!

Here's our original write-up:

This is a graphic novel where much of the meaning and significance is manifested in and through the artist's method. Evens has developed a unique comics language involving the transparency of watercolor that you can get some idea of here, but only some, as the pages they chose for this preview only hint at what is to come in this dazzling 184 page work. What you can see is that Evens's figures possess...

For twenty years and counting, Scott McCloud's explication of the mechanics of comics remains essential.



Testamonials:

<>"If you've ever felt bad about wasting your life reading comics, then check out Scott McCloud's classic book immediately. You might still feel you've wasted your life, but you'll know why, and you'll be proud."
-Matt Groening, creator ofThe Simpsons

<>"In one lucid, well-designed chapter after another, [McCloud] guides us through the elements of comics style, and... how words combine with pictures to work their singular magic. When the 215-page journey is finally over, most readers will find it...

Gilbert's follow up to 2013'sMarble Season,Bumperheadis another full-size, hardcover graphic novel fromDrawn & Quarterly, but it is much more than just a follow up. It's not going too far out on a limb to proclaimBumperheadGilbert's most fully realized work outside of theLove and Rocketscontinuity. He is in the zone here, playing to his strengths as a storyteller and artist as he relates life events, group dynamics and family to character formation and the Hernandezian Arc of Life. It's almost magic the wayBumperhead's players are broughtso vibrantly to lifethatthe reader comes away feeling that theyknowthe pen & ink people that...

Get ready for a 474 page graphic novel that entirely transpires on the one single day of the title. Move over Virginia Woolf, step aside Marcel Proust, get back James Joyce, Olivier Schrauwen is here to dilate time and fill it with consciousness, comics-style! Schrauwen's choice of imagery and manner of drawing it adds dimension and perspective to the stream of consciousness, creating meanings otherwise invisible – and in the process puts the comic in comic book. In addition to being a masterpiece, this is a very funny book.

Schrauwen knows how to leverage the innate strengths of comics like few others. If you want to know what ...

Here at Copacetic Comics, we've long been fond of calling Hicksville "The Watchmen of small press comics." This is useful in that practically all comics readers are familiar with and have positive associations with The Watchmen, and we feel that Hicksville is a similarly ambitious, successful and important work, and so is one that we like to draw attention to, and comparing it to The Watchmen is a cheap and easy way to do so. Whether or not this is a good, right or fair thing to say in regards to to the themes and content of the respective works, we're not going to try to defend. The comparison's validity rests more on a historical point...

In this boldly printed, oversize (8 1/4" x 11 1/2") edition of Plaza, Yuichi Yokoyama has managed to translate the frenetic phantasmagoria of hyperconnected late capitalism into page after page after page of manic manga possessed of a relentless rhythmicity that will leave readers reeling in stupefaction. This edition includes a brief interview with and afterword by Yokoyama, conducted by Ryan Holmberg, who also edited and translated this edition.

Here's what a couple of fave Copacetic creators have to say about this work:

Art and literature historians of the future will be flabbergasted that Yokoyama Yuichi existed in our time. He is a...