Never one to rest on her laurels, Ms. Davis has once again headed out into new territory, thematic as well as technical. Superficially the tale of an all-girl suburban sleepover pool party at the home of the divorced father of one of the girls – the titular character –Libby's Dad is a multilayered andmultileveled tale of the porous border between innocence and ignorance. Set firmly in the present, Davis pithily portrays contemporary mores and cogently addresses contemporary concerns in her presentation of both story and setting, yet manages to evoke timeless narratives that echo – albeit indirectly – biblical themes, specifically that of...

Finally! A new – and very improved – edition of Seiichi Hayashi's manga masterpiece of alienation has been releasesd by Drawn and quarterly. This new edition has a nice heft and feel, and the design has been slightly tweaked for a mild aesthetic improvement, but the big change is the addition of a 60 page, illustrated essay by manga/gekiga/Garo scholar, Ryan Homberg. The inclusion of this essay will enable all readers to better situate Hayashi's work in manga history and better appreciate his achievements. As Red Colored Elegy is over 45 years old, andHayashi's work is far from typical manga fare, Holmberg's essay is a crucial improvement...

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...

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,...

Speaking of "a whole new approach to comics," what better fits this description than MOME? To any readers who might have felt a creeping worry that MOME wouldn't be able to keep it up, that there simply wasn't enough high calibre new work being produced to keep MOME floating on its lofty plane, let us be first to say that these fears can be laid to rest with this issue, which is arguably the best yet. It starts off with a new Al Columbia piece that (finally) lives up to the promise of his outsized rep. "5:45 A.M." is a story which shows us that, yes, God is in the details. In a mere eight, actionless panels -- more or less a tableaux...

The power of images to communicate is amply demonstrated in the pages of The Longest Day of the Future. Lucas Varela simultaneously constructs and communicates an entire future society predicated on a projected subsuming of national political systems into that of corporate business, one in which corporate icons dominate personal identity and brand loyalty trumps all. This is accomplished entirely without words, in this 120 page full color pantomime graphic novel that was originally published in France. There is more, of course, to this work than simply the construction of a future society. There is also its deconstruction which is set in...

The greatness continues! 1950 was the year of Carl Barks. Along with the title track this volume includes the mega-classics, "In Ancient Persia," "The Magic Hour Glass," "Big-Top Bedlam," the lessser know but nonetheless classic Christmas tale, "You Can't Guess," and perhaps the greatest summer vaction comic book story ever penned, "Vacation Time." Also on hand are a lone ten-pager from WDC&S #117 and three low-profile tales that accompanied "Vacation Time" in the pages of Vacation Parade #1: a one-page written but not drawn by Barks, and two tales that are drawn but, unusually,not written by Barks; one featuring Grandma Duck, and one...

"The definitive course in comics narrative" continues, as Mastering Comics ventures deeper into the wilderness of formal comics instruction, widening and extending the trail blazed by Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. This horizontally formatted volume follows the same textbookish format as its precursor; this time around divided into eleven lessons, rather than 15, and at 318 pages is a tad heftier. This works out to lessons that are on average 50% longer and more in depth. In other words, Mastering Comics is a 200 level class to DW&WP's 100 level (although the authors clearly state that DW&WP is not a prerequisite for MC)....