Here it is: the best selling work (when combining the sales of its two previous incarnations) in the history of The Copacetic Comics Company has finally been published in a richly deserved, shelf-worthy – and, more to the point, library friendly – permanent edition. This 120 page hardcover is printed on archival white stock and presents the complete original work along with bonus pages documenting its history. Originally self-published in 2001 as Super Monster #14, "Gloriana" was the culmination of Huizenga's development as an artist, knitting together all his strengths as a comics theoretician, cartoonist and graphic explicator to produce...

A Body Beneath collects DeForge's flagship title, Lose in a single, affordable volume designed with reading in mind. The release of this volume marks another milestone in the establishment of DeForge at the forefront of contemporary comics, as with its release the bulk of his corpus is now easily available, in this and two other volumes – 2013's Very Casual, also from Koyama, and Ant Colony, a hardcover released earlier this year by Drawn and Quarterly. To be sure, there are still plenty of obscurities out there that are worth hunting for, including recent anthology work in a variety of publications, three issues of Kid Mafia, The Boy in...

Unstable Molecules is one of the best graphic novels Marvel has produced... well, possibly, ever, but, to hedge our bets, let’s say, "in quite awhile." In any event, it is like nothing Marvel has ever produced in the past. It is a textual analysis of comics done in comics, and it is one of the finest ever produced -- certainly the finest ever produced by Marvel! It should be considered in the context of Understanding Comics and Hicksville as much as the Fantastic Four. Telling the "true" story of the "real people" that the Fantastic Four were based on, this book is a work of metacomics and a dream come true for students of narrative theory...

A tour de force of comics formalism, John Hankiewicz's graphic novel, Education is a bolt from the blue. Hankiewicz's comics work is perilously difficult to describe, butwe're going to take a moment to get our thoughts in order here at Copacetic... andmake anattempt to back upour encouragementto any and all takers to tackle the challenge proffered byEducation,throughhighlighting its artistic virtues,as it is a work that will offer rewards more thancommensurate with the efforts made to come to terms with it.

On the purely æsthetic level of the drawing and, especially, the composition, each page is a gem of finecraftsmanship. Onthe level of...

Writtenand drawn – and designed – by the Italian artist, Igort (translated into English by Jamie RIchards) and printed in Italy, Japanese Notebooks is a sumptuous visual feast. It is also, of course, much more. It is: an investigation of the personal forces that drive artists to create in general andto pursuethe particular paths they do; an exploration ofhow their imaginationscome to be possessed byspecific images; a memoir of one particular artist's journey; and much else. Igort is one of the most accomplished comics makers currently working, and Japanese Notebooks is likelyhis most personal work yet, one that is apt to hold aparticular...

Yes, it has finally come to pass: Ed the Happy Clown is back in print in book form for the first time in decades, in what is likely to be the definitive edition. This is the ground breaking work that both put Chester Brown on the map and broadened the horizons of comics in the 1980s, causing a seismic shift in its landscape and charting a new direction away from heroic fantasy through a methodology that, in hindsight, can be seen to be – at least in some respects – a deconstruction of the psychological as well as epistemological underpinnings of that genre, which has since become dominated by corporate entertainment behemoths. Ed the Happy...

Perfect timing! Dark Horse has just published The Life and TImes of Martha Washington in the 21st Century,which collects the complete Martha Washingtonsaga by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. Created over a period of twenty years starting in the late 80s with Give Me Liberty, this story is set in an early 21st century America that is splitting at the seams and headed towards civil war. Sound familiar? Now's your chance to see what today looked like from the vantage point of a quarter century (or so) back. All 560 pages of the saga are here + a 40 page scrapbook of preliminary sketches, thumbnail layouts, promo posters and more, making for a...

Here it is in all its glory: the complete X'ed Out Trilogy – X'ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull – altogether in a single, attractive and affordable, full-size, softcover collection. Conceived as a Burnsian tribute to Herge's TinTin, the tale told in Last Look is a tortuously twisted take on thoseepic adventures in which the polyanna-ish innocence of TinTin is replaced molecule by molecule with the corruptions that are so readily at hand inthe world as we find it and, crucially, inthe world as our humanimagination makes it, as well. Perhapsmost of all, Burns demonstratesthe way in which these two worlds intersect.It is here that the...