Back in print at last, this classic memoir of Chester's high school obsession with Playboy Magazine disabused Hugh Hefner of his notion that Playboy was just good clean fun - but only for the five minutes or so it took him to put it out of his mind. Other, more engaged thinkers will hold onto this impression a bit longer. It's hard for most to realize in this day and age when the high school memoir is a major staple of the comics – or should we say, graphic novel – market, but when the comics that make up this volume, and its companion piece, I Never Liked You, were first serialized in the pages of Yummy Fur, they were like nothing anyone...

Kus! mono #11: This Year Is Next Year's Last Year by Christopher Sperandio

This Year Is Next Year's Last Year takes classic old school public domain comics – that look like they're largely from the 1950s, but maybe also some from the '40s and/or early 60s – and remixes them in all their newsprint saturated four-color glory in high quality scans repurposed via newly created (by Mr. Sperandio, we can only assume) text approriately rendered in a digital recreation of Leroy Lettering (or a close approximation therof) to create a caustic comics satire of the sad state of affairs that is the USA today. Everything is printed just right and really...

Pittsburgh is now at last back in print in a sturdy softcover edition from New York Review Comics. This edition features heavier, slightly brighter paper – subtly altering color reproduction relative to the hardcover, yet every bit as sharp. Nice job! And as for the book itself, here's our original write-up:

A story that required years of fermentation to arrive at its requisite form, Pittsburgh is a comics meditation on family and identity that unfolds within a complex matrix of time, place and self as it is inscribed within memory. On the surface, it is a memoir of the artist's parents' courtship, marriage and divorce – and its...

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...

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'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, Max Ernst and Franz Kafka, and then convert the whole shebang into a pen-and-ink graphic...

YES! Olivier Schrauwen's one-of-a-kind masterwork is back in print, in this very nicely done French-flapped softcover edition. Fantagraphics has done right by this classic, carrying over the production specifics from the hardcover in this softcover: same crisp duo-tone (red & blue) printing, same toothy, flat, off-white paperstock. Very nice. The one significant difference is that it is printed in a slightly (roughly 15%) smaller size – 7 3/4" x 9 1/2" compared to the 9" x 11 1/4" of the hardcover. At last, those Copacetic customers who missed out on this during its original release can experience this mind-bending work.

Here's our...

Reid Paley's now classic 1999 debut solo LP, Lucky's Tune has at long last been released on (140g) vinyl, in a limited, SIGNED, gatefold edition of 1000 copies from Demon Records in the UK.

A key architect of the Pittsburgh punk scene, among whose many roles were show promoter, gig securer, venue locator, press liaison, actor in the seminal Pittsburgh punk film, Debt Begins at Twenty and, oh yeah, being the front man for Pittsburgh's greatest punk band (which later relocated to Boston), THE FIVE, Reid Paley has gone on to have a lengthy solo career, based in Brooklyn, NY where he continues to write, record and perform his unique brand of...

Having devoted himself to assembling the massively influential series of anthologies,Kramers Ergot, Sammy Harkham now at last steps into the spotlight himself in this collection devoted solely to his own work. Published by PictureBox,Everything Togetherlives up to its title, collecting a decade's worth of Harkham's concentrated comics narratives. Opening with hisminimalist meditations on personal perspective, "Napoleon" and "Elisha", the work ranges from hismost sustained pieces, the epic "Poor Sailor", "Somersaulting," the upside-down-under memoir of Australian adolescence, and "Lubavitch, Ukraine, 1876", to his short, comics-insider...

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...