<<• edited by Chris Polkki •>>  Don't let the fact that some of your favorite comics anthologies are concluding their runs get you down:  there's a world of comics out there waiting to be discovered.  Take this swell 100-page anthology from 2005, for example.  We thought it was long gone, but we stumbled on a source and so are eager to let late-comers in on this swell package of comics from around the world, with a special emphasis on the Japanese avant garde.  Bête Noire features what we believe was the first North American publication of Yuichi Yokoyama, as well as works by fellow Japanese manga masters Junko Mizuno, Ichiba Daisuke, Takeshi Nemoto and Suzy Amakane.  Also on hand are Helge Reumann of Switzerland, Anke Feuchtenberger of Germany, Ludovic Debeurme, Lucie Durbiano and Caroline Sury of France, as well as artists from Italy, Spain, Finland, along with Kevin Scalzo, Renée French and cover artist David Heatley from the USA.  Recommended for readers of Kramers Ergot, MOME and Blood Orange (which Mr. Polkki also edited).

These difficult-to-find works have now been collected in a solid, hardcover tome – by New York Review Comics, of course.  Here's what NYRC has to say about it:

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West German–born Katrin de Vries read a magazine featuring the drawings of the East German–born Anke Feuchtenberger. De Vries wrote to ask Feuchtenberger if she might want to collaborate, and together they’ve produced some of the most striking German comics of the last thirty years, most notably W the Whore.

Collected here in English for the first time, W the Whore, W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, and W the Whore Throws the Glove present the shared vision of de Vries and Feuchtenberger at its most ambitious. The titular heroine, W the Whore, drawn in a shifting guise by Feuchtenberger, navigates the tedious rituals of womanhood, the unsettling mysteries of male desire, and the strangeness of motherhood, all while moving through a familiar but hostile everyday landscape of houses, factories, rail yards, and other ominous structures. An intimate and captivating work of comics, W the Whore is a testament to the challenges of existing in the bodies that we have been fated to inhabit, and what we do to persevere.