I Am Young reads likea series oflushly renderedpostcards sent through time from eras past, eachaccompanied by an illustrated "soundtrack" consisting of classic LPs. Running throughout, as the main theme, is an ill-starred love story set to the music, lives and times of The Beatles. Other LPs incorporated into the narratives of love and heartbreak are Eddy Arnold's Anytime, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, theTom Jones debut, Along Came Jones (ironic or not ironic? / that is the question), along withChuck Berry's greatest hits collection, The Great Twenty-Eight –and it all gets started with a Brunswick 78 rpm 10" of Cab Calloway's "St. James...

by Anneli Furmark, Amanda Vähämäki, and T. Edward Bak We listed this last month, but in our haste neglected to write it up, a gross oversight on our part, as you will see... This volume has a special Scandinavian focus, with two of the three comics works originating in the somber lands of the midnight sun. A melancholy northern mood pervades the entire collection, including its centerpiece, the contribution of the lone North American, T. Edward Bak. The Partisan -- his first fully developed work since Service Industry, the work for which he is best known -- is a complex multi-layered work that (or, at least, so it seems to us) seeks to...

Hot House has at long last arrived here at Copacetic! The publisher, Fieldmouse Press, has produced a very nice, heavy-duty, oversize (9" x 11"), Smyth-sewn hardcover edition that runs 100 pages; in black & white, of course.

A notably multidisciplinary artist, John Hankiewicz is best known among Copacetic customers for his comics work, which features a labored, detailed pen & ink drawing style that has gradually evolved over his quarter century of comics making. His comics work is also especially notable for its highly successful translations of verbal/textual poetic principles such as meter, foot and rhyme into their visual/comics...

Here it is, the book that put Katchor firmly on the map when it was first published in 1996. While he has been regularly producing comics in and about NYC since the 1980s, and had already had one collection –Cheap Novelties– published by Penguin (and recently reissued by D & Q),Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographeris the book which finally attracted the attention that Katchor’s work had long deserved. Katchor’s pen and ink (and ink wash!) comics create a parallax lens which show a reality that is invisible to others, that transports readers through a crack in the surface of “reality” to reveal a magical series of vignettes that seem –...

This collection of works from the early 1980s by Millhauser starts off with August Eschenburg, a prototypical tale which serves as the template for several later Millhauser works, most notably Martin Dressler (see below). The middle section is composed of three stylistically linked forays into the classic short story mode, each of which stages an elaborate wedding of location with season to produce an exquisite evocation of an exact yet unnameable emotion, and each of which manages to pull it off. The stories that will really having you reaching for the champagne to celebrate their success, however, are the three that close out the volume,...

WIth Halcyon: Hermeneutics, or "The New Cartoon Utopia, Ron Rege, Jr. channels the Skibber Bee Bye vibe into a hybridic (schizophrenic?) enhanced/virtual reality // back to nature future via the hyper-connected computer/gaming saturated present and in the process continues to build his unique brand of visionary comics. This foray into the fantastic realms takes the physical form of a 112 page, giant-size (10+" x 12+"), full (flat) color, laminated hardcover volume. Angels and devils (who may be one and the same?) and other celestial beings of the spirit realm dash and dart about the cosmos, both inner and outer – and while doing so,...

Available again at last, courtesy New York Review Comics (thanks!), after being out of print for decades,Gary Panter's Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise originally exploded on the comics scene in 1988 and forever changed the landscape. It is arguable that moreformal innovation is contained in this work than in any other single work of comics. Jimbo open up vast new territories for comics, territories that have been avidly explored ever since by a host of innovative artists that have followed the trail that Panter blazed here (and elsewhere, of course; but this is the motherlode). Now, a new generation of readers, including the artists among...

Brecht Evens, creator of The Wrong Place, The Making Of and Panther (all of which except forPanther, which was, thankfully, just reprtinted arecurrently – and shockingly –out of print here in North America)has,in TheCity of Belgium,likely produced hismasterpiece.There might not be any other work that compares in the effectiveness ofits conveyance of the feeling of being immersed in the overflowing of city life, of the sense of being aware of everything, of being surrounded byso much – too much – that ishappening all aroundat every moment. Ariotous explosion of color and details communicate the overwhelming feelings that accompany this...

The fabulous Fantagraphics project to collect the complete classic Carl Barks comics featuring the "Disney" Ducks – which could more accurately be described as the Barks Ducks – continues with this volume devoted to Barks's most famous creation, Uncle Scrooge. "Only a Poor Man" collects the entirety of the first six issues of Uncle Scrooge that were originally published between 1952 and 1954. Not only are the classic Scrooge epics that form the bulk of each of the six issues collected here (for the record: "Only a Poor Old Man", "Back to the Klondike", "The Horse Radish Treasure", "The Menehune Mystery", "The Secret of Atlantis" and...