introduction par Chris Ware Le secret le mieux gardé des vingt dernières années de la bande dessinée est probablement Storeyville. Aucune autre bande dessinée ne capture avec autant de succès l'énergie propulsive américaine que nous associons dans la littérature aux œuvres de Walt Whitman et de Jack Kerouac. Storeyville était sui generis à l’époque de sa publication initiale en 1995, quand il a paru sous la forme d’un journal tabloïde de 40 pages. Poème épique en bande dessinée, il révèle des profondeurs jusque-là inexplorées dans la forme. Employant une audace artistique qui était à l’époque sans égal, Storeyville incorpore des éléments d...
WOW!!! It's here and it's a dream come true. Founding editor of Comic Artmagazine, Todd Hignite has given us an elegant, oversize, beautifully produced, 320 page hardcover book that takes you into the studio and collections of today's top independent cartoonists. Featuring tons (499, to be exact) of reproductions of the highest quality, depicting the original art, personal collections and physical environs of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Charles Burns, Jaime Hernandez, Dan Clowes, Seth, Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti side by side with extensive interviews with the creators themselves, this is a book to savor. Todd Hignite is a...
The definitive account of the early jazz scene -- and so much more...
An unforgettable reading experience that opens new perspectives on American history and cultural life.
Now, at last, back in print from New York Review Books!
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Here it is, what is sure to be the definitive Trots and Bonnie collection. Originally appearing in the pages of National Lampoon from, roughly, the early-1970s to the late-1980s, Trots and Bonnie featured Bonnie,a preternaturally naive13 year-old"everyteen", and her dog, Trots, along with her sidekick, the worldwise Pepsi, and hercomic foil, the clueless male, Elrod. Itwas – and still is – a one of a kind strip. Its creator, Shary Flenniken, employed a strong grasp of the classic strips from back in the earliest days of the Sunday comics page – the line,the pacing, the page layouts, the characterization;all of it – and then drafted it in...
Working in an office building – or even visiting one! – will never be the same again after reading Theo Ellsworth's richly imaginative graphic novel interpretation of Jeff VanderMeer's tale (that was originally published as the lead storyin his2004 collection of the same name). Secret Life, as one might expect,is all about revealing adifferent sort of life lurkingjust below the surface of quotidian normalcy. It only takes an instant to realize that this is straight up Theo Ellsworth's alley! It's close toa perfect match, and Theo really goes to town. It is a bit different seeing him work on a more formally straightforward narrative, and...
Creator of the critically acclaimed Sabrina, Nick Drnaso's highly anticipated new graphic novel,Acting Class, has arrived. In the 248 full color, flat, heavyweight, off-white pages of this hardcover volume, role playing and reality mix it up in the shared headspace of a group of adults who are drawn to the idea of inhabiting new characters as a reult of difficulties in their own lives. Almost immediately, the destabilizing effects of the acting lessons set the stage for the dissolution of borders between actor and role and an ever increasing sense of disorientation.
Set in a world in which all forms of remote communication are quite...
Originally published in 1960 and out of print for many years, The Labyrinth is Saul Steinberg's most significant single volume collection. It has now at long last been reissued in a this superb hardcover edition from New York Review of Books, whichfeaturesa new introduction by Nicholson Baker, along with anafterword by Harold Rosenbergandnew notes on the artwork from by Sheila Schwartz, the Research and Archives Director of The Saul Steinberg Foundation. Steinberg's oeuvre is unique, straddling the worlds of comics, illustration and gallery art whileproviding a window on the process ofcreative thought in line.
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...
If you’re looking for a book to kick-start your brain and move it into a higher gear, a book that will set your thinking on a fresh path and that by doing so will help extricate us, as a society, together, out of our present dark morass, and to provide a strong, sensible, workable basis on which to build a better tomorrow, then look no further –Doughnut Economicsis that book.
Kate Raworth is an educator, researcher and activist currently based at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute who is both smart enough and strong to recognize and identify the errors in the reigning economic theories that underpin the global capitalist...
It is rare indeed when our opinion completely agrees with that of publisher provided cover hype, but in this case it does. The material that Will Eisner produced over a period of 20 years (!!!) for P*S Magazine is indeed, "the missing link between The Spirit and A Contract with God" as the cover states. The work contained in this 272 page hardcover volume has the highest critical-importance to critical-awareness ratio of any work we can think of. It represents the single largest unified body of work of one of the most admired creators in the history of comics, yet very few have read much – if any – of it. Now, thanks to Denis Kitchen, Ann...
Having personally known and professionally worked with Ed Piskor for over twenty years, the news that he has, evidently, taken his own life, came as a deep shock here at Copacetic. We first encountered Ed while he was still a gawky, geeky teenager and had no inkling of the major force in comics that he would go on to become. As we followed his progress from working with Harvey Pekar to self-publishing – and very savvily marketing – Wizzywig, it became apparent that he was both very capable and highly ambitious, and, perhaps most notably, extremely focused on his goals. Once he launched his Hip Hop Family Tree series, he was truly in his element. He took off from there, and didn't look back.
As there is no longer any road ahead for Ed, we will take a moment to look back now and keep him in our thoughts.
We are death. This thing we think of as life is only the sleep of real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die. These worlds have become reversed for us. When we think we are alive, we are dead ... Everything we consider important in our active lives participates in death, is all death. What are ideals but a confession that life is not enough? What is art but negation of life?
...
To consider our greatest anguish an incident of no importance, not just in terms of the life of the universe, but in terms of our own souls, is the beginning of knowledge. To reflect on this whilst in the midst of that anguish is the whole of knowledge. When we suffer, human pain seems infinite. But not even human pain is infinite, because nothing human is infinite, nor is our pain ever anything more than a pain that we have ... The pain of not understanding the mystery of life, the pain of being unloved, the pain of others' injustice to us, the pain of life crushing us, suffocating and imprisoning us ...
To some who speak and listen to me I must seem an insensitive person. However, I am, I think, more sensitive than the vast majority of men. I am, moreover, a sensitive man who knows himself and therefore knows what sensitivity is. It isn't true that life is painful, or that it's painful to think about life. What is true is that our pain is only as serious and important as we pretend it to be. If we live naturally, it would pass as quickly as it came, it would fade as quickly as it bloomed. Everything is nothing, and our pain is no exception.
...
Everyone and everything oppresses me, chokes me, and maddens me; I am troubled by a crushing physical sense of other people's lack of comprehension ... Seeing myself frees me from myself. I almost smile, not because I understand myself, but because, having become other, I'm no longer able to understand myself. High up in the sky, like a visible void, hangs one tiny cloud, a pale forgotten fragment of the whole universe.
– Fernando Pesoa, from The Book of Disquiet (translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa)
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