This volume reissues the seminal, long out-of-print, and highly sought after volume which collected Spiegelman's trailblazing (pre-Maus)1970s work. These are the thoroughly original, self-aware comics about comics through which he forged a comics of deconstruction. This, in turn, led him, along with his wife, François Mouly, to pioneer a new comics aesthetics that forefronted comics' formal properties, consciously focused on the mechanics of production and that changed the face of comics in the 1980s: RAW. And there's more: this fabulous, oversize harcover volume includes a 20-page introduction in comics form in which Spiegelman takes the...

Action and adventure comics simply don't get any better than this epic graphic novel by Jiro Taniguchi. Conceived of as an homage to the "spaghetti westerns" of cinema and bandes dessinée – especially the Lt. Blueberry series by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Taniguchi outdoes them all in this tale of cowboys and indians... and samurai!

Sky Hawk is an historically accurate account of the post-civil war American west. As the railroads spanned the continent, an alliance (some might call it a conspiracy) of the railroad companies, the US government and gold hungry settlers of European ancestry pushed the Native American Indians off of more and more...

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...

There's no point in trying to compete with Chris Ware's own description of his latest project, so we won't. Here it is:

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Written by Chris Ware, Preface by Ira Glass, Introduction by Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman

A flabbergasting experiment in publishing hubris,Monographcharts the art and literary world's increasing tolerance for the language of the empathetic doodle directly through the work of one of its most esthetically constipated practitioners.

For thirty years, writer and artist (i.e. cartoonist) Chris Ware (b. 1967) has been testing the patience of readers and fine art fans with his complicated and...

BACK IN PRINT AT LAST! This is the big book that has it all! Originally serialized in Biggu Komiku in 1970-71, and a personal favorite of the artist, manga founding-father Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito is a unique effort, in more than one respect. Weighing in at a mammoth 822 pages, Ode is the first of Tezuka's works to incorporate adult themed gekiga (see Tatsumi's Abandon the Old in Tokyo) elements. Perhaps paradoxically, it is also a work that while dealing with the darker sides of human nature simultaneously deals with Christian (Kirihito is a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of Christ, Kirisuto) themes -- specifically of overcoming...

Wow, a double dose of Ron Regé, Jr.! (along with YH #12, which was released simultaneously) This one is technically Yeast Hoist #(lucky)13. It is a beautifully drawn, designed and produced square format volume. Printed in two colors with a full color flexi cover and endpapers this book is an aesthetic treat and a bargain to boot. Ron Regé, Jr. is channelling the spirit of the 20th century American painter, Charles Burchfield into 21st century comics. Like Burchfield's paintings, Regé's comics in this volume fill the viewer/reader with a sense of wonder at the impossible beauty and strange otherness of nature. His work really puts you...

Ronald Wimberly & Co. are back with another issue of the broadsheet newspaper art magazine, LAAB! A feast for the mind as well as the eyes, it features a host of fascinating pieces chock full of interesting insights designed to challenge our perceptions and conceptions of yesterday, today and tomorrow. This issue "concerns themes of death and environmental devastation, horror, hauntology, necropolitics, and the anthropocene. We ask what it means to die, and what it means to live -- and what might have to die for a future to be born." While this issue states that it is "#4", it is in fact the second issue, so, as long as you have the ...

Craig Thompson's long awaited follow up to Blankets – one of the most widely and loudly lauded graphic novels in history – is now weighing heavily on the shelves here at Copacetic. A sprawling, multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-pronged work, Habibi is part history lesson, part tutorial, part travelogue, part anthro/socio/psychological study, part sermon, and all love story. Thompson clearly had outsized ambitions for this work, likely necessitated by the high expectations surrounding any follow up to Blankets. It's always an additional challenge for creators to follow up a highly praised work. Should they try to compete with their big...

The sub-title does not lie: this book isindeed chock full of tales of mischief. In fact, there are21 full color 6 page comics featuring Akissi & Co. getting into all sorts of trouble, both in their home stomping grounds in theYopougon neighborhood of Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)and out in the country at Akissi's nan and granpap's rural digs, where the natural world plays a larger part in the shenanigans. These are kids comics par excellence; think Dennis the Menace without the hyperbole. In Akissi, the world of childhood comes alive on the page: the zany antics, the interactions of children withtheir parents and peers, the...

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...