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...

It's here! It looks... AMAZING!!! Featuring the work of many of today's most adventurous comickers and cartoonists, the ninth volume in this epoch-making anthology harkens back to the look, feel and heft of the fourth, which was the volume that put Kramers on the map, and is still the sentimental favorite at Copacetic. Here we have a highly informed selection of 288 pages of comics that draws on Harkham's knowledge of and connections with the contemporary comics making community. The work he has assembled here displays a full spectrum of the amazing variety of what the form is capable of expressing. Miss at your own peril!

BACK IN STOCK....

While Darwyn Cooke originally planned for a two-year stint on The Spirit, circumstances conspired to cut his run short at the halfway mark. The evidence of this final issue -- an exigetical adaptation of Eisner's original Sand Saref story (the same story Frank Miller's upcoming movie is also using as it's core text) -- bears out that this is all it took for Cooke to bore right to the core of not just the character of The Spirit but of the spirit of the noir sensibility itself. Through his masterful employment of Eisner's late style (which Eisner himself used to portray the past; i.e. his own childhood during the depression out of which so...

Boundless is a 248 assemblage composed of ninetales: World Class City;Body Pods;The Clairfree System;1. Jenny;Half Life;Darla!;bedbug;Sexcoven;Boundless. Each is possessed of itsown individual artistic personality, chosen to best visually convey the character of the story:rough and ready;smooth and silky;precise;loose;colorful;stark. Here, the real story is the way in which the taleis told. Decision embodied in line and composition.

Each of the pieces, while being a unique organic whole in and of itself, is part of a greater whole as well; part ofa tapestric unity. These stories deal with individuals alone, together and in groups. They...

At looooong last – the first issue of Ganges was published in 2006 – the completeGangeshas been collected in this excellent hardcover volume from Drawn and Quarterly. And not just collected: In preparing this work for its permanent home, Huizenga went through the original issues with his inspector's hat on and tweaked this here and fixed that there, with the goal of bringing it all together in the best shape and form possible. Anyone who is looking for challenging, thought-provoking comics that push the boundaries of what comics can do – look no further, this is it!

In the meantime, we have written extensively on each of the individual...

Mister Baker, perhaps the funniest cartoonist alive, steps out of his clown shoes and puts on his severest suit and tie to deliver this sermon of repression and defiance, violence and vengeance, and struggle and sacrifice, in this synecdochical story of slavery in these United States. Reading this book, in which the narrative is advanced almost entirely in images (pantomime style) interspersed with excerpts from The Confessions of Nat Turner, it is impossible not to marvel at the strength of Baker's storytelling. And, there is a method to the madness of attempting to relate so complex a tale entirely in images. It captures the forced...

What more can be said about the genius of Carl Barks? It towers over the landscape of comics history like the statue of Duckburg's founder, Cornelius Coot (erected by Uncle Scrooge in "Statuesque Spendthrifts" fromWalt Disney's Comics and Stories#138; collected inA Christmas for Shacktown),towers over that fair city. The title tale of this latest volume in the 15 year project to collect the entirety of Barks's Disney oeuvre, "The Old Castle's Secret" is a classic book-length tale of eerie mystery that was originally presented inFour Color#189, published in the summer of 1948, that provides the first fleshed out iteration of Uncle Scrooge...

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (JCTSKOE) is, first and foremost, the tale of the development of the American super-ego, it’s human cost, and its relationship to the comic book super-hero. Ware’s choice of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 to serve simultaneously as historical signifier and the origin of his narrative is key in this regard. It is with the exposition of 1893 -- most importantly, at least as far as JCTSKOE is concerned, in its design and architecture-- that the USA reveals its fantasy of, and implicit ambition towards, empire in the classical Greco/Roman mold. It was Walt Whitman’s fever dream made flesh-- or at least...

Yes, it has finally come to pass: Ed the Happy Clown is back in print in book form for the first time in decades, in what is likely to be the definitive edition. This is the ground breaking work that both put Chester Brown on the map and broadened the horizons of comics in the 1980s, causing a seismic shift in its landscape and charting a new direction away from heroic fantasy through a methodology that, in hindsight, can be seen to be – at least in some respects – a deconstruction of the psychological as well as epistemological underpinnings of that genre, which has since become dominated by corporate entertainment behemoths. Ed the Happy...