At long last, a book edition – and a swell hardcover, no less – collecting Ethan Rilly's excellent Pope Hats series (issues 2, 3 & 5). Only, it turns out, Ethan Rilly is really... Hartley Lin*! So, now we have Young Frances by Hartley Lin. A finely crafted tale of young urbanites navigating the worlds of work and life as they come of age in 21st centuryNorth America. Recommended.

Don't want to take our word for it? Then how about these wordsfromsomeone whose opinion is worth paying attention to:

"Young Frances is a meditation on work and meaning. Its depiction of corporate culture and the finesse required to exist within it feels...

Underground comix live! Gary Panter's Crashpad is a classic old school underground comic book that is a comic book about old school underground comic books: what they were, what they are, what they mean, where they come from, where they're going. Did we mention acid? Cover to cover comics; every line drawn by Panter; 36 pages. Black and white interior art on heavy newsprint. "Gain intuition to the endless play of becoming free."

ONE COPY

Believe it or not, it's been over twenty years since the publication of Understanding Comics, which established the breakthrough realization that the most effective way to truly explain how comics work is in comics form. Now, at last, we have the next iteration of this understanding: that the most effective way to explain how comics presented here as consciously thinking and writing and, of course, reading — in a free flowing combination of images and text — are changing the way we represent our world and understand ourselves is also in comics form. Unflattening, just published by Harvard University Press, is the book form of Sousanis's...

We were excited enough by this book's publicationthat we ordered it – from France – in it's originalFrench language release (resulting in us charging more than twice as much as we are for this North American release!). While, of course, there have been comics about jazz in the past – some of the best of which, intriguingly, have also originated in Europe– in Total Jazz, Blutch, comics master that he is, has done more than most to bring the spirit of jazz to itsrepresentation in comics form;working towardstranslating the jazzethos of improvisation within formal compositions into the language of comics. While many of the short pieces...

The follow up to last year's It Never Happened, New Construction features two new comics novellas, "Backyard" and "Household."Each is tautly rendered in Alden's forceful pencil line. New Construction is aptly titled in that it is put together diferently. It is a bifurcated edition, with the first tale, "Backyard," being both tightly rendered and printed on a (relatively) bright cream colored stock, while the second, "Household" is far more loose and expressionistic in its rendering and is printed on a dull light gray newsprint. It is worth noting here that the reproduction quality in New Construction is significantly superior to that of It...

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...

Inspired by Raymond Queneau's 1947 opus, Exercises in Style, reigning comics formalist, Matt Madden undertook to transliterate this deconstructive approach to the practice of storytelling into the language of comics. Six years in the making, 99 Ways has accomplished exactly that. Taking the most mundane of events so as not distract from the formal elements, each of the 99 ways meticulously illustrated in this volume tell the story of Matt's journey from his drawing table to the refrigerator. Absurd? Yes, but that's the idea. It's all about how, not about what. It may sound like a crazy idea, but we're pretty sure that this volume will be...

THE FIVE-VinylLP
Produced by LouGiordanoatWhiteDog

REIDPALEY-Vocals

TOMMORAN-Guitar

DAVEDOREMUS-Bass

BRIANGILLESPIE-Drums

Believe it or not, westillhave some factorysealed copies of the original 1989 vinyl LP release ofTHE FIVE,
straight out of the original pressing plant boxes,in gleaming black vinyl, and arecurrently offeringthemfor the amazingly
copaceticpriceof $16.75

SIDE ONE

TheLongHaul
NoRegrets
AllTheWay
Invocation
AllRight
PrayForMe

SIDE TWO

SacredHeart
TheOnlyHonorableThing
SameToMe
CutMeLoose
TheFatLadySings
WhenYrDone

"Clearly the most pivotal and important of all Pittsburgh bands.THE FIVE, (who...

Final Cut presents – for the first time in English – Burns's latest major work, that had up to now only been available in the French language editions published by Cornelius under the title Dédales. All three Cornelius volumes are collected here in an elegantly designed and produced, 224 page, full color, clothbound hardcover volume by Pantheon Books. Very Nice.

Anyone familiar with the work of Charles Burns will not be surprised to learn that Final Cut is a multi-levelled work; that there are layers within layers. Even the title, which has an obvious first level meaning, is open to multiple readings. The action is set, as per usual with...