Golden Boyis an exuberant portrayal of the early, formative years of the object of thePeanutscharacter, Schroeder’s obsession, the German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. Originally published in Germany in 2020, it has now been released in North America in an English translation by Nika Knight that well captures the spirit and style of the original German. This attractive, 192 page, full color, hardcover edition comes to us courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. It is by turns fascinating, fun, insightful, entertaining and altogether hugely enjoyable.

Mikael Ross, whose previous work from Fantagraphics,The Thuddisplayed a highly developed level...

Picking up where the first issue left off, Cold Heat #2 revs it up a few notches and takes us on a whirlwind ride through the dis-united states of the disturbed American psyche. Series artist, Frank Santoro once again refuses to play it safe. This time around he pulls out all the stops and takes the chances that most other artists wouldn't take even if they could. Leaping into the artistic no man's land between the well established borders of pre-existent genres, Santoro combines the propulsive narratives of mainstream American heroic adventure comics, the exaggerated expressiveness of Japanese manga, and the naivete of self-published...

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...

The cover image with whichthe collectedArt Comicfirst greets the eye,in juxtaposing Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void” with Jeff Koon’s “Balloon Dog,” sends a strong, clear signal of what is in store for the reader, once they crack the cover. The protagonist’s leap here is made with an expression mixing equal parts of hope,fear and anxiety (with, perhaps, a hint of aggression), likely matchingThurber’s own feelings regarding the work’s central concern: the contemporary, NYC-centered, fine art world, and his experiences therein and thereof.

The story begins from the perspective of youthful idealism embodied by students attending Thurber’s...

Sub-titled, "July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme",The Great Warpresents in a single image a visual distillation of the events of that day. While this is not the first 20+ foot-long single image comics book that has come our way – that honor going to Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel's hyper kineticElvis Road, originally published in Switzerland in 2002 by Pipifax, and then in the USA by Buenaventurra Press in 2007. But whereas Elvis Road presented a frenzied instant of urban chaos that was unreadable – in the sense that there was simply no way to narratively digest the complexity of the image; all one could do was bask in...

Sacha Mardou is a natural born comics storyteller. Her pen & ink characters live and breath on the page. The situations they find themselves in, their reactions to them, and the way it all plays out in the pages of her comics works have a verisimilitude that few other comics creators can match. The Sky in Stereois her first foray into long form comics (i.e., a graphic novel). She's been at work on it for a number of years (she and her husband, fellow comics maker, Ted May are also raising a child, who was an infant at the start of Sky in Stereo) and has released two of it's chapters as successful stand-alone comics. Here in this...

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,...

Though he is better known now as the creator of a series of Victorian murder mysteries, back in the day Rick Geary was (more or less) the Richard Brautigan of comics. He pioneered the genre of short, off-kilter stories that, by virtue of their peculiar slant on the events they portray, continue to provide readers with fresh perspectives on the mundane. The stories contained in Housebound are, on average, over twenty years old, but they are as unique now as they were when he first laid Rapidiograph pen to paper. Quirky, entertaining and fun, this book is a one of a kind* treasure that is now out of print... but we still have a few left!...