The fabulous Fantagraphics project to collect the complete classic Carl Barks comics featuring the "Disney" Ducks – which could more accurately be described as the Barks Ducks – continues with this volume devoted to Barks's most famous creation, Uncle Scrooge. "Only a Poor Man" collects the entirety of the first six issues of Uncle Scrooge that were originally published between 1952 and 1954. Not only are the classic Scrooge epics that form the bulk of each of the six issues collected here (for the record: "Only a Poor Old Man", "Back to the Klondike", "The Horse Radish Treasure", "The Menehune Mystery", "The Secret of Atlantis" and...

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...

Defying the norm, this second collection of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's classic romance comics – a genre which they created, by the way; Young Romance #1 was the very first romance comic book – is a better book than the first volume, with both stronger stories and superior reproduction than the first volume. Romance was among the most successful of comic book genres in the history of the form, and was the most popular during its heyday of the late '40s and early '50s – the period on display in this excellent volume. Many people have a negative perception of romance comics as cliche ridden melodramas of brainless women duped into marriage by...

FROM THE ARCHIVES

ONE very nice, as new,ex-library copy. This cover has been laminated and the spine has been stickered; also a blacked-out barcode on back cover; plus a library stamp on the front endpapers and title page. Other than that, clean and apparently unread. Here's a chance to snag this coming of age classic for less!

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Five years in the making – by the team that brought you the Certified Copacetic Classic, This One Summer – Roaming is a triune portrait of youthful awakening into the dawning of adulthood. Over the course of its over 400 pages, the Tamakis weave layer upon layer of exuberence, curiosity and experience...

Anyone on the lookout for intellectually stimulating, æsthetically challenging work – regardless of the form it takes – should be sure to investigate the comics of Dash Shaw. Shaw is a sophisticated visual thinker and natural experimenter unconstrained by generic conventions or audience expectations. In Doctors, soap operatic melodrama mixes freely with science fiction concepts (Philip Jose Farmer / Philip K Dick) and both are together presented to the reader with a bold decisive formalism that simultaneously brings to mind painters such as Hans Hoffman and filmmakers like Jean Luc Godard. The final product is in intriguing investigation...

What can you say about a book that opens with a Galactus quote from Fantastic Four #49, drops more comics references -- particularly to the classics of the 1980s -- than any novel we've ever read, clearly shows the influence of Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar and, especially, Luba stories, AND won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel of 2007? We'd say, "This is a must read! Particularly suitable for fans of Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and Michael Chabon's (also Pulitzer Prize winning) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." And then we'd add: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a gigantic meditation on the inner life of the...

FROM THE ARCHIVES

A run of nine consecutive volumes of Ranma 1/2 by one and only Rumiko Takahashi. Ranma 1/2 is a true classic manga series, whose influence on subsequent shoojo manga is hard to overstate. It also offers a wealth of humorous observations on gender norms and gender construction, to boot!

We came across this run in the archives; all new and unread. If there's anyone who picked up the first volume and is ready to read more, this is a perfect opportunity to do so!