Here is a one of a kind item. It is a real challenge to describe just how different it is. Ronald Wimberly has long been a student of Japanese culture and æsthetics – among much else – and has leveraged that experience into this multi-levelled, ultimately unclassifiable work (and that unclassifiability is very much part of its significance). Wimberly has the chops to code switch between a host of stylistic practices both visual and linguistic, encompassing classical Japanese forms and practices, European high culture, American academia (which is represented here by several essays by recognized scholars writing on Wimberly's work that are...

We've been big fans of the work of Mr. Hankiewicz for quite some time, and are thrilled to be able to offer Sparkplug Comic Books' massive new 108-page, 8 1/2" x 11" collection of his totally unique, perplexingly obscure, abstrusely enigmatic, elegantly rendered pen and ink parables and small tales. This work is frustratingly difficult to describe, and we're not going to try at this juncture. (OK, we'll give it a lame whirl: think of the precise, detail driven work of Charles Sheeler (got it?) and then add to this a blend of David Lynch, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Franz Kafka, and then convert the whole shebang into a pen-and-ink graphic...

Another impossibly good album from the one and only Joe Henry. Amazingly, you can listen to the entire LP online at his site, HERE (Just click on "Launch MP3 player to listen"). And while you're listening to it, you can take a moment to read the note he penned on the day of its release, HERE. And, please note that both the package and booklet covers feature photographs taken by Eugene Smith in Pittsburgh, PA during his epic Dream Street project of 1955-56.

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...

This is perhaps the longest awaited work in the history of comics (No? Let us know what, in your estimation, beats it.). Over ten years in the making, Mazzucchelli's first ever solo graphic novel is also his first major work since his 1994 graphic adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass, a trailblazing, highly influential work which put him at the forefront of the then nascent "serious" graphic novel movement. David Mazzucchelli's work with Frank Miller in the mid-80s -- Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One -- made him amainstream comics superstar, but then he walked away from it all to pursue his own calling of an independent,more...

Creator of the critically acclaimed Sabrina, Nick Drnaso's highly anticipated new graphic novel,Acting Class, has arrived. In the 248 full color, flat, heavyweight, off-white pages of this hardcover volume, role playing and reality mix it up in the shared headspace of a group of adults who are drawn to the idea of inhabiting new characters as a reult of difficulties in their own lives. Almost immediately, the destabilizing effects of the acting lessons set the stage for the dissolution of borders between actor and role and an ever increasing sense of disorientation.

Set in a world in which all forms of remote communication are quite...

Miraculously, after two decades of less than stellar recordings, Iggy has managed a return to form here on this album, produced at age 65 and released close on the heels of his 66th birthday. This is doubtless due in no small measure to the return of James Williamson on the heels of the multi-year reunion of Iggy with the (almost) original Stooges line-up. The presence of the Ron and Scott Asheton was not enough to saveThe Weirdness. Ready to Die is another story, however. Backed by James Williamson on multiple-tracked guitars, Scott Asheton on Drums, Mike Watt on Bass and Steve Mackay on Sax (of which there is plenty) as well as a number...

One could say thatJoseph Smith and the Mormons, a 464-page, hardcover, full color, historical-epic/biography in comics form of the life of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Church of the Latter Day Saints – aka the Mormons – is the work of a lifetime. It is the fruition of years of self-reflection and research followed by even more years of writing and drawing (and then editing). Noah Van Sciver was brought up in the the Church of the Latter Day Saints, but then fell away from it – along with his mother, and some (but not all) of his siblings – after his parents divorced. His father stayed in the church. These biographical facts shed...

One of the best – perhaps the best, and almost without doubt, the most painfully sad – graphic memoir ever penned. The urtext of adolescent alienation. An undisputed masterpiece. Recommended to all serious comics readers as well as anyone who needs help in facing up to painful and unhappy memories.

Now back in iprint!

Yes! The latest volume in the epic 30-volume Carl Barks Library has arrived. This one is perhaps the most riotous volume yet, filled with more fun-filled antics than any other yet published. This is due in no small part to Fantagraphics' decision to follow the stories that make up Donald Duck No. 26 -- one of the last wholly by Barks -- which includes the title track "Trick or Treat", with a whoppingfourteen consecutive classic 10-pagers! Originally published in a stretch that ran from late 1952 through 1953, these 10-pagers are filled with the comedic splapstick antics that Barks arguably did better than anyone else in comics, ever, and...