Finally! A new – and very improved – edition of Seiichi Hayashi's manga masterpiece of alienation has been releasesd by Drawn and quarterly. This new edition has a nice heft and feel, and the design has been slightly tweaked for a mild aesthetic improvement, but the big change is the addition of a 60 page, illustrated essay by manga/gekiga/Garo scholar, Ryan Homberg. The inclusion of this essay will enable all readers to better situate Hayashi's work in manga history and better appreciate his achievements. As Red Colored Elegy is over 45 years old, andHayashi's work is far from typical manga fare, Holmberg's essay is a crucial improvement...

Hot off the press!

John P. has this to say about his latest creation: "This All-Animals Issue features stories on possums, dogs, cats, Midwestern mountain lions, moths, horses, frogs, toads, and more! Plus Catcalls and Top 40 etc etc. A winner. 40 digest pages, black and white throughout."

The All-Animals Issue! Don't miss it!

This is the fifth volume in the series of young adult graphic biographies published by Hyperion under the ægis of The Center for Cartoon Studies, which reaches an important milestone here in that this volume is the first to be created by a graduate of their program, and as such provides proof postive that CCS is fulfilling its mission. Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller is the most substantial work yet in this series and represents its strongest artistic achievement. More than that, it is an inspired work that demonstrates the power of comics to communicate.

It runs for 86 full color pages, each of which works from a 16-panel...

It's here! The complete collection of Conor Stechschulte's groundbreaking, decade-in-the-making masterpiece, Generous Bosom, here collected under the title of its film adaptation, Ultrasound.

Here's our orignal overview essay on the series:

PLEASE NOTE: while no plot particulars will be revealed in what follows,there are implicit reveals of aspects of the work that are deliberately withheld by the authoruntil well into the series, and then only gradually shown. These revelations are made here in order to provide an overall sense as to what the series may be getting at and of the overall experience that is in store for interested readers....

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...

And what better to follow the latest Kevin H. with than the latest by his longtime associate and fellow St. Louisan, Dan. Z., whose long promised graphic novel debut has at last arrived! Birdseye Bristoe is 72 full color pages of pure Zettwoch: set in a fictional (but perhaps even more authentic for being so) midwestern locale somewhere between St. Louis and Louisville, and filled with cut-away drawings, explanatory diagrams, maps and, of course, page after page of fun-filled comics filled with down home midwestern characters of all ages and stripes, it tells a story of industrial development and technological change that for all it's...

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...

Craig Thompson's long awaited follow up to Blankets – one of the most widely and loudly lauded graphic novels in history – is now weighing heavily on the shelves here at Copacetic. A sprawling, multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-pronged work, Habibi is part history lesson, part tutorial, part travelogue, part anthro/socio/psychological study, part sermon, and all love story. Thompson clearly had outsized ambitions for this work, likely necessitated by the high expectations surrounding any follow up to Blankets. It's always an additional challenge for creators to follow up a highly praised work. Should they try to compete with their big...