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...

Here it is: the best selling work (when combining the sales of its two previous incarnations) in the history of The Copacetic Comics Company has finally been published in a richly deserved, shelf-worthy – and, more to the point, library friendly – permanent edition. This 120 page hardcover is printed on archival white stock and presents the complete original work along with bonus pages documenting its history. Originally self-published in 2001 as Super Monster #14, "Gloriana" was the culmination of Huizenga's development as an artist, knitting together all his strengths as a comics theoretician, cartoonist and graphic explicator to produce...

2011 marked the culmination of a decades-spanning career arc as Frank Santoro found his art at the center of the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial at The Carnegie Museum of Art, where he attended studio art classes as a youth. We are excited to at last be able to offer for sale copies of his 16-page tabloid newspaper comics work that was the highlight of that exhibit. In a signature Santoro move, Blast Furnace Funnies is a work of "High" (i.e., museum quality) art executed in the lowest of the "Low" art forms (a disposable newspaper); employing ephemerality to evoke eternity, he has here worked (in a form that often ends up) in the gutter to reach...

Long – and criminally! – out of print, Howard Cruse's epochal work of long form comics, Stuck Rubber Baby,one of the most significant early North American graphic novels – and among the first to truly merit the label – is at last back in print in this deluxe hardcover edition from First Second that has been released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its initial publication – an anniversary that Cruse did not get to celebrate himself, having passed away late last year (but he was involved in the preparations for this edition, and so, of course, knew it was coming, thankfully). This edition includes over 20 pages of bonus materials, much...

Picking up, more or less, where Ganges left off, Kevin Huizenga's new series, Fieldercontinues to map new worlds for comics. The issue opens up – after an intriguing symbolization of the nature of thought on the inside front cover – withBona, a deconstructive remix of Sam Glanzman’sKona(which featured, improbably yet likely, scripts by Lionel Ziprin), published by Dell in the early 1960s. This story, which is bifurcated, with another, earlier part of the story appearing later(!) in the issue, highlights formal aspects of classic comics narratives while simultaneously reflecting on their generic tropes and the cultural milieu that produced...

Here it is, at last: a cosmic consciousness primer for kids. Inthese pages, Crane has stripped down his æsthetic to its core, crafting bold,optic nerve stimulating illustrations thatleapscales from the macroscopic to microscopic and back again, in dynamic andwildly colorfulimages that arestraight forward andimmediately,intuitively comprehensible.Taken together with the accompanyingsimple blocks of text, the series ofsequential combinations of images that make up We Are All Me unlock a latent power strong enough tolightup dormantneurons, leadingto new connections, and stimulatingspeculations, revealinga sense of wonder at creation capable...

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...

Summerland is a unique piece of comics work, one which turns the typical creative hierarchy on its head, with the coloring in the dominant position, followed by the inking, then pencilling, and with the scripting tacked on almost an afterthought. The boldly inked lines are minimal yet effective in delineating the scene, and to brace the colors and let them do their stuff, and what they do here is something new. In the pages ofSummerland, Ms. Dawkins has improvised an innovative approach to color, one in which she "plays" the color scheme using tone clusters and chords, rather than the normative approach of hitting single notes and then...

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...

Whether the point of this novel is to show us the adult that lies latent in the child or to reveal to us the child that the adult never manages to quite fully outgrow is a question that is difficult if not fruitless to answer. What is certain, however, is that the novel Edwin Mullhouse is brilliantly conceived. It is also shockingly well written, replete with uncannily accurate descriptions of childhood perceptions that can at times be overwhelmingly sympathetic. It is at turns funny, sad, insightful, and even profound; but above all else, it is deeply creepy: It reveals -- almost imperceptibly at first, but then slowly, incrementally, the...