Eleanor Davishas been producing comics of all sorts and sizes, employing a dazzling array of techniques and styles, for over a decade. In addition, she is an accomplished and widely published illustrator who also engages in a personal art practice. These multiple disciplines have continually informed and reinforced each other, leading to the rich and varied nature of the work that she continues to create. The work collected between the covers of How to Be Happy – much of it previously published inMOME– amply demonstrates the quality and range of her work, with a special focus on her most recent watercolor comics work, most notably "In Our...

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...

Available again at last, courtesy New York Review Comics (thanks!), after being out of print for decades,Gary Panter's Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise originally exploded on the comics scene in 1988 and forever changed the landscape. It is arguable that moreformal innovation is contained in this work than in any other single work of comics. Jimbo open up vast new territories for comics, territories that have been avidly explored ever since by a host of innovative artists that have followed the trail that Panter blazed here (and elsewhere, of course; but this is the motherlode). Now, a new generation of readers, including the artists among...

FROM THE ARCHIVES | ONE solid second hand copy

When it comes to artfully integrating book design into the form of a graphic novel in such a way as to enhance the expression of its content, Mr. Hornschemeier has few peers. To our mind, only Clowes, Ware and Seth have been as successful in this department*, and it bears remarking that there seems to be a bit of trend in effect among these design-oriented comics craftsmen as the latest work by each of these three creators shares with Hornschemier's a strong biographical focus on the protagonist. Wilson, Lint and George Sprott each present their eponymous protagonist's life story**, and Life...

How's this for value: the complete 360 page graphic novel in hardcover for the same price as the 160 page Book One in softcover issued by Fantagraphics a couple years back? Not only that, but this edition completes Kim Thompson's excellent translation that he started for Book One. Originally published in six volumes in France between 1996 and 2004, this edition represents the first time the complete story has appeared in English. As readers of David B.'s recently released Babel already know, he is a formidable graphic stylist with a strong and sure line and a great sense of how to use blacks to create a balanced page. Epileptic is the...

The much anticipated first collection by up-and-coming-new-comics-champ, Kevin Huizenga is at last on our shelves. Its arrival may, however, signal the end of Huizenga's status as an up-and-comer, and initiate his ensconsement in the ranks of established contemporary masters of comics. This volume brings together a wide range of Huizenga's work from a wide variety of sources. It starts off with a little known (well, not to long time Copacetic customers) gem from the Orchid anthology published by Sparkplug Comics, titled, "Green Tea." It is adapted from a classic Victorian horror story of the same name by Sheridan Le Fanu, but is given the...

Seventeen years in the making... it's Marc Sobel's mightily researched, heavily sourced, profusely illustrated, in-depth, from-soup-to-nuts study of the original run of the one-and-only Love and Rockets!

This 344 page, 8" x 11", French-flapped softcover is filled to the brim with not only the comics and art of Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez, but also illustrations of a wide variety of their inspirations – primarily comics of all sorts, but also movies, music and more – which serve to illuminate their pathway from culture consumers to culture producers, along with a healthy helping of photographs that show them at varioius points along...

Beginning with the first impression – the juxtaposition of the book’s title, “Black Arms to Hold You Up” and its accompanying cover illustration of large, looming black arm(ament)s against a background of skeletons, between which the human actors are running in fear – it is clear right from the start that we are being presented with a multivalent and irony-rich agitprop work. It will be equally clear by the end that it is also a work capable of constructing new meaning through a masterful synthesis of image and text.

The phrase “to hold you up” in the title can have (at least) three possible meanings: 1) to physically hold you up, as in to...

Through a hard won personal process developed over decades of his artistic practice, Mark Doox has merged the respective iconographies of Byzantine Christian art and racist American art, effecting a strange transformation whereby each becomes the other as they become one. A large selection of the mixed-media artworks that have emerged from this practice have been assembled together with artworks created specifically for this volume and then accompanied by a series of self-authored texts, which serve the dual purpose of providing exigetical commentary on the artworks themselves and advancing arguments which the artworks then serve to...