OK, this is not just the perfect gift book for the jazz fan on your list, it is also makes for an ideal gift to give to anyone -- of any age -- who has a love of words and pictures. This sumptuous hardcover volume has the potential to turn the squarest square into the heppest cat. Everyone is a jazz fan in the making: this is just the ticket to inspire them to take a closer look. Jazz ABZ is a pæn to jazz in art and poetry that simply has to be seen to be believed. The essence of jazz -- collaboration, composition, and improvisation -- is embodied in this singular tribute to the form. The overall package is designed to resemble the...

An epic, hallucinatory journey that while physically set in South Africa, embarks from a place of alienation and detachment and travels throughdark and confusing psychological spaces – often viathe useof various psychoactive drugs – to arrive at an unexpected series of destinations, Highbone Theaterprovidesa comics trip like no other to anyreader adventurous enough to climb aboard.Imagine, if you will, a very Charles Burnsian narrative in which dream and reality, imagination and perception, delusion and conception, fiction, fantasy and rumination are all inextricably bound together into an irreducible mass. Then imagine it featuring a cast...

From the Archives: ONE new copy of the original hardcover edition (2nd print; September 2011) of the first volume of the superb – and definitive – archival study of the life and work of Alex Toth.

Here's the original Publisher write-up:

Compiled with complete access to the family archives and with the full cooperation of Toth's children, this lavishly illustrated biography features many rare comics pages, photographs, and drawings and reproduces twenty complete stories, including a previously unknown and unfinished story from the 1950's, most printed from the original artwork. Includes bibliographical references. Presents a biography of...

For twenty years and counting, Scott McCloud's explication of the mechanics of comics remains essential.



Testamonials:

<>"If you've ever felt bad about wasting your life reading comics, then check out Scott McCloud's classic book immediately. You might still feel you've wasted your life, but you'll know why, and you'll be proud."
-Matt Groening, creator ofThe Simpsons

<>"In one lucid, well-designed chapter after another, [McCloud] guides us through the elements of comics style, and... how words combine with pictures to work their singular magic. When the 215-page journey is finally over, most readers will find it...

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...

No one has ever created better Christmas comics than Carl Barks. "Christmas on Bear Mountain" is more than just another Barks Christmas Classic, however: it has the added historical significance of being the story for which Barks created his most famous character: Scrooge McDuck – Uncle Scrooge to Donald and his nephews. Scrooge – obviously patterned after the character of the same name form Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol– was originally created simply as the dramatic foil for Donald and his nephews in this particular story that was originally released for Christmas in 1947, and that was supposed to be that... but Barks quickly...

It's here! The new volume of comics pedagogy by The Funnest Teacher in the World, Lynda Barry! As most watchers of this space are likely already aware, Ms. Barry was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (aka "the genius award").Making Comicsprovides further evidence that this award was well deserved.

This much anticipated follow up to her previous work,Syllabus, also based on her experiences teaching at the University of Wisconsin, follows the same format, using it to dig deeper into the cave of creativity. In the 200 pages of this facsimile composition bookwe leave the safe,well defined confines of the symbolic realm and are...

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...

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...