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...

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (JCTSKOE) is, first and foremost, the tale of the development of the American super-ego, it’s human cost, and its relationship to the comic book super-hero. Ware’s choice of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 to serve simultaneously as historical signifier and the origin of his narrative is key in this regard. It is with the exposition of 1893 -- most importantly, at least as far as JCTSKOE is concerned, in its design and architecture-- that the USA reveals its fantasy of, and implicit ambition towards, empire in the classical Greco/Roman mold. It was Walt Whitman’s fever dream made flesh-- or at least...

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...

FROM THE ARCHIVES

FOUR new copies of the fifth printing of the original one shot comic book edition of Reid Fleming, The World's Toughest Milkman – the one that started it all!

This is a comic book.

This collection of works from the early 1980s by Millhauser starts off with August Eschenburg, a prototypical tale which serves as the template for several later Millhauser works, most notably Martin Dressler (see below). The middle section is composed of three stylistically linked forays into the classic short story mode, each of which stages an elaborate wedding of location with season to produce an exquisite evocation of an exact yet unnameable emotion, and each of which manages to pull it off. The stories that will really having you reaching for the champagne to celebrate their success, however, are the three that close out the volume,...

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 graphic novel edition of Craig Thompson's epic memoir that centers on his personal relationship with ginseng, Ginseng Roots! While it starts out specifically focusing on his family roots in ginseng cultivation, it gradually spreads out into an in-depth historical biography of the humble plant itself, one that reveals the many unexpected ways in which ginseng's roots are deeply entangled in the history of America – both before and after 1492 – and that in the process touches on international cultures, war, world trade – specifically that between East Asia and the US – Christianity, family values, work ethics and much more....

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...

Unstable Molecules is one of the best graphic novels Marvel has produced... well, possibly, ever, but, to hedge our bets, let’s say, "in quite awhile." In any event, it is like nothing Marvel has ever produced in the past. It is a textual analysis of comics done in comics, and it is one of the finest ever produced -- certainly the finest ever produced by Marvel! It should be considered in the context of Understanding Comics and Hicksville as much as the Fantastic Four. Telling the "true" story of the "real people" that the Fantastic Four were based on, this book is a work of metacomics and a dream come true for students of narrative theory...