For the with it, way out person on your list, a specially priced, double dose of Marc Bell may just fit the bill.

Here's your chance to score both Raw Sewage Science Fiction and Worn Tuff Elbow #3 for one low price.

TWO SETS available.

Here's an anthology to boost your start to 2025!  Alive Outside takes the baton from Kramers Ergot, Mould Map and Freak Buck and heads out into the unknown armed only with a  free-for-all editorial approach and an anything-goes æsthetic.

The first thing you notice about Alive Outside is its funkiness as an object, with it’s hand-folded outer wrap (by Lilli Carré?), the four 6” x 8” insert comics – two 8-pagers, two 16-pagers – and then the 20-page, full-size, bound in, underground-comic-book that is printed on a different, newsprinty paper stock, along with an amazing variety of art styles within.

The focus, if there is one, is on exploring through drawing, following the impulse, building on it, seeing where and how far it will go.  The results of these explorations range from work focused on the process(es) and their production of imagery to observational drawing to caricatured cartooning and through straight-up sequential comics all the way to mythographic world building.  It’s all here.

The editing, curation and sequencing have a DJ vibe, making for an experience that’s part reading, part gallery exhibit, part dance party/rave.  Taken as an organic whole, it feels like being led on a tour of the hive mind.  Moving through the book is like being led deeper and deeper into the swarm, until reaching the pulsing center in the sequence of Andy Cahill, Lukas Weidinger, Marc Bell & Christian Schumann and Trenton Doyle Hancock, and then being slowly led back out again.

And, a special highlight for us here at Copacetic is the 10-page full color meta-story, "Hyper Curious” which covers all the bases, providing an internalized avatar for the reader, and then proceeding to insert it into a story that could be taken as a narrative of the experience of reading the book being read; worlds within worlds.

Alive Outside is a work that pulls you in, and that you will find yourself returning to – dipping in, flipping through and/or poring over – to fathom its mysteries and find clues for existing today.

Neoglyphic has this to say about their creation:

"ALIVE OUTSIDE: An anthology to obliterate the impending monoculture! A convergence of new voices joining verifiable legends, all tearing at the walls of expectation. Cultural innovation as an impulse. Algorithmically-born tastemaking be damned! This is elemental vitality pressed into a wood pulp manifesto for the messy comedy of creation ~”

ALIVE OUTSIDE collects previously unpublished work from an international cast of artists, including:

Aapo Rapi, Aaron Rossner, Andy Cahill, Angela Fanche, Becchi Ayumi, Bridget Trout, Christian Schumann, Clayton Schiff, Dongery, Doug Allen, Dylan Jones, Eden Veaudry, J Bradley Johnson, Jordan Rae Herron, Joe Grillo, Joey Haley, Julie Doucet, Julien Ceccaldi, Kari Cholnoky, Keith Jones, Leomi Sadler, Lilli Carre, Lukas Weidinger, Marc Bell, Mark Connery, Matt Lock, Poncili Creation, Roman Muradov, Ron Rege Jr., Shoboshobo, Steven M. Johnson, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Theo Ellsworth, Trenton Doyle Hancock

Edited by Cullen Beckhorn and Marc Bell

248 pages, multiple inset booklets, mixed-process 6-color offset, and extraneous Risograph materials; produced in an edition of 900 copies.

And, anyone so inclined can now get into the granular details of this anthology's creation (and reception) in an interview with Cullen and Marc conducted by Bill Boichel for TCJ, HERE.

The new TCJ has arrived! Once again edited by Kristy Valenti and Austin English, #311 is chock-a-block with interviews, essays, analyses, career overvivews, amd more!

Fanta sez:

Featured in this issue: An in-depth, personal conversation between Kate Beaton (Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Hark! A Vagrant) and Sarah Glidden (Rolling Blackouts), from the Pizza Island comics collective, about depicting history, humor, and social issues in comics form; a profile of Gilbert Shelton (Zap, Fabulous Furry Freak Bros.), which includes a never-before-published-in-English “Shelton Hagiography” by French cartoonist Pic; and an interview with musician and cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis (12 Crass Songs, Fuff). Plus: “An Imaginary Publication Cover Gallery” by Marc Bell (Hot Potatoe); a new manga column that puts classic and contemporary manga (Kamen Rider and Hunter X Hunter) in concert; a publishing roundtable on how to grow the adult audience for comics; a deep dive into an underdiscussed Charlton cartoonist, Enrique Nieto; a case for fine artist Dorothy Iannone’s work as comics, and much more.

220 pages in all, plenty of which are in full color.

<<•>>  conducted, edited and compiled by Robin McConnell; introduction by Jeet Heer  <<•>>  Here we have an print edition collection of interviews culled from the unparalleled archives that Robin McConnell has amassed over the last five years of his Vancouver-based radio show (Get a bit of back story via this interview with Robin, HERE).  McConnell has been universally praised as both a sensitive and responsive interviewer and as a knowledgeable and tasteful comics connoisseur.  The interview subjects included in this volume span a wide swath of the (North American) comics universe.  In addition, it is worth noting that Inkstuds not only includes many of our finest contemporary comics practitioners, but also important non-creator members of the comics community as well:  Kate Beaton, Gabrielle Bell, Marc Bell, Jonathan Bennett, Chester Brown, David Collier, Jordan Crane, Rebecca Dart, Kim Deitch, Mary Fleener, Sammy Harkham, Jeet Heer, Jaime Hernandez, Jeff Lemire, Jason Lutes, Billy Mavreas, Françoise Mouly, Dan Nadel, Marv Newland, Anders Nilsen, Joe Ollmann, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Seth, Tom Spurgeon, Ted Stearn, Barron Storey, Jillian Tamaki, and Carol Tyler.