Best known for his series of comics documentaries on famous 19th century murders, Rick Geary enters the 20th century with a comics biography of the most famous lawman of them all, J. Edgar Hoover, that manages to cull the essentials and distill them into exactly 100 pages of the precisely rendered comics that are his trademark (as Copacetic customer David Grim has just serendipitously pointed out).  Informative and enjoyable, this is a straightforward story that, while minimal in detail, is, almost entirely free of speculation, and thereby skirts salacious material regarding the longtime director of the FBI.  Nevertheless, the reader will come away with a solid picture of the man and his times.  

Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm; edited by Paul Buhle w/ addditional text by SDS members and addtl. art by Josh Brown, James Cennamo, and others.  A history lesson, a consciousness-raising session, a political roundtable discussion, an artistic jam-sesion --   in its mulitplicity of perspectives, this comics history provides a well-rounded portrait of its subject.  One of the most high-profile, widely-active and important political groups of its time, SDS is almost synonomous with leftist politics in the 1960s.  The tale told here is complex, multi-faceted, labyrinthine and fascinating.  The fact that Pekar's editor on this volume, Paul Buhle, is a well regarded leftist writer and scholar who was the founding editor of the SDS journal, Radical America, is a big plus in bringing together the former SDSers who tell their personal stories alongside Pekar's history.  A walloping 26 bonus tales are presented here in all thier graphic glory, including several each by Pekar and Buhle along with those by lesser known figures such as Mark Naison, Penelope Rosemont and many others.  Taken together these multiple points of view weave a comics tapestry of the SDS years. The 212 page volume closes out with brief look at the tentative revival that SDS is currently undergoing, illustrated by none other than Pittsburgh's own Ed Piskor!

According to the publisher's remarks accompanying this work, "Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (is) the final graphic memoir" from Pekar.  Structured as a sort of variant of the Socratic dialogue, this work presents Pekar and Waldman spending a day in Pekar's hometown (Cleveland, OH, for the uninitiated among you) hashing out the "mythologies and realities surrounding the Jewish homeland," during which "Pekar interweaves his increasing disillusionment with the modern state of Israel with a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from the biblical times to the present."   Harvey has always been someone who speaks his mind and what he has had to say has been worth listening to; it should be no different this time around.  Concludes with an epilogue by Joyce Brabner

Long in the making (and right here in the Pittsburgh area, too, as that is where Mark Zingarelli has been hunched over his drawing table, converting Ms. Brabner's elegaic yet uplifting script into page after page of hard won comics), Second Avenue Caper takes readers back to the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic in NYC, when no one knew what was happening, what caused it, how it was spread, or how to stop it.  Many – perhaps most – Copacetic customers are too young to have experienced the early days of AIDS, and the fear, sorrow, anger and, ultimately, hope-filled community building, that it engendered.  This 144 page hardcover graphic history of this era brings it to life for the younger generations that have grown up and come of age in its wake, and whose lives and behaviors have been shaped by it, without their necessarily realizing it.