Graphic Novels
Abandoned Cars is Tim Lane's first collection of graphic short stories, noirish narratives that are united by their exploration of the great American mythological drama by way of the desperate and haunted characters that populate its pages. Lane's characters exist on the margins of society--alienated, floating in the void between hope and despair, confused but introspective.
The writing is straightforward, the stories mainstream but told in a pulpy idiom with an existential edge, often in the first person, reminiscent of David Goodis's or Jim Thompson's prose, or of films like Pick-Up on South Street or Out of the Past. Visually, Lane's drawing is in a realistic mode, reminiscent of Charles Burns, that heightens the tension in stories that veer between naturalism on the one hand and the comical, nightmarish, and hallucinatory on the other. Here, American culture is a thrift store and the characters are thrift store junkies living among the clutter. It's an America depicted as a subdued and haunted Coney Island, made up of lost characters--boozing, brawling, haplessly shooting themselves in the face, and hopping freight trains in search of Elvis. Abandoned Cars is an impressive debut of a major young American cartoonist.
In the second Adventure Zone graphic novel (adapted from the McElroy family's wildly popular D&D podcast), we rejoin hero-adjacent sort-of-comrades-in-arms Taako, Magnus, and Merle on a wild careen through a D&D railroad murder mystery. This installment has a little of everything: a genius child detective, an axe-wielding professional wrestler, a surly wizard, cursed magical artifacts, and a pair of meat monsters.
You know, the usual things you find on a train. Hot on the heels of The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins, the smash hit graphic novel that launched the series, The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited picks up the saga where volume 1 left off. Both books are based on The Adventure Zone, a tabletop RPG comedy podcast with downloads numbering in the tens of millions and an army of passionately devoted fans. With art and co-adaptation from Carey Pietsch, the McElroys are once again turning their raucous freewheeling D&D campaign into some damn fine comics.
from HBO Films and Fine Line Features AMERICAN SPLENDOR
The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar Two classic comic anthologies in one volume Stories by Harvey Pekar Introduction by R. Crumb Art by Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, and Gerry Shamray The classic collection of the comics that inspired the movie American Splendor, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival American Splendor is the world's first literary comic book. Cleveland native Harvey Pekar is a true American original. A V.A. hospital file clerk and comic book writer, Harvey chronicles the ordinary and mundane in stories both funny and touching. His dead-on eye for the frustrations and minutiae of the workaday world mix in a delicate balance with his insight into personal relationships. Pekar has been compared to Dreiser, Dostoevsky, and Lenny Bruce. But he is truly more than all of them--he is himself. "Mr. Pekar has . . . proven that comics can address the ambiguities of daily living, that like the finest fiction, they can hold a mirror up to life."
--The New York Times "[Pekar] has a vision that makes daily city life--a ride on the bus, a run-in with a boss, or simply buying bread--dramatic."
--Chicago Sun-Times "Simply stated, American Splendor is the most superb literary endeavor to come off the streets of Cleveland in decades."
--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Mr. Pekar lets all of life flood into his panels: the humdrum and the heroic, the gritty and the grand."
--The New York Times Book Review
A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and man appears, with clubs, with spears, with crueler weapons still--and things do not go well for the wilderness. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke choke the undergrowth and the creatures that once moved through it. This is not a happy story, and it will not have a happy ending.
Working in his distinctive, monochromatic linocut style, Stanley Donwood achieves with his art what words cannot convey, carving out a mesmerizing, stark parable of environmental disaster and the end of civilization.
An engaging illustrated history of feminism from antiquity through third-wave feminism, featuring Sappho, Mary Magdalene, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.
The history of feminism? The right to vote, Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem, white pantsuits? Oh, but there's so much more. And we need to know about it, especially now. In pithy text and pithier comics, A Brief History of Feminism engages us, educates us, makes us laugh, and makes us angry. It begins with antiquity and the early days of Judeo-Christianity. (Mary Magdalene questions the maleness of Jesus's inner circle: "People will end up getting the notion you don't want women to be priests." Jesus: "Really, Mary, do you always have to be so negative?") It continues through the Middle Ages, the Early Modern period, and the Enlightenment ("Liberty, equality, fraternity!" "But fraternity means brotherhood!"). It covers the beginnings of an organized women's movement in the nineteenth century, second-wave Feminism, queer feminism, and third-wave Feminism.
Along the way, we learn about important figures: Olympe de Gouges, author of the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen" (guillotined by Robespierre); Flora Tristan, who linked the oppression of women and the oppression of the proletariat before Marx and Engels set pen to paper; and the poet Audre Lorde, who pointed to the racial obliviousness of mainstream feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. We learn about bourgeois and working-class issues, and the angry racism of some American feminists when black men got the vote before women did. We see God as a long-bearded old man emerging from a cloud (and once, as a woman with her hair in curlers). And we learn the story so far of a history that is still being written.
B & W illustrations.
Acclaimed manga creator Sean Michael Wilson has brought these renegade poets to life, showing the places they went and the philosophical and meditative aspects of their lives, as well as revealing their humor and wackiness and their penetrating insights into the human condition.Their poetry is interwoven throughout--translations by J. P. Seaton, one of the most respected tranlsators of Chinese poetry in the United States.
Physicist Clifford Johnson thinks that we should have more conversations about science. Science should be on our daily conversation menu, along with topics like politics, books, sports, or the latest prestige cable drama. Conversations about science, he tells us, shouldn't be left to the experts. In The Dialogues, Johnson invites us to eavesdrop on a series of nine conversations, in graphic-novel form--written and drawn by Johnson--about "the nature of the universe." The conversations take place all over the world, in museums, on trains, in restaurants, in what may or may not be Freud's favorite coffeehouse. The conversationalists are men, women, children, experts, and amateur science buffs. The topics of their conversations range from the science of cooking to the multiverse and string theory. The graphic form is especially suited for physics; one drawing can show what it would take many words to explain.
In the first conversation, a couple meets at a costume party; they speculate about a scientist with superhero powers who doesn't use them to fight crime but to do more science, and they discuss what it means to have a "beautiful equation" in science. Their conversation spills into another chapter ("Hold on, you haven't told me about light yet"), and in a third chapter they exchange phone numbers. Another couple meets on a train and discusses immortality, time, black holes, and religion. A brother and sister experiment with a grain of rice. Two women sit in a sunny courtyard and discuss the multiverse, quantum gravity, and the anthropic principle. After reading these conversations, we are ready to start our own.
The third in Corinne Maier and Anne Simon's collection of graphic novels exploring the lives of some of the most influential figures in modern history lands its spotlight upon Albert Einstein, the German-born physicist who developed the theory of relativity. He is considered the most influential physicist of the twentieth century.
You've probably heard of him, but you've never seen him like this!
Anne Simon was born in 1980 in France. She studied in the Beaux-Arts in Angoulème, and then in the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, one of the most prestigious art schools in France. In 2004, she received the "New Talent" prize at the Angoulème festival, and she released her first comic book Persephone in the Underworld in 2006.
Corinne Maier was born in 1963 in Geneva. As a writer, economist, historian, and psychoanalyst, she has produced around fifteen non-fiction books on subjects like psychoanalysis, society, history, and humor. Her books are bestsellers in her native France and some (such as Hello Laziness) have been translated into several languages.
"World War 3 Illustrated is the real thing."--New York Times
"The best and longest running alternative comics anthology around."--Comics Journal
Since its founding by Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper in 1979, World War 3 Illustrated has been publishing cutting-edge, political comics that have inspired the developing popularity and recognition of comics as a respected art form. Now rebranded as a book series, the first, and timely, theme of this new imprint is fascism.
Contributors include: Erik Drooker, Sue Coe, Kate Evans, Peter Kuper, Steve Brodner, Isabella Bannerman, Kevin Pyle, Seth Tobocman, and more.
Cartoonist Edward Ross uses comics to illuminate the ideas behind our favorite movies. In Filmish, Ross's cartoon alter ego guides readers through the annals of cinematic history, introducing some of the strange and fascinating concepts at work in the movies. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme--the body, architecture, language--and explores an eclectic mix of cinematic triumphs, from A Tripto the Moon to Top Gun. Like other bestselling nonfiction graphic novels such as Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, Filmish tackles serious issues--sexuality, race, censorship, propaganda--with authority and wit, throwing new light on some of the greatest films ever made.
The first volume of a glorious two-volume, four-color graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman's #1 New York Times bestselling and Newbery Medal-winning novel The Graveyard Book, adapted by P. Craig Russell and illustrated by an extraordinary team of renowned artists.
Inventive, chilling, and filled with wonder, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book reaches new heights in this stunning adaptation. Artists Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, and Stephen B. Scott lend their own signature styles to create an imaginatively diverse and yet cohesive interpretation of Neil Gaiman's luminous novel.
Volume One contains Chapter One through the Interlude, while Volume Two includes Chapter Six to the end.
The second volume of a glorious two-volume, four-color graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman's #1 New York Times bestselling and Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning novel The Graveyard Book, adapted by P. Craig Russell and illustrated by an extraordinary team of renowned artists.
Inventive, chilling, and filled with wonder, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book reaches new heights in this stunning adaptation. Artists Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Galen Showman, Scott Hampton, and David Lafuente lend their own signature styles to create an imaginatively diverse and yet cohesive interpretation of Neil Gaiman's luminous novel.
Volume Two includes chapter six to the end of the book.
Acclaimed illustrator Peter Kuper delivers a visually immersive and profound adaptation of Joseph Conrad's enduring classic.
Heart of Darkness has unsettled generations of readers with its haunting portrait of colonialism in Africa. Acclaimed illustrator Peter Kuper delivers a visually immersive and profound interpretation of this controversial classic, evoking the danger and suspense at the heart of this brutal story. Longtime admirers of the novella will appreciate his innovative interpretations, while new readers will discover a brilliant introduction to a canonical work of twentieth-century literature.
An entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative of the dangerous thinkers who laid the foundation of modern thought
This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority--sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death--to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. With masterful storytelling and color illustrations, Heretics! offers a unique introduction to the birth of modern thought in comics form--smart, charming, and often funny.
These contentious and controversial philosophers--from Galileo and Descartes to Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton--fundamentally changed the way we look at the world, society, and ourselves, overturning everything from the idea that the Earth is the center of the cosmos to the notion that kings have a divine right to rule. More devoted to reason than to faith, these thinkers defended scandalous new views of nature, religion, politics, knowledge, and the human mind.
Heretics! tells the story of their ideas, lives, and times in a vivid new way. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes their meetings and clashes with each other--as well as their confrontations with religious and royal authority. It recounts key moments in the history of modern philosophy, including the burning of Giordano Bruno for heresy, Galileo's house arrest for defending Copernicanism, Descartes's proclaiming cogito ergo sum, Hobbes's vision of the nasty and brutish state of nature, and Spinoza's shocking Theological-Political Treatise.
A brilliant account of one of the most brilliant periods in philosophy, Heretics! is the story of how a group of brave thinkers used reason and evidence to triumph over the authority of religion, royalty, and antiquity.
-- "Library Journal"
"Irrational, violent, tender, ironic, Max Ernst has invoked the whole kaleidoscope of human phenomena in these collages ... [turning them] into stunning proposals for adventure," noted this volume's translator, Dorothea Tanning. The Hundred Headless Woman was the first of Ernst's collage novels, and its classic status ensures a place in modern art history classes. Every visit and re-visit to its pages tells a different story, an endlessly fascinating tale that runs an emotional gamut from keen humor to outright horror.
Hysteria is a graphic novel account of the first steps, errors, and frustrations of Sigmund Freud's career, which would lead to the foundation of a revolutionary new clinical therapy: psychoanalysis. The book traces Freud's early training in neurological research and medicine; the crucial turning-point of his studies with Jean-Martin Charcot at La Salpêtrière; and his establishment of a therapeutic practice in Vienna.
Perfectly matching text and illustrations, Hysteria recounts Freud's interest in his colleague Josef Breuer's "Anna O" case study, as well as giving an account of his own case histories of hysteria, particularly the treatment of Fräulein Elisabeth von R. The studies brought to life in this authoritative, beautifully illustrated graphic novel are collected in Freud and Breuer's co-authored Studies in Hysteria, which marked the birth of psychoanalysis.
A New York Times Bestseller
Selected as a 2017 ALA/YALSA Great Graphic Novel for Teens: Nonfiction
Award winning authors Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis present a historically accurate graphic novel biography of English mathematician and scientist Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.
English mathematician and scientist Alan Turing (1912-1954) is credited with many of the foundational principles of contemporary computer science. The Imitation Game presents a historically accurate graphic novel biography of Turing's life, including his groundbreaking work on the fundamentals of cryptography and artificial intelligence. His code breaking efforts led to the cracking of the German Enigma during World War II, work that saved countless lives and accelerated the Allied defeat of the Nazis. While Turing's achievements remain relevant decades after his death, the story of his life in post-war Europe continues to fascinate audiences today.
Award-winning duo Jim Ottaviani (the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Feynman and Primates) and artist Leland Purvis (an Eisner and Ignatz Award nominee and occasional reviewer for the Comics Journal) present a factually detailed account of Turing's life and groundbreaking research--as an unconventional genius who was arrested, tried, convicted, and punished for being openly gay, and whose innovative work still fuels the computing and communication systems that define our modern world. Computer science buffs, comics fans, and history aficionados will be captivated by this riveting and tragic story of one of the 20th century's most unsung heroes.
In what renowned translator Arthur Goldhammer called "a piano reduction of an orchestral score," the first volume of Stéphane Heuet's adaptation of In Search of Lost Time electrified the graphic community like no other--re-presenting the novel for anyone who has always dreamed of reading Proust but was put off by the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. Whereas the first volume described the narrator's childhood in the pastoral town of Combray, the second volume portrays the narrator's foray into adolescence, set in the opulent seaside resort of Balbec. Preserving Proust's original dissection of the spontaneity of youth, translator Laura Marris captures the narrator's infatuation with his playmates--his memories of their intoxicating afternoons together unfolding as if in a dream. Featuring some of Proust's most memorable characters--from mysterious Charlus to beguiling young Albertine--this second volume becomes a necessary companion piece for any lover of modern literature.
With its sweeping digressions into the past and reflections on the nature of memory, Proust's oceanic novel In Search of Lost Time looms over twentieth-century literature as one of the greatest, yet most endlessly challenging, literary experiences. Influencing writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and even anticipating Albert Einstein in its philosophical explorations of space and time, In Search of Lost Time is a monumental achievement and reading it is a rite of passage for any serious lover of literature.
Now, in what renowned translator Arthur Goldhammer says might be "likened to a piano reduction of an orchestral score," the French illustrator Stéphane Heuet re-presents Proust in graphic form for anyone who has always dreamed of reading him but was put off by the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. This New York Times best-selling graphic adaptation reveals the fundamental architecture of Proust's work while displaying a remarkable fidelity to his language as well as the novel's themes of time, art, and the elusiveness of memory. As Goldhammer writes in his introduction, "The reader new to Proust must attend closely, even in this compressed rendering, to the novel's circling rhythms and abrupt cross-cuts between different places and times. But this necessary attentiveness is abetted and facilitated by the compactness of the graphic format."
In this first volume, Swann's Way, the narrator Marcel, an aspiring writer, recalls his childhood when--in a now-immortal moment in literature--the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea unleashes a torrent of memories about his family's country home in the town of Combray. Here, Heuet and Goldhammer use Proust's own famously rich and labyrinthine sentences and discerning observations to render Combray like never before. From the water lilies of the Vivonne to the steeple and stained glass of the town church, Proust's language provides the blueprint for Heuet's illustrations. Heuet and Goldhammer also capture Proust's humor, wit, and sometimes scathing portrayals of Combray's many memorable inhabitants, like the lovelorn Charles Swann and the object of his affection and torment, Odette de Crécy; Swann's daughter, Gilberte; local aristocrat the Duchesse de Guermantes; the narrator's uncle Adolphe; and the hypochondriac Aunt Léonie.
Including a Proust family tree, a glossary of terms, and a map of Paris, this graphic adaptation is a surprising and useful companion piece to Proust's masterpiece for both the initiated and those seeking an introduction.
In the award-winning Irmina, Barbara Yelin presents a troubling drama about the tension between integrity and social advancement. Based on a true story, this moving and perceptive graphic novel perfectly conjures the oppressive atmosphere of wartime Germany, reflecting with compassion and intelligence on the complicity that results from the choice, conscious or otherwise, to look away.
In Kafkaesque, Peter Kuper combines stunning artistic technique with shrewd political and social commentary for a mesmerizing interpretation of fourteen iconic Franz Kafka short stories.
Long fascinated with the work of Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper began illustrating his stories in 1988. Initially drawn to the master's dark humor, Kuper adapted the stories over the years to plumb their deeper truths. Kuper's style deliberately evokes Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel, contemporaries of Kafka whose wordless novels captured much of the same claustrophobia and mania as Kafka's tales. Working from new translations of the classic texts, Kuper has reimagined these iconic stories for the twenty-first century, using setting and perspective to comment on contemporary issues like civil rights and homelessness.
Longtime lovers of Kafka will appreciate Kuper's innovative interpretations, while Kafka novices will discover a haunting introduction to some of the great writer's most beguiling stories, including "A Hunger Artist," "In The Penal Colony," and "The Burrow." Kafkaesque stands somewhere between adaptation and wholly original creation, going beyond a simple illustration of Kafka's words to become a stunning work of art.
This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal-to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics-continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity.
This story is at the same time a historical novel and an accessible explication of some of the biggest ideas of mathematics and modern philosophy. With rich characterizations and expressive, atmospheric artwork, the book spins the pursuit of these ideas into a highly satisfying tale. Probing and ingeniously layered, the book throws light on Russell's inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless questions he spent his life trying to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between an ideal rationality and the unchanging, flawed fabric of reality.
