Search results for ""Drawn and Quarterly""

Inspired by a 16th-century Zen monk s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full colour vignettes. In Barry s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighbourhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda Barry has the innate ability to zero in on the essence of truth, a magical quality that has made her book One! Hundred! Demons! an enduring classic of the early 21st century. In the book s intro, however, Barry throws the idea of truth out of the window by asking the reader to decide if fiction can have truth and if autobiography can have a fiction, a hybrid that Barry coins autobiofictionalography. As readers get to know Barry s demons, they realize that the actual truth no longer matters because the universality of Barry s comics, true or untrue reigns supreme.

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Living on the moonWhatever were we thinking? ...It seems so silly now. The lunar colony is slowly winding down, like a small town circumvented by a new super highway. As our hero, the Mooncop, makes his daily rounds, his beat grows ever smaller, the population dwindles. A young girl runs away, a dog breaks off his leash, an automaton wanders off from the Museum of the Moon. Each day that the Mooncop goes to work, life gets a little quieter and a little lonelier. As in Goliath, Tom Gauld's retelling of the Bible story, the focus in Gauld's science fiction is personal-no big explo-sions or grand reveals, just the incremental dissolution of an abandoned project and a person's slow awakening to his own uselessness. Depicted in the distinctive, matter-of-fact style of his beloved Guardian strips, Mooncop is equal parts funny and melancholy. Gauld captures essential truths about humanity, making this a story of the past, present, and future, all in one.

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First Year Healthy purports to be the story of a young woman, recently released from the hospital after an outburst, and her burgeoning relationship with an odd, perhaps criminal Turkish immigrant. In a scant thirty-two pages, working with a vibrant, otherworldly palette of magentas, yellows, and greys, Michael DeForge brings to life a world whose shifting realities are as treacherous as the thin ice its narrator walks on. First Year Healthy is all it appears to be and more: a parable about mental illness, a folk tale about magical cats, and a bizarre, compelling story about relationships. Michael DeForge's singular voice and vision have, in a few short years, rocketed his work to the apex of the contemporary comics canon. Ant Colony was his first book with Drawn and Quarterly: it appeared on the New York Times Graphic Bestseller list and was lauded by the Chicago Tribune, Globe and Mail, and Harper's Magazine. His effortless storytelling and eye for striking page design make each page of First Year Healthy a fascinating puzzle to be unravelled. First Year Healthy is knotty and mysterious - it demands to be read and reread.

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In 1980, Sylvie Rancourt and her boyfriend moved to Montreal from rural Northern Quebec. With limited formal education or training, they had a hard time finding employment, so Sylvie began dancing in strip clubs. These experiences formed the backbone of the first Canadian autobiographical comic book, Melody, which Rancourt wrote, drew, and distributed, starting in 1985. Later, Rancourt collaborated with artist Jacques Boivin, who translated and drew a new series of Melody comics for the American market - the comics were an instant cult classic. The Rancourt drawn-and-written comics have never before seen English publication. These stories are compelling without ever being voyeuristic or self-pitying, and her drawings are formally innovative while maintaining a refreshingly frank and engaging clarity. Whether she's divulging her first experiences dancing for an audience or sharing moments from her life at home, her storytelling is straightforward and never sensationalized. With a knowing wink at the reader, Rancourt shares a world that, in someone else's writing, might be scandalous or seedy, but in hers is fully realized, real, and often funny. The Drawn and Quarterly edition of Melody, featuring an introduction from Chris Ware (Building Stories), will place this masterpiece of early autobiographical comics in its rightful place at the heart of the comics canon.

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The very first Drawn and Quarterly Kitaro collection, now back in print with a lush new cover. Kitaro seems just like any other boy. Of course, he isn t what with his one eye and jet-powered geta sandals, and the fact that he can shape shift like a chameleon. It s all a part of being a 350 year-old yokai, a Japanese spirit monster. Against a backdrop of photorealistic landscapes, Kitaro and his otherworldly cartoon friends plunge into the depths of the Pacific Ocean and forge the oft-unseen wilds of Japan s countryside. The twelve stories in this special collection include more works published in the golden age of GeGeGe no Kitaro between 1967 and 1969. It is a must-have for Kitaro s most devoted fans and features one of the earliest battles of monster versus giant robot battles seen in print. In another very special episode, our titular good guy even battles vampires, werewolves, and witches alongside creepy compatriots and occasional foes. Kitaro, as seen on TV and played in video games, is now a cultural touchstone for several generations. This updated and newly released edition is a wonderful companion to the classic all-ages Kitaro series that blends the eerie with the comic. The Eisner-Award winner Shigeru Mizuki s offbeat sense of humor and genius for the macabre make for a delightful, lighthearted romp where bad guys always get what s coming to them.

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Lynda Barry's bestselling treatise on creativity, What It Is, is now available in paperbackHow do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? What is an image? What is the past? For decades, these questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Barry's What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive mind who wishes to write or to remember.In this exploratory workbook, confessional, and memoir each page is a full-color collage that is a gentle guide to the creative process packed full ofswirling collaged images with pen and ink drawings on Barry's signature legal paper. Barry's award winning book is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: The ordinary is extraordinary.

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Everybody's favorite party girl Wendy is so backWhen Wendy is nominated for the coveted National FoodHut Contemporary Art Prize alongside her friend Winona, all of her millennial dreams seem to be coming true. She lives a post-pandemic, polyamorous fine artist's lifestyle in the big city and basks in the glory of national attention with the success of her popular comic strip, Wanda.But not even achieving bona fide art star fame can hide the truth: a never-ending struggle with imposter syndrome. After she cracks in an online interview and gets dragged in the comments section, she heads straight to a local watering hole to drown her sorrows. Several lines of coke, too many drinks, and one all night rager with fans later, Wendy is ready to curse Gen Z and confront her addictions. All the while, she and Winona drift apart as a younger Indigenous artist wedges herself between them. Will Wendy's commitment to change wind up short-lived?The Wendy Aw

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Dhaliwal creates a land ruled by magic and fire, where the sky is thick with witchesA witch's work is never done when she works for the people. With the success of her town relying on her magic, demands are high. But what happens when a witch can''t keep up with the magical requests? She is burnt, of coursein a cruel ritual that extinguishes her magic and erases all her memories, making her just like everybody else. But when a burning ceremony is interrupted by rain in Chamomile Valley, a witch is left writhing at the stake. It''s up to a witch doctor and her toad friend to save the singed witch and nurse her back to health. Can they help her before her magic is lost forever?Aminder Dhaliwal's A Witch's Guide to Burning is a whimsical and humorous allegory for burnout in a society in desperate need of self-care. With a lavish blend of prose, illustration, and comics, Dhaliwal crafts an enthralling hybrid adventure story like you've never seen before. Fo

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No matter how wrong relationships can be, there's nothing quite like getting them right.Every guy's been a creep at one point or another. That's just the way it is. Or at least, that's what Cleo tells herself once she finds out her boyfriend might not be the man she thought he was. Is it possible to keep loving someone you're not sure you can trust? More to the point, should you? Once the fabric of Cleo's relationship rips at the seams, the life she had built with himabroad and away from those closest to herunravels right before her eyes. Yet, letting it fall to pieces as she walks away is only half the story.So Long Sad Love swaps out the wobbly transition of weaving a new existence into being post-heartbreak for the surprising effortlessness and simplicity of a life already rebuilt. Cleo not only rediscovers her identity as an artist but uncovers her capacity to find love where she has always been most at home: with other women.Mirion Malle da

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The final, Eisner Award-winning chapter of a legendary cartoonist s history of Japan. Showa 1953-1989: A History of Japan concludes award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki's stunning historical and autobiographical series about Japanese life in the twentieth century. The final volume picks up in the wake of utter defeat in World War II, covering the United States shift from enemy to ally. Jobs, money, and opportunity are funneled along in a bid to establish the country as a bulwark against Communist expansion. Japan thus reinvents itself, emerging as an economic powerhouse. Events like the Tokyo Olympiad and the World's Fair reintroduce the world to a much friendlier Japan, but this period of peace and plenty conceals a populace still struggling to come to terms with the devastation of their all-too-recent past. Mizuki's own struggles mirror those of the nation during this period of recovery and reconciliation. He fights his way back from poverty, rising to the rank of cartoon celebrity beloved by millions of manga-reading children. However, prosperity cannot bring the happiness Mizuki craves, as he struggles to find meaning in the sacrifices made during the war. This visionary series, told by a true man of his time, is a magnum opus fully representative of the graphic novel as world literature.

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From toddler antics to doctor appointments, Keiler Roberts breathes humour and life into the fleeting present. Keiler Roberts affirms her status as one of the best autobiographical cartoonists working today with The Joy of Quitting, a work encompassing 8 years of hilarious moments in the author s life, mined from the universal. It spans her frantic child-rearing, misfires in the workplace, and frustrating experiences with the medical system. In one strip, the author and her daughter Xia have itchy scalps. Roberts asks her husband to check her hair and all she gets is the cursory remark that he just sees a bunch of bugs. In another, Xia describes her oddly shaped poop in precise detail. We then see Xia sitting at the breakfast table telling the family that she recently learned the word nuisance and everyone agrees it s a good word for her to know. As Xia grows from toddler to big kid, the family evolves and its dynamics shift in subtle ways, changes that pass all too suddenly in real life captured forever with Roberts s keen observational humour. The Joy of Quitting is Roberts magnum opus of domestic comedy, highlighting how she continues to work within and expand the rich tradition of autobiographical comics. Again and again, Roberts shows us that most meaningful moments or gestures often don t have any meaning at all.

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The satirical saga of three artists seeking recognition. But there can be only one Artist. A novelist, single, forty-four years old. A painter, divorced, forty-six years old. A musician, single, forty-two years old. On the outer limits of relevancy in an arts culture that celebrates youth, these three men make up the artist group Arcade. Caught in circular arguments about what makes real art and concerned about the vapid interests of their younger contemporaries, none of them are reaping the benefits of success. But there s always another chance to make it. When it comes time, out of the three, who will emerge as an acclaimed artist? More important, when one artist s star rises, will he leave the rest behind? Following Yeong-shin Ma s hit manhwa, Moms, this plunge into artistic friendships is as hilarious and infuriating as it is real. With absurdist style and off-beat humour, Artist simultaneously caricatures and complicates the figure of the artist. The friendships between the three are impassioned and mercurial, resulting in conflicts about fashion choices, squabbles with foreign children, and changes in one another's artistic fortunes for better and worse. As the story progresses we see the ways that recognition or lack thereof moulds each character s outlook, whether they will be changed by the scene or end up changing it to fit their ideals.

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A deeply emotional visual representation of a teenager s confusion. Still reeling from the death by suicide of his drug addicted father, Travis moves in with his grandmother to become her caretaker as she battles cancer. Meanwhile he tries to live a typical teen life of pulling pranks, occasional shoplifting, dating, and endless drives through the twisting backroads of Central Massachusetts with Nirvana s Nevermind as the soundtrack. When the police intervene after a prank backfires, the boys realize that their time as children is rapidly disappearing and they may never fully understand each other as they move apart. After his Lynd Ward Prize-winning graphic novel, King of King Court, explored the power that parents hold over their children s emotional lives, Travis Dandro employs his signature dream imagery and crass humour to tell the story of teenage independence and resilience as he prepares to head off to art school. Hummingbird Heart is a detailed and stylish account of a time of great uncertainty. Dandro s densely crafted pages create a deeply emotional experience as his story swings from character confrontation to finely-wrought domestic detail a slapstick cafeteria destroying brawl gives way to the beautifully rendered flight of the impossible hummingbird.

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The classic book featuring Maybonne Mullen and her little sister Marlys is back in print! Lynda Barry captures all the glorious magic and excruciating pain of junior high school in this Ernie Pook Comeek collection from the early 90s. The star of this collection is 14 year old Maybonne who relays the angst and insecurity of life through hand scrawled diary entries, class assignments, and letters, in cursive with doodle and bubble letters. Of course, there is the ever-annoying yet adorable little sister Marlys who never fails to read her big sister s diary. Barry deftly portrays the capricious nature of teen friendships, adolescent peer-pressure, and the kill or be killed nature of a middle school s social scene in her signature style. No one but Lynda Barry can so naturally zero in on the joyous urgency yet heartbreaking poignancy of childhood. In an authentic teen voice full of diffidence and melodrama, the bespectacled and freckled Maybonne relates all of life s indignities on equal measure. Heartbreaking stories of a broken home, child molestation, an alcoholic absentee father and a bitter mom emerge between strips about home ec class, summer vacation, and babysitting, illustrating Barry s peerless ability to make the reader both cry and laugh.

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A wormhole into a fleeting romance told in a mind-bending first-person chorus. Time Zone J is Julie Doucet s first inked comic since she famously quit in the nineties after an exhausting career in an industry that, at the time, made little room for women. The year is 1989 and twenty-three-year-old Doucet is flying to France to meet with a soldier. He s a man she only knows through their mail correspondence, a common enough reality of the zine era, when comics were mailed from cartoonist to reader and close relationships were formed. Time is not on their side the soldier is just on furlough for a few days but the two make the most of their visit and discuss future plans, maybe even Christmas in Doucet s city, Montreal. Based on diary entries from the whirlwind romance, the passion and high emotions of youth before you know the limits of love, before you know the difference between love and lust seep through the pages. In contrast to the tryst, Doucet draws herself today, at fifty-five. After years of being in a crowd of men, Doucet compulsively returns to drawing, creating an alternate universe that foregrounds women. The pages of Time Zone J overflow with images pulled from past and present, faces and people that have inspired Doucet across more than three decades of creative work.

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An immigrant weaves a new, surreal americana, complete with bubblegum fights and bomb queens. Rarely does a new talent arrive in the medium as unmistakably distinct as Rumi Hara. With immersive art and a clear-eyed storytelling rhythm, her uncategorizable debut, Nori, put her playful cartooning on display. Her new collection, The Peanutbutter Sisters and Other American Stories, delights with equal mischievousness. The Peanutbutter Sisters is a glorious balance of contradictions, at once escapism and realism; science fiction and slice of life. Two students explore the urban landscape while following Newton Creek, the polluted Queens-Brooklyn border. As they do, they plan a traditional Japanese play with contemporary pop culture. Another story features an intergalactic race of all living things set in the year 2099 and is a dazzling treatise on the environment and journalism. Yet, sometimes the fantastical collides with the quotidian in the same story. A man struggling with vertigo during quarantine encounters a world of sexual revelry whenever he has a dizzy spell. The Peanutbutter sisters ride a hurricane into NYC and yet aren t able to hitch a ride back with a whale due to a heavily polluted ocean. Hara s magical realist tendencies and diverse cast of characters all contort the tropes of the American comics canon. Yet above all else, her innate control of the comics language her ability to weave the absurd with the real on such a charming and commanding level is refreshingly unrivaled.

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Unvarnished. Punk. The New York Times. King-Cat Classix collects material from the first fifty issues of John Porcellino s King-Cat Comics as they appeared in self-published, handmade zines throughout the 1990s. These strips span Porcellino s dynamic evolution from saturated, punk drawings to his characteristic refined minimalism, revealing his work as nothing short of a catalyst that has inspired artists like Chris Ware in the emerging literary comics scene. In the inky drawings featuring beloved pets, awkward teenage one-night-stands, and everyday blunders, we see a nascent style steeped in truth and transparency one that continues to ring true today. Porcellino s mind is spread out on the page, with an uninhibited id running wildly about dreams and sexual fantasies, not unlike the gritty, stabbing pen strokes of Julie Doucet. He sketches fragmented moments and glimpses of interaction that seem to reflect the very manner in which we process memory: we are made up of a stream of consciousness, captured in fleeting mental images, and Porcellino externalizes that messy internal reality. Follow along the path of Porcellino s dynamic evolution and relish in the inspirational power of this groundbreaking collection.

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The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud collects the best short stories from Kuniko Tsurita s remarkable career. While the works of her male peers in literary manga are widely reprinted, this formally ambitious and poetic female voice is like none other currently available to an English readership. A master of the comics form, expert pacing and compositions combined with bold characters are signature qualities of Tsurita's work. Tsurita s early stories Nonsense and Anti provide a unique, intimate perspective on the bohemian culture and political heat of late 1960s and early 70s Tokyo. Her work gradually became darker and more surreal under the influence of modern French literature and her own prematurely failing health. As in works like The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud and Max, the gender of many of Tsurita's strong and sensual protagonists is ambiguous, marking an early exploration of gender fluidity. Late stories like Arctic Cold and Flight show the artist experimenting with more conventional narrative modes, though with dystopian themes that extend the philosophical interests of her early work. An exciting and essential gekiga collection, The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud is translated by comics scholar Ryan Holmberg and includes an afterword cowritten by Holmberg and the manga editor Mitsuhiro Asakawa delineating Tsurita's importance and historical relevance.

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R. Sikoryak is the master of the pop culture pastiche. In Masterpiece Comics, he interpreted classic literature with defining twentieth-century comics. With Terms and Conditions, he made the unreadable contract that everyone signs, and no one reads, readable. He employs his magic yet again to investigate the very framework of the country with Constitution Illustrated. By visually interpreting the complete text of the supreme law of the land with more than a century of American pop culture icons, Sikoryak distills the very essence of the government legalese from the abstract to the tangible, the historical to the contemporary. Among Sikoryak s spot-on unions of government articles and amendments with famous comic-book characters: the Eighteenth Amendment that instituted prohibition is articulated with Homer Simpson running from Chief Wiggum; the Fourteenth Amendment that solidifies citizenship to all people born and naturalized in the United States is personified by Ms. Marvel; and, of course, the Nineteenth Amendment offering women the right to vote is a glorious depiction of Wonder Woman breaking free from her chains. American artists from George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Charles Schulz (Peanuts) to Raina Telgemeier (Sisters) and Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For) are homaged, with their characters reimagined in historical costumes and situations. We the People has never been more apt.

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In The River at Night, Kevin Huizenga delves deep into consciousness. What begins as a simple, distracted conversation between husband and wife, Glenn and Wendy Ganges him reading a library book and her working on her computer becomes an exploration of being and the passage of time. As they head to bed, Wendy exhausted by a fussy editor and Glenn energized by his reading and no small amount of caffeine, the story begins to fracture. The River at Night flashes back, first to satirize the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and then to examine the camaraderie of playing first-person shooter video games with work colleagues. Huizenga shifts focus to suggest ways to fall asleep as Glenn ponders what the passage of time feels like to geologists or productivity gurus. The story explores the simple pleasures of a marriage, like lying awake in bed next to a slumbering lover, along with the less cherished moments of disappointment or inadvertent betrayal of trust. Huizenga uses the cartoon medium like a symphony, establishing rhythms and introducing themes that he returns to, adding and subtracting events and thoughts, stretching and compressing time. A walk to the library becomes a meditation on how we understand time, as Huizenga shows the breadth of the comics medium in surprising ways. The River at Night is a modern formalist masterpiece as empathetic, inventive, and funny as anything ever written.

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From a child s-eye view, Travis Dandro recounts growing up with a drug-addicted birth father, alcoholic step-dad, and overwhelmed mother. As a kid, Dandro would temper the tension of his every day with flights of fancy, finding refuge in toys and animals and insects rather than the unpredictable adults around him. Dandro perceptively details the effects of poverty and addiction on a family while maintaining a child s innocence for as long as he can. King of King Court spans from Travis s early childhood through his teen years, focusing not only on the obviously abusive actions, but also on the daily slights and snubs that further strain relations between him and his parents. Alongside Dandro s birth father committing crimes and shooting up, King of King Court lingers on scenes of him criticizing Travis and his siblings. Dandro gives equal heft to these anecdotes, emphasizing how damaging even relatively slight traumas can be to a child s worldview. As Travis matures into young adulthood and begins to understand the forces shaping his father s toxic behaviours, the story becomes even more nuanced. Travis is empathetic to his father s own tragic history, but unable to escape the cycle of misconduct and reprisals they are caught in. King of King Court is a revelatory autobiography that examines trauma, addiction, and familial relations in a unique and sensitive way.

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How could this happen? The question of 2016 becomes deeply personal in James Sturm s riveting graphic novel Off Season, which charts one couple s divisive separation during Bernie Sanders s loss to Hillary Clinton, Clinton s loss to Donald Trump, and the disorienting months that followed. We see a father navigating life as a single parent and coping with the disintegration of a life-defining relationship. Amid the upheaval lie tender moments with his kids a sleeping child being carried in from the car, Christmas-morning anticipation, a late-night cookie after a temper tantrum and fallible humans drenched in palpable feelings of grief, rage, loss, and overwhelming love. Using anthropomorphized characters as a tactic for tempering an otherwise emotionally fraught situation, Off Season is unaffected and raw, steeped in the specificity of its time while speaking to a larger cultural moment. A truly human experience, Off Season displays Sturm s masterful pacing and storytelling combined with conscious and confident growth as the celebrated cartoonist and educator moves away from historical fiction to deliver this long-form narrative set in contemporary times. Originally serialized on Slate, this expanded edition turns timely vignettes into a timeless, deeply affecting account of one family and their off season.

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Peter Bagge returns with a biography of another fascinating twentieth-century trailblazer the writer, feminist, war correspondent, and libertarian Rose Wilder Lane. Following the popularity and critical acclaim of Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story and Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story is a fast-paced, charming, informative look at the brilliant Lane. Highly accomplished, she was a founder of the American libertarian movement and a champion of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in bringing the classic Little House on the Prairie series to the American public. Like Sanger and Hurston, Lane was an advocate for women s rights who led by example, challenging norms in her personal and professional life. Anti-government and anti-marriage, Lane didn t think that gender should hold anyone back from experiencing all the world had to offer. Though less well-known today, in her lifetime she was one of the highest-paid female writers in America and a political and literary luminary, friends with Herbert Hoover, Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis, and Ayn Rand, to name a few. Bagge s portrait of Lane is heartfelt and affectionate, probing into the personal roots of her rugged individualism. Credo is a deeply researched dive into a historical figure whose contributions to American society are all around us, from the books we read to the politics we debate.

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John Porcellino makes his love of home and of nature the anchors in an increasingly turbulent world. He slows down and visits the forests, fields, streams, and overgrown abandoned lots that surround every city. He studies the flora and fauna around us. He looks at the overlooked. Porcellino also digs deep into a quintessential American endeavour the road trip. Uprooting his comfortable life several times in From Lone Mountain, John drives through the country weaving from small town to small town, experiencing America in slow motion, avoiding the sameness of airports and overwhelming hustle of major cities. From Lone Mountain collects stories from Porcellino s influential zine King-Cat John enters a new phase of his life, as he remarries and decides to leave his beloved second home Colorado for San Francisco. Grand themes of King-Cat are visited and stated more eloquently than ever before: serendipity, memory, and the quest for meaning in the everyday. Over the past three decades, Porcellino's beloved King-Cat thas offered solace to his readers: his gentle observational stories take the pulse of everyday life and reveal beauty in the struggle to keep going.

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Before penning his acclaimed graphic novel Market Day and founding the Center for Cartoon Studies, James Sturm proved his worth as a master cartoonist with the eloquent graphic novel, The Golem s Mighty Swing, one of the first breakout graphic novel hits of the 21st century. Sturm s fascination with the invisible America has been the crux of his comics work, exploring the rarely-told or oft-forgotten bits of history that define a country. By reuniting America s greatest pastime with its hidden history, the graphic novel tells the story of the Stars of David, a barnstorming Jewish baseball team of the depression era. Led by its manager and third baseman, the nomadic team travels from small town to small town providing the thrill of the sport while playing up their religious exoticism as a curio for people to gawk at, heckle, and taunt. When the team s fortunes fall, the players are presented a plan to get people in the stands. But by placing their fortunes in the hands of a promoter, the Stars of David find themselves fanning the flames of ethnic tensions. Sturm s nuanced composition is on full display as he deftly builds the climax of the game against the rising anti-Semitic fervour of the crowd. Baseball, small towns, racial tensions, and the desperate grasp for the American Dream: The Golem s Mighty Swing is a classic American novel.

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Sticks Angelica is, in her own words, 49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, head- mistress, Mountie, columnist, libertarian, cellist. After a high-profile family scandal, Sticks escapes to the woods to live in what would be relative isolation were it not for the many animals that surround and inevitably annoy her. Sticks is an arrogant self-obsessed force who wills herself on the flora and fauna. There is a rabbit named Oatmeal who harbours an unrequited love for her, a pair of kissing geese, a cross- dressing moose absurdly named Lisa Hanawalt. When a reporter named, ahem, Michael DeForge shows up to interview Sticks for his biography on her, she quickly slugs him and buries him up to his neck, immobilizing him. Instead, Sticks narrates her way through the forest, recalling formative incidents from her storied past in what becomes a strange sort of autobiography. Deforge s witty dialogue and deadpan narration create a bizarre yet eerily familiar world. Sticks Angelica plays with autobiography, biography, and hagiography to look at how we build our own sense of self and how others carry on the roles we create for them in our own personal dramas.

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Inspired by Yeon-sik Hong s attempt to Uncomfortably, Happily is the story of a young couple finding their way. Burdened by unmet comics deadlines and high rent, our narrator and his wife know they must make a change. Convinced the absence of traffic noise will ease his writer s block, our pair welcomes the idea of building a life from scratch. Deciding on a home atop an uninhabited mountain, they excitedly embrace the charms of their new rural existence. From tending to the land and attempting grocery runs through snow, to the complexities of fighting depression in seclusion, the move does not immediately prove to be the golden ticket they d hoped for, and the silence of the mountain poses as much of an obstacle to output as the sirens of the city. Through it all, though, we see simple pleasures seep in and gain prominence over these commercial, and, often, comparatively trivial worries: the smell of the forest, the calming weight of enveloping snow, and the gratification of a stripped down life making art begin to muffle other concerns. Originally published in Korean to great acclaim and winning the Manhwa Today award, Uncomfortably, Happily uniquely explores our narrator s inner world. Hong propels the comic with gorgeously detailed yet simple art, sharing the story of two lives unfolding slowly, sometimes uncomfortably, yet ultimately, happily.

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Cheap Novelties is an early testament to Ben Katchor's extraordinary prescience as both a gifted cartoonist and an astute urban chronicler. Rumpled, middle-aged Julius Knipl photographs a vanishing city-an urban landscape of low-rent apartment buildings, obsolete industries, monuments to forgotten people and events, and countless sources of inexpensive food. In Katchor's signature pen and ink wash style, Cheap Novelties is a portrait of what we have lost to gentrification, globalization, and the malling of America that is as moving today as it was twenty-five years ago. In 1991, the original Cheap Novelties appeared in an unassuming paperback from the RAW contributor; it would become one of the first graphic novels of the contemporary graphic novel golden age and set the stage for Katchor as he is now regarded-a modern day cartooning genius. Drawn and Quarterly's 25th anniversary edition will be a deluxe hardcover reformatted to Katchor's original vision and will feature a new cover.

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After losing both his fortune and his girlfriend, Moomin has hit rock bottom. Luckily, in his darkest moment, he stumbles across the beloved family he lost as a child Moominmamma and Moominpappa and together, the Moomins embark on their first adventure. Moominmam- ma struggles to balance her husband s desire for danger with her own homebody sensibilities, while Moomin fears his new parents will even- tually tire of him. A poignant story of love and reunion unwinds in this classic Moomin caper from Tove Jansson.

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In the fifth volume of Anouk Ricard's hilarious modern kids' classic, Anna, Froga, Ron, Christopher, and Bubu continue their non-adventures with bickering, needling, cajoling, and honest friendship. No white lie goes unexposed, no small embarrassment goes unrevealed, no secret is kept. For Christmas, the gang decides to forego shopping malls and make their own gifts for one another; Bubu goes on a retreat to shed a few extra pounds and get in touch with his zen side; a vampire with exceptional Scrabble skills moves in next door; and the five friends embark on an unforgettable trip to Paris, where they stay in an itsy-bitsy apartment. Rarely is friendship treated so realistically and delightfully as it is in the comics of Anouk Ricard.

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Julie Doucet is an artist who has mastered many voices and styles, from her landmark and medium-defining early work in comics with her comic-book series Dirty Plotte and the classic graphic novel My New York Diary, to her linocut and collage work in Lady Pep and Long Time Relationship. Most recently, Doucet has focused primarily on col- lage, crafting impeccable zines, prints, and other ephemera. In Carpet Sweeper Tales, her first new book in a decade, we see this multi-faceted artist combine her many talents into one genre-defying masterwork. Though Doucet stopped drawing comics over ten years ago, here she revisits the art form, pulling images from 1970s Italian fumetti, or photonovels, to create her own collage comics. Doucet collages a unique dialogue of love and travel between characters sitting in classic cars, driving through cities and pristine countryside. This book is the first to combine Doucet's love of collage with her gift at comics storytelling. The result is a collection of lighthearted stories that play upon the disconnects between 1970s imagery and our modern world. Lost in translation, the dialogue is stilted, the characters alien, the mood always playful. Carpet Sweeper Tales is a milestone in a career filled with milestone achievements.

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The iconoclastic and bestselling cartoonist of Paying for It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John returns with a polemical interpretation of the Bible that will be one of the most controversial and talked-about graphic novels of 2016. Mary Wepte over the feet of Jesus is the retelling in comics from of nine biblical stories that present Chester Brown's fascinating and starling thesis about biblical representations of prostitution. Brown weaves a connecting line between Bathsheba, Ruth, Rahab, Tamar, Mary of Bethany, and he Birgin Mother and the reassesses the Christian moral code by examining the cultural implications of the Bible's representations of sex work. Mary Wept over the Feet of Jesus is a fitting follow-up to Brown's sui generis graphic memoir Paying for It, which was reviewed twice in the New York Times and hailed by sex workers for Brown's advocacy for the decriminalization and normalization of prostitution. Brown approaches the Bible as he did the life of Louis Riel, making these stories compellingly readable and utterly pertinent to a modern audience. In classic Chester Brown fashion, he provides extensive handwritten endnotes that delve into the biblical lore that informs Mary Wept over the feet of Jesus. 'There aren't many cartoonists as brave - or frankly, as strange - as this Canadian artist.' - Rolling Stone.

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Big Kids is simultaneously Michael DeForge's most straightforward narrative and his most complex work to date. It follows a troubled teenage boy through the transformative years of high school, as he redefines his friends, his interests, and his life path. When the boy's uncle, a police officer, gets kicked out of the family's basement apartment and transferred to the countryside, April moves in. She's a college student: mysterious and cool, she quickly takes a shine to the boy. The boy's own interests quickly fade away: he stops engaging in casual sex, taking drugs, and testing the limits of socially acceptable (and legal) behaviour. Instead, April and the boy hang out with her friends, a bunch of highly evolved big kids who spend their days at the campus swimming pool. And slowly, the boy begins to change, too. Eerie and perfectly paced, Michael DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with in adolescence, the choices we make to fit in, and the ways we survive times of change. Like Ant Colony and First Year Healthy, Big Kids is a testimony to the harshness and beauty of being alive.

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Leanne Shapton's bold, vibrant watercolor portraits of the trees of Canada come to new life in this postcard set. The lively hues of the garry oak and the simple elegance of the staghorn sumac are perfectly presented in a beautiful keepsake box, great as a gift for a friend or yourself! Native Trees of Canada: A Postcard Set collects thirty of Shapton's spirited and singular drawings of the native trees of Canada.

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As springtime dawns in Moominvalley and the first northern crocus opens, Moominpappa and Snorkmaiden, glamourised by the prospects of movie stars and gambling, insist the whole family take a trip down to the Riviera. Reluctantly Moomin and Moominmamma agree to go along, and the Moomins set off on a grand adventure, complete with butlers, luxury shops, indoor swimming pools, and duels at dawn. With their innocent curiosity about everything, the Moomins prove the perfect foil for the cynical, world-weary residents of the Riviera. Moomin on the Riviera is a classic Moomin story reworked in full colour. A delight for the whole family!

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"Love and Rockets author Gilbert Hernandez returns with Bumperhead, a companion book to Marble Season. Whereas Marble Season explored the exuberant and occasionally troubled existence of the wide-eyed pre-teen Huey, Bumperhead zeroes in on disaf--fected teenhood with its protagonist Bobby, a young slacker who narrates his life as it happens but offers very little reflection on the events that transpire. Bobby lives in the moment exclusively, and is incapable of seeing the world outside of his experiences. He comes of age in the 1970s, making a rapid progression through that era's different subcultures - in a short period of time he segues from a stoner glam-rocker to a drunk rocker to a speed-freak punk. He drifts in and out of relationships with friends, both male and female. Life zooms past him.

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White Cube is Belgian cartoonist and illustrator Brecht Vandenbroucke's debut book, a collection of mostly wordless strips that follow a pair of pink-faced twins as they attempt to understand contemporary art and the gallery world. Their reactions to the art they encounter are frequently comedic, as they paint over Pablo Picasso's famous mural Guernica, and recreate a pixelated version of Edvard Munch's The Scream after receiving one too many emails. Lushly painted, these irreverent strips poke fun at the staid, often smug art world, offering an absurdist world view on the institutions of that world-questioning what constitutes art and what doesn't, as well as how we decide what goes on the walls of the gallery and what doesn't. Brecht Vandenbroucke's distinctive work blends the highbrow with the low, drawing equally from Gordon Matta-Clark's site-specific artwork, and the Three Stooges' slapstick timing. With a knowing wink at the reader, Vandenbroucke continuously uncovers something to laugh about in the stuffiness and pretentiousness of the art world.

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