Search results for ""Drawn and Quarterly""

Burdened with grief, confusion, and anger, Pascal Girard explores the childhood passing of his five-year-old brother. Girard delves into the emotional repercussions of this life-changing trauma, from his memories as a nine-year old struggling to understand up until present day, twenty-five years after the shattering loss. At the heart of Nicolas lies the question shared by most undergoing bereavement: why? This confusion multiplies for a young boy with few answers to his questions, lacking even a basic explanation of the cause of his brother's departure. As sorrow and guilt are muffled by time and the flurry of even the most typical childhood and adolescence, this is a story of grief not grieved, and a glimpse into the ongoing process of reckoning. Pascal struggles to reconcile the magnitude of this tragedy with the minutiae of his daily experience of loss. Nicolas is a delicate, minimalist portrait of the many faces of mourning, identified with surprising humor and pathos by an artist who knows them intimately. Originally published in a micro-run ten years ago, Girard creates new comics and an introduction that contemplate the larger effect of Nicolas's death on his current behaviors and habits. With masterful visual restraint, Girard pens a work of great honesty and integrity: Nicolas resonates long after the book is closed, the weight of the story echoing closely the heft of the personal loss.

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Young Edna Arkins lives in a neighborhood that is rapidly changing, thanks to white flight from urban Seattle in the late 1960s. As the world changes around her, Edna is exposed to the callous racism of adults; sometimes subtle and other times blatant, but always stinging. At the heart of The Good Times Are Killing Me is the forbidden friendship between Edna who is white and Bonna Willis who is black, and how the world around them forces them to challenge their loyalties to each other. As Barry does in her comics, she perfectly captures the awkward and earnest adolescent voice as Edna moves from childhood to middle school. Originally published in 1988, The Good Times Are Killing Me is as relevant now as it ever was. Its influence cannot be overstated as it was adapted into an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor's Award. D+Q will be publishing the novella in hardcover with a new cover and the color illustrations from the first edition.

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Vanessa Davis s autobiographical comics delighted readers ten years ago when she first began telling stories about her life in New York as a young single Jewish woman. More observational than confessional, Spaniel Rage is filled with frank and immediate pencil drawn accounts of dating woes, misunderstandings between her and her mother, and conversations with friends. Her keen observation of careless words spoken casually is refreshingly honest, yet never condemning. Unabashedly, Davis offers up gently self-deprecating anecdotes about her anxieties and wry truths about the contradictions of life in the big city. These comics are sexy, funny, lonely, beautiful, spare, and very smart the finest work from a natural storyteller.

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Enter the strange and wordplay-loving world of cartoonist and fine artist Marc Bell (Shrimpy and Paul, Hot Potatoe [sic]), where the All-Star Schnauzer Band runs things and tiny beings hold signs saying It's under control. Our hapless hero Stroppy is minding his business, working a menial job in one of Monsieur Moustache's factories, when a muscular fellah named Sean blocks up the assembly line. Sean's there to promote an All-Star Schnauzer Band-organized songwriting contest, which he does enthusiastically, and at the expense of Stroppy's livelihood, home, and face. In hopes for a cash prize, Stroppy submits a work by his friend Clancy The Poet to the contest. Mishaps and hilarity ensue and Stroppy is forced to go deep into the heart of Schnauzer territory to rescue his poet friend. Stroppy is Marc Bell's triumphant return to comics; it's also his first full-length graphic novella, one that thrums with jokes, hashtags, and made-up song lyrics. Densely detailed not-so-secret underground societies, little robots, and heavy weight humdingers leap off the page in full colour. With Stroppy, Bell continues to explode the divide between fine art, doodling, and comics.

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Moomin: The Complete Lars Jansson Comic Strip, Volume 10 welcomes readers back to the beloved world of Moominvalley, where pancakes and jam are a perfectly acceptable supper and wealthy aunts can be altogether too fierce to handle. The tenth volume of Tove and Lars Jansson's classic comic strip features the macabre and hilarious Moomin and the Vampire and The Underdeveloped Moomins story. Together, the four stories in this collection display the poignancy, whimsy, and philosophical bent that constitute the Moomins' enduring appeal.

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Delicate, complex drawings tell of a science-fiction worldIntelligent Sentient? feels like an artifact from another timea lost feature in OMNI magazine or the album booklet for a late-1970s Hawkwind record or perhaps a print version of Koyaanisqatsi. Beautiful, detailed filigreed drawings fold in on themselves and blossom out at the reader as time speeds up and contracts. A loose story is told that involves a society of giant people, strange art, and inexplicable scientific experiments utilizing nonexistent technology. Factories and tree houses teem with life, and the city nestles up against a landscape filled with dinosaurs, apes, and dragonflies living peacefully side by side.Intelligent Sentient? is a series of images that are tied together not in narrative but in a progressing theme, the takeaway being that everything is connected. The drawings contain the fine detail of a watchmaker and the visual scope of a social reform muralist.

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Tadao Tsuge was one of the key contributors to the legendary avant-garde Japanese comics magazine Garo during its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, renowned for his unpretentious journalistic storytelling and clear, eloquent cartooning. Trash Market brings together six of Tsuge's compelling, character-driven stories about life in post-World War II Japan. Trash Market and Gently Goes the Night touch on key topics for Tsuge: the charming lowlifes of the Tokyo slums and the WWII veterans who found themselves unable to forget the war. Song of Showa is an autobiographical piece about growing up in a Tokyo slum during the Occupation of Japan with an abusive grandfather and an ailing father, and finding brightness in the joyful people of the neighbourhood. Trash Market blurs the lines between fiction and reportage; it's a moving testament to the grittiness of life in Tokyo during the post-war years. Trash Market features an essay from the collection's editor and translator Ryan Holmberg, who is a specialist in Japanese art history. He will explore Tsuge's early career as a cartoonist and the formative years the artist spent working in Tokyo's notorious for-profit blood banks.

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Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings, Scenes from an Impending Marriage) has forged countless iconic images of New York City in his career as an illustrator. A master of conveying an entire story with a single panel, his covers for The New Yorker are beloved by New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike, as much for their frank yet charming portrayal of life in the big city as for their flawless design and gorgeous linework. This postcard set celebrates thirty of Tomine's most well-known illustrations, and is a loving homage to the city that Tomine, a West Coast transplant, has called home for the past eight years.

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The WORN Archive is a manifesto on why fashion and clothing matter. For eight years, the Canadian magazine has investigated the intersections of fashion, pop culture, and art. With its prescient, intelligent articles WORN strives to address diverse issues like gender, identity, and culture with openness and honesty. WORN asserts that fashion is art, history, ideas, and most of all fun-that style is a personal experience that need not align with the fashion industry. The five-hundred page book features the best content from the journal's first fourteen issues, assembled by founder and editor-in-chief Serah-Marie McMahon. Articles penned by a host of unique contributors (academics, writers, curators, and artists) touch on topics as wide-ranging as the relationship between feminism and fashion; the discourse on hijabs, how to tie a tie, the history of flight attendants, and textile conservation. With eclectic photo shoots featuring real models, striking illustrations, and whimsical layouts, every page is a joyful, creative approach to clothing. The WORN Archive is the ultimate cultural style map for those who don't want to be told how to dress, but are seeking a transformative understanding of why we wear what we do.

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Pascal's in a bad place. He's out of work, he and his long-time girlfriend have just broken up, and when he goes out for a run to ease his frazzled nerves, he falls and injures his back so badly, he's strictly forbidden from running. What's an endorphin-loving cartoonist to do? In a bid to distract himself, Pascal throws himself into his other pleasure: reading. And while at the bookstore one day, he spies a young woman picking up his own book. But then she darts out of the shop without paying. Bemused, he decides to figure out why she did it. Petty Theft is a comedy of errors, a laugh-out-loud account of a man on a mission, and a heavily fictionalised memoir about the addictiveness of book-ownership. Pascal Girard intermingles an all-too-true-to-life snapshot of contemporary relationships with slapstick trials and dryly funny tribulations in this delightfully readable book. From the award-winning author of Reunion, Petty Theft is a deftly told, finely drawn contemporary romance that will keep book-lovers on the edge of their seat from the first page until the book's denouement.

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An internationally-renowned cartoonist and reluctant war vet details Japan's involvement in World War II. Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan continues Eisner award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki's historical and autobiographical account of Japanese life in the twentieth century. This volume covers the devastation of the Sino-Japanese War and the first few years of the Pacific War a chilling reminder of just how harsh life in Japan was during this hostile era. Pivotal events like the attack on Pearl Harbor are reframed as part of a larger context detailing the country's brutal military expansion into Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Its effects on the otherwise unseen Japanese populace similarly come to the fore. On a personal level, these years mark a dramatic transformation in Mizuki's life too. His idyllic youth in the countryside comes to an abrupt halt when he is conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army against his will. On the tiny island of Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, a constant struggle for survival ensues. Not only must he fend off attacks from Allied forces, but from the harsh discipline of his own commanding officers too. It is here that Mizuki comes to understand the misery and beauty of the island itself, a place that will permanently mark and haunt him for the rest of his life.

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Chippendale''s . . . obsessively detailed [comics] feel like [they''ve] been shot straight from his brain onto the page. -Village VoicePuke Force is social satire written dark and dense across Brian Chippendale''s deconstructed multiverse of walking, talking M&Ms, hamsters, and cycloptic-yet-glamorous trivia hosts. In scathingly funny single-page strips that build and build, he takes on social media narcissism, governmental propaganda, racism, and a culture of violence, skewering the malice of the right and the hypocrisies of the left.A bomb explodes in a coffee shop: the incident is played out over and over again from the perspective of each table in the shop, revisiting moments from ten and twenty years before. We see the inevitable as the characters bicker or celebrate, unaware of what''s coming. Throughout this dystopic graphic novel, Chippendale uses humor and a frantic drawing style to show how the insidious nature of corporate greed and

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An intimate, unforgettable, and exquisite collection, Pallookaville is an essential for your Seth library. Palookaville 24 marks the long-awaited return of Seth s beloved series, which offers readers an invitation into the world and varied artistic practice of the iconic cartoonist. Beginning with Seth s serialized adolescent autobiography, Nothing Lasts, we enter the fleeting summers of his late teen years, specifically focusing on his summer jobs a stint as a gofer at the Ministry of Natural Resources and his experiences as a bellboy, dishwasher, and cook at a local inn. A memoir ruminating on memory and place and the people who pass through his life, this chapter of Nothing Lasts closes with a seminal event in Seth s young life. An intriguing visual feast, The Apology of Albert Batch is the culmination of ten years of collaboration between the director Luc Chamberlane and Seth a short film documenting Seth's venture into puppetry. An extensive photo essay detailing the making of the film accompanies a DVD. And lastly, Seth presents, warts and all, an exercise from his sketchbook. A simple activity: Select five names from a list and produce five stories to go with them. Drawn loosely with poster paint and ink, the work is spontaneous, showing a different side of the master artist. Palookaville 24 showcases Seth s artwork alongside his continually evolving artistic practice with unique elegance.

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The book that brought pre-eminent Manga-ka Shigeru Mizuki to the English-speaking world. Kokopo, 1943. A platoon of soldiers is ordered into battle. The objective is death. The alternative is certain execution as a consequence of survival. Inspired by Eisner Award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki's own mandatory tour of duty as an active combatant in the Imperial Japanese Army, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths portrays a flailing infantry unit on its last legs near the end of the Second World War. This deeply personal and landmark anti-war work could only have been made by a pacifist. The desperation and moral depravity on display is devastating. Mizuki's fanciful characters must make do against a photo-realistic backdrop teeming with tropical life that remains inhospitable. Indeed, commanding officers prove even more ferocious than the wild unknown of Papua New Guinea. And yet the human instinct endures, seeing through the absurdity of such a rigid and outdated command structure with gallows humor.

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Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the comics medium. For twenty years, Jason Lutes toiled on this intimate, sweeping epic before the collected Berlin was published in 2018 to widespread acclaim, including rave reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Vulture, Washington Post, and many other outlets. Lutes s historical fiction about the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism is seen through the eyes of the Jews and the Nazis; the socialists and the socialites; the lavishly decorated queer clubs and the crumbling tenement apartments. Marthe Muller is an aspiring artist escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War One by throwing herself into a life-altering romance. Kurt Severing is an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold. The Brauns are a family torn apart by poverty, politics, and the May Day protests of 1929. The Cocoa Kids are an American jazz band slowly realizing there s no place left for them in a changing Berlin. Lutes weaves these characters lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart, crafting a polyphonic novel that is rich in its historical detail and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism.

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Wendy is an aspiring contemporary artist whose adventures have taken her to galleries, art openings, and parties in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Toronto. In Wendy, Master of Art, Walter Scott s sly wit and social commentary zero in on MFA culture as our hero hunkers down to complete a master of fine arts at the University of Hell in small-town Ontario. Finally Wendy has space to refine her artistic practice, but in this calm, all of her unresolved insecurities and fears explode at full volume usually while hungover. What is the post-Jungian object as symbol? Will she ever understand her course reading or herself? What if she s just not smart enough? As she develops as an artist and a person, Wendy also finds herself in a teaching position, mentoring a perpetually sobbing grade-grubbing undergrad. Scott s incisively funny take on art school pretensions isn t the only focus. Wendy, Master of Art explores the politics of open relationships and polyamory, performative activism, the precariousness of a life in the arts, as well as the complexities of gender identity, sex work, drug use, and more. At its heart, this is a book about the give and take of community about learning to navigate empathy and boundaries, and to respect herself. It is deeply funny and endlessly relatable as it shows Wendy growing from millennial art party girl to successful artist, friend, teacher and Master of Art.

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How to encapsulate a life in all its messiness, epiphanies, misunderstandings, disappointments, and joys? Seth, cartoonist of Clyde Fans, the first graphic novel nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, offers his tragicomic answer with George Sprott: 1894 1975. Page by page, we learn about George outmoded television host, creature of habit, charming if pompous old man, selfish lover, man about to die and though this is ultimately the story of one man s death, Seth leavens it with humour and restraint. The book s omniscient narrator offers a patchwork tale: a series of interviews with the people who cared about George, flashbacks, and personal reminiscences. The thwarted love of his life, Olive Mott, and the woman he marries, Helen. His trips to the Arctic and the exoticized portrait his documentaries painted of a Great White North. His habit of falling asleep on-air. His humdrum demise. What emerges is a story about memory, loss, time, and the stories we tell (and retell) to get through the day. George s romanticizing and repeating of his adventures up North, adventures that are revealed to be entirely fictional, holds a mirror to the ways we each historicize our own lives. Originally serialised in The New York Times Magazine before being published in an expanded, large-format hardcover by Drawn & Quarterly, this new edition is the definitive George Sprott.

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An uncanny and eye-opening journey into a mysterious building, adapted from a short story by Jeff VanderMeerTo the west: trees. To the east: a mall. North: fast food. South: darkness. And at the centre is The Building, an office building wherein several factions vie for dominance. Inside, the walls are infiltrated with vines, a mischief of mice learn to speak English, and something eerie happens once a month on the fifth floor. In Secret Life, Theo Ellsworth uses a deep-layered style to interpret Nebula award-winning author Jeff VanderMeer's short story. What emerges is a mind-bending narrative that defamiliarizes the mundanity of office work and makes the arcane rituals of The Building home.When his manager borrows his pen for a presentation, a man is driven to unspeakable acts as he questions the role the pen has played in his workplace success. The despised denizens of the second floor develop their own tongue, incomprehensible to everyone else in Th

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Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry s bestselling Syllabus and this time she shares all of her comics-making exercises. In a new hand drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can t draw that they can, and most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

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The early work of the pioneering feminist cartoonist plus her acclaimed new story Dream HouseAline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area's underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 1960s. Kominsky-Crumb didn't worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating humor and honesty of a cartoonist confident in the story she wants to tell.Collecting comics from the 1970s through today, Love That Bunch is shockingly prescient while still being an authentic story of its era. Kominsky-Crumb was ahead of her time in juxtaposing the contradictory nature of female sexuality with a proud, complicated feminism. Most important, she does so without apology.

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When a charismatic prophet comes to town, the residents of Moominvalley are easily convinced to follow his doctrine for true happiness. Intrigued by their friends and neighbours lifestyle changes, the impression- able Moomins find themselves attempting to adopt the teachings of their new spiritual leader. But the freer they get, the more miser- able they feel. Moominvalley s state of divine chaos is further complicated by the proph- et s well-intentioned decree to free all of the jail s inmates. Moomin Begins a New Life is an eccentric all-ages adventure from the acclaimed Finnish cartoonist Tove Jansson that explores the appeal of self-transformation and the pursuit of happiness culture is that she addresses serious, often uncomfortable issues uncertainty, heart-break, mortality, natural disasters, our ample human imperfections with great compassion and warmth, never chastising or preaching but instead celebrating the light in life and aiming its generous beam at the dark. Maria Popova, Brainpickings

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A master cartoonist and veteran tells the life story of the man who started the Second World WarSeventy years after his death, Adolf Hitler remains a mystery. Historians, military tacticians, and psychologists have tried in vain to unravel his complex motivations for leading Germany into the Holocaust and World War II. With Shigeru Mizuki''s Hitler, the manga-ka (Kitaro, NonNonba, Showa: A History of Japan) delves deep into the history books to create an absorbing and eloquent portrait of Hitler''s life.Beginning with Hitler''s time in Austria as a starving art student and ending with a Germany in ruins, Shigeru Mizuki''s Hitler retraces the path Hitler took in life, coolly examining his charismatic appeal and his calculated political maneuvering. The Munich Beer Putsch, Hitler''s ascent to chancellor, the sudden death of his half-niece Geli, the Battle of Stalingrad, his relationship with Eva Braun, and his eventual demise:

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Palookaville 22 is an all-new collection of work from It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken's Seth. This instalment of Seth's critically acclaimed one-man anthology features an autobiographical comic about Seth's childhood, part four of his long-running Clyde Fans se--rial, a photo essay about a barbershop he designed, and a comic strip about the art of barbering. Nothing Lasts revisits Seth's childhood in 1960s Ontario, with a special focus on the salvation that he found in library books and drug-store comics. Drawn in the sketchbook style Seth popularized in his books Wimbledon Green and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, "Nothing Lasts" offers a glimpse at the agonies of adolescence for a shy, often alienated, small-town teen. The Clyde Fans chapter included here shows the conclusion of brothers Abe and Simon Matchcard's first lengthy conversation, and Abe's pensive, self-questioning mood as he drives back to Dominion to meet up with his old flame, Alice. Rounding out the collection is a photo essay on Seth's wife's barbershop, The Crown Barber--shop, and a short story in comics form about barbering. Palookaville 22 displays the range of Seth's cartooning and design career, and is a thing of beauty from cover to cover.

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The first English translation of Mizuki''s best-loved workNonNonBa is the definitive work by acclaimed Gekiga-ka Shigeru Mizuki, a poetic memoir detailing his interest in yokai (spirit monsters). Mizuki''s childhood experiences with yokai influenced the course of his life and oeuvre; he is now known as the forefather of yokai manga. His spring 2011 book, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, was featured on PRI''s The World, where Marco Werman scored a coveted interview with one of the most famous visual artists working in Japan today.Within the pages of NonNonBa, Mizuki explores the legacy left him by his childhood explorations of the spirit world, explorations encouraged by his grandmother, a grumpy old woman named NonNonBa. NonNonBa is a touching work about childhood and growing up, as well as a fascinating portrayal of Japan in a moment of transition. NonNonBa was the first manga to win the A

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The author of Grass and The Naked Tree returns with a profound tale of familyYuna never wanted to adopt a dog. But with her partner in mourningand in desperate need of a boost in moraleshe gives in to his humble request. And in the grand tradition of reluctant pet owners, she and their puppy soon become inseparable. The young couple even goes so far as to relocate to soothe their new canine pal's anxiety. After all, there's nothing like a move to the country to set yourself right. Right?The idyll of a quiet life soon gives way to a surprising degree of antagonism, including clashes with long-time local residents of a different generation. The culture shock is palpable for all three urban transplants as the isolation of their new environs starts to sink in. They eventually adopt another dog, and still anotherall while reckoning with the ups and downs of middle-age and childlessness in an unforgivingly traditional milieu.Dog Days is critica

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A fascinating period in Japanese history recounted by manga s most distinguished author. Showa 1926 1939: A History of Japan lays the groundwork for Eisner award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki s historical and autobiographical series about Japanese life in the twentieth century. Depicted against his trademark photorealistic backdrops, Mizuki effortlessly portrays a nation forced into a period of upheaval and brings history into the realm of the personal. Indeed, as a child coming of age in the Showa era, the author s earliest memories coincide with key events of the time. It all begins with the Great Kanto Earthquake, a natural disaster that forces the country into a financial crisis. The period leading up to World War II is thus a time of economic hardship and record unemployment. Forthright descriptions of ensuing militarization reveal Mizuki s lifelong stance as a thoughtful pacifist, critical of domestically disputed events like the Nanjing Massacre clearly painted here as an atrocity. This first volume in a four-part series is a captivating historical portrait tracking the industrial and societal developments that would come to shape Japan's foreign policy in the interwar period.

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A boldly drawn, unforgettable memoir about trauma and the barriers to gender affirming health care. In the winter of 2004, a shy woman named Emma sits in Toby s office. She wants to share this wonderful new book she s reading, but Toby, her therapist, is concerned with other things. Emma is transgender, and has sought out Toby for approval for hormone replacement therapy. Emma has shown up at the therapy sessions as an outgoing, confident young woman named Katina, and a depressed, submissive workaholic named Ed. She has little or no memory of her actions when presenting as these other two people. And then Toby asks about her childhood..As the story unfolds, we discover clues as to Emma s troubled past and how and why these other two people may have come into existence. As Toby juggles treating three separate people, each with their own unique personalities and memories, he begins to wonder if Emma is merely acting out to get attention, or if she actually has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Is she just a troubled woman in need of help? And is the third person in her brain protecting her, or derailing her chances of ever finding peace? The Third Person is a riveting memoir from newcomer Emma Grove. Drawn in thick, emotive lines, with the refined style of a comics vet, Grove has created a singular, gripping depiction of the intersection of identities and trauma. The Third Person is a testament to the importance of having the space to heal and live authentically.

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Maybonne and Marlys Mullen endure the mortifying highs and lows of middle school in this Lynda Barry classic. Collected from the strip Ernie Pook s Comeek, which was serialized in alternative weeklies across the continent, My Perfect Life captures the moment when Lynda Barry finding the perfect balance in longer form storytelling between the belly aching laughs and the brutal reality checks. Along with the 2022 release Come Over Come Over, this collection continues to spotlight the life of teenager Maybonne Mullen. She suffers through the utterly relatable insults of junior high and the excruciating embarrassment caused by her little sister Marlys. Hovering in the background, however, is a broken home, parents struggling with addiction, a grandmother who takes her granddaughters from the diverse big city to a bewilderingly bland small town. Yet fitting into the new school and surroundings is, of course, paramount to a young teenager. Maybonne begins September full of life and excitement. As the school year progresses, she experiences bullying, her first boyfriend, family drama, drinking, and more. The book ends with Maybonne withdrawn and jaded as the reality of her world outweighs the magic.

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An affecting glimpse into the ways millennials cope with mental health strugglesClara's at a breaking point. She's got writer's block, her friends ask a lot without giving much, her psychologist is useless, and her demanding publishing job leaves little time for self care. She seeks solace in the community around her, yet, while her friends provide support and comfort, she is often left feeling empty, unable to express an underlying depression that leaves her immobilized and stifles any attempts at completing her poetry collection. In This Is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle paints an empathetic portrait of a young woman wrestling with psychological stress and the trauma following a sexual assault.Malle displays frankness and a remarkable emotional intelligence as she explores depression, isolation, and self-harm in her expertly drawn novel. Her heroine battles an onslaught of painful emotions and while Clara can provide consolation to those around her, sh

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A new mother takes us on a tour of Hamil- ton, a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. This mother represents the city s next wave of inhabitants the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. Creation looks at gentrification from the inside out an artist mother making a home and neighborhood for her family, struggling to find her place amid the exist- ing and emerging communities. While pushing her child s stroller around Hamilton, Nickerson shows us the warehouse filled with open barrels of toxic sludge, the parking lot where the city s homeless population sleeps, and the re- furbished Victorian house (complete with elegant chandeliers) that is now a state- of-the-art yoga studio. Creation presents the city as a living thing a place where many small lives intersect and where death, motherhood, pollution, poverty, and violence are all interconnected. Drawn in evocative watercolor, Cre- ation is unafraid to leave questions open- ended as Nickerson wanders the city and ponders just where the personal and political intersect, and where they ought to intersect.

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Hot Comb offers a poignant glimpse into black women s lives and coming-of-age stories as seen across a crowded, ammonia-scented hair salon while ladies gossip and bond over the burn. The titular Hot Comb is about a young girl s first perm a doomed ploy to look cool and stop seeming too white in the all-black neighborhood her family has just moved into. In Virgin Hair, taunts of tender-headed sting as much as the perm itself. My Lil Sister Lena shows the stress of being the only black player on a white softball team. Lena s hair is the team curio, an object to be touched, a subject to be discussed and debated at the will of her teammates, leading Lena to develop an anxiety disorder of pulling her own hair out. Throughout Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers re-creates classic magazine ads idealizing women s need for hair relaxers and products. Change your hair form to fit your life form and Kinks and Koils Forever call customers from the page. Realizations about race, class, and the imperfections of identity swirl through these stories and ads, which are by turns sweet, insightful, and heartbreaking. Flowers began drawing comics while earning her Ph.D., and her early mastery of sequential storytelling is nothing short of sublime. From her black-and-white drawings to her color construction-paper collages, Hot Comb is a propitious display of talent from a new cartoonist who has already made her mark.

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Coyote is a dreamer and a drama queen, brazen and brave, faithful yet fiercely independent. She beats her own drum and sews her own crop tops. A gifted equestrian, she s half dog, half coyote, and all power. With the help of her trusty steed, Red, there s not much that s too big for her to bite off, chew up, and spit out right into your face, if you deserve it. But when Coyote and Red find themselves on the run from a trio of vengeful bad dogs, get clobbered by arrows, and are tragically separated, our protagonist is left fighting for her life and longing for her displaced best friend. Taken in by a wolf clan, Coyote may be wounded, but it s not long before she s back on the open road to track down Red and tackle the dogs who wronged her. An homage to and a lampoon of Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Lisa Hanawalt s Coyote Doggirl is a self-aware, playful subversion of tropes. As our fallible hero attempts to understand the culture of the wolves, we see a journey in understanding and misunderstanding, adopting and co-opting. Uncomfortable at times but nonetheless rewarding and empowering, the story of these flawed, anthropomorphized characters is nothing if not relentlessly hilarious and heartbreakingly human. Told in Hanawalt s technicolor absurdist style, Coyote Doggirl is not just a send-up of the Western genre but a deeply personal story told by an enormously talented cartoonist.

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Walt Disney is exhausted both physically and mentally. After a breakdown where he trashes his office, his wife Lilian brings him to a retreat to recover?the Von Spatz Rehabilitation Center. With a campus that includes studio buildings, a gallery, an art supply store, a hot dog booth, and a penguin pool, the clinic is a paradise for artists in crisis. There Disney meets Tomi Ungerer and Saul Steinberg, and together, they embark on a regimen of relaxation and art therapy. Anna Haifisch looks at the fervent drive and crippling insecurities of the average artist and places those same issues on the shoulders of three celebrated 20th century artists. Part study of isolation, part tale of a begrudging camaraderie, daily life at the center mixes with reminiscences from the world outside. Wryly written, precisely composed, and glowingly colored, Von Spatz is a hilarious, heartwarming absurdist tale.

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The scene is late seventies Sweden: the four-decade-long reign of the once indestructible socio-democratic party has come to an end. Parties on the far left begin to mobilize, hoping to overcome the prevailing capitalist model on a national scale, but also in the streets, factories, and small towns to the North. This is where we meet Siv: a married mother of three employed by the youth sector of her local socio-democratic chapter. Without warning, Siv falls in love with a young Maoist, Ulrik, who recently arrived from the south of Sweden to militarize?and gain control?of the steelworkers union. Anneli Furmark s Red Winter weaves together the story of Siv, Ukrik, and the concentric circles of tension that slowly build around them, threatening to disintegrate her family s foundation. Her three children look on, noticing a shift in their mother without fully understanding it. Siv and Ulrik drift through the season, musing on their actions, their politics, their love, and its inevitable consequences?while Furmark s delicate hues of blue and orange heighten the cinematic qualities of northern Sweden s isolated landscape. Red Winter is a tale of a love that haunts in the darkness of winter.

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