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Having mastered comic books and gag cartoons, in 1958 Jack Cole set his sights on the cartoonist's pot of gold - a syndicated newspaper strip. He hit the bull's-eye with Betsy and Me, a breezy domestic farce focusing on a middle-class urban couple and their smart-aleck genius son. Betsy and Me was an instant success and newpapers were lining up to buy it. Then, with only two-and-a-half month's worth of strips completed, Cole purchased a .22 caliber pistol and ended his life. For Betsy and Me, featuring city dweller Chet Tibbit's day-to-day stuggles and achievements, Cole stripped his style down to its bare essentials, creating a strip that sparkles with economy, wit, and charm. What gave the strip its edge, however, was Cole's innovative storytelling. As R.C. Harvey writes in his introduction, "Cole's storytelling manner was unique: the comedy arose from the pictures' contradicting the narrative prose. Cole's fatuous protagonist and narrator would say one thing in the captions accompanying the drawings, but the pictures of his actions showed the opposite, revealing [him] to be a trifle pretentious and wholly delusional." Harvey's intro also serves as a biographical sketch and sheds light on the circumstances surrounding Cole's suicide.

This special collection features more than 30 EC classics from the pages of Tales From the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, Shock SuspenStories, Impact, and Crime SuspenStories. Of special note is all of Orlando's Panic stories, including parodies of Mother Goose, TV commercials, and soap operas.

This comics anthology includes Krigstein's most famous story ― which broke both aesthetic and narrative boundaries ―plus material that's never been reprinted since the 1950s. In addition to "Master Race," this volume includes "The Flying Machine" (based on a story by Ray Bradbury). Other stories include: "Slave Ship," an unpublished science fiction tale that was only discovered in the decades following EC's demise, "The Monster From The Fourth Dimension," a horror/science fiction shocker that has never been reprinted since its original appearance in 1954, and other Krigstein crime, horror, war, and science fiction stories covering the full gamut of EC titles, including Tales From the Crypt, Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories, Aces High, and Incredible Science Fiction.

A local medical expert and sheriff are summoned to investigate a strange sighting that sets the stage for Conor Stechschulte's debut graphic novella: a severed human head that still seems to be talking. We flashback to a pair of butchers who arrive at work one morning to find not only that there is no meat in their shop but also that they have forgotten completely how to do their job. As customers arrive, they are too fearful for their livelihood to admit their dilemma, leading to increasingly disastrous events. But what has caused their strange amnesia? This often hilarious, enigmatic and uncomfortable book will establish Stechschulte as an exciting new talent.

A thrilling, kinetic bio-epic about Michael "Air" Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time and most influential athlete in history, from the creator of the acclaimed and best-selling 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente. This tour de force explores Jordan's public successes and private struggles, with the depth of Santiago's passion for his subject shining through on every full-color page.

This series is rated Adults Only
DISCLAIMER: graphic sexuality
Holmes' life story is richly illustrated with drawings, comic strips, watercolors, and paintings that span his whole career, from the hot rod cartoons he drew as a teenager, dozens of covers for the Georgia Straight, pornographic cartoons for the sex tabloid Vancouver Star, to complete comic stories from Slow Death Funnies, Dope Comix, All Canadian Beaver, Death Rattle, Grateful Dead Comix, and many more. The full-length Harold Hedd comic novels, Wings Over Tijuana and Hitler's Cocaine are reprinted in their entirety together for the first time. This unique collection of art documents a lifetime of work by one of the most talented artists of his generation.

In Joe Daly's most ambitious stand-alone graphic novel, Palmer - wallflower, mystic seeker and paper mill worker - moves into a new apartment with his outwardly self-assured and womanizing friend. Events take a peculiar turn as Palmer befriends an iconoclastic co-worker, Billy Boy, and plunges head-long into the mysterious and sinister world of sorcery, psychological operations, subterranean organizations and wild-goose chases.

When The Crippler comes to town for a wrestling match, James isn't awestruck, he's just trying to get by in medical school. Schooling that The Crippler has paid for. In this debut work from Max Riffner, two brothers attempt to reconnect despite a wrestling ring's worth of differences. We guarantee you'll stay around until the final round.

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is an art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to his own (and Randian) principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 55 years.

In the second volume of critically acclaimed cartoonist Josh Simmons's lifelong page-a-month series, Jessica encounters a room whose physics you can alter with your mind and much more. Jessica Farm fuses serialized adventure, fantasy and psychological horror and stamps it with Josh Simmon's signature macabre sensibility. In Book 2, our heroes come upon the Groovy Room, where the atmosphere is different and if you configure your mind just right, you can hover in the air. Jessica Farm is an ambitious experiment in worldbuilding as conceived by Simmons.

Jessica Farm fuses serialized adventure, fantasy and psychological horror and stamps it with Josh Simmon's signature macabre sensibility. Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland,Jessica Farmopens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse. Once inside, we track our titular heroine as she bounds out of bed on Christmas and goes about her morning routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread, as we discover that Jessica's increasingly nightmarish house is filled with creatures around every corner: some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing and some malevolent. Most terrifying of all is Jessica's father, whose promise of presents under the tree is loaded with the threat of violence.

Winner of the prestigious Grand Prize of the 2010 Angoulême Comics Festival, 5,000 km Per Second tells or almost tells the love story between Piero and Lucia, which begins with a casual glance exchanged by teenagers across the street through a window and ends with a last, desperate hook-up between two older, sadder one-time lovers.
Executed in stunning watercolors and broken down into five chapters (set in Italy, Norway, Egypt, and Italy again), 5,000 km Per Second manages to refer to Piero and Lucia's actual love story only obliquely, focusing instead on its first stirrings and then episodes in their life during which they are separated a narrative twist that makes it even more poignant and heart-wrenching.
5,000 km Per Second is another delicate graphic-novel masterpiece from Europe.

The long-lost comic strip masterpiece by legendary children's book author Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Carrot Seed), collected in full and designed by graphic novelist and Barnaby superfan Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Volume Three collects the postwar years of 1946 - 1947, continuing five-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his Fairy Godfather J.J. O'Malley's misadventures. Bumbling but endearing, Mr. O'Malley rarely gets his magic to work―even when he consults his Fairy Godfather's Handy Pocket Guide. The true magic of Barnaby resides in its canny mix of fantasy and satire, amplified by the understated elegance of Crockett Johnson's clean, spare art. In its combination of Johnson's sly wit and O'Malley's amiable windbaggery, a child's feeling of wonder and an adult's wariness, highly literate jokes and a keen eye for the ridiculous, Barnaby expanded our sense of what comics can do.

The beloved comic strip is finally given the Fantagraphics treatment. Barnaby's deft balance of fantasy, political commentary, sophisticated wit, and elegantly spare images expanded our sense of what comic strips can do. Barnaby revolved around a precocious five-year-old named Barnaby Baxter and his fairly godfather Jackeen J. O'Malley. Yet O'Malley, a cigar-chomping, bumbling con-artist and fast-talker, was not your typical protector. His grasp of magic was usually specious at best, limited to occasional flashes, often aided and abetted by his fellow members in The Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society.

The beloved comic strip is finally given the Fantagraphics treatment. Barnaby's deft balance of fantasy, political commentary, sophisticated wit, and elegantly spare images expanded our sense of what comic strips can do. Barnaby revolved around a precocious five-year-old named Barnaby Baxter and his fairly godfather Jackeen J. O'Malley. Yet O'Malley, a cigar-chomping, bumbling con-artist and fast-talker, was not your typical protector. His grasp of magic was usually specious at best, limited to occasional flashes, often aided and abetted by his fellow members in The Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society.

Escape from "Special" is the coming-of-age story of Melissa, who we first meet as a small child and depart from at the end of the book just before she enters high school. Drawn in black and white and washed in moody blues and full spectrum grays, Lasko-Gross's art, with its detailed backgrounds and expressive characters, exquisitely conveys the story's blend of humor (sometimes of the gross-out variety) and keenly observed insights. Miss Lasko-Gross, who has the sensibility of a love child of Linda Barry and David B. midwifed by Judy Blume, has created a graphic novel that should appeal not only to the growing readers of graphic novels, but to teens grappling with similar unresolved questions.

This series is rated Adults Only
DISCLAIMER: GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: In addition to the sex, violence and scatological filth on display, Angry Youth Comix delivers equal opportunity antagonism toward every race, gender, sexual orientation, political persuasion and religion, as well as jokes about international and humanitarian tragedies, in abundance. Reader discretion is advised.
Johnny Ryan's utterly unpretentious taboo-tackling is an infectious and hilarious bombardment of political incorrectness, taking full advantage of the medium's absurdist potential for maximum laughs. In an age when the medium is growing up and aspiring to more mature and hoity-toity literary heights, Ryan builds on the visceral tradition that cartooning has had on our collective funny bone for over a century. Now, for the first time, all fourteen issues of Ryan's career-defining comic Angry Youth Comics (2000-2008) are collected in one place. All the comics, the covers, and even the contentious letter pages, in one toilet-ready brick shithouse.

Artichoke Tales is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Brigitte whose family is caught between the two warring sides of a civil war, a graphic novel that takes place in a world that echoes our own, but whose people have artichoke leaves instead of hair. Influenced in equal parts byLittle House on the Prairie, The Thorn Birds, Dharma Bums, and Cold Mountain, Kelso weaves a moving story about family amidst war. Kelso's visual storytelling, uniquely combining delicate linework with rhythmic, musical page compositions, creates a dramatic tension between intimate, ruminative character studies and the unflinching depiction of the consequences of war and carnage, lending cohesion and resonance to a generational epic.

Oaf, a wuvable Bay Area bear, searches for love in the local metal and wrestling scenes inBlood and Metal, which collects a number of short stories. Featuring tales of Oaf 's formative childhood years, and much more!

John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, made himself the stuff of legend by spreading the seeds of apple trees from Pennsylvania to Indiana. Along with that, he offered the seeds of nonviolence and vegetarianism, good relationships with Native Americans, and peace among the settlers. He was one of the New World's earliest followers of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. The story of John Chapman operates as a counter-narrative to the glorification of violence, conquest, and prevailing notions of how the West was Won. It differentiates between the history and the half-myths of Johnny Appleseed's life and work: His apples, for instance, were prized for many reasons, but none more so than for the making of hard cider. He was also a real estate speculator of sorts, purchasing potentially fertile but unproven acres and then planting saplings before flipping the land. Yet, he had less interest in financial gain - and yes, this is an accurate part of the mythology - than in spreading visions of peace and love. Johnny Appleseed brings this quintessentially American story to life in comics form.