Comixxxx to buy when you actually have an income, you bum

I closed Adrian Tomine's Sleepwalk and Other Stories feeling depressed, something in Tomine's negativity, his view of the disconnect inherent in the relationships between his characters and contemporary life filled me with a (temporary, I hope) despair. These short graphic stories are deeply unsettling, there is no hope, no grand resolutions. Sleepwalk doesn't wallow in the angst of the various situations presented, but is resigned to an elementary bleakness. Sleepwalk again proves that Tomine's style is better suited to the short story form. We are only briefly exposed to these drifting, disaffected lives, but that glimpse is enough to identify the hopelessness, the isolation, and the misunderstandings within. A minor issue is Tomine's overreliance on slabs of text, as if he is using a voice-over for his characters instead of relying on dialogue and image to show their stories. "Supermarket", the story of the girl in the grocery store and the blind man, completely devastated me, just ... painful in the obvious and honest depiction of enforced interactions.Sleepwalk is a difficult book to recommend, but undoubtedly provides some basic understanding and insight into the emotional landscape of the alienated and the outcast.

What is “Art”? It’s widely accepted that art serves an important function in society. But the concept falls under such an absurdly large umbrella and can manifest in so many different ways. Art can be self indulgent, goofy, serious, altruistic, evil, or expressive, or any number of other things. But how can it truly make lasting, positive change? In Why Art?, acclaimed graphic novelist Eleanor Davis (How To Be Happy) unpacks some of these concepts in ways both critical and positive, in an attempt to illuminate the highest possible potential an artwork might hope to achieve. A work of art unto itself, Davis leavens her exploration with a sense of humor and a thirst for challenging preconceptions of art worth of Magritte, instantly drawing the reader in as a willing accomplice in her quest.

A mysterious, unsettling parable from one of North America's most popular cartoonistsFirst 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 forty-five pages, working with a vibrant, otherworldly palette of magentas, yellows, and grays, 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 folktale about magical cats, and a bizarre, compelling story about relationships. 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 & Quarterly: It appeared on The New York Times Graphic Bestseller List and was lauded by the Chicago Tribune, The 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 unraveled. First Year Healthy, knotty and mysterious, demands to be read and reread.

Looking for the ultimate honeymoon experience, a newly married couple hire a guide to take them to a truly exotic location, one teeming with strange life forms and best described as an unimaginably alien version of a jungle. While the reader immediately realizes that the unfathomable flora and fauna is much more than what our couple bargained for, the blissfully ignorant honeymooners themselves continue to display a sense of entitlement that appears increasingly ludicrous in the context. To them, all those indigenous life forms that almost devour the very pages they are drawn on merely fall into one of the following two categories: cute but disposable pets, or prey to be shot and transformed into trophies. Needless to say, our honeymooners do not stand a chance...Having indulged in some rather infantile Tarzan nostalgia over the last few weeks, I am afraid I was overdue for a wake-up call. Jesse Jacobs' meticulously designed, Heart of Darkness-inspired deconstruction of neocolonialism certainly did the job, but it did much more than that. I highly recommend Safari Honeymoon to anybody interested in surrealist comic books, and especially to those with a soft spot for the similarly trippy, absurdist, obsessive comics by Michael DeForge!

AN ANGOULÊME AWARD WINNER RETURNS WITH A PARABLE ABOUT LIFE IN THE ART WORLDBrecht Evens, the award-winning author of The Wrong Place and The Making Of, returns with an unsettling graphic novel about a little girl and her imaginary feline companion. Iconoclastic in his cartooning and page layouts, subtle in his plotting, and deft in his capturing of the human experience, Evens has crafted a tangled, dark masterwork.Christine lives in a big house with her father and her cat, Lucy. When Lucy gets sick and dies, Christine is devastated. But alone in her room, something special happens: a panther pops out of her dresser drawer and begins to tell her stories of distant Pantherland, where he is the crown prince.A shape-shifter who tells Christine anything she wants to hear, Panther begins taking over Christine's life, alienating her from her other toys and friends. As Christine's world spirals out of control, so does the world Panther has created for her. Panther is a chilling voyage into the shadowy corners of the human psyche and a revelatory work about the traumatic nature of abusive relationships.

Michael DeForge, premiato ai prestigiosi Ignatz Awards e Eisner Awards, è un artista iperprolifico che vanta importanti collaborazioni, dalla serie Adventure Time a Cartoon Network. Dopo Dressing torna con un graphic novel che segna un punto di svolta artistico e che è stato considerato una delle sue opere più importanti. Brat è la storia di una "star della delinquenza giovanile", ora in crisi, che deve barcamenarsi tra la sua nuova stagista (ovviamente non pagata), i suoi fan e l'ideazione di una nuova performance che la riporti sulla cresta dell'onda perché non ha intenzione di essere buttata fuori dalla scena della delinquenza giovanile di cui è stata pioniera. Un'opera divertente e disturbante, popolata da personaggi cinici con cui però è impossibile non empatizzare. Una parodia del nostro mondo, della sete di popolarità e ribellione, delle "hot-news" al tempo dei social e dei like. Paragonato negli States alla serie Netflix Bojack The Horseman, Brat continua il percorso intrapreso da Eris con autori come Jesse Jacobs, Julia Wertz, Adam Tempesta, Fabio Tonetto e Hurricane.

TEENAGE MISFITS AND ADOLESCENT RABBLE-ROUSING TAKE CENTER STAGE IN THIS DARK COMING-OF-AGE TALEBig 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, and 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) behavior. Instead, he hangs out with April and 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, DeForge's Big Kids muses on the complicated, and often contradictory, feelings people struggle with during 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.

A Johnson has his Boswell and every Sticks Angelica has her Michael DeForgeSticks Angelica is, in her own words, “49 years old. Former: Olympian, poet, scholar, sculptor, minister, activist, Governor General, entrepreneur, line cook, headmistress, 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 harbors 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.

Two exquisite stories drawn in Sam Alden's signature, flowing, and lush pencil style. In “Hawaii 1997,” few words are spoken, but Aldens imagery evokes the magic of a night-time encounter at a Hawaiian resort. In “Anime” he explores the complicated dynamics of pop culture obsession. Sam Alden is one of the brightest young talents working today.Sam Alden was born in 1988 in Portland, Oregon. In 2013 he was an official guest at the BilBOLbul festival in Bologna, Italy, and his ongoing comic Haunter will be excerpted in the forthcoming Best American Comics 2013 from Houghton-Mifflin. He now lives and works as an illustrator and cartoonist in his hometown of Portland, with plans to move to Montreal, Quebec, in the fall. Sam lives alone with no pets and has won no awards.

‘A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].’ Thomas W. Hodgkinson, a Spectator Book of the YearCharles Burns’ graphic trilogy has been hailed as one of the masterpieces of the form. Now readers can find the long strange trip of Doug in all its mind-bending, heartbreaking totality. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means ... it will make you go right back to the first page and read it all again with new eyes. Just like Doug.

"...an aching clarity [is] evident in [Castrée's] sombre grey tones and her dexterous, serpentine lines."-Globe & Mail Best 100 Books of 2013"With mesmerizing honesty Castrée resurrects the obscenely disorienting turning points of a childhood, the ones that haunt a person for a lifetime. After reading the last page I closed the book and wept a little bit about its simple, perfect ending."-MIRANDA JULY, author of It Chooses You and No One Belongs Here More Than YouGoglu is a daydreamer with a young working mother, a disengaged stepfather, and a father who lives five thousand miles away. Drawing, punk rock, and the promise of true independence guide Goglu to adulthood while her home's daily chaos inevitably shapes her identity. Susceptible is a devastating graphic novel debut by Geneviève Castrée; it's a testament to the heartbreaking loss of innocence when a child is forced to be the adult amongst grownups..

(Between 3 and 4 stars.)Spoiler alert! This review reveals things that happen in the book.Though "revealing" things in a review of this book is unlikely to diminish the pleasure of reading it. Sometimes I like to read reviews before reading a book and I doubt that would have made this reading experience any less intriguing. It might even have enriched a first reading, as this book is eccentric, disjointed and layered. Then again, maybe it's best to read the book once or twice before reading any reviews? I can't imagine reading this book and not, afterward, wanting to look at interviews and reviews for help in decoding. So far I've read "Sacred Heart" twice and I'm still unsure of my interpretations, but here, a link to an interview that was pretty illuminating and gave me a lot to think about. Also, I am very relieved to see, in the interview, things are acknowledged that I haven't so far seen addressed in the GR reviews.http://www.tcj.com/a-conversation-wit...1) The first time we see Otto, he's licking the bottom of someone's sneaker (that someone with those sneakers happens to be sitting on the bleachers watching a football game, and Otto stands stealthily under the bleachers face-to-shoe.)2) The first time Otto and Ben hook up, Otto is wearing a dress. 3) There is a lot going on thematically with questions of love and care-taking. 4) There are a lot of references to horror flicks in this book.5) Music plays a large role in this book as do familiar structures of teenage daily life (which provide a sense of the familiar or the 'normal' even as what is normal shifts very quickly and the structures themselves are reduced to pure, pared down, naked, frame-like bodies.)One thing I'm really interested in right now is the way that this book honors the power of horror genre films to offer high schoolish aged kids an acknowledgement of the absurdity and unfairness of their social worlds, and to offer some small catharsis as the social situation is taken to its absolute imaginable limits, a kind of burlesque. And simultaneously, this book turns the horror genre inside out, takes horror and says, how can we humanize the concerns of the horror film? Because there are real concerns. It's a kind of odd de-burlesquing of horror and yet it calls into question biblical tropes relating to horror. There is a sense of humor here in connection to messianic religious beliefs and religious fanaticism (which often turns into real murder and real horror in real life, and certainly turns into real murder in this fictional world) and at the same time, there is a fantastically unnerving look at social structures that stay in place as a sort of unsafe safety net. In other words, this graphic novel opens up with a quintessential trope of both a coming of age teenage romantic comedy and perhaps a horror film? (I haven't seen very many.) The protagonist, Ben, a female bodied Jewishish cis-female type (ish?) person, going to watch a football game to see her crush, football player Dominic. What could be more normal? But this isn't a John Cusack situation. It's not Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's not Undeleted Scenes or Awkward and Definition, though we're getting warmer with Ariel Schrag. But only a little. Why is there a football game happening when all of the kids of this town have been abandoned by their parents, by all adults in fact, and when there are murders happening and life is as far from normal as can be? That's a great question. How is there even a football game? How is anything still running, how do people still have electricity and food and gasoline for their cars, how are their telephones still working, etc. etc.? It's not entirely clear, but it makes the book all the more eerie. Things are sort of normal and yet completely berserk. The kids are all going about their daily life, "mimicking" their daily rituals while waiting for their parents to return, which seems more and more unlikely to happen. So, how is a regular football game being played under the lights no less in this most irregular of times?...Hard to say. But that's how this book opens. By contrasting the teenage mundane with chaos and horror. Ben is walking with her dog, she goes to the high school stadium and catches Otto in the act of covert shoe-licking, and on her way to Otto's house that night to hang out in a very regular teenage manner, she sees a dead body. It's not a pleasant sight for her, but it's also not so out of the ordinary. Almost everyone in this book has killed someone or seen a dead body or is in some way accustomed to violence. And a lot of them watch horror films, which is different, but thematically connected. It's not that watching horror films makes violence easier for these characters. It doesn't. It's just that there is a layering and interrogation of violence, and our way of processing violence, and the kinds of violence that are systemically acceptable versus those that aren't. There are no easy answers in here, but I find that there is some underlying critique of our way of managing, categorizing and relating to violence, both idealizing it and fearing it rather than acknowledging its reality in a way that allows us to, more clearly, see each other and all these systems and cycles of violence we are caught up in. This book is working on many levels. We are closest to Ben and Otto, compelling, interesting characters and best friends who turn to each other as lovers at a certain point, which complicates their relationship in ways they are perhaps not emotionally ready for. And for them this is in many ways a typical coming of age story. But then they are set in a world that is uneasily dystopic and religiously allegorical. There are questions of how people present themselves versus how they actually feel inside. There are complications of how characters reveal themselves in terms of gender and sexuality and affection and how they do or don't gradually discover new things about their choices and behavior. And then, of course, there is that great existential premise of waiting (waiting for the big end-of-the-world type storm and also waiting for the parents to return.)Sometimes I think there are too many plots forming and Suburbia doesn't know which road she wants to take, so she just throws in a lot of roads all going in different directions. And the ending of the book did feel a bit sudden and forced in terms of resolution. Did Ben's sister Empathy, who Ben feels overly-responsible for, really have to be murdering all the guys she's hooking up with? And did we really need Ben to develop stigmata? Really? But the characters are complex and compelling enough and the art, too, that I look forward to the next installment.

In a secluded castle, at the beginning of a winter that is predicted to last for three years, Lars is battling illness and boredom. He passes the time with his siblings and his giant cat, Nemo, as secrets are revealed and tensions within the family begin to simmer... Tillie Walden's classic debut graphic novel returns in this special edition that includes the new prequel story, 'Lars & Nemo'.

In the basement, through the appliances and past the veil that separates realities, lies a rainbow-hued world where a group of kids have found retreat from their suburban mundanity with a coterie of iridescent creatures. But in the fraught realm of adolescence, can friendship survive the appeal of the surreal?Jesse Jacobs was born in Moncton, NB, and now draws comics and things from his home in Hamilton, ON. In 2009, his books Small Victories and Blue Winter were short listed at the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning. He received the Gene Day Award for Canadian Comic Book Self-Publisher of 2008. Even the Giants (AdHouse, 2011) marked his major publishing debut after several award-winning, self-published titles, and his work has appeared in the acclaimed Latvian comics anthology š!, as well as the 2012 edition The Best American Comics edited by Françoise Mouly and published Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He made his debut with Koyama Press in 2012 with the psychedelic creation myth By This Shall You Know Him, which was followed by the trippy take on nature versus nurture, Safari Honeymoon in 2014.

The debut graphic novel from a dazzling newcomer with a singular, idiosyncratic styleIn the few short years since he began his pamphlet-size comic book series Lose, Michael DeForge has announced himself as an important new voice in alternative comics. His brash, confident, undulating artwork sent a shock wave through the comics world for its unique, fully formed aesthetic.From its opening pages, Ant Colony immerses the reader in a world that is darkly existential, with false prophets, unjust wars, and corrupt police officers, as it follows the denizens of a black ant colony under attack from the nearby red ants. On the surface, it’s the story of this war, the destruction of a civilization, and the ants’ all too familiar desire to rebuild. Underneath, though, Ant Colony plumbs the deepest human concerns—loneliness, faith, love, apathy, and more. All of this is done with humor and sensitivity, exposing a world where spiders can wreak unimaginable amounts of havoc with a single gnash of their jaws.DeForge’s striking visual sensibility—stark lines, dramatic color choices, and brilliant use of page and panel space—stands out in this volume.

Jenny, post-breakup, becomes obsessed with the mirror Facebook of herself seeing a life that could be hers. An anonymous music file surfaces on the internet and a cult springs up in its wake. A group of city animals briefly open their minds to us. Helen finds her clothes growing baggy, her shoes looser, and as she shrinks, the world around her recedes. A lifetime of romantic relationships are charted against the rise and fall of the celebrity cast of a classic film.Jillian Tamaki brings her characteristic blend of realism and humor to her first collection of short stories. Boundless explores the lives of women and how the expectations of others influence their real and virtual selves. Mixing objective reality, speculative fiction, out-and-out fantasy, and a deep understanding of the contemporary world's contradictions, Tamaki shows herself to be a short story talent equal to her peers Adrian Tomine and Eleanor Davis. Tamaki's styles shift from story to story, each delicately setting the mood for her characters' inner turmoil: thick chunky blocks of ink become hyper-realist detailing which become brushy drawings of plants, all effortlessly rendered in Tamaki's distinctive hand.

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories is not a sustained narrative, but rather a collection of three short stories. The stories in this collection contain Julia Wertz's signature acerbic wit, ribald humor, and keen eye for the everyday, but they also find the cartoonist delving more deeply into the personal.

Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine's first long-form graphic novel, is the story of Ben Tanaka, a confused, obsessive Japanese American male in his late twenties, and his cross-country search for contentment (or at least the perfect girl). Along the way, Tomine tackles modern culture, sexual mores, and racial politics with brutal honesty and lacerating, irreverent humor, while deftly bringing to life a cast of painfully real antihero characters. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Tomine has acquired a cultlike fan following and has earned status as one of the most widely acclaimed cartoonists of our time.Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine's iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13.