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Sep 23, 2015

Drawn & Quarterly

Drawn & Quarterly

Summary: North America's pioneering comics publisher celebrates its quarter-century with new and rare archival comics; essays from Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, and more.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Drawn & Quarterly has stood at the vanguard of art comics for a quarter-century now, and this massive tome celebrates the Canadian publisher and its beloved chief, Chris Oliveros, who conceived of "a comic company with literary and artistic aspirations." Oliveros, staff, and cartoonists are featured in essays, interviews, and photographs as well as appreciations by such literary luminaries as Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem. For readers with no interest in any of that, though, it also brims with new and collected comics. The cartoonist list reads like a who's who of artists who have made independent comics what they are now and are defining where they're going: Beaton, Barry, Brown, Clowes, DeForge, Gauld, Hernandez, Spiegelman, Tomine, Ware . . . though that list barely scratches the surface. This is a magnificent monument to the diversity of aesthetic philosophies and personal styles, and if there's a prevalent theme, it's everyday indignities and how real people face them, even if these real people are occasionally zombies or superheroes. Even skipping the prose, this is a tall mountain to scale in one climb, but sampling and returning to it again and again affords an incomparable journey through comics' state of the art. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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