20th Century Boys (Vol. #5 and up) - Urasawa Naoki

Atomic Frenchie - Tom Sniegoski

Captain Marvel: Carol Danvers: the Ms. Marvel years - Brian Reed

Fence - C.S. Pacat

Fatale - Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

Hawkeye - Matt Fraction and David Aja

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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Wedgies (Lenore series) - Roman Dirge

Wedgies - Dirge, Roman

Summary: A full-color collection of comics featuring Lenore, a cute little dead girl with a knack for unintentional mayhem and occasional wanton destruction, features limbless cannibals, clock monsters, cursed vampire dolls, taxidermied friends, an obsessed would-be lover and more.



Booklist Reviews
With her pale face, huge eyes, skull barrettes, lack of a pulse, and propensity for senseless violence, Lenore could be the next full-fledged, merchandise-ready goth-girl icon. This compendium collects four comics, though there's no through line anywhere. Rather, each issue is a hodgepodge of stories, poems, twisted fables, and tattoo designs. The jokes are pretty sick and swerve between genius (the taxidermied chipmunk who bemoans his missing back half until Lenore jams a pair of Barbie legs onto it) and the uncomfortably cruel ("Kittie #53" involves the relatively straightforward drowning of a cat). What keeps it afloat—for the right reader, of course—is Lenore's obliviousness to wrongdoing. When she engages in "13 hours of gnome slaughter," it's only because she was overcaffeinated. It's all a lot funnier and cuter than it sounds, which is a credit to Dirge's ability to inject personality into his morbid mix of pale colors and black humor. Interestingly, Dirge's occasional autobiographical intrusions ("Things Involving Me") steal the show.

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Inside the Human Body

Inside the Human Body

Summary: Survive! Inside the Human Body, Volume 1 begins an epic journey through the human body with a look at the digestive system. This lively, full-color science comic explores Phoebe's insides after she accidentally swallows a microscopic ship. The only problem? Dr. Brain (the ship's eccentric inventor) and Phoebe's friend Geo are on board!


Publishers Weekly Reviews
What better way to understand the human digestive system than to take a trip through it? Eager and curious Geo and scientist Dr. Brain shrink down to microscopic size and inadvertently venture through the digestive tract of Geo's tomboyish friend Phoebe, while Dr. Brain's harried assistant, Kay, desperately tries to alleviate the situation. The madcap plot and near-constant gags (no pun intended) deliver educational content in an entertaining fashion reminiscent of the Magic School Bus series, while the manhwa (Korean comics) form is sure to appeal to many readers. The creators aren't afraid to get technical (occasional "Survival Science" spreads discuss sphincter muscles, parasites, and more) or to indulge in bathroom humor ("Why are you looking for Geo in my poop?" a befuddled Phoebe asks Kay). Like the human body, where, as Dr. Brain emphatically proclaims, "even the smallest cell plays an important role," the book succeeds on the collective efforts of all those involved in its production, including translators and medical experts who reviewed its accuracy. Geo and Dr. Brain explore the circulatory and nervous systems in two subsequent titles, available simultaneously. Ages 7–up.

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Up, up, and oy vey! - Simcha Weinstein

Up, up, and oy vey!: how Jewish history, culture, and values shaped the comic book superhero - Weinstein, Simcha

Summary: From the birth of Krypton in Cleveland to the Caped Crusader, the Incredible Hulk, Spider Man, the X-Men and more, Up, Up, and Oy Vey chronicles the story about the origins of the most famous superheroes. Jewish contribution to pop-culture is well-documented, but the Jewish role in the creation of action comic superheroes has not been —- until now!

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The art of Daniel Clowes - Daniel Clowes, Alvin Buenaventura, Chip Kidd and Chris Ware

The art of Daniel Clowes: modern cartoonist - Clowes, Daniel

Summary: Examines the work and accomplishments of the author of "Eightball," "Ghost World," and other alternative comics and graphic novels.



Booklist Reviews
Clowes is the ultimate alt-comics artist, combining drawing chops equal to those of Jaime Hernandez, the derisively skeptical attitude of a Peter Bagge, and a formal mastery of the medium that rivals Chris Ware's. This handsome volume, released in connection with a traveling exhibition of Clowes' artwork, offers an overview of his 25 years in comics, from his late-'80s magazine Eightball through his acclaimed graphic novels, including Ghost World (1997), David Boring (2000), and Wilson (2010). The volume opens with a recent, career-spanning interview and a generous selection of his groundbreaking Eightball-era work, followed by an appreciation by close friend Ware, who reminisces about their days as struggling cartoonists in Chicago in the early '90s (their informal collaborations are among the rarest of the many rarities reprinted in the book). Other essays offer insight into Clowes' later work, but it's the profusion of his artwork collected here—comics pages, unpublished sketches, New Yorker covers, and other commercial illustrations—that makes the most compelling case for Clowes as one of the most accomplished and important figures on the contemporary comics scene. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Understanding comics - Scott McCloud

Understanding comics: The invisible art - McCloud, Scott

Summary: A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication. Understanding Comics has been translated into 16 languages, excerpted in textbooks, and its ideas applied in other fields such as game design, animation, web development, and interface design.

Winner of the Harvey and Eisner Award, the Alph'art Award at Angoulême, and a New York Times Notable Book for 1994 (mass market edition).

Review
"A landmark dissection and intellectual consideration of comics as a valid medium."-- Will Eisner

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The ten-cent plague - David Hajdu

The ten-cent plague: the great comic book scare and how it changed America - Hajdu, David

Summary: "In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress--only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine."-- From publisher description.

Booklist Reviews
The movies and rock 'n' roll have had brushes with censorship, but the comic-book industry was nearly wiped out in the 1950s by do-gooders concerned about their hypothesized detrimental effects on young readers. As Hajdu shows, comics were controversial right from their turn-of-the-century origins in newspapers, but the post–World War II development of lurid crime comic books depicting the exploits of violent gangsters aroused virulent opposition that intensified with the medium's next step—gruesome horror titles. The latter became the target of newspaper crusades, the psychiatric establishment (led by Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 screed Seduction of the Innocent became a bestseller), congressional hearings, and censorship boards in more than 50 cities. The industry, a refuge for ethnic minorities and other outsiders who reveled in the freedoms gained by working under the radar of adult audiences, survived only through self-regulation in the form of a Comics Code that stripped comics of much vitality. As a telling coda, Hajdu appends a list of nearly 900 creators who, after the crackdown, never worked in comics again. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.

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