|
 (4.5 / 5.0) HILARIOUS PARODIES OF CLASSIC LITERATURE REIMAGINED WITH CLASSIC COMICS 
|
$13.57 |
|
|
(4.5 / 5.0) “Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+” —Salon How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry’s compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry’s first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: “The ordinary is extraordinary.”
|
$13.31 |
|
|
 (4.0 / 5.0) The 2007 New York Times Book Review Notable Book now in paperback Adrian Tomine is a graduate of The University of California Berkeley and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His illustrations have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and his stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 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. “Adrian Tomine . . . may be the best prose writer of the bunch. His young people, falling in and out of relationships, paralyzed by shyness and self-consciousness, take on a certain dignity and individuality.”—Charles McGrath, The New York Times Magazine “The author is an expert at hooking the reader without tricks or obvious effort, and you'll be tempted to buzz through Shortcomings in an hour. But you'll want to slow down to take in the detailed black-and-white panels that casually document the way we live now. Tomine has always been attracted to love gone wrong among the hesitant young men and women of the bourgeois-bohemian set, but he gets his subject across in the unsentimental style of an anthropologist's report. Unlike the more playful graphic novelists who influenced him, Daniel Clowes and the Hernandez brothers, Tomine isn't given to flights of surrealism, rude jests or grotesque images. He is a mild observer, an invisible reporter, a scientist of the heart. His drawing style is plain and exact. The dialogue appearing inside his cartoon balloons is pitch-perfect and succinct. He's daring in his restraint.”—Jim Windolf, The New York Times “Graphic novels are rarely this disquieting and subtle.”—The Boston Globe “Perfect . . . Shortcomings is Tomine's richest and most rewarding read, packed with the most human characters he has ever created.”—The Star Tribune “One of the most masterful cartoonists of his generation. [Shortcomings] is equal parts poignant, hilarious, and sad.”—The Village Voice “Tomine's genius is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the result is that life itself floods in. His mise-en-scène rivals Eric Rohmer's in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro. Shortcomings, as near as he'd get to a grand statement, is as deceptively simple and perfect as a comic book gets.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude “Graphic literature's most gifted realist . . . Fiercely honest.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch “[Shortcomings] follows moody movie-theater owner Ben Tanaka, who struggles to hang on to his Asian girlfriend while secretly lusting after white ladies. He’s sad and somewhat despicable, and yet Tomine, being the understated virtuoso he is, effortlessly spins him into a Gen-X hero . . . Exploring race, adulthood, and ambition with exquisitely tuned humor and poignancy, Shortcomings is a graphic narrative as piercingly realistic as any prose fiction.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A) “It's a fair bet that Shortcomings will only further secure [Tomine's] title as the 'most masterful' and 'most critically-acclaimed' comics writer of his generation.”—The Believer “One of the most gifted graphic novelists of our time.”—Wired “Tomine's lacerating falling-out-of-love story is an irresistible gem of a graphic novel. Shortcomings is set primarily in an almost otherworldly San Francisco Bay Area; its antihero, Ben Tanaka, is not your average comic book protagonist: he's crabby, negative, self-absorbed, über-critical, slack-a-riffic and for someone who is strenuously race-blind, has a pernicious hankering for white girls. His girlfriend Miko (alas and tragically) is an Asian-American community activist of the moderate variety. Ben is the sort of cat who walks into a Korean wedding and says, Man, look at all these Asians, while Miko programs Asian-American independent films and both are equally skilled in the underhanded art of fighting without fighting . . . In Tomine's apt hands, Tanaka's heartbreaking descent into awareness is reading as good as you'll find anywhere. What a relief to find such unprecious intelligent dynamic young people of color wrestling with real issues that they can neither escape nor hope completely to understand. Tomine . . . keeps the issues secondary to his characters' messy humanity and gains incredible thematic resonance from this subordination. Tomine's dialogue is hilarious . . . his secondary characters knockouts (Ben's Korean-American only friend Alice steals every scene she's in, and the Korean wedding they attend together as pretend-partners is a study in the even blending of tragedy and farce), and his dramatic instincts second-to-none . . . almost incidentally and without visible effort (for such is the strength of a true artist) he explodes the tottering myth that love is blind and from its million phony fragments assembles a compelling meditation on the role of race in the romantic economy, dramatizing with evil clarity how we are both utterly blind and cannily hyperaware of the immense invisible power race exerts in shaping what we call desire . . . In crisp spare lines, he captures in all its excruciating, disappointing absurdity a single moment and makes from it our world.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Publishers Weekly (starred review)
|
$10.15 |
|
|
(4.5 / 5.0) Famously referred to as an 'Axis-of-Evil' country, North Korea remains one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today. A series of manmade and natural catastrophes have also left it one of the poorest. When the fortress-like country recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city. Armed with a smuggled radio and a copy of 1984, Delisle could only explore Pyongyang and its countryside while chaperoned by his translator and a guide. But among the statues, portraits and propaganda of leaders Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il - the world's only Communist dynasty - Delisle was able to observe more than was intended of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered. His astute and wry musings on life in the austere and grim regime form the basis of this remarkable graphic novel. "Pyongyang" is an informative, personal and accessible look at an enigmatic country.
|
$8.97 |
|
|
(4.5 / 5.0) The epic autobiography of a manga master
|
$15.78 |
|
|
(4.5 / 5.0) “That’s what I wanted to show in Aya: an Africa without the . . . war and famine, an Africa that endures despite everything because, as we say back home, life goes on.” —Marguerite Abouet Ivory Coast, 1978. Family and friends gather at Aya’s house every evening to watch the country’s first television ad campaign promoting the fortifying effects of Solibra, “the strong man’s beer.” It’s a golden time, and the nation, too—an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa—seems fueled by something wondrous. Who’s to know that the Ivorian miracle is nearing its end? In the sun-warmed streets of working-class Yopougon, aka Yop City, holidays are around the corner, the open-air bars and discos are starting to fill up, and trouble of a different kind is about to raise eyebrows. At night, an empty table in the market square under the stars is all the privacy young lovers can hope for, and what happens there is soon everybody’s business. Aya tells the story of its nineteen-year-old heroine, the studious and clear-sighted Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It’s a breezy and wryly funny account of the desire for joy and freedom, and of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City. An unpretentious and gently humorous story of an Africa we rarely see–spirited, hopeful, and resilient—Aya won the 2006 award for Best First Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Clément Oubrerie’s warm colors and energetic, playful lines connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet’s vibrant writing. Marguerite Abouet was born in Abidjan in 1971. At the age of 12, she was sent with her older brother to study in France under the care of a great uncle. Aya, her first comic, taps into Abouet’s childhood memories of Ivory Coast in the 1970s. She now lives Paris. Clément Oubrerie was born in Paris in 1966. With over 40 children’s books to his credit, he is also co-founder of the 3-D animation studio, Station OMD. A drummer in a funk band in his spare time, he travels frequently, especially to Ivory Coast. Aya is Oubrerie’s first comic. Ivory Coast, 1978. Family and friends gather at Aya’s house every evening to watch the country’s first television ad campaign promoting the fortifying effects of Solibra, “the strong man’s beer.” It’s a golden time, and the nation, too—an oasis of affluence and stability in West Africa—seems fueled by prosperity and promise. Who’s to know that the Ivorian miracle is nearing its end? In the sun-warmed streets of working-class Yopougon, aka Yop City, holidays are around the corner, the open-air bars and discos are starting to fill up, and trouble of a different kind is about to raise eyebrows. At night, an empty table in the market square under the stars is all the privacy young lovers can hope for, and what happens there is soon everybody’s business. Aya tells the story of its nineteen-year-old heroine, the studious and clear-sighted Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors. It’s a breezy and wryly funny account of the desire for joy and freedom, and of the simple pleasures and private troubles of everyday life in Yop City. An unpretentious and gently humorous story that captures an Africa we rarely see—spirited, hopeful, and resilient—Aya won the 2006 award for Best First Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Clément Oubrerie’s warm colors and energetic, playful lines connect expressively with Marguerite Abouet’s vibrant writing. "Studious Aya and her flighty party-girl friends, Adjoua and Bintou, live in suburban Ivory Coast in 1978. Aya hopes to continue her studies and become a doctor, while her father, a manager at a local brewery, would rather see her marry well. Unfortunately, the mate he has in mind for her, the son of his boss, is an even bigger partier than Bintou and Adjoua—as all will soon find out. Aya is actually more observer than participant—most of the action revolves around the peripheral characters—although she is often an instigator. This realistic story immerses readers in the life of an Ivorian teen of the period. Yet for those familiar with the civil unrest occurring in this part of Africa during the ensuing years, the simplicity of life depicted can't help but be extra poignant; the subplot of one teen's unplanned pregnancy has universal elements. Oubrerie's images are comic and light, somewhat reminiscent of Joann Sfar's, who edited this collection when it was first published in France. There is also some fun back matter, including a glossary, how to wrap a pagne (skirt cloth), and a few recipes. This pleasing volume will make a good addition to graphic-novel collections."—Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, Maryland, Library Journal "Aya is set in the 1970s in the Ivory Coast of Africa and features the antics of three girls: Aya, Adjoua and Bintou. Aya wants to be a doctor; her friends want to dance, flirt with boys and have a good time. Adjoua and Bintou party with Moussa, a twit with big ears and a silly haircut. Soon afterwards Bintou gets grounded for going dancing with her father's best friend, a man twice her age; they are caught red-handed by Bintou's father, who is at the same disco. Adjoua has her own problems: she gets pregnant, declares Moussa to be the father, and two weeks later we see their shotgun wedding, which features skunked beer, no cutlery and a bride and groom who are both sporting black eyes. Despite its light-hearted exterior, I found Aya to be rather sad. The world depicted in this graphic novel is a man's world; the only option the women have is to marry well. Afterwards, they are expected to stay at home and watch their husbands openly cheat on them. Moussa is not the father of Adjoua's baby, but she says that he is because his father is wealthy and he's considered a great catch. Aya—an intelligent woman who applies herself—is clearly an outsider here; she acts mainly as an observer. Aya contains adult situations and people talking about sex (no sex is shown, though there's lots of it) and is recommended for graphic novel collections that cater to high school students."—KLIATT "A young woman navigates shallow men, self-destructive friends and the newly erected class ladder in the prosperous city of Abidjan. The West African nation of the Ivory Coast won its independence from France in 1960, and thanks to agricultural development, it enjoyed a flourishing economy until the early '80s. This graphic novel by Abouet, an Ivory Coast native, and French artist Oubrerie, is set in 1978, as Aya, the 19-year-old heroine, becomes increasingly aware of how money is reshaping her family and friendships. Her father, a manager for a local beer company, takes pride in his car, TV set and other trappings of a steady paycheck; her friends Bintou and Adjoua are obsessed with landing a wealthy husband, and they have enough free time to pursue suitors at the disco; Aya, for her part, aspires to attend college and become a scientist. This is mainly a breezy, colorful snapshot of middle-class Ivory Coast life at the height of the country's boom years, in a tone tha
|
$10.00 |
|
|
(4.5 / 5.0) Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, a young man,Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father’s death, he finds himself piecing together not only the last few months of his father’s life but his entire identity. With thin, precise lines and luscious watercolors, Rutu Modan creates a portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties. Exit Wounds is the North American graphic-novel debut from one of Israel’s best-known cartoonists. Modan has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times and Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture. She is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. Rutu Modan graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, where she lives. A member of the Israeli comics group Actus Tragicus, she has done illustrations for children’s books as well as for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Le Monde. This is her first graphic novel. Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, a young man, Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father’s death, he finds himself piecing together not only the last few months of his father’s life but his entire identity. With thin, precise lines and luscious watercolors, Rutu Modan creates a portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties. Exit Wounds is the North American graphic-novel debut from one of Israel’s best-known cartoonists. Modan has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times and Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture. She is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. "The most thrilling, gorgeous, complex and satisfying new graphic novel in years comes from Israel, written and illustrated by a woman whose storytelling skills and ability to capture emotional nuances in her characters are right up there at the top, on an equal with Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel, the two reigning goddesses of graphic storytelling. The story is a grabber and unfolds expertly. A woman serving her military duty tells our appealing hero, Koby, a young taxi-cab driver in Tel Aviv, that she has good reason to think his estranged father was blown up in a recent bombing. (Let me mention right now that the entire novel, hinged on terrorist activity, contains not a single anti-Palestinian comment. The lack of hatred and blame in Modan's world is part of the compassion that plays throughout the story.) How she convinces Koby to help her find out what happened to his father, and what they discover, is Chinese boxes-within-boxes of secrets and lies. It's a superb mystery, full of false conclusions and theory-breakers wrecking each of your theories. The two central characters are both so likeable and complex—and constantly fighting—that they're straight out of classic comedy, except that they feel utterly real and you ache for their confusion, played out against the tortured backdrop of Tel Aviv, a city constantly taking the lives of its own citizens in explosive bloodbaths. Modan works in big, bold colors, wisely knows what to show instead of tell and generates a sense of perpetual surprise, of rugs constantly being jerked out from under you. The volume is visually rich, handsomely produced, utterly unsentimental in tone, witty and heartbreaking and humane, with a jim-dandy ending. Graphic novel doubters, here's the one that will break your resistance."—Nick DiMartino "This first graphic novel from an award-winning Israeli illustrator tells the story of Koby Franco, a 20-something cab driver working in Tel Aviv. Franco's everyday life screeches to a halt when he receives a phone call from a soldier claiming his estranged father was killed by a suicide bomber at a train station. He and the young woman enter into a journey that takes them through cemeteries, train stations, and Franco's father's disheveled apartment to determine whether the man is dead or alive. The black-and-white artwork, with its thin lines accented by simple watercolor brushstrokes, combines with precise dialogue to convey subtle and powerful emotions throughout the story. Limited depictions of sex, nudity, and violence both in the story and the pictures make this a work that confronts mature themes in an emotionally complex manner. Franco's journey draws a portrait of modern Israel, showing how people cope with the violence around them as they go about their day-to-day lives. Modan doesn't shy away from criticizing some of the attitudes the state of Israel holds, hinting that these exacerbate some of the problems with the Palestinians. But the core of the story rests on Franco dealing with not only all the anger he feels toward his father, but also with the realization that he still loves him and has much to learn from him. An accomplished and moving book."—Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, Virginia, School Library Journal "Tel Aviv cab driver Koby has been alienated from Gabriel, his father, for years when he is pulled into a search for Gabriel's body in the wake of a bus station bombing. Koby is irritated with having to consider Gabriel again and with the strange young woman, Numi, apparently Gabriel's paramour, who insists on Koby's help. Time and Numi's unabating energy for tracking induce Koby to reflect on all he doesn't know about his father's life, let alone his possible death. The relationship between Koby and Numi builds, as it must given their proximity and the emotional tension each brings to the search. But there are tensions other than father-son, man-woman, and romantic-pragmatic at work. Numi and Koby are of different classes, civic life in Israel is conducted with an unblinking eye for possible terrorism, and Gabriel kept many secrets that become only partially revealed. An excellent storyteller, Modan balances plot and characterization well. Meanwhile, her art is intricate enough to fully evoke physical setting and cultural context."—Booklist "Tel Aviv-based Modan gives American comics readers a sharp sense of Israeli life in this brilliant and moving graphic novel. The story follows Koby Franco, a young taxi driver and lost soul, as he searches for his missing father, a man who long ago left the family and may or may not have been killed in a suicide bomb attack. Assisting and prodding him is Nuni, a young soldier who was romantically involved with the missing father. Modan takes her characters across Israel and through a variety of different Israeli social strata as the search progresses. Along the way it becomes clear that Koby's father's identity is in flux—he leaves all those that he loves, but touches on everything it means to be an Israeli: family man, soldier, religious pra
|
$10.74 |
|
|
 (5.0 / 5.0) First serialized in The New York Times Magazine “Funny Pages”
|
$13.32 |
|
|
(5.0 / 5.0) The enchanting comic strip that introduced adult readers to the wonderful world of Moomin Tove Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children’s authors of the twentieth century for her illustrated chapter books regarding the magical worlds of her creation, the Moomins. The Moomins saw life in many forms but debuted to its biggest audience ever on the pages of the world’s largest newspaper, the London Evening News, in 1954. The strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world with millions of readers in forty countries. Moomin Book One is the first volume of Drawn & Quarterly’s publishing plan to reprint the entire strip drawn by Jansson before she handed over the reins to her brother Lars in 1960. This is the first time the strip will be published in any form in North America and will deservedly place Jansson among the international cartooning greats of the last century. The Moomins are a tight-knit family–hippo-shaped creatures with easygoing and adventurous outlooks. Jansson’s art is pared down and precise, yet able to compose beautiful portraits of ambling creatures in fields of flowers or on rock-strewn beaches that recall Jansson’s Nordic roots. The comic strip reached out to adults with its gentle and droll sense of humor. Whimsical but with biting undertones, Jansson’s observations of everyday life, including guests who overstay their welcome, modern art, movie stars, and high society, easily caught the attention of an international audience and still resonate today.
|
$9.00 |
|
|
 (3.5 / 5.0) The follow-up graphic novel to the acclaimed Pyongyang: A Journey to North Korea Shenzhen is entertainingly compact, with Guy Delisle’s observations of life in a cold urban city in southern China that is sealed off from the rest of the country by electric fences and armed guards. With a dry wit and a clean line, Delisle makes the most of his time spent in Asia overseeing outsourced production for a French animation company. By translating his fish-out-of-water experiences into accessible graphic novels,Delisle is quick to find the humor and point out the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. Yet he never forgets to relay his compassion for the simple freedoms that escape his colleagues by virtue of living in a Communist state.
|
$11.18 |