The Comics Journal 302

The 2011 edition of the newly formatted 600-plus page Comics Journal proved to be a massive hit, with Comics Journal #302 poised to replicate that success as a vital print compendium of critiques, interviews and comics.The cover feature is an extraordinary and unique interview-portrait of Maurice Sendak, one of the greatest children's book illustrators of the century. Other features include a lengthy interview with French graphic novel pioneer Jaques Tardi. Fans of all types of graphic novel and comics in general will find features that will inform and entertain.

Depicting the bustling crowds of humanity from magisterial heights was once a popular visual genre among artists and the public, regularly appearing in mass-market newspapers and magazines: carnivals and circuses, cook-outs and baseball games, bustling city streets and train stations or parades and epic battle scenes... artists depicted the everyday life of urban and country settings where communities gathered for fun and revelry. Adults and children alike could spend hours delighting in the details of these marvelously orchestrated scenes of human bustle. This coffee-table collection showcases the remarkable beauty and breadth of these forgotten American classics.

The first of two volumes presenting all of the world-renowned hardboiled crime graphic novels (one of which has never before been collected in English!). In the never-before-collected Griffu, the titular character is a legal advisor, not a private eye, but even he knows that when a sultry blonde appears in his office after hours, he shouldn't trust her ― and she doesn't disappoint. Griffu is soon ensnared in a deadly web of sexual betrayal, real estate fraud, and murder. In West Coast Blues, a young sales executive goes to the aid of an accident victim, and finds himself sucked into a spiral of violence involving an exiled war criminal and two hired assassins. This volume also offers a bonus, 21-page unfinished story by Manchette and Tardi, as well as a single page introduction to another incomplete story, both appearing in English for the first time.

A collection of comics drawn from Golden Age comic books from the 1940s through the early 1960s features selections from such comics as Captain Marvel, Pogo, Donald Duck, and Dennis the Menace.

This collection from the New York Times–bestselling graphic novelist includes his most beloved illustrations and rare, previously unpublished works. Throughout his decades-long career, alternative cartoonist and screenwriter Daniel Clowes has always been ahead of artistic and cultural movements. The creator of acclaimed graphic novels like Ghost World and David Boring, Clowes is widely praised for his emotionally compelling narratives that reimagine the ways that stories can be told in comics. The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist is the first monograph on this award-winning, New York Times–bestselling creator. It includes all of Clowes’s best-known illustrations, rare and previously unpublished work, as well as interviews and essays by Chip Kidd, Chris Ware, and others.

The Hugo Award-winning classic sci-fi novel about interstellar war. The Beyond started with the Stations orbiting the stars nearest Earth. The Great Circle the interstellar freighters traveled was long, but not unmanageable, and the early Stations were emotionally and politically dependent on Mother Earth. The Earth Company which ran this immense operation reaped incalculable profits and influenced the affairs of nations. Then came Pell, the first station centered around a newly discovered living planet. The discovery of Pell's World forever altered the power balance of the Beyond. Earth was no longer the anchor which kept this vast empire from coming adrift, the one living mote in a sterile universe. But Pell was just the first living planet. Then came Cyteen, and later others, and a new and frighteningly different society grew in the farther reaches of space. The importance of Earth faded and the Company reaped ever smaller profits as the economic focus of space turned outward. But the powerful Earth Fleet was sitll a presence in the Beyond, and Pell Station was to become the last stronghold in a titanic struggle between the vast, dynamic forces of the rebel Union and those who defended Earth's last, desperate grasp for the stars.

Fans and scholars have long regarded the 1980s as a significant turning point in the history of comics in the United States, but most critical discussions of the period still focus on books from prominent creators such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Art Spiegelman, eclipsing the work of others who also played a key role in shaping comics as we know them today. The Other 1980s offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this robust era of ambitious comics publishing. The twenty essays in The Other 1980s illuminate many works hailed as innovative in their day that have nonetheless fallen from critical view, partly because they challenge the contours of conventional comics studies scholarship: open-ended serials that eschew the graphic-novel format beloved by literature departments; sprawling superhero narratives with no connection to corporate universes; offbeat and abandoned experiments by major publishers, including Marvel and DC; idiosyncratic and experimental independent comics; unusual genre exercises filtered through deeply personal sensibilities; and oft-neglected offshoots of the classic “underground” comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The collection also offers original examinations of the ways in which the fans and critics of the day engaged with creators and publishers, establishing the groundwork for much of the contemporary critical and academic discourse on comics. By uncovering creators and works long ignored by scholars, The Other 1980s revises standard histories of this major period and offers a more nuanced understanding of the context from which the iconic comics of the 1980s emerged.

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