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When a pair of washed-up silhouettes abandon the optical illusion business to make a graphic novel, they desperately hope the book will rocket them to fame and fortune. They’ll do just about anything to finish their project — anything, that is, except put forth any kind of effort whatsoever. Instead, they enlist a Juilliard-trained actor…
Don Simpson, master of superhero parody (creator of Megaton Man and Splitting Image and original letterer, inker, and logo designer of 1963) brings to life the avatars of the Little Comics Group That Could in satirical form–as avatars of avatars. They’re all here: Cyclobster, Black Bug, Psychic Psquid, Dr. UG, Helldiver, Limber Lass, Moonrock, and…
One day, Willy Murphy, a rising young star at a prestigious Madison Avenue advertising agency, whipped off his tie, cast away his suit, and said goodbye to a high-pressure, high-profile, high-paying career. All just to draw — not comics — but comix. What followed was the flowering of a sharp comedic sensibility paired with a…
Ernest Hemingway, as the author of this graphic adaptation acknowledges, may be culturally out of fashion, but his short stories, especially those that appeared in the first 1924 version of in our time, are timeless. The stories from that edition are, as the cartoonist Jason Novaks writes in his introduction, “the shortest Hemingway ever wrote….
In 1920, Argentine author Roberto Arlt, while first developing his own quest as a writer, published an essay on his uneasy experiences with esoteric groups in Buenos Aires. Diego Arandojo and Jorge Fantoni’s graphic novel The Hidden River tells the story of Fausto Dumrauf who, many decades later continues Ault’s work, following in the footsteps…
In the 1950s, between his legendary EC work and his celebrated Marvel comics, John Severin joined with Mad artist Will Elder and Two-Fisted Tales writer Colin Dawkins to introduce a new level of historical accuracy to the comic-book Western. While Native Americans had generally been vilified or left in the shadows of gun-slinging cowboy heroes,…
In Smoking Kills, an odd couple is doomed to roam a desolate afterlife: Skeleton, a sensitive soul full of curiosity and wonder, and Ghost, a cantankerous character who drowns his cynicism in booze and cigarettes. This hilarious pairing leads to all manner of misadventures as they give a whale whiskey, encounter bizarro versions of themselves,…
Reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, teenage Billie travels over the rainbow and under tangled concrete overpasses, from her native Austin, Texas to the improbably named Liberal, Kansas. Her plan is to live with her godfather, Adam, “a lonely, gay, film geek stuck inside a jock’s body – a jock’s…
Seamlessly blending sex, body horror, isolation, and violence with humor, color, and a seductive sense of design and composition (or, as the artist puts it, “love, gags, shit, holes, crashes, and bodies”), Cutting Season is a tour-de-force of distorted romantic abstraction: an unnerving and sustained howl, in comics form, that demands attention like a raw,…
Nancy Burton was among the earliest underground cartoonists, creating comic strips that appeared in The East Village Other (“Gentle’s Tripout”) and Gothic Blimp Works (“Busy Boxes”) in 1966. Under the pen names “Panzika” and “Nancy Kalish” and most importantly, “Hurricane Nancy,” she contributed to many notable underground comix including It Ain’t Me, Babe. Drawing on…
Leading off with the eponymous novella-length thriller, “A Pocketful of rain” is drawn with realistic human beings instead of Jason’s trademark blank-faced animal characters–a true revelation for longtime fans. This collection showcases three distinct styles: the artist’s earliest “realistic” drawing style (used to unsettling effect in some particularly creepy stories), an intermediate “bighead” cartoony style…
The old-timers in Texas’s Erzsébet county say that nature don’t ask permission, it feeds when it needs. But the bloodsucking bug in this here yarn got to thinking that nature ought not be absolute. Would you believe that this guy would rather dry up ‘n die than ruin another picnic by taking his thirsty fangs…
