Includes international essays on possibly the most important aspect of the aesthetics and narratives of comics - urban topography and environment.

"Warm, funny, and a visual delight, Steenz's take on Heart of the City is next-level." –Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn This first book collection of Heart of the City comics by the strip’s new creator, Steenz, is packed with outstanding art, a diverse cast of characters, and engaging, positive storylines about friendship, pop culture, ghost stories, and a wide range of real-world issues. Heart Lamarr is a girl with big dreams who lives in Philadelphia with her single mom. She has her sights set on a life of theater, but she runs into plenty of drama off-stage, too. Luckily, her best friends Dean, Kat, and Charlotte form a stellar supporting cast to help Heart navigate the challenging world of school plays, cliques, rumors, and everything else middle school throws at them.

Psychopathic hard man, Marvin, is drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse with the murderer of his lover, Goldie, and the police. As he teams up with Goldie's twin sister and friends, he finds himself taking on the corrupt authorities and the influential man behind it all - Cardinal Rock.--Amazon.com.

Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment. Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends. Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.

New York City has had a profound influence on the Marvel Comics universe. Unlike Batman's Gotham City or Superman's Metropolis, the Marvel superheroes - Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers - are grounded firmly in the streets of New York, working and living beside us. This fun and informative guide will take you through those streets, pointing out locations of interest along the way. Peter Parker's apartment in the West Village? We'll show you how to get there. Looking for the Avengers headquarters? They might give you funny looks when you show up at the Frick Museum, but don't worry, you're in the right place. You'll also discover why Stan Lee decided to use New York as his backdrop in the first place, and what effect that decision has had on subsequent generations of comic book artists and writers. Whether you're a curious traveller or just a Marvel Comics fan, The Marvel Comics Guide to New York Citygives a fresh and fun new look at the greatest city in the world - and the Marvel universe.

Grace and her friends must protect a newly hatched dragon from mysterious evildoers. When Grace moves to Hong Kong with her mom and new stepdad, her biggest concern is making friends at her fancy new boarding school. But when a mysterious old woman gifts her a dragon egg during a field trip, Grace discovers that the wonderful stories of dragons she heard when she was a young girl might actually be real--especially when the egg hatches overnight. The dragon has immense powers that Grace has yet to understand. And that puts them both in danger from mysterious forces intent on abusing the dragon's power. And now it's up to Grace and her school friends to uncover the sinister plot threatening the entire city!

An exquisitely drawn exploration of three lost souls’ emotional terrain As night falls in the City of Belgium, three strangers in their late twenties—a most dangerous age—arrive at a popular restaurant. Jona is about to move away; he calls his wife, who’s already settled in Berlin, before trying to make plans with friends for one last night on the town. No one bites—they’re all busy or maybe they just don’t want to party—but he’s determined to make this night something to remember. Victoria is lively and energetic, but surrounded by friends and family who are buzzkills, always worrying about what is best for her. Rodolphe glumly considers his own misery and then suddenly snaps out of it, becoming the life of the party. The three careen through the city’s nightlife spots and underbelly, getting ever deeper in the messiness of human existence as they chase pleasure—or at least a few distractions from their daily lives. Each has a series of misadventures that reveal them to be teetering on the edge of despair, of destruction, of becoming the people they’ll be for the rest of their lives. The City of Belgium occupies a place between lucid dream and tooth-grinding nightmare.