In Hammer, Volume 1, Stud’s father has gone on another expedition, leaving him alone to fend for himself. Luckily, he can turn his bare hands into hammers.

Once they were heroes, but the age of heroes has long since passed. Banished from existence by a multiversal crisis, the old champions of Spiral City--Abraham Slam, Golden Gail, Colonel Weird, Madame Dragonfly, and Barbalien--now lead simple lives in an idyllic, timeless farming village from which there is no escape! But as they employ all of their super abilities to free themselves from this strange purgatory, a mysterious stranger works to bring them back into action for one last adventure! Collects Black Hammer #1-#6. The first chapter in Jeff Lemire (The Underwater Welder, The Complete Essex County, Animal Man) and Dean Ormston's (Lucifer) acclaimed series! “I don’t read many comics these days, and I can’t remember the last time I read a superhero comic, but I’m loving Black Hammer.” – Mike Mignola “Black Hammer is easily one of Lemire’s best creations.” – Scott Snyder “Amazing. Just flat-out amazing.” – Patton Oswalt

Spiral City finds itself trapped in a vicious cycle of crime, corruption, and violence. With the heart of the city at stake, a vigilante rises in Skulldigger. However, when the nefarious Grimjim escapes from prison, will Skulldigger and his ward, Skeleton Boy, be enough to save Spiral City?

"An evil mage intends to annihilate the world. I need your help to save it from destruction!" Everything about college student Amamiya Yuuhi is average: grades, looks, and his blasé outlook on life. So what happens when he awakens one day to a talking lizard, who informs him that there is a gigantic hammer in outer space that is poised to split the Earth into pieces and requests his allegiance in the fight against the forces of evil? Pretend it never happened? Unfortunately for Yuuhi, a bit of coercion in the form of a super-powered princess prevents him from returning to his mediocre life-as-usual. In the adventure of a lifetime, Yuuhi will join forces with the capricious princess and a motley crew of companions to fight back against an evil mage and his horrifying homunculus before the Biscuit Hammer can destroy the planet!

A best selling text and self-training manual.

Music in film is often dismissed as having little cultural significance. While Hammer Film Productions is famous for such classic films as Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein, few observers have noted the innovative music that Hammer distinctively incorporated into its horror films. This book tells how Hammer commissioned composers at the cutting edge of European musical modernism to write their movie scores, introducing the avant-garde into popular culture via the enormously successful venue of horror film. Each chapter addresses a specific category of the avant-garde musical movement. According to these categories, chapters elaborate upon the visionary composers who made the horror film soundtrack a melting pot of opposing musical cultures.

Hammer Film's is justly famous for Gothic horror but the company also excelled in the psychological thriller. Influenced by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Alfred Hitchcock, Hammer created its own approach to this genre in some of the company's very best films. This book takes a chronological, film-by-film approach to all of Hammer's thrillers. Well-known classics such as Seth Holt's The Nanny (1965) and Taste of Fear (1961) are discussed, together with less well known but equally brilliant films such as The Full Treatment (dir. Val Guest, 1960) and Michael Carreras' Maniac (1963). The films' literary ancestry, reflection of British society and relation to psychological theories of Freud and Jung, architectural metaphor, sexuality, religion, and even Nazi atrocities are all fully explored.