This book examines the fictional female bodies of four stylistically distinct comics artists in the United States—Chris Ware, Emil Ferris, Ebony Flowers, and Tillie Walden—whose work has attracted significant attention. These bodies showcase how comics and its unique visual language can both critique and re-envision some of the most challenging social issues of our time. The characters analyzed in this book illustrate diverse techniques for projecting the complex humanity and "truth" of U.S. women’s unruly bodies onto a two-dimensional page. All of the protagonists qualify as "outsider" in some way, whether by gender identity, sexuality, ability, religion, race, class, ethnicity, age, or a combination of these and other categories. These bodily expressions of outsider identity both resist traditional categorization and stereotypes, and sometimes harness and employ those stereotypes for the purposes of parody or social critique. The language of comics affords a unique opportunity for complex representation of these disparate women’s bodies, especially when comics artists use the full range of tools at their disposal, such as style, materials, narrative direction, the space of the gutter, and the friction between word and image. This is an a timely and important intervention suitable for researchers and students in comics studies, gender studies, literature and queer studies.

“I love comics. Comics is (Comics ARE?) a perfect language, robustly evolving and expanding like any other living language,” writes Phoebe Gloeckner in her Introduction to The Best American Comics 2018. This year’s collection includes work selected from the pages of graphic novels, comic books, periodicals, zines, online, and more, highlighting the kaleidoscopic diversity of the comics language today. Featuring GABRIELLE BELL • TARA BOOTH • GEOF DARROW • GUY DELISLE • EMIL FERRIS • JULIA GFRÖRER • SARAH GLIDDEN • SIMON HANSELMANN • JAIME HERNANDEZ • JULIA JACQUETTE • GARY PANTER • ARIEL SCHRAG, and others

In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.

The true crime story that made international headlines: Josef Fritzl held his daughter captive as a sex slave, and fathered seven children with her, creating a hidden family no one knew about-not even Fritzl's own wife.

Pin-ups are a classic American art form that have enthralled several generations since first gaining widespread popularity in the 1920s. Today, internationally acclaimed photographer Celeste Giuliano has developed a style of photography that masterfully pays homage to the sweet and sexy look of the classic pin-up girl illustrations from WWII America. With a focus on details, authenticity, lighting, studio techniques, and poses, she has made a career of transforming everyday women into pin-up queens and making both men and women alike fall in love with their classic beauty all over again. In this, her first definitive collection, Celeste reminds us why men "pinned up" these lovely ladies and why their timeless beauty is still as sexy as ever. Each of the 130 portraits takes you back to the time when a flirtatious smile or a peek at a garter was what made the girl next door the ultimate bombshell.