The book ranges playfully from riffs on the gag cartoon to paranoid soliloquies of a surrealistic apocalypse, with references to contemporary politics, pop culture, and religion, plays on language, and sequential abstractions. Stories intertwine, branch off, dead end and double back. These are experimental, absurdist art comics, but the book is a page-turner, and some of it is laugh-out-loud funny. Reading it is not so much like reading comics as it is watching the artist make connections between ideas, find patterns, and set down the story as it happens. It's a tour de force, beautifully and uniquely packaged, in black and white and color, by one of the most fascinating new cartoonists of the decade. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.9px Arial; color: #424242}

This book is an insider's guide to how the comic book industry works. You'll learn how comic book superheroes are created and the deeper meanings they represent. You'll follow the development of sequential art storytelling - from caveman wall paintings to modern manga and cinematic techniques. Here you will explore comics in all forms: those flimsy pamphlets we call comic books; thick graphic novels; Japanese manga; and blockbuster movies featuring epic battles between good and evil. But behind it all, you'll discover how comics are an intellectual property business, the real money found in licensed bedsheets and fast-food merchandise, heart-pounding theme park rides and collectible toys, video games, and Hollywood extravaganza featuring such popular superheroes as Spider-Man, Superman, X-Men, and Batman.

An experimental collection of art, humor and philosophy. Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes takes up where the artist's first volume, Monologues for the Coming Plague, left off. Like the Coming Plague, the Density of Black Holes is a creatively experimental laboratory, comprising a collection of free flowing stream-of-consciousness gags, strips, and drawings that slowly coalesce into an unexpectedly compelling and complex narrative. The hints of story that came together in Coming Plague are extrapolated and expanded upon and grow to incorporate some of Nilsen's other outre strips from the anthology MOME, two of which are reprinted here in expanded form. The book is an audacious investigation into the rhythms of storytelling, the blurring of media, and an exercise in reconciling contrasts. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.9px Arial; color: #424242}

In 1976, a fledgling magazine held forth the the idea that comics could be art. In 2016, comics intended for an adult readership are reviewed favorably in the New York Times, enjoy panels devoted to them at Book Expo America, and sell in bookstores comparable to prose efforts of similar weight and intent. We Told You So: Comics as Art is an oral history about Fantagraphics Books’ key role in helping build and shape an art movement around a discredited, ignored and fading expression of Americana. It includes appearances by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Harlan Ellison, Stan Lee, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and more.

This accessible, reasonably priced, quarterly anthology runs approximately 120 pages per volume and spotlights a cast of a dozen of today's most exciting cartoonists. Mome is quickly earning a reputation as one of the premier literary anthologies on the market, and the only one comprised entirely of comics. Hightlights of the seventh and eighth volumes include: the concluding chapters of Lewis Trondheim's "At Loose Ends," an autobiographical diary comic that portrays the acclaimed French cartoonist at a crossroads in his life and work; the Momedebuts of Eleanor Davis, Tom Kaczynski and T. Edward Bak; contributions from Momeregulars such as 2006 Eisner Award Most Promising Newcomer nominees Jonathan Bennett and R.Kikuo Johnson, as well as Tim Hensley, David Heatley, Paul Hornschemeier, Anders Nilsen, Sophie Crumb, Kurt Wolfgang, Andrice Arp, Martin Cendreda, Zak Sally and Gabrielle Bell.

Suddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and images of the rest of contemporary culture. In Reading Comics, critic Douglas Wolk shows us why this is and how it came to be. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics-from Alan Moore to Alison Bechdel to Dave Sim to Chris Ware -- and introduces a critical theory that explains where each fits into the pantheon of art. Reading Comics is accessible to the hardcore fan and the curious newcomer; it is the first book for people who want to know not just what comics are worth reading, but also the ways to think and talk and argue about them.