Calling all comic fans! Packed with tips, techniques and step-by-step guides based on the illustrations of 5 acclaimed comic artists, this is the ultimate guide to creating action-packed comics for ages 8+. This is a guide not just to drawing characters, but to the whole process of comic book creation: planning a story, developing characters and plots, using dialogue, setting out dynamic comic pages, and creating appealing covers.

Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.

On the surface, the relationship between comics and the ‘high’ arts once seemed simple; comic books and strips could be mined for inspiration, but were not themselves considered legitimate art objects. Though this traditional distinction has begun to erode, the worlds of comics and art continue to occupy vastly different social spaces. Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world, including museums, auction houses, and the art press. Bart Beaty's analysis centres around two questions: why were comics excluded from the history of art for most of the twentieth century, and what does it mean that comics production is now more closely aligned with the art world? Approaching this relationship for the first time through the lens of the sociology of culture, Beaty advances a completely novel approach to the comics form.

In The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces, prominent scholar Thierry Groensteen offers a distinct perspective on important evolutions in comics since the 1960s through close readings of ten seminal works. He covers over half a century of comics production, sampling a single work from the sixties (Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt), seventies (The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius by Moebius), eighties (Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), and nineties (Epileptic by David B.). Then this remarkable critic, scholar, and author of The System of Comics and Comics and Narration delves into recent masterpieces, such as Building Stories by Chris Ware. Each of these books created an opening, achieved a breakthrough, offered a new narrative model, or took up an emerging tendency and perfected it. Groensteen recaptures the impact with which these works, each in its own way, broke with what had gone before. He regards comics as an expanding art, not only because groundbreaking works such as these are increasing in number, but also because it is an art that has only gradually become aware of its considerable potential and is unceasingly opening up new expressive terrain.

Washington State, late nineteenth century. During the frenzied historical era commonly known as the Klondike Gold Rush, a mysterious woman arrives in Woodsburgh, a small mining town close to the Canadian border. Meanwhile, the streets and surroundings of Woodsburgh are flooded in blood: a heinous creature is killing incautious citizens. What's the connection, if any, between this disturbing presence and the ivory-skinned stranger? MERCY is a bestselling goth-inspired horror graphic novel by acclaimed creator MIRKA ANDOLFO (UNNATURAL) and is perfect for fans of Penny Dreadful, Crimson Peak, The Alienist, Parasol Protectorate, and Dark Shadows. Collects MIRKA ANDOLFO'S MERCY #1-6

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.

"Before the rise of underground comics in the late 1960s, there was no place for eccentric talent in the comics industry. Rather than creating super heroes like Superman and Spider-Man, comic strips like Peanuts and Krazy Kat, or graphic novels like Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Ghost World, the artists represented in Art Out of Time created their own "ingenious" versions of the super hero, western, romance, humor, and horror genres that dominated the comics of their day." "Their visions found a home, but were mostly obscured by the more accessible mainstream work of others. These artists have a distinct, fully formed visual sensibility, and their comics stray from the usual thematic and visual ideas of what we now consider the medium to be. All of them were under-recognized in their lifetimes, and all of them remain outside the usual narratives of comic book history." "Art Out of Time reprints complete comic book and comic strip stories, most of which are being reprinted here for the first time since their initial publication. In five thematic sections, this anthology is a "counter history" of comics, containing nearly thirty often-unknown visionary American cartoonists from 1900 to 1969. These artists foreshadowed and influenced the innovations within the comics medium of today. Together for the first time, these oddballs and obsessives truly constitute an underground that wasn't."--BOOK JACKET.