Can’t Get No,     Rick Veitch

Within this oddly shaped book lies one of the most remarkable achievements in recent comics history. Veitch (Maximortal; Swamp Thing) has given the graphic novel medium what may just be its first long-form poem. The drawings tell the story of corporate drone Chad Roe, who is given a new outlook when a weekend bender leaves him tattooed on every inch of his body. His life is further upended when the World Trade Center, where his office is located, is destroyed. This book's distinct style shines through with the narrative captions that accompany Veitch's remarkable art. They don't contain the main character's inner monologue or a narrator's comments on the actions. Instead they present a satirical yet lyrical commentary on the modern American life Roe was very much a part of, but is suddenly removed from now that he is a walking piece of abstract art. It's a biting evisceration of the comfortable place many Americans convinced themselves they had, a conviction that was challenged on 9/11. The words and pictures move in and out of synch with each other, sometimes exemplifying the power and possibilities of comics. When they seem to be telling two different stories, it goes even further to show how several ideas can be communicated at once. Fortunately, Veitch's ideas are strong enough to justify the treatment. (Publishers Weekly review)

Caricature,     Daniel Clowes

These nine stories show Clowes (Ghost World) as a writer compelled to produce infinite variations on the inner monologues of articulate, geeky loners. His characters exude a stylish, contemporary misanthropy; they're self-isolated, bland and ordinary, straight from some small town or emotionally dead family; and admittedly and intensely self-involved. They invariably substitute a trendy obsession with media kitsch, porn, fashion, old folk music or with just looking bored for empathetic communication or even small talk with others. These personages seem depressed and are usually fed up with most people. Though saturated in this tone of mannered disdain, Clowes's pieces are rescued from cliche and repetition by his expressive, meticulously glum drawings (in b&w and color) and a constant undertone of oddball, mocking hilarity. In the title story, he provides a portrait of an itinerant, county fair caricaturist and the unstable hipster brat-chick who insinuates herself into his life. In "Blue Italian Shit," he relates the story of Rodger Young, secret virgin and pathetic poseur, and his journey through a succession of bad late-1970s New York City styles ("there were fifteen minutes on this earth when I had a John Travolta haircut") and peculiar roommates ("Nat... listened to Kansas, and walked around naked"). In the supremely weird "Gynecology," Clowes deftly generates his characteristic emotional anemia in a story featuring a singing gynecologist and racist iconography. Clowes is a strange master at creating entertaining scenarios about contemporary social vacuity. (Publishers Weekly review)

Chicken with Plums,    Marjane Satrapi

The question of what makes a life worth living has rarely been posed with as much poignancy and ambition as it is in Satrapi's dazzling new effort. Satrapi's talent for distilling complex personal histories into richly evocative vignettes made Persepolis a bestseller. Here she presents us with the story of her great-uncle Nasser Ali Khan, one of Iran's most revered musicians, who takes to bed after realizing that he'll never be able to find an instrument to replace his beloved, broken tar. Eight days later, he's dead. These final eight days, which we're taken through one by one, make up the bulk of this slim volume. While waiting for death, Nasser Ali is visited by family, memories and hallucinations. Because everything is being filtered through Satrapi's formidable imagination, we are also treated to classical Persian poetry, bits of history, folk stories, as well as an occasional flash forward into lives Nasser Ali will never have a chance to see. Each episode is illustrated with Satrapi's characteristic, almost childlike drawings, which take on the stark expressiveness of block prints. Clear and emotive, they bring surprising force and humor to this stunning tribute to a life whose worth can be measured in the questions it leaves. (Publishers Weekly review)

City of Glass,     Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli

Karasik and Mazzucchelli's 1994 comics adaptation of Auster's existentialist mystery novel, reprinted here with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, has been a cult classic for years. The Comics Journal named it one of the 100 best comics of the century. Miraculously, it deepens the darkness and power of its source. Auster's novel (about a novelist named Quinn who's mistaken for a detective named Paul Auster and loses his mind and identity in the course of a meaningless case) zooms around in metafictional spirals, but it doesn't have a lot of visual content. In fact, it's mostly about the breakdown of the idea of representation and the widening chasm between signifier and signified. So the artists, perversely and brilliantly, play fast and loose with the text. Mazzucchelli draws everything in a bluntly sketched, bold-lined style, and having set up a suitably film noir mood at the beginning, he substitutes literal depictions of what's happening for symbolic or iconic images wherever possible. One character's monologue about the loss of meaning in his speech is drawn as a long zoom down his throat, followed by Charon arising from a void, a cave drawing, a series of holes and symbols of muteness and finally a broken marionette at the bottom of a well. This reflected, shattered Glass introduces a whole new set of resonances to Auster's story, about the things images can and can't represent when language fails. (Publishers Weekly review)

Conan: The Frost Giant’s Daughter,     Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord

The popular barbarian is back in full-color painted adaptations of the original pulp novels by Robert E. Howard. Conan, the dark-haired Cimmerian warrior, leaves his homeland, inspired by his grandfather's tales of Hyperborea, a paradise in the far north. He befriends an Aesir chieftain by showing his skill in battle and joins a raiding party. After a particularly bloody battle, Conan, the last man standing, is visited by the Frost-Giant's daughter, a nymph made of ice. He eventually finds his way to the fabled lands of Hyperborea, where the countryside's beauty comes at a terrible price. These tales, like the originals, are long on swordplay and short on character development. Even so, Conan has an endearing earnestness that hearkens back to the golden age of pulp fiction: what Conan lacks in intelligence he makes up for in brute strength. The illustrations are lush, adding a new vibrancy to this fantasy world. Rounding out this collection of the first six and a half issues is a biography of Howard and Nord's highly amusing audition piece for the job as Conan penciler. (Publishers Weekly review)

Concrete,     Paul Chadwick

Possessed of the mind of a mild-mannered mensch in a gigantic, superstrong, rocklike body, Concrete was an early star of the independent comics movement, appearing intermittently since 1986. The character's outlandish origin--he was fashioned by aliens who were never again seen in the series--serves as an improbable but effective device for exploring human nature. Trapped in his granite shell, unable to feel sensual pleasures but graced with heightened senses, Concrete seeks new experiences that only he can attempt, such as a hike across the ocean's floor. Although he occasionally undertakes standard superhero exploits, such as rescuing miners trapped underground, he also engages in decidedly nontraditional jobs, like serving as bodyguard to a dotty, Prince-like rock star. Chadwick accentuates the stories' humanistic bent in his graceful, carefully wrought, black-and-white art. This collection begins a series that reprints Concrete's early appearances and previously uncollected stories by Chadwick, such as the autobiographical "Vagabond" in this volume; recalling a cross-country hitchhiking trip, it hints at how much the creator's character informs that of the creation. (Booklist review)

Contract with God, A,     Will Eisner

Four powerful dramas recall tenement life in 1930s New York--an absolute must for fans of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth,and Isaac Singer. The storytelling is straightforward: sometimes heart warming, sometimes heart breaking. It's printed in a single sepia-colored ink, which adds to the nostalgic feel of the book and includes "A Contract with God," "The Street Singer," "The Supper," and "Cookalein." (Amazon.com review)

Cravan,     Mike Richardson and Rick Geary

It's not known what became of Arthur Cravan—boxer, poet, adventurer, hoaxer and Oscar Wilde's nephew—after he disappeared while sailing to Mexico in 1918. This graphic novel biography presents the larger-than-life incidents from his life, including various daring escapes, schemes and a scam involving boxing matches with Jack Johnson. Along the way, Cravan runs into such figures as Leon Trotsky and marries poet Mina Loy. Richardson even adds to the mystery by speculating that Cravan was also reclusive B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Geary, creator of the outstanding Treasury of Victorian Murder series, is an excellent choice to illustrate and co-write this historical overview. His distinctive pen-and-ink style captures the reality of the times, especially when it comes to establishing settings like cluttered sitting rooms or angry groups of men in striped suits. Cravan embarrasses his family but claims it's all for experience to become a writer. Their good advice—"If you want to write, sit down and write"—is ignored in favor of more sensation seeking. The result is a life of violence and dada, a colorful footnote to the history of the era. (Publishers Weekly review)

Channel Zero,     Brian Wood

Special interest groups have bullied the government into passing the Clean Act, effectively killing freedom of speech and silencing the country into submission. TV and God become one and the same as America wages its own holy war against its citizens. Meet Jennie 2.5, media slut turned info-terrorist, out to save the country from itself, and restore free will and self expression. Hailed internationally as ground-breaking work in the field of sequential art, Channel Zero challenges and tests the limits, combining current events and no-future shock into a dark, paranoid, deep-ambient visual narrative. (Publisher’s description)

De:Tales,     Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Brazilians Moon and Ba are twin writer-artists whose drawing styles are very alike--their urban settings resemble Munoz and Sampayo's noirish cities in Alack Sinner, but the details are naturalistic rather than expressionist. Working apart and together, they create deeply satisfying realist and magic realist comics about middle-class, urban students and professionals like themselves. They're in nearly all the stories, and their preoccupations in them, par for young men, are connecting with women and clubbing and partying with friends, activities that easily overlap. In the wordless "Estrela," a man and a woman meet in a bar, leave together to walk and chat, kiss, and part, perhaps just for now. "Late for Coffee" is very similar but more mysterious. A man walks down a street to where a woman challenges him. "You're late," she says. "I don't know you," he responds. Rambling travel ensues, their talk hints at desire, they kiss, but when he invites her in, she repeats what she first said to him and strolls away. In the two versions of "Reflections," each brother works himself through the same spooky scenario about losing a chance to connect. The three-page "All You Need Is Love," in which neither brother appears, is even bleaker, this time about failed connection. Striking a related, bittersweetly regretful note is the collaborative ghost story, "Happy Birthday, My Friend!" The five other stories are just as good. (Booklist review)

Desolation Jones,     Warren Ellis

Ellis' best comics are character-based thrillers involving high concepts and heavy attitude. Desolation Jones has both in spades. The titular hero is a former MI6 agent who was subjected by his government to the brutal "Desolation Test," which left him shattered and scarred. He is now confined, with other, similarly victimized ex-agents, to Los Angeles--a hellish prison, since the experiment left Jones pathologically susceptible to sunlight. Reduced to PI work, he is hired by an elderly pornography connoisseur to retrieve "the Holy Grail of cinematic filth," a sex film directed by and starring Hitler. The caper is consciously Chandleresque. The wealthy client with troubled, wayward daughters is straight out of The Big Sleep. Jones' outlook is thoroughly cynical, the dialogue hard-boiled, and the ending noirishly bleak. J. H. Williams III, whose intricate art limns the dark, violent world of Jones as convincingly as he portrayed the fantasy realm of Alan Moore's Promethea, aids Ellis' effort immeasurably. Ellis' Transmetropolitan was a cult favorite; this new series, while less accessible, may become another. (Booklist review)

DMZ,     Brian Wood

A near-future America is torn by war between the Free Armies, who control New Jersey and the inland, and the United States, ensconced in New York City's boroughs. In the war-torn DMZ of Manhattan, Matty Roth, hired as a phototech intern to a famous battlefield journalist, is stranded when the rest of his crew is killed. Overcoming initial panic, he decides to remain as the sole embedded journalist in the devastated, largely depopulated city. It's a career-making assignment--if it doesn't get him killed. Befriended by former med student Zee, who runs a clinic, Matty discovers a society struggling to survive amid skirmishes and snipers (appropriate soundtrack music: Talking Heads' "Life during Wartime"). Of the DMZ issues collected here, the first three establish its premise. In the succeeding two, Matty discovers the "Ghosts of Central Park"--paramilitaries who defend the now-deforested preserve and its zoo animals--and chases a robber who steals his press badge. Wood's writing does justice to the intriguing concept, and Burchielli's jagged artwork effectively conveys the characters' desperation. (Booklist review)

Doom Patrol,     Grant Morrison

Before writing such critically acclaimed cult comics as The Invisibles, Morrison made his name in 1988 by updating Animal Man, a third-rate 1960s costumed crimefighter. The next year he similarly resuscitated the Doom Patrol, a band of misfit superheroes whose strange powers made society fear and hate them (compare Marvel's X-Men, who debuted at the same time). Morrison's Animal Man drew praise for daring experimentation, but his "World's Strangest Superheroes" raised the stakes by replacing many original cast members with the likes of Crazy Jane, a schizophrenic whose multiple personalities each has its own superpower, and Dorothy Spinner, an ape-faced girl with the ability to distort reality. Morrison's outrageously inventive takes on superheroes, which manage to be both smart and silly, may be off-putting to tradition-minded fans. The compensation is that his sensibility draws readers who usually prefer alternative comics. (Booklist review)

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,     Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky

Mattotti and his longtime collaborator Kramsky return to the comix world with an interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson's tale of gothic horror. While the story is set in Victorian England, Mattotti's artwork evokes the masterful expressionism of Berlin of the 1930s and such influences as Max Beckman, George Grosz and Giorgio de Chirico. Dr. Jekyll's obsession with the duality of the human personality-the good and evil that reside within-leads him to concoct the potion that brings out his purely evil side. Depicting this transformation, Mattotti's art becomes even more expressive, reminiscent of the later paintings of Francis Bacon. Jekyll's assertion that with his potion "Life would be relieved of all that is horrible" proves wrong. Indeed, he has distilled life's horrors in the person of the brutal Mr. Hyde, who haunts the nightclubs, parties, darkened streets and brothels of London, a perfect vehicle for Mattotti's masterful command of color, composition and mood. An accomplished colorist, Mattotti saturates the book's pages with a rich palette, and each panel is beautiful and expressive. Kramsky's adept condensation of Stevenson's book appropriates snatches of the original text verbatim, maintaining the power of Stevenson's prose while using a minimum amount of text. This is an impressive and vivid interpretation of Stevenson's timeless tale of the human spirit. (Publishers Weekly review)

Dungeon,     Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim

This first volume of the Dungeon graphic novel series follows the misadventures of Herbert the Duck. As a result of some unfortunate accidents, Herbert, usually a lowly messenger in the great Dungeon, is called upon to defend it from all manner of beasties. In his endeavors to become a warrior, he is helped by his friend Marvin the vegetarian dragon and by the Dungeon Keeper. Although there's a solid dose of cartoon-style violence and gore, teens will appreciate Herbert's pseudo-slacker attitude, which turns him into an accidental hero time and time again. They'll also like the tongue-in-cheek storytelling, rife with screwball humor that is so bad it's hilarious. The art is offbeat and fun, too, with detailed backgrounds that are often as over the top as the action. A great change of pace from mainstream comics. (Booklist review)

Elfquest,     Wendy and Richard Pini

This near-definitive edition collects the Pinis' classic tale of elves struggling to survive in a hostile world. Exploding off the page in lurid, Technicolor splendor, the art should enthrall a new generation of pixie lovers. Originally published in the 1970s, ElfQuest chronicles the adventures of a forest-dwelling tribe of elves forced from their homes by evil humans. After encountering some duplicitous trolls, the band of refugees makes its way across the wilderness and finds another, previously unknown tribe of elves. The perils of the trip and the integration of the two tribes make for all sorts of dramatic tableaux. The woodland elves, who are hunters, ride wolves and court danger, while the desert elves are civilized townsfolk with elaborate social customs. The conflict is embodied in Cutter (a wolf rider) and Leetah (a desert healer); it isn't surprising that the two are destined to be together. Perhaps more unexpected is the irrepressible sexuality of these elves. Every elf female has the figure of a petite Playboy playmate, while the elfin males resemble diminutive body builders. With such fabulous looks, it's no shocker that they enjoy scampering into each other's beds at every opportunity, although this is hardly the tale's central point. Rather, the Pinis focus on how their elven archetypes—the dreamer, the hero, the earth mother—interact and change as their world faces upheaval. Subtle it ain't, but it's fun, and the series has captured a loyal following in its 25-year history. (Publishers Weekly review)

Epileptic,     David B.

David B. is one of the founders of the French experimental comics collective L'Association, and this hallucinatory work (the first of two volumes) is a sort of refracted story of his childhood when he was known as Pierre-Francois. On a literal level, it's a fascinating memoir of how his brother's epilepsy became the driving force of his family's life in the 1960s and '70s. Desperate to find a cure for his brother's condition, his parents turn to ascetic macrobiotic cults, deeply esoteric spiritualists and more in search of something that might help him. They encounter all manner of cruelty and quackery but occasionally find something that helps. B.'s own fascination with history and war seems to protect him from the despair that perpetually surrounds the family. His visual retelling of their suffering is a masterpiece of surrealistic cartooning and fantastic imagery. Readers see B. as a child; as his mind blurs the distinction between reality, metaphor and fiction, so does his art. He draws a macrobiotic healer as a cartoon tiger, and fills the book with iconic metaphors for disease (epilepsy is like a demon from a cave drawing). His has a fascination with Swedenborgian mysticism and Samurai warriors, who are vehicles for gorgeously stylized b&w illustrations of warfare and bloodletting. The narrative thread peels aside for digressions to depict young Pierre-Francois' dreams or to carefully denote the family's endless efforts to find relief for their son and ultimately for themselves. Almost every panel is a graphic balancing act between representation and psychological distortion. This is truly a remarkable and powerful piece of comics narration. (Publishers Weekly review)

Exit Wounds,     Rutu Modan

Tel Aviv-–based Modan gives American comics readers a sharp sense of Israeli life in this brilliant and moving graphic novel. The story follows Koby Franco, a young taxi driver and lost soul, as he searches for his missing father, a man who long ago left the family and may or may not have been killed in a suicide bomb attack. Assisting and prodding him is Nuni, a young soldier who was romantically involved with the missing father. Modan takes her characters across Israel and through a variety of different Israeli social strata as the search progresses. Along the way it becomes clear that Koby's father's identity is in flux—he leaves all those that he loves, but touches on everything it means to be an Israeli: family man, soldier, religious practitioner and, perhaps, victim. Modan is a deft and subtle storyteller, and her meditation on Israeli identity and the possibilities of love and trust (between father and son, woman and man) are finely wrought. Her loose, expressive drawing is both tremendously evocative and precise—always enhancing the plot. The stellar combination makes this one of the major graphic novels of 2007. (Publishers Weekly review)

Ex Machina,     Brian K. Vaughan

Set somewhere between The West Wing and an alternative future, this taleasks the question: What if the mayor of New York was a superhero? Vaughan (Y: The Last Man) and Harris (Starman) answer with intelligence and dash. In classic superhero origin, Mitchell Hundred is just another civil engineer until an encounter with a glowing light under the Brooklyn Bridge gives him the power to talk to machines. Fast forward three years: after a famed stint as a superhero, Hundred has just been elected mayor of New York and must deal with not only the colorful cast of characters that make up his staff but also a host of crises: a PR disaster set off by an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum; a crippling blizzard; and, most worryingly, a serial killer who's bumping off the city's snow plow drivers. Vaughan cleverly adapts real news stories—New York mayoral politics, the Sensations art scandal—and plausibly fits them into a world where superheroes exist, but are forbidden by the NSA to talk about their powers, while adding surprising twists and turns. Harris's gritty, charismatic characters give the story further appeal. (Publishers Weekly review)

Fables,     Bill Willingham

This elaborate fantasy series begins as a whodunit, but quickly unfurls into a much larger story about Fabletown, a place where fairy tale legends live alongside regular New Yorkers. Years ago, fables and fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella "were a thousand separate kingdoms spread over a hundred magic worlds," until they were invaded and driven into hiding and, eventually, into modern-day Gotham. And so, on the city streets we find Beauty and the Beast in trouble with the law and Prince Charming reduced to a broke cad auctioning off his royal title, while his ex-wife, Snow White, rules over the de facto kingdom the fables created. When Snow White's sister, Rose Red, disappears from a blood-soaked apartment, the Wolf, reformed and now the kingdom's house detective, is assigned to the case. Willingham uses the Wolf's investigation to introduce readers to Fabletown's dissolute, hard-luck inhabitants, and he is at his best here, relishing one-liners and spinning funky background information of a world where fairy tale characters spend their time fretting about money and thinking up get-rich schemes. The mystery seems mostly an excuse to delineate Willingham's world, as the caper is easily resolved-in true fairy tale fashion-during a massive ballroom celebration. Willingham's dialogue is humorous, his characterizations are sharp and his plot encompasses a tremendous amount of information with no strain at all. The art, mostly by Medina and Leialoha, is well drawn and serviceable, if somewhat unremarkable, with occasional flares of decorative invention. But it's Willingham's script that carries the tale. (Publishers Weekly review)

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