Fate of the Artist, The,     Eddie Campbell

Campbell, best known for his work on From Hell and his autobiographical Alec comics, has come up with a marvelous sui generis oddity: a meta-memoir about his own disappearance that's a kind of intently controlled nervous breakdown on paper. It's a nonlinear, mixed-media collage of a book—there are typeset prose passages, painted comics about his family, old-fashioned newspaper strips, photos with typeset word balloons, a child's crayon scrawl representing God and, near the end, an illustrated adaptation of O. Henry's story "The Confessions of a Humorist," which concerns how habitually turning life into art can make life unbearable. Campbell's always been interested in the curious nooks of history, and there's a running thread about artistic also-rans like Johann Schobert and the Greek sculptor Phidias; there's also an ongoing gag about Campbell replacing himself with an imaginary actor named Richard Siegrist. The tone is whimsical and playful, but there's a deep despair beneath it—about drinking, burnout and what happens to an artist "when his imaginary friends [stop] calling"—that overwhelms and takes the place of the plot. What pulls the whole thing together is Campbell's stunningly protean visual technique: fierce blotches of watercolor, scraggly pen-and-ink work and whiplash stylistic shifts from impressionistic caricatures to exquisitely rendered painterly miniatures. (Publishers Weekly review)

From Hell,     Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

The mad, shaggy genius of the comics world dips deeply into the well of history and pulls up a cup filled with blood in From Hell. Alan Moore did a couple of Ph.D.'s worth of research into the Whitechapel murders for this copiously annotated collection of the independently published series. The web of facts, opinion, hearsay, and imaginative invention draws the reader in from the first page. Eddie Campbell's scratchy ink drawings evoke a dark and dirty Victorian London and help to humanize characters that have been caricatured into obscurity for decades. Moore, having decided that the evidence best fits the theory of a Masonic conspiracy to cover up a scandal involving Victoria's grandson, goes to work telling the story with relish from the point of view of the victims, the chief inspector, and the killer--the Queen's physician. His characterization is just as vibrant as Campbell's; even the minor characters feel fully real. Looking more deeply than most, the author finds in the "great work" of the Ripper a ritual magic working intended to give birth to the 20th century in all its horrid glory. Maps, characters, and settings are all as accurate as possible, and while the reader might not ultimately agree with Moore and Campbell's thesis, From Hell is still a great work of literature. (Amazon.com review)

Fun Home,     Alison Bechdel

This autobiography by the author of the long-running strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, deals with her childhood with a closeted gay father, who was an English teacher and proprietor of the local funeral parlor (the former allowed him access to teen boys). Fun Home refers both to the funeral parlor, where he put makeup on the corpses and arranged the flowers, and the family's meticulously restored gothic revival house, filled with gilt and lace, where he liked to imagine himself a 19th-century aristocrat. The art has greater depth and sophistication that Dykes; Bechdel's talent for intimacy and banter gains gravitas when used to describe a family in which a man's secrets make his wife a tired husk and overshadow his daughter's burgeoning womanhood and homosexuality. His court trial over his dealings with a young boy pushes aside the importance of her early teen years. Her coming out is pushed aside by his death, probably a suicide. The recursively told story, which revisits the sites of tragic desperation again and again, hits notes that resemble Jeanette Winterson at her best. Bechdel presents her childhood as a "still life with children" that her father created, and meditates on how prolonged untruth can become its own reality. She's made a story that's quiet, dignified and not easy to put down. (Publishers Weekly review)

Get Your War On,     David Rees

About a month after 9/11, stiff little drawings of office workers talking on the phone about the developing war on terrorism appeared on Rees' Web site. They have proliferated since into a bitterly funny running commentary on what Rees obviously considers a profound waste of the human spirit, not to mention personnel, materiel, and money. The drawings are clip-art figures--the same handful used over and over, cropped, enlarged, and diminished--and they look eminently bland and middle-of-the-road, not a boat-rocking bunch. What Rees has coming out of their mouths, however, couldn't contrast more starkly: slash-and-burn cynicism, frothing with anger and fear, liberally peppered with the f-word, especially in participial form; in short, the kind of impotent, resentful, but intelligent bile hip youngsters might spout. The sheer incongruity of pictures and text provokes laughter, and references to trashy pop culture keep it coming. Rees' conceit that straight-arrow, would-be patriotic Americans are actually profoundly unnerved by Bush-administration policies as well as lethal fanaticism, however, ensures that one's laughter is satiric. Very smart protest stuff. (Booklist review)

Ghost World,     Daniel Clowes

Dan Clowes described the story in Ghost World as the examination of "the lives of two recent high school graduates from the advantaged perch of a constant and (mostly) undetectable eavesdropper, with the shaky detachment of a scientist who has grown fond of the prize microbes in his petri dish." From this perch comes a revelation about adolescence that is both subtle and coolly beautiful. Critics have pointed out Clowes's cynicism and vicious social commentary, but if you concentrate on those aspects, you'll miss the exquisite whole that Clowes has captured. Each chapter ends with melancholia that builds towards the amazing, detached, ghostlike ending. (Amazon.com review)

Goon, The,     Eric Powell

If at first Powell's square-jawed and square-headed, hypermuscular hero, the Goon, looks like some kind of Hellboy rip-off, look again. The Goon and his milieu are retro in appearance and allusions, and making a movie of them wouldn't need as big an FX budget as Mike Mignola's demon-gone-good required. Oh, sure, the Goon tangles with the supernatural, but supernatural isn't paranormal, like Hellboy's antagonists. The Goon just has to stomp zombies now and then. His other foes include regular, or at least real, humans, such as cops, and a mad scientist who's turned his flesh into gold, and those plug-uglies with tails, the Mud brothers, and a redneck werewolf. Just regular guys. The Goon is an old-style enforcer for reclusive mobster Labrazio in a seemingly Depression-era seaside burg, where the talk's like the scripts for the Dead End Kids, and the Goon must have a sidekick like Franky, a pint-size palooka with pupil-less peepers right out of Little Orphan Annie. Franky's eyes aren't Powell's only tip of the hat to comics tradition. He draws one extended flashback in a style reminiscent of graphic-novel elder statesman Will Eisner and another to resemble early Mad stalwart Bill Elder's work, and he frames one of the flashbacks with fumetti starring his nine-ish-looking son. Another Mad ace, Wally Wood, exerts a more pervasive influence on Powell, yet he is always very much his own man, a fearless parodist of even the most shopworn tough-guy cliches. (Booklist review)

Great Gatsby, The,     Nicki Greenberg

In homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic, this graphic novel adaptation brings to life the glitter, the melancholy and the grand and crumpled dreams of Fitzgerald's unforgettable characters. Daisy, Nick, Tom, Jordan and Gatsby himself are rendered true to Fitzgerald's original characterisation, with a difference: they are not human. Inhabiting the authentic setting of 1920s New York, they join a throng of fantastical creatures to play out the drama, the wry humour and the tragedy of the novel. Why not humans? To me, Fitzgerald's characters are so incisively rendered, their personalities, movements and voices so immediate and true, that an ordinary human representation does not capture the essence of the written characters. In imagining the physical form of each creature - Nick's shy antennae and soft body, the lift of Daisy's dandelion head on her slender neck, Jordan's languid tentacles - my aim was to make their physical attributes embody and illuminate their personalities, that "series of successful gestures" so sharply drawn by Fitzgerald. (Author’s description)

Hellboy,     Mike Mignola

Hellboy is one of the most celebrated comics series in recent years. The ultimate artists' artist and a great storyteller whose work is in turns haunting, hilarious, and spellbinding, Mike Mignola has won numerous awards in the comics industry and beyond. When strangeness threatens to engulf the world, a strange man will come to save it. Sent to investigate a mystery with supernatural overtones, Hellboy discovers the secrets of his own origins, and his link to the Nazi occultists who promised Hitler a final solution in the form of a demonic avatar. (Publisher’s description)

Hey Buddy! (and the other Buddy Bradley collections),     Peter Bagge

Bagge ( The Bradleys ) continues to chronicle the misadventures, life experiences and repugnant habits of Buddy Bradley, oldest son of America's most dysfunctional suburban family. Buddy has managed to leave the clammy security of his family in New Jersey. Now he's living in Seattle, which Bagge portrays as the grunge capital of the U.S.; a place of cheap apartments, cheaper drugs and plenty of lowlife, with rocker deadbeats working in used bookstores and organizing bands. Buddy shares an apartment with his old friend Stinky and with George, a reclusive devotee of arcane religious, UFO and conspiracy theories, and probably the oddest black man ever to show up in a comic book. These stories satirize a special kind of low-budget lifestyle that, often as not, continues long past the twentysomething years into a cheerful, underachieving, bohemian middle age. Bagge's drawings have an abstract wackiness and comic flair all their own. Also included is the short story "Prisoner of Hate Island," a very funny recreation of the kind of editorial meetings that "alternative" cartoonists must endure on a regular basis.  (Publishers Weekly review)

The Hollow Grounds,     François Schuiten and Luc Schuiten

In the 1980s, Francois Schuiten collaborated with his brother, Luc, who had introduced him to comics in his childhood, on a graphic-novel trilogy set on hollow planets that contain different societies on concentric outer surfaces. Upper- and lower-level societies interact only accidentally, as when an upper-level inhabitant breaks through her world's floor and the lower level's ceiling in part two, "Zara," although winged humanoids, separate from all wingless societies, travel between planets as well as levels, at least in part one, "Carapace." The six stories of "Carapace" and the single stories "Zara" and "Nogegon" are all concerned with sexual desire, because Francois draws slender young women so beautifully as well as because there is strict sexual segregation on some planets. Francois' delight in architecture, perspective, and flight is also highly evident. While the long stories are in Francois' technically impeccably drawn comics style, those of "Carapace" show him experimenting with softer delineation and painterly color effects. If Dali had done comics, they may have looked like this. Exquisite. (Booklist review)

I Never Liked You,     Chester Brown

Brown's latest autobiographical work is a study in adolescent socialization and the peculiar combination of budding sexuality, self-obsessed dreaminess and downright mean-spiritedness that epitomize the teenage years. Like The Playboy, his previous book, I Never Liked You chronicles the Harvey Award-winner's suburban, Canadian childhood and his affectless relations with his family, the idiosyncrasies of his mother and his strained encounters with both admiring and hostile schoolmates. But unlike the previous book (which focused on his onanistic obsession with Playboy magazine), this one captures Brown's weirdly detached relations with almost everyone and his awkward, almost pathological passivity and inability to "fit in." But girls do like him, which can be both a dream come true and his worst nightmare. Chester isn't sure (actually hasn't got a clue) what to do after he tells a friend he loves her. Brown is a wan, but intensely focused, episodic storyteller who can transform the usual memories of teenage yearning into distinctive passages of muted comedy or adolescent emotional desperation. He scatters his panels asymetrically across black pages, isolating their beauty and carefully pacing the narrative forward. His drawing is exceptional both for its economy and for the attenuated sensuality of his lines and figures. A strange and engrossing teen memoir by one of the most talented artists working in alternative comics today. (Publishers Weekly review)

Ice Haven,     Daniel Clowes

Clowes (Ghost World) casts a harsh spotlight on the misfit dreamers who inhabit the small town of Ice Havenin this riveting graphic novel. Originally published in a somewhat different form as part of Clowes's occasional comic book Eightball, this piecefinds Clowes moving beyond the withering satire of his earlier works to a more nuanced style. Readers will wince even as they feel sympathy for the self-deluded characters who reside in Ice Haven. Take narrator Random Wilder, writer of doggerel poetry. One would think it'd be easy to be the best poet in a place like Ice Haven, but Wilder has a rival: Ida Wentz, an old woman who likes to bake cookies. Wilder spends his spare time plotting against her. Ida's visiting granddaughter, Vida, also has literary yearnings, despite having sold zero copies of her fanzine. These and other oddballs play out their stories against the mysterious disappearance of a little boy named David Goldberg, whose possible murder recalls the Leopold and Loeb case. Clowes unfolds the multifaceted story as a series of brief comics, some drawn in a wildly cartoony style, others in his well-known mid–20th-century look. Masterfully blending fact and fiction, this is a funny, sad, chilling and absurd work. (Publishers Weekly review)

In the Shadow of No Towers,     Art Spiegelman

Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001—it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me." The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ("brigands suffering from war fever") and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. This beautifully designed, oversized book (each page is heavy board stock) opens vertically to offer large, colorful pages with Spiegelman's contemporary lamentations along with wonderful reproductions of 19th-century broadsheet comic strips like Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Rudolf Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids. Old comics, Spiegelman (Maus) writes, saved his sanity. "Unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century... they were just right for an end-of-the world moment." This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist. (Publishers Weekly review)

Invisibles, The,     Grant Morrison

What will inevitably be considered a masterwork ten years ahead of its time, Grant Morrison's INVISIBLES gets to a start with this book at equal times fascinating and frustrating. INVISIBLES is the story of Order and Chaos, split into two armies that have been fighting since the beginning of time for control of Everything, and the initiation of young Dane McGowan as the newest member of one Invisibles cell lead by the charismatic, atavistic King Mob. Dane may or may not be the new incarnation of the Buddah. The first half of the book is the story of Dane's initiation into the strange shadow world that the Invisibles occupy, his indoctrination into the War For Everything brewing just below the surface of the world. From juvenile delinquent full of rage and pluck to wide-eyed neophyte, Dane and the reader are introduced hard and fast to Morrison's pre-millennial milieu. The second half, collecting the arc called Arcadia is a time-hopping and genre defying piece of historical weirdness as the Invisibles go back in time to swipe the Marquis de Sade and bring his particularly bent talents to bear in the modern era. A disjointed and dense story, Arcadia is a hard bit to get through when read side by side with the manic verve of the first part. Morrison himself admits that making Arcadia the second story was probably near-fatal for the book as a whole. Inventive, ostentatious, complex and visionary, INVISIBLES is one of the most startlingly dense and rich works ever released by a major comics publisher. Unfairly maligned as impenetrable by readers too lazy to let the book teach them how to read it, INVISIBLES is Morrison's magnum opus and worth any head scratching it may provoke. Stick with it; believe it or not, it all makes a perfect, essential sense by the end. (artbomb.net commentary by Matt Fraction)

It’s a Bird…,     Steven T. Seagle

A quarter-century after Harvey Pekar began American Splendor, autobiographical comics are more a cliche than a novelty, unless they come from a mainstream comic-book publisher and depict a superhero-comics creator's life. When Seagle was offered the chance to write Superman, his surprising response was to reject the plum assignment, contending that he couldn't relate to the unbelievable character. But the refusal coincided with other crises: his father's disappearance, his girlfriend's desire to have children, and, looming over all, the grim prospect of developing Huntington's disease, which had struck other family members. Kristiansen's expert illustration in a variety of styles adds a polish that smooths over the awkward passages in Seagle's sometimes overearnest script. Hardcore alternative-comics devotees may find this effort too slick and self-indulgent; superhero fans probably won't even bother to pick it up. Comics readers with a foot in both camps, however, will recognize Seagle as facing, albeit more urgently than most others, the kinds of questions every grown-up, including those still open to the adolescent charms of superheroes, confronts. (Booklist review)

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,     Chris Ware

Ware's hero is a doughy, middle-aged loser who retreats into fantasies that he is "The Smartest Kid on Earth." The minimal plot involves Jimmy's tragicomic reunion with the father who abandoned him in childhood. In abruptly juxtaposed flashbacks, Ware depicts previous generations of Corrigan males, revealing how their similar histories of rejection and abandonment culminated in Jimmy's hapless state. What makes the slight story remarkable is Ware's command of the comics medium. His crisp, painstaking draftsmanship, which sets cartoonish figures in meticulously detailed architectural settings, is matched by his formal brilliance. Ware effectively uses tiny, repetitive panels to convey Jimmy's limited existence, then suddenly bursts a page open with expansive, breathtaking vistas. His complex, postmodern approach incorporates such antiquated influences as Windsor McCay's pioneering Little Nemo strips and turn-of-the-century advertising, transforming them into something new, evocative, and affecting. His daunting skill transforms a simple tale into a pocket epic and makes Jimmy's melancholy story the stuff of cartoon tragedy. (Booklist review)

Laika,     Nick Abadzis

Nick Abadzis masterfully blends fiction and fact in the intertwined stories of three compelling lives. Along with Laika, there is Korolev, once a political prisoner, now a driven engineer at the top of the Soviet space program, and Yelena, the lab technician responsible for Laika's health and life. This intense triangle is rendered with the pitch-perfect emotionality of classics like Because of Winn Dixie, Shiloh, and Old Yeller. Abadzis gives life to a pivotal moment in modern history, casting light on the hidden moments of deep humanity behind history. Laika's story will speak straight to your heart. (Publisher’s Description)

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The,     Alan Moore

Acclaimed comics author Moore (Watchmen) has combined his love of 19th-century adventure literature with an imaginative mastery of its 20th-century corollary, the superhero comic book. This delightful work features a grand collection of signature 19th-century fictional adventurers, covertly brought together to defend the empire. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comprises such characters as Minna Murray (formerly Harker), from Bram Stoker's Dracula; Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll (and his monstrous alter ego, Mr. Hyde); and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, restored to the dark, grim-visaged Sikh Verne originally intended. There's also Hawley Griffin, the imperceptible hero of H.G. Well's The Invisible Man, and Allan Quatermain, the daring adventurer of King Solomon's Mines and other classic yarns by H. Rider Haggard. It's 1898, and these troubled adventurers are spread around the globe, in the midst of one pickle or another. Quatermain is found near death, delirious in a Cairo opium den; the perverse Griffin is captured terrorizing an all-girls school (leaving behind a series of mysterious pregnancies); and the gruesome Mr. Hyde is rescued from the mob set to kill him at the end of Stevenson's classic novel. This collection of flawed and gloomy heroes is recruited to fight a criminal mastermind (a notorious 19th-century literary villain) intent on firebombing the East End of London. The book also includes "Allan and the Sundered Veil," a rip-snorting, prose time-travel story starring Quatermain and written in the manner of the 19th-century "penny dreadful." Moore and O'Neill have created a Victorian era Fantastic Four, a beautifully illustrated reprise of 19th-century literary derring-do packed with period detail, great humor and rousing adventure. (Publishers Weekly review)

Lovecraft,     Hans Rodionoff and Keith Giffen

Inspired by a Rodionoff screenplay that assumes the "reality" of the alien monsters invented by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Argentine artist Breccia and DC writer Giffen (Lobo) take a surreal, psychosexual look at the American horror master's life story. The book focuses on the graphics, notably lurid, dialogue-free sequences depicting Cthulhu and his tentacled kin assaulting helpless humans, starting with HPL's father, Winfield, shown in bed with a woman not his wife in a Chicago hotel. Like the actual philandering father, who contracted syphilis, this Winfield dies in an insane asylum in Lovecraft's native Providence, R.I., though not before passing on the family copy of Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon to his young son. The story's remainder concerns Lovecraft's repetitive attempts, in childhood and adulthood, to ward off a series of repellent creatures (perhaps the evil offspring of the dreaded magical tome, or just the product of his sick imagination). Those familiar with the five volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters or S.T. Joshi's 1996 biography may be dismayed to find only caricature. In typical Hollywood fashion, the authors make Lovecraft's one-time wife Sonia Greene a generic heroine (prettier and slimmer than the original), whom he meets in a hospital where he's recovering from an assault by an unclothed Wilbur Whateley. The child Lovecraft has the pronounced lantern jaw that he developed only in maturity. Still, Cthulhu Mythos fans who aren't pedantic nitpickers will enjoy the way the book blends bits of biographical detail with Lovecraft's frightening fictional concepts to create a grotesque and disturbing visual experience. (Publishers Weekly review)

Marvels,     Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross

Ten years ago, Marvels was the breakthrough work for both of its creators: a worm's-eye view of the spectacle of Marvel comics history—35 years of glorious superheroes and terrifying super-disasters, told from the perspective of Phil Sheldon, a newspaper photographer who's experienced "the marvels" from ground level. Renowned artist Ross's rich, lush, nearly photorealistic style (he painted all the major characters from photographs of models) made his reputation—and the book—a landmark. The story, too, suggests a sort of grandeur that had largely slipped away from superhero comics by the early '90s, even as it describes the helplessness that normal people might feel in the presence of angel-winged mutants and rapacious gods from outer space. There are plenty of Easter eggs in Marvels for longtime comics buffs, although the book is structured so that new readers won't be lost, either. The level of detail goes much deeper than what's visible on the page, but its creators' command of that unseen background gives the story itself force and resilience. This new edition augments the original with over 200 pages of extras: four drafts of Busiek's original proposal for the series, all of his scripts, a short bonus story, dozens of Ross's sketches and related artwork, and a guide to the many celebrity cameo appearances Ross drew into the original. (Publishers Weekly review)

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