Maus,     Art Spiegelman

Here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker). It now appears as it was originally envisioned by the author: The Complete Maus. It is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times). Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us. (Publisher’s description)

Meow, Baby!,     Jason

Jason's short stories and gag strips demonstrate the comic side of a creator whose fascinating full-length graphic novels (e.g., Why Are You Doing This? 2005) are grim noir crime stories. The protagonists of Jason's funny stuff, like those of his graphic novels, are tall and thin with animal heads. They include a reanimated mummy, zombies, a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, an angel, a devil, a werewolf, and other monster and sf movie icons, whose eldritch auras suggest a noirishly oppressive atmosphere. Meanwhile, the comedy they play out, usually wordlessly, is the whimsical, fanciful, incongruous stuff of physical comedians from Chaplin to Gleason. Jason presents them in the deadpan, no-frills manner of Ernie Bushmiller's bedrock comic-strip classic, Nancy. Their antics should seem lame and warmed over, but the ludicrousness of them behaving as if monstrousness was just a job and they are otherwise ordinary guys and gals, subject to ordinary appetites and urges (head turned by a pretty girl, the mummy reacts all-too-masculinely), saves the day. Invariably. (Booklist review)

Metamorphosis, The,     Peter Kuper

Kuper has adapted short works by Kafka into comics before, but here he tackles the most famous one of all: the jet-black comedy that ensues after the luckless Gregor Samsa turns into a gigantic bug. The story loses a bit in translation (and the typeset text looks awkward in the context of Kuper's distinctly handmade drawings). A lot of the humor in the original comes from the way Kafka plays the story's absurdities absolutely deadpan, and the visuals oversell the joke, especially since Kuper draws all the human characters as broad caricatures. Even so, he works up a suitably creepy frisson, mostly thanks to his drawing style. Executed on scratchboard, it's a jittery, woodcut-inspired mass of sharp angles that owes a debt to both Frans Masereel (a Belgian woodcut artist who worked around Kafka's time) and MAD magazine's Will Elder. The knotty walls and floors of the Samsas' house look like they're about to dissolve into dust. In the book's best moments, Kuper lets his unerring design sense and command of visual shorthand carry the story. The jagged forms on the huge insect's belly are mirrored by folds in business clothes; thinking about the debt his parents owe his employer, Gregor imagines his insectoid body turning into money slipping through an hourglass. Every thing and person in this Metamorphosis seems silhouetted and carved, an effect that meshes neatly with Kafka's sense of nightmarish unreality. (Publishers Weekly review)

Murder Mysteries,     Neil Gaiman

Celebrated comics creators Gaiman (Sandman) and Russell (The Ring of the Nibelung) have teamed up to produce a story of deception and vengeance involving the first betrayal, the first heartbreak and the first crime in God's own city of angels. Raguel is a lost angel, a ragged drifter on the streets of Los Angeles, who tells this story to the narrator, a young Brit stranded on his way back to England. In Raguel's former world, the one in which he had wings, he served as the agent of the Lord's vengeance. When an angel was found murdered, Raguel was assigned to find the killer and his motives. Like an unearthly detective, Raguel questioned his fellow angels until he discovered the murderer and then delivered the Lord's terrible punishment. But upon wreaking God's vengeance, Raguel began to realize it was God himself who set up this murder. Using sharp, crystalline drawings of the eternal city and ribbons of color that suggest creation's simultaneous plasticity and solidity, Russell conveys a bright, illuminated world of purity and divine experimentation. His crisp and vividly rendered drawings capture the haunting sense of loss and isolation Gaiman expresses in this mythic tale of love and jealousy. (Publishers Weekly review)

Opera Adaptations,     P. Craig Russell

The closest Classics Illustrated got to opera was William Tell, adapting Schiller's play rather than Rossini's grandest work. Too bad, because opera is customarily visually opulent. But then, Classics Illustrated didn't have Russell, the most opulent contemporary realistic comics artist, who loves opera. His second roundup of opera adaptations includes Wagner's Parsifal, Dukas' Ariane and Bluebeard, Mascagni's I Pagliacci, and, for good measure, two Mahler songs. Russell portrays Parsifal's encounters with the witch Kundry and the eunuch sorcerer Klingsor in the middle of the opera (some earlier events appear in flashback) and wisely discards the New Age-ish ending. Dukas' crypto-feminist modification of Bluebeard, with its rooms full of gems, lets Russell indulge his lapidary flair and conjure a morbid decorativeness also found in the Mahler song illustrations. Best comes last, though. Russell's Pagliacci, a black-and-white collaboration with Galen Showman, is the most dynamic in action, the most varied in angle of vision from panel to panel, and, like the original--a verismo, or real-life opera--the most humanly engaging. Bravo, maestro, bravo! (Booklist review)

Orbiter,     Warren Ellis

Ten years after its mysterious disappearance, the space shuttle Venture returns to Earth covered in organic material, rewired with alien technology and missing all but one of its crew members. The dust in its wheel tracks indicates it has been on Mars and possibly other planets as well. The United States government drafts an ex-astronaut biologist, a brash young propulsion expert and a washed-out psychiatrist to piece together what happened to the Venture. Ellis has crafted a scientific mystery similar in structure to an issue of his acclaimed series Planetary. However, where the protagonists of that series are detached observers of the fantastic, here Ellis gives each character a personal stake in the investigation. Ellis has struck gold: his old talents for mad ideas and nuanced tough talk melds with a new optimism, giving this story an emotional depth far beyond that of typical sci-fi. Doran's art serves his story well, as she handles cataclysmic disaster scenes, detailed technical exposition and tender human moments with equal deftness. (Publishers Weekly review)

Other Side, The,     Jason Aaron

The Other Side demonstrates that war comics, out of favor for decades, retain substantial viability. It follows two farm boys, one from rural Alabama, the other from a village near Hanoi, approaching one another in Vietnam. While Private Bill Everette and his fellow grunts come to hate the country to which they've been sent, naively idealistic Vo Binh Dai voluntarily marches to the south to join the revolution. Both endure unspeakable horrors, including the ghosts of fallen soldiers, on their grueling treks to eventual confrontation at the besieged Khe Sanh combat base. Aaron, decades too young to remember the Vietnam era, has been inspired by his cousin Gustav Hasford, who wrote the novel Stanley Kubrick filmed as Full Metal Jacket. Despite its surreal aspects, his grisly account of the harrowing experiences of both sides rings lamentably true. Rather than taking a gritty, realistic illustrative approach, Stewart, best known for superhero work, employs his slightly cartoony style to bring just the right touch of exaggeration to the story's grotesque elements. (Booklist review)

Palestine,     Joe Sacco

Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, who has often been called the first comic book journalist. Sacco's insightful reportage takes place at the front lines, where busy marketplaces are spoiled by shootings and tear gas, soldiers beat civilians with reckless abandon, and roadblocks go up before reporters can leave. Sacco interviewed and encountered prisoners, refugees, protesters, wounded children, farmers who had lost their land, and families who had been torn apart by the Palestinian conflict. In 1996, the Before Columbus Foundation awarded Palestine the seventeenth annual American Book Award, stating that the author should be recognized for his "outstanding contribution to American literature," while his publisher, Fantagraphics, is "to be honored for their commitment to quality and their willingness to take risks that accompany publishing outstanding books and authors that may not prove 'cost-effective' in the short run." This new edition of Palestine also features a new introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said, author of Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine and one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict. (Publisher’s description)

Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories,     Gilbert Hernandez

In 1983, Hernandez started writing and drawing short stories in Love and Rockets about a little central American town called Palomar and the interconnected lives of its inhabitants. The "Heartbreak Soup" stories, as they were called, established his reputation, and this mammoth, hugely compelling book collects the first 13 years' worth of them. The earliest stories in the book owe more to magical realism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez than to anything that had been done in comics before. But in later pieces, like the harrowing "Human Diastrophism" and "Luba Conquers the World," Hernandez's style is entirely his own: brutally telegraphic (he can capture an entire emotionally complex scene in a single panel, then imply even more by abruptly cutting to the middle of a later scene), loaded with insight about the bumpy terrain of familial and sexual relationships, swinging wildly in tone between suffocating darkness and sunny charm. His characters have enormous, tangled family trees, and he gradually unfolds their histories: there are some plot developments he sets up a decade or more in advance. And for all the bold roughness of his drawing style, Hernandez is a master of facial expression and body language. He tracks dozens of characters across decades of their lives, and their ages and their distant family resemblances are instantly recognizable, as are their all too human dreams and failings. This is a superb introduction to the work of an extraordinary, eccentric and very literary cartoonist. (Publishers Weekly review)

Peanutbutter & Jeremy's Best Book Ever,     James Kochalka

Peanutbutter, a cat who wears a tie and fedora, likes to pretend she’s a businessman. She plays at working on files and needing her morning coffee, although she pounces on the paperwork when she’s not napping on it. She sets out to buy tape with a dollar she found under the bed, only to be rooked by Jeremy. The crow is greedy, selfish, mean, cranky, and violent. He encourages the confused cat to kill squirrels, but Peanutbutter just wants to go home and keep working.

Both of them have a fondness for hats. On casual day, Peanutbutter wears a baseball cap, while Jeremy keeps trying to steal her headwear. In another story, the cat trades a bowler to Jeremy for a favor, but the hat gets stuck on Peanutbutter’s head. When they go out in the snow for french fries, the cat wears mittens on her paws and a knit cap. Later, Jeremy gives himself a concussion while trying to steal Peanutbutter’s newsboy cap. Other stories — there are nine in all — include Jeremy trying to write his memoirs (by diving at pieces of paper clutching a pencil) and Peanutbutter’s birthday party. The stories have a fable-like structure but deal with elements of modern life. At times, the cat seems to be acting like a typical wage slave, then she’s completely cat-like. The contrast makes for giggles. Jeremy, on the other hand, is only out for himself, calling Peanutbutter names and stealing from her. Kochalka’s simple cat shape captures the grace and flexible motion of the animal, and the primitive art style makes for very easy reading.  (Comics Worth Reading Review)

Persepolis,     Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi's autobiography is a timely and timeless story of a young girl's life under the Islamic Revolution. Descended from the last Emperor of Iran, Satrapi is nine when fundamentalist rebels overthrow the Shah. While Satrapi's radical parents and their community initially welcome the ouster, they soon learn a new brand of totalitarianism is taking over. Satrapi's art is minimal and stark yet often charming and humorous as it depicts the madness around her. She idolizes those who were imprisoned by the Shah, fascinated by their tales of torture, and bonds with her Uncle Anoosh, only to see the new regime imprison and eventually kill him. Thanks to the Iran-Iraq war, neighbors' homes are bombed, playmates are killed and parties are forbidden. Satrapi's parents, who once lived in luxury despite their politics, struggle to educate their daughter. Her father briefly considers fleeing to America, only to realize the price would be too great. "I can become a taxi driver and you a cleaning lady?" he asks his wife. Iron Maiden, Nikes and Michael Jackson become precious symbols of freedom, and eventually Satrapi's rebellious streak puts her in danger, as even educated women are threatened with beatings for improper attire. Despite the grimness, Satrapi never lapses into sensationalism or sentimentality. Skillfully presenting a child's view of war and her own shifting ideals, she also shows quotidian life in Tehran and her family's pride and love for their country despite the tumultuous times. Powerfully understated, this work joins other memoirs - Spiegelman's Maus and Sacco's Safe Area Goradze - that use comics to make the unthinkable familiar. (Publishers Weekly review)

Planetary,     Warren Ellis

Layers of mystery wrap Planetary: All over the World like rice candy. Follow the enigmatic heroes Jakita Wagner, Elijah Snow, and the Drummer as they excavate the secret history of the world from its wealth of bizarre happenings. Though the characterization isn't sparklingly brilliant--the "insane" Drummer behaves more like the A-Team's Murdock than a believable madman--the stories are both broad and deep, exploring a web of conspiracies and shadowy superheroes that manipulate and "protect" our world. Clever retellings of primal comics myths are interlaced with X-Files-esque secret government tales, and they drive the reader back and forth to collate evidence; the characters can't do all the work. Illustrator John Cassaday mirrors Warren Ellis's script from circumspect to sublime, befitting the best successor yet to the pulp comics of the 1940s. (Publishers Weekly review)

Pride of Baghdad,     Brian K. Vaughan

A heartbreaking look at what it's like to live in a war zone. Inspired by true events, this story tells of four lions that escape from the Baghdad Zoo during a bombing raid in 2003 and encounter other animals that offer unique perspectives, such as a tortoise that survived World War I. They begin to question the nature of freedom. Can it be achieved without being earned? What is its price? What do the lions owe the zookeepers who took care of them at the cost of keeping them in captivity? Where should they go? What should they eat? The four lions soon realize that a desert city is nothing like the grassy savannas of their memories. Their experiences mirror those of the Iraqi citizens displaced by the conflict. The book succeeds as a graphic novel and as an account of the current crisis. Henrichon's full palette emphasizes browns and grays that evoke the sands of the country, while his long brushstrokes and careful attention to detail reflect the precise and minimalist dialogue that Vaughan uses. An allegorical tale with compelling and believable characters, Baghdad makes it clear that without self-determination, there can be no freedom. (School Library Journal review)

Professor’s Daughter, The,     Joann Sfar

Two of France's best graphic novel talents, the ever-prolific Sfar and the subtle illustrator Guibert, collaborate. The result is a fun—if slight—effort, as much a love letter to Victorian London as a story unto itself. Very simply, a mummy, somehow alive and walking around London, has a charming romance with a professor's daughter. The logistical complications involved are comically dismissed, and the pair have a grand old time together. That is, until the mummy's father appears to complicate matters. Sfar has written an utterly engaging romp comparable to a fine 1930s romantic comedy. His dialogue is snappy, and he moves from thrills to chills to humor without missing a beat. The whole book is silly, and it seems to know it. But Guibert's work is the real treat. His deft brushwork and spectacular sense of color bring the places and dramas to life. In his hands, otherwise stock characters gain a real presence and liveliness, and he has a filmic sense of drama, describing the characters with detail and wit. A section of Guibert's sketches stashed at the end of the book is extraneous, but otherwise this is an excellent little volume. (Publishers Weekly review)

Quimby the Mouse,     Chris Ware

This large-format collection of Ware's early work, mostly from 1990 and 1991, repackages material that appeared in Acme Novelty Library as well as other publications, but still feels amazingly fresh. Even in these early strips, Ware displays a virtuoso ability in both rendering and storytelling. The material consists of primarily one or two page strips focusing on Quimby's remarkable bad luck in life and everything else. Quimby resembles a distant cousin of Disney's iconic Mickey Mouse, but instead of being a chipper mascot, he's a tiny, bleak figure travelling across a hostile world. The depressing subject matter is clothed in the peppy antics of primal cartooning, making the strong emotions that much more potent for being so surprising. All of the work is packaged impeccably-Ware's beautiful gold foil stamped cover alone is worth the book's price, while his running joke that the book is, in fact, a discarded library book is funny and touching, underscoring comics' ephemeral quality. Ware also provides a wonderful autobiographical introduction that gives the work context without ever explaining it; he simply adds another layer. Fans of Ware's earlier Jimmy Corrigan will find much to enjoy here; the tragicomic sensibility, beautiful drawing and impeccable packaging that marked that book are all here in full effect.  (Publishers Weekly review)

Quitter, The,     Harvey Pekar

Pekar's work, memorialized in the movie American Splendor, is an ongoing chronicle of his life in all its quotidian glory. Until now, he's only written nonfiction vignettes of his life as a jazz-loving slacker. The strength of Pekar's work is in his depiction of moments, but you have to read a great deal of it to understand the overall arc. This autobiographical full-length comic amends that problem, providing the missing overview: a searingly honest memoir of a smart but troubled boy who depends on quitting any time he might fail—a strategy that eventually leads to a near-nervous breakdown after he joins the navy. But Pekar doesn't dwell on his anxiety with the look-at-me tantrums of Philip Roth or Woody Allen—he's not that indulgent. Pekar's frequent artistic collaborator Haspiel provides the square-jawed, nebbishy characters, drawn with a fat, '60s line, giving a sharp-edged sense of the frustration and tension of an immigrant midcentury boyhood. This book is full of the deeply flawed but sympathetic characters that populate Pekar's work: his hard-working but oblivious parents, an overrated tough guy Pekar beats up, the jazz writer who gives him an outlet away from being a street tough. Pekar's work dignifies the struggle of the average man, and this book shows how that dignity is earned. (Publishers Weekly review)

Rabbi’s Cat, The,     Joann Sfar

Sfar, the French cartoonist behind the Little Vampire children's books, has come up with a hilarious and wildly original graphic novel for adults. The nameless, scraggly-looking alley cat who narrates the story belongs to an Algerian rabbi in the '30s. When the cat eats a parrot, he gains the power of speech and tries to convince his master to teach him the Torah, raising the question of whether the appropriate age for his bar mitzvah should be in human years or cat years. Of course, being a cat, he has plenty of impertinent opinions about Judaism. That's a delicious setup on its own, but it gets better when the cat loses his speech again halfway through, and the story becomes a broader, more bittersweet comedy about the rabbi's family and the intersection of Jewish, Arab and French culture. The rabbi's daughter Zlabya marries a young man from a nonobservant family in France. The Algerian family's visit with their Parisian in-laws is the subject of the final and funniest section of the book. Sfar's artwork looks as mangy and unkempt as the cat, with contorted figures and scribbly lines everywhere, but there's a poetic magic to it that perfectly captures this cat's-eye view of human culture and faith. (Publishers Weekly review)

R. Crumb’s Kafka,     Robert Crumb

Part illustrated biography, part comics adaptation, R. Crumb's Kafka is a vibrant biography that examines this Czech writer and his works in a way that a bland textbook never could! R. Crumb's Kafka is a work of art in its own right, a very rare example of what happens when one very idiosyncratic artist absorbs another into his world view without obliterating the individuality of the absorbed one. Crumb's art is filled with Kafka's insurmountable neuroses. They are all there: Gregor Samsa's sister, the luscious Milena Jesenska, the Advocate's 'nurse' Leni, Olda and Frieda, and the ravishing Dora Diamant--drawn in that mixture of self-command, tantalizing knowingness and sly sexuality--that Amazonian randiness and thick-limbed physicality that is Crumb. (Publisher’s description)

Ring of the Nibelung, The,     P. Craig Russell

The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie comprises Volume One of Russell’s adaptation of the Ring cycle by German composer Richard Wagner. Wotan has exhausted himself and his godly resources to have a mighty fortress built with the labor of the giants, Fasolt and Fafnir. But in his bargaining with them, he has promised the fair Freia, keeper of the golden apple tree whose fruit gives power and immortality to the gods. The giants come to collect their pay, and only Logé, the trickster god, can find something to offer the giants in exchange: the Rhinegold. The only problem is, Wotan doesn’t have the Rhinegold yet! The ultimate adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle concludes with these elaborate and faithful renditions of Siegfried and Gotterdammerung: The Twilight of the Gods. Siegfried is separated from his love, the Valkyrie Brunhilde, and even the All-Father himself cannot make things right. In the stunning conclusion, all of creation hangs in the balance because of gods meddling in the affairs of man — all over the gold of the Rhinemaids. In this massive undertaking, P. Craig Russell has created a living, breathing version of the Ring Cycle that Richard Wagner could only have dreamed of executing in his day. (Publisher’s description)

Rising Stars,     J. Michael Straczynski

Rising Stars is the story of the Pederson Specials, a group of 113 people empowered by a single event.In the late Sixties a fireball struck the town of Pederson, Illnois granting fantastic powers to the 113 children who were in utero at the time of impact. They grew up as the world watched. Labeled the "Specials" by the Media, their powers were monitored and catalogued by the United States Government. Public perception of them changed often. Were they the future of mankind? A scourge? A random occurrence? Heroes? Villains? Role models or simply caricatures? What would be their impact on culture and society? They were a waried as kids and adults ever are; some were more powerful, some less. As adults they became many things: a policeman, a corporate symbol, a singer, an assassin, a writer, a painter, a thief, a preacher. Some found celebrity, some notoriety, while others simply went to work and raised families like everyone else. But they all carried inside them a seed of something great. Something special. Something that made them stars. (Publisher’s description)

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