ENJOY THE ECSTASY OF AGONY. Amy and Jordan are just like us: hoping for the best, even when things go from bad to worse. They are menaced by bears, beheaded by ghosts, and hunted by the cops, but still they struggle on, bickering and reconciling, scraping together the rent and trying to find a decent movie. It’s the perfect solace for anxious modern minds, courtesy of one of the great innovators of American comics. Now if only Amy’s skin would grow back ... This NYRC edition features a recreation of the original, pocket-size, slipcovered paperback, designed by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly.

Agony (New York Review Comics)

Comics & Graphic Novels

Beyer, Mark

Manga

New York Review Comics

The man known as Blutch is one of the giants of contemporary comics, and Peplum may be his masterpiece: a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels. Thrilling and hallucinatory, vast in scope yet unnervingly intimate, Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision. His hypnotic storytelling and stark, gorgeous art pull us into one of the great works of graphic literature, translated into English for the first time. This NYRC edition features new English hand-lettering and is an oversized paperback with French flaps and extra-thick paper.

Peplum

Arts & Photography

BLUTCH

History & Criticism

Over four decades and a multitude of books, “Colonel” Glen Baxter has built a world and a language all his own—slightly familiar, decidedly abnormal, irresistibly funny. Have you felt the terror of a failed Szechuan dinner? Have you seen what happens at precisely 6:15? Do you know where the beards are stored? Either way, this is the book for you. Baxter’s drawings are a delicious stew of pulp adventure novels, highbrow hjinks, and outright absurdity: lonesome cowboys confront the latest in modern art, brave men tremble before moussaka, schoolgirls hoard hashish, and the world’s fruits are in constant peril. Wimples abound. This new selection of Baxter’s work brings together highlights from the full sweep of his long career, and is sure to enchant both confirmed Baxterians and those iin dire need of an introduction. This NYRC edition is a hardcover with printed endpapers, debossed cover design, and extra-thick paper.

Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings

Baxter, Glen.

Comic Strips

The legendary Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner’s scathing comics masterpiece—lost for decades, and never before published in the U.S.—is an epic vision of a single day in a world gone wrong: a brightly smiling, disturbingly familiar dystopia of towering skyscrapers, omnipresent surveillance, and endless distant war. “CLEAN BOMB THE HAPPY-HAPPY WAY,” blares the morning paper. “Heil Hilton!” barks an overlord on the news. Welcome to Soft City. Now don’t be late for work. This NYRC edition is a giant-sized hardcover extra-thick paper and spot-color throughout.

Soft City: The Lost Graphic Novel

Pushwagner, Hariton

The first book to appear in English by the acclaimed Belgian artist Dominique Goblet, Pretending is Lying is a memoir unlike any other. WINNER OF THE 2018 SCOTT MONCRIEFF PRIZE FOR TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH In a series of dazzling fragments—skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black and white—Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents. The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma—a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics. This NYRC edition is a hardcover with extra-thick paper, full color throughout, and features new English hand-lettering by the artist.

Pretending Is Lying

Goblet, Dominique

Graphic Novels

What Am I Doing Here? is a startling masterwork by one of the forgotten innovators of American comics. In 1945, after more than a decade as a commercial illustrator—drawing advertisements and cartoons for Life, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, and many other publications—Abner Dean invented a genre all his own: One might call it the Existential Gag Cartoon. He used the elegant draftsmanship and single-panel format of the standard cartoons of the day, but turned them to a deeper, stranger purpose. With an inimitable mixture of wit, earnestness, and enigmatic surrealism, Dean uses this most ephemeral of forms to explore the deepest mysteries of human existence. What Am I Doing Here?, Dean’s second book and perhaps his best, depicts a world at once alien and familiar, in which everyone is naked but acts like they’re clothed—a world of club-wielding commuters and byzantine inventions, secret fears and perverse satisfactions. Through it all strolls (or crawls, or floats, or stumbles) Dean’s unclad Everyman, searching for love, happiness, and the answers to life’s biggest questions. This NYRC edition is a jacketed hardcover with extra-thick paper, and features brand-new, restored scans of the original artwork throughout.

What Am I Doing Here?

Literature & Fiction

Dean, Abner

Dramas & Plays

Germany, in the final years of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau is a sound engineer obsessed with recording the human voice in all its variations—the rantings of leaders, the roar of crowds, the rasp of throats constricted in fear—and indifferent to everything else. Employed by the Nazis, his assignments take him to Party rallies, to the Eastern Front, and into the household of Joseph Goebbels. There he meets Helga, the eldest daughter: bright, good-natured, and just beginning to suspect the horror that surrounds her... Based on an acclaimed novel by Marcel Beyer, Voices in the Dark is the first fictional graphic novel by Ulli Lust, whose award-winning graphic memoir Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life appeared in English in 2013. It is the story of an unlikely friendship and of a childhood betrayed, a grim parable of naïveté and evil, and a vivid, unsettling masterpiece. This NYRC edition is a trade paperback and features full color throughout and new English hand-lettering.

Voices in the Dark

Lust, Ulli

Nicole Claveloux’s short stories—originally published in the late 1970s and never before collected in English—are among the most beautiful comics ever drawn: whimsical, intoxicating, with the freshness and splendor of dreams. In hallucinatory color or elegant black-and-white, she brings us into lands that are strange but oddly recognizable, filled with murderous grandmothers and lonely city dwellers, bad-tempered vegetables and walls that are surprisingly easy to fall through. In the title story, written with Edith Zha, a new houseplant becomes the first step in an epic journey of self-discovery and a witty fable of modern romance—complete with talking shrubbery, a wised-up genie, and one very depressed bird. This new selection, designed and introduced by Daniel Clowes, presents the full achievement of an unforgettable, unjustly neglected master of French comics. This NYRC edition is an oversized hardcover and features multiple extra-thick paper stocks, full color, and new English hand-lettering.

The Green Hand and Other Stories

Claveloux, Nicole

Father and Son is one of the most beloved comic strips ever drawn—an uproarious, timeless ode to the pleasures, pitfalls, and endless absurdity of family life. Father and Son is a slyly heartwarming, dizzyingly inventive classic in the tradition of Calvin and Hobbes and The Simpsons. Created in 1934 by the German political cartoonist Erich Ohser (using the pseudonym E.O. Plauen after being blacklisted for his opposition to the Nazi regime), the gruff, loving, mustachioed father and his sweet but troublemaking son embark on adventures both everyday and extraordinary: family photoshoots and summer vacations, shipwrecks and battles with gangsters, a Christmas feast with forest animals and a trip to the zoo. Drawn almost entirely without dialogue, the strips overflow with slapstick, fantasy, and anarchic visual puns. Father and Son remains an uproarious, timeless ode to the pleasures, pitfalls, and endless absurdity of family life. This NYRC edition is an extra-wide hardcover with raised cover image, and features new English hand-lettering.

Father and Son

Plauen, E. O.

A gritty collection of graphic short stories by a Japanese manga master depicting life on the streets among punks, gangsters, and vagrants. Tadao Tsuge is one of the pioneers of alternative manga, and one of the world’s great artists of the down-and-out. Slum Wolf is a new selection of his stories from the late Sixties and Seventies, never before available in English: a vision of Japan as a world of bleary bars and rundown flophouses, vicious street fights and strange late-night visions. In assured, elegantly gritty art, Tsuge depicts a legendary, aging brawler, a slowly unraveling businessman, a group of damaged veterans uniting to form a shantytown, and an array of punks, pimps, and drunks, all struggling for freedom, meaning, or just survival. With an extensive introduction by translator and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, this collection brings together some of Tsuge’s most powerful work—raucous, lyrical, and unforgettable.

Slum Wolf

Tsuge, Tadao

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