Books — All Formats  

A great look at the never-ending genius of the legendary Steve Ditko – one of the greatest comic book artists of all time, and someone who's given us decades of enjoyment! This beautiful oversized book is a great companion to all the vintage Ditko material that's been reissued in recent years – and features a brilliantly-illustrated bio of Steve – with loads of images from his work at Marvel, Charlton, DC, Warren, and on his own – plus a key look at the influence of Ayn Rand on Ditko's images and ideas. A very hefty book, filled with color images – hardcover, and oversized!

Amazing work from the great Roy Crane – one of the most important newspaper strip artists of the 20th Century! The book features the initial few years of Buz Sawyer – a new project that Crane did for William Randolph Hearst after leaving behind his very successful Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy strip – and the volume features beautiful black and white reproductions of over two years' worth of daily strips, plus cool color fold-out pages of Sunday pages as well! Crane's penmanship is amazing – tight, yet full of feeling and energy – and definitely at a level that wins him comparisons to Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, and other contemporary greats. Over 206 pages, and very nicely done!

One of the first great adventure strips of the 30s – presented here in a beautiful oversize volume! Roy Crane's artwork on Captain Easy is tremendous – a magnificently thin line at times, yet full of rich feeling that's augmented by the coloring of the strip – often almost water-color like, with echoes of Frank King's Sunday strips – and set up in these really inventive panel breakdowns that really shift from the usual grid style of the time! The blend almost makes the whole thing feel like an action-based take on the Sunday page style of Gasoline Alley or Polly & Her Pals from the 20s – with all the wonderful images and over-the-top graphic quality that might imply. 128 pages, full color, and in these cool heavy cardboard covers!

One of the first great adventure strips of the 30s – presented here in a beautiful oversize volume! Roy Crane's artwork on Captain Easy is tremendous – a magnificently thin line at times, yet full of rich feeling that's augmented by the coloring of the strip – often almost water-color like, with echoes of Frank King's Sunday strips – and set up in these really inventive panel breakdowns that really shift from the usual grid style of the time! The blend almost makes the whole thing feel like an action-based take on the Sunday page style of Gasoline Alley or Polly & Her Pals from the 20s – with all the wonderful images and over-the-top graphic quality that might imply. 140 pages, full color, and in these cool heavy cardboard covers!

Amazing early work from Bill Everett – easily one of our favorite artistic talents of the Golden Age – famous for creating Sub Mariner, but seen here in a host of other rare work that's never been collected before! Everett's name was associated with Marvel/Timely for decades – but the work here was done for the competing Hillman and Centaur imprints – often with a sense of darkness that's really wonderful – that kind of un-fixed approach to comic art that can make some early Golden Age work so startling, even after all these years. Everett was a hell of a drafstman, even at this early point – and many of the stories have these slightly creepy vibes that come through in both the art and rough stories – similar to Bill's brilliance on Sub Mariner at the start, but different too. The book is mostly in color, and features a bit of additional text – 238 pages, hardcover, and mighty nice!

A beautiful collection of early 30s newspaper strips penned by Floyd Gottfredson – early daily comics starring Mickey Mouse, but offering up a very different version of the character than on the screen! The format does a great job of tying Mickey to some of the other comic stars of the time – and as many of these strips are in a longer-form narrative mode, with as much adventure as humor, there's more parallels here to strips like The Gumps, Gasoline Alley, and Thimble Theater than you might expect. Gottfredson's line work is wonderful – clean and lean, with that edgey early version of Mickey that disappeared later on – presented here in sparkling black and white, in a hardcover volume that's almost 300 pages in length!

A beautiful collection of early 30s newspaper strips penned by Floyd Gottfredson – early daily comics starring Mickey Mouse, but offering up a very different version of the character than on the screen! The format does a great job of tying Mickey to some of the other comic stars of the time – and as many of these strips are in a longer-form narrative mode, with as much adventure as humor, there's more parallels here to strips like The Gumps, Gasoline Alley, and Thimble Theater than you might expect. Gottfredson's line work is wonderful – clean and lean, with that edgey early version of Mickey that disappeared later on – presented here in sparkling black and white, in a hardcover volume that's almost 300 pages in length! Also features bonus essays – and some color material too.

A cinematic effort from Gilbert Hernandez – a standalone graphic novel that expands on the story of one of the characters from his Palomar epic – but with a gritty sort of vibe that really matches the cover! The shift is a nice one – as Hernandez works in an even more visually-focused style here – without dialogue in a number of scenes, and often hitting the pacing of a b-movie thriller! 120 pages, black and white, and with a nice sort of oversized crime novel feel.

A really compelling project that's very much in the spirit of work by Lynda Barry or Debbie Dreschler – served up in a cool slipcover package! The book is loosely based on a teenage diary found in a gas station bathroom in the 80s – and tells the tale of a high school sophomore in 1985, through starkly powerful images from Esther Pearl Watson. The story's presented over many pages in one panel images, but these weave together slowly, and present the tale with a well-rounded vibe that would otherwise be more exploitative in a more direct format. Both books are hardcover, and the small slipcase is pretty hefty too!

Way more than you might expect! Once again, comic historian Craig Yoe blows us away with the breadth of his knowledge – as the book's a huge range of anti-war images that span the space of a century – from early drawings by Daumier and Thomas Nast, to expressionist work by George Grosz, and underground moments from Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman! 190 pages, softcover and large, with mostly black and white, but also some color images too.

Sexy cartoons galore – pulled from the pages of the vintage Humorama publications of the 50s, 60s, and 70s – and featuring work from comic giants Jack Cole, Dan DeCarlo, Basil Wolverton, Dave Berg, Bill Ward, and others! The gimmicks are usually simple – a busty gal in skimpy clothing in a possibly tricky situation – but the execution here is brilliant, especially given the great postwar look of most of the cartoons. The book follows in the individual artist series from Fantagraphics – but is bigger than those volumes, with a great sense of variety – over 200 pages, in black and white and a bit of color too.

Completely bizarre, and wonderfully beautiful images from Fletcher Hanks – an overlooked cartoonist from the early days of comic books – and a talent as weirdly unique as bigger names like Basil Wolverton or Virgil Finlay! The cover and title offer stark testimony to the genius within – presented over a few different strips pulled from obscure action, sci fi, and jungle comics from the first few years of the Golden Age – a wonderful time before comics had become too standardized, and folks like Hanks were left to work their own original vision of the art form. Most stories are a few pages in length, but have a magic that's undeniable – served up in brilliant color, in the book's 230 oversized pages!

Some of the darkest work we've ever seen from Gilbert Hernandez – his third standalone graphic novel in this cool crime/b-movie-styled series! The work has a feel that's a bit like his Palomar stories, but packs a bit more punch, too – somewhat raunchier in themes, with the kind of crime thriller feel you'd guess from the cover! Done in a very nice format – 120 pages, black and white, and hardcover.

The earliest days of cartoon advertising – loads of rare work from a time before the medium had been reduced to Big Boy hawking pancakes, and Batman selling Twinkies! The book offers up some incredible stuff we weren't aware of – images that go as far back as the 1870s, and up to the years of WWII – showing a rich array of cartoon and comic advertisments for a huge variety of products – all presented in beautiful full color images! The book provides a written history of the medium, supported by a few hundred examples – and with an oversized presentation, the whole thing's got the appeal of flipping through a pile of old copies of Life Magazine and Saturday Evening Post, looking for rare ads.

A totally great little book – with a cover that's actually made from plywood! The package is a fitting one for Wisconsin cartoonist Norman Pettingill – who started as a trapper, then grew into a cool home-grown cartoonist – one with a great eye for the underbelly of outdoor life! At some level, these are postwar gag cartoons – but at another, they almost preface underground work of the 60s – as Pettingill's got a no-holds-barred approach that often looks at the seedier side of the north woods – where things aren't always as cute as they might seem in picture postcards! The book features an introduction by Robert Crumb, a bio by Gary Groth, and loads of great artwork in black and white – all printed on oversized pages with rounded corners. 136 pages, and very hardcover – given the plywood!

A treasure trove of vintage work by one of the greatest talents in comic books – captured here during some of his most fruitful years! The package brings together rare material from the early 50s – pre-code gems by Alex Toth, one of the most mature, most thoughtful comics artists of his time – working here with a sophistication and sense of space that few of his contemporaries could hope to match! And although most of the subject matter is pulled from the depths of the pulps – sci-fi, crime, romance, and western tales – Toth's handling of the material is superb, and completely transcends their roots. The book is the first time most of these works have been reprinted – and it's a whopping 428 pages, with full color images – plus some good notes by editor Greg Sadowski.

Weird and wonderful collages from Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices – accompanied by some of his lyrics, but mostly focusing on full-color reproductions of the original creations! There's a great use of juxtaposition here – images that have a nice sense of surprise, and a good sense of humor, too – not the kind of over-the-top collages you might have seen in the post-Hippie or Brit Marxist years – but a bit more subtle, and with a keen eye for texture, too. The book is full color, about the size of an album cover – but nice and heavy, too!

A loving tribute to the legendary Bill Everett – filled with rare drawings, vintage comics, and a huge amount of biographical information! Everett was one of the key forces of comic books in the early days – creator of Sub-Mariner for Marvel/Timely, and artist of countless action, horror, and sci-fi features – a good deal of which are referenced in the book! Everett emerged on the scene with draftsmanship that was already head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries – and by the late 40s, his work was incredible – a sense of line, space, and balance that was simply beautiful – presented here in some oversized images that really leave us breathless! The book's filled with color images, nestled alongside the writing – and it's coffee-table sized, almost 200 pages in length!