"Imagine that all the characters from the world's most beloved storybooks were real -- real, and living among us, with all their powers intact. How would they cope with life in our mundane, un-magical reality?"--Cover, p. [4].
The first and now critically-acclaimed book from Chicago artist Chris Ware. A lonely and emotionally impaired everyman, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, is provided with the opportunity to meet his father for the first time when he is 36 years old. The story, set in 1890s Chicago and 1980s small-town Michigan, is told in hundreds of small, precisely drawn panels that regularly expand to reveal stunning draughtsmanship, and supported by fold-out instructions, an index, paper cutouts and beautifully drawn period adverts.
A graphic novel based on the author's 1995-96 visits to Gorazde, one of the U.N.-created "safe areas" in Eastern Bosnia, showing the brutality and humanity that coexisted there during the Bosnian War of 1992-95.
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
