Taking A Line for A Walk
by Chris Lambert
Antique Collector's Club
The artist Paul Klee said drawing is just 'Taking a line for a walk'. Sixty-eight year old Chris Lambert did exactly that. In 2000, he decided to walk solo across Europe, from Le Havre in France to Rome in Italy. He drew a blue line across a map of Europe and seventy-one walking days and 1,100 miles later, with a small rucksack, he arrived in the Eternal City. A sketchbook and pencils were his journey-long companions and he documented his journey with daily sketches and commentary of a very personal trek along that blue line, giving the reader a vivid glimpse of the road to Rome as undertaken by this latter day pilgrim. A retired architect, his drawings are both charming and evocative. They capture the beauty of the landscapes, the grandeur of the cities, and the tone, be it humorous or heartfelt, of those he encountered along the way.

"My journal started out as just another part of my impedimenta, and the early sketches reflect this. But as I slowly emerged from the chrysalis to become this different person, the importance of being able to talk to my journal developed. It popped constantly in and out of my rucksack as events demanded, and I gradually began to take more trouble over the way I juxtaposed writing and drawing. In any case, I needed something other than walking to occupy my mind. I had allotted one page per day, and they were very small pages. Consequently the writing had to be small. Space and energy for long descriptions was limited. The sketches had priority - to the extent that I would often make myself late departing from a place because I just had to record it. Also the frustration of never quite achieving what I wanted spurred me on to try again when the next scene demanded attention. I wanted to shake off my architectural, topographical style and in a few flicks of the pen and pencils capture the essence of a thing or place, but it very rarely happened. Nevertheless, these small drawings became my footsteps, and as the miles elapsed and the pages filled I began to realise that this little book was me in my new role as a slow, long distance traveller."
Chris Lambert

"The illustrations have a wonderful vividness and the text has a gentle undercurrent of humour. It provides a wonderful and very readable guide to the route, full of the places and happenings on the way. At the same time the diary, written as it happened has an absorbing immediacy. It is the combination of the two, amazingly laid out simultaneously as Chris sketched and coloured and wrote, that has a special spontaneous magic which makes of the whole a unique and delightful art form. It's the kind of book that you can pick up time after time and feel yourself wandering through the byways of France and Italy, hearing the sounds and smelling the fragrances of the hedgerows and fields around and about, or imagining yourself sitting outside in a village square enjoying a glass of wine... This book has given me much delight, and if I might never set out on such a long walk, I feel I have been there."
Sir Chris Bonington, life-long friend, mountaineer, writer and lecturer

Carnet De Voyage
by Craig Thompson
Top Shelf Productions
Carnet de Voyage is the travelogue diary of the three months Craig Thompson spent traveling in France, Spain and Morocco where he embarked on a Blankets book signing tour and spent time researching his next book, Habibi. It contains his spontaneous thoughts and impressions of alien cultures, documenting the sights and sounds of his adventures and quite moments, creating a raw and intimate portrait of countries, culture and the wandering artist. Carnet has a relaxed, lyrical quality which allows the reader to share Craig's experiences and confusion as he struggles to shake of the tourist label and blend in with the locals, while highlighting the loneliness of traveling alone in a strange and foreign land.

"Carnet is the off-the-cuff record of Thompson's European book-signing and interview tour, which took place early last Spring. It is the story of a conflicted young artist, knee-deep in heartache, reeling from the success of his last book, and the subsequent fall-out of that success. Thompson, through the course of this very intimate book, becomes a compelling character in his own right, and his journey through Europe, across borders, and along the periphery of so many lives is a story every bit as engaging as Blankets, or even Thompson's first book, Goodbye Chunky Rice."
Graphic Novel Review Read the full review here.

"Everything is pictorial, with the words running helter-skelter obbligato, picking up anything neglected by the image, including people's names, which Thompson collects avidly, as though are endangered folk melodies. Sometimes these words do not bother integrate, but always they are as handmade as the pictures, lovingly so in many instances. Here he stops to lavish attention on a study of a girl (often) who has posed for him, there he lingers over an expanse of rooftop detail, later a whole market stall of attention arresting oddities... In Carnet he is a prince among his fellows. We read and we envy."
Eddie Campbell, from a review in The Comics Journal #266

American Elf: Collected Sketchbook Diaries
by James Kochalka
Top Shelf Productions
Since 1998, James Kochalka has kept a daily diary in comic strip form with the desire to explore the rhythm of daily life and to become more conscious of what it really means to live. Sleeping, eating, thinking, talking - day in, day out. The Sketchbook Diaries are a grand masterpiece created from the little nothings of everyday life. They are a hypnotic and compelling look into the life of a Magic Elf Boy.

"...the delights of the book are in Kochalka's endearingly quirky personality and simple, but not uncrafted graphical style. We could take lessons from his focus on being in the moment."
Time.com

Bannock, Beans & Black Tea
by John Gallant & Seth
Drawn & Quarterly
A stark, brutally honest memoir recounting one man's experiences of deprivation and poverty growing up in a rural farming village during the Great Depression. Written with a concise honesty and clarity, the stories reveal the sad reality of a boy growing up in brutal social and economic conditions. This collection of short stories is written by John Gallant and illustrated by his son Seth, better known to many as The New Yorker illustrator and award-winning cartoonist.

"He's not a writer, but he is a wonderful storyteller. Over the last decade or so, I've managed to get him to write down all the stories he's told me over my life, and I have been editing them into a book... They have a wonderful tone - both innocent and bitter at the same time. I've poured a lot of effort into making it a beautifully designed monument to his life."
Seth

Persepolis 2
by Marjane Satrapi
Random House
In Persepolis 1 Marjane Satrapi began her heart-rending memoir about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In this sequel, its 1984 and she flees fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in Vienna. Once there, she faces the trials of adolescence far from her family and friends, surrounded by people who have no way of understanding her experience as she struggles for a sense of belonging. She decides to return to Iran after graduation and her difficult homecoming forces her to confront the changes both she and her country have undergone in her absence. The repression and state-sanctioned chauvinism lead her to question whether she can have a future in Iran.

"I cannot praise enough Satrapi's moving account of growing up as a spirited young girl in revolutionary and wartime Iran. Persepolis is a disarming and often humorous, but ultimately it is shattering."
Joe Sacco, creator of Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde

"Sometimes funny and sometimes sad but always sincere and revealing, Persepolis will be one of the best graphic books of the year."
Time.com Read the full review here.

Eightball #23: The Death Ray
by Dan Clowes
Fantagraphics Books
"With its allusions to US foreign policy and acute observations of teen ennui, The Death Ray displays a genuine affection for the comic form and an urge to deconstruct it. In Clowes's capable hands, escapist iconography is given new and more resonant life, and The Death Ray reads as a cautionary parable and an acidic rumination on the travails of adolescence. Clowes unfolds his story by means of an artful intercutting of time frames and perspectives. This fractured narrative approach is nearer to the cinematic techniques of Robert Altman than to literature. With surprising ease, we shift from the aftermath of Andy's 'adventures' to his early experiments with smoking, while throughout an increasingly envious Louis plots an ill-fated coup. In taking the reader on this kaleidoscopic route, Clowes demonstrates what the comic book can do and literary fiction can't."
The Observer Read the full review here.

"Using old ideas to build new ones, exploring new frontiers of the narrative and formal possibilities of comix while keeping his work readable and entertaining, Eightball #23 continues Dan Clowes' ascendancy as one of America's top comix artists. Even if you hate superheroes, this one will come to your rescue."
Time.com Read the full review here.

In The Shadow Of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman
Pantheon Books
On 11th September 2001, Art Spiegelman raced to the World Trade Center, not knowing if his daughter Nadja was alive or dead. Once she was found safe - in her school at the foot of the burning towers - he returned home to meditate on the trauma. "I hadn't anticipated that the hijackings of September 11 would themselves be hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a war recruitment poster..." In his first graphic novel since the groundbreaking Maus, Art Spiegelman presents a deeply moving personal, politically charged account of the events and aftermath of September 11th, 2001. In a large format book, Spiegelman relates his experiences of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary and often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.

"What No Towers captures most vividly in its documentary sections are those moments when the witnesses begin to comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe, when the almost holiday atmosphere of a normal evacuation turned into horror. It is Spiegelman's ability to recapture the feelings of the moment before that will make No Towers an important document in times to come."
R. Fiore, The Comics Journal #259

"Though it may be brief, In the Shadow of No Towers synthesizes Art Spiegelman's incomparable talents for personal history and comix theory into a timely and unique work of art. Using the medium's past to explore new kinds of expression, the book captures the visual experimentation of the old strips and updates them to modern times. What a treat to see Spiegelman back in his element. Let us hope it doesn't take another atrocity to keep him going."
Time.com Read the full review here.

Locas: A Love & Rockets Book
by Jamie Hernandez
Fantagraphics Books
Locas tells the story of Maggie Chascarrillo, a bisexual, Mexican-American woman attempting to define herself in a community rife with class, race and gender issues. Maggie's story begins in the early 1980's punk scene of Southern California, where she meets Hopey Glass, a feisty anti-authoritarian punkette who quickly becomes Maggie's on/off lover and a constant presence in her life throughout the book. Maggie evolves from an angry young punk into a mature woman, encountering cruelties large and small and resigning herself to dashed hopes, shattered illusions, and even death with ironic acceptance over her 20 year story arc. Locas is the hardcover collection of all the Maggie stories from the original Love & Rockets series.

"Bound together, these stories follow not just the residents of Jaime's fictional Mexican-American California neighborhood known as Hoppers, but also follow Jaime's own exponentially growing powers as one of our premier comix creators. Hernandez' skills at creating unforgettable characters that live in a slightly surreal world (one character grows and shrinks intermittently) are exceeded only by his sense of how to compose a perfectly balanced panel of light and shadow. Though all the stories contained in Locas have been in print separately for years, collecting them together in Locas creates what is nearly a Bible of comix art."
Time.com Read the full review here.

Paul Auster's City Of Glass
adapted by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli
St Martin Press
Quinn writes mysteries. An unknown voice on the telephone is begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.

"By poking at the heart of comics structure, Karasik and Mazzucchelli created a strange doppelganger of the original book. It's as if Quinn, confronted with two nearly identical Peter Stillmans at Grand Central Station, chose to follow one drawn with brush and ink rather than one set in type. The volume that resulted, first published in 1994, overcame all my purist notions about collaboration. It offers one of the richest demonstrations to date of the modern Ikonologosplatt at its most subtle and supple."
Art Spiegelman, from the introduction

"... does not merely render Auster's text visually but actively brings new metaphors to the surface by plumbing the novel's depths to a degree heretofore unheard of in a comic book literary adaptation."
Top 100 Comics, The Comics Journal #210

Bone: One Volume Edition
by Jeff Smith
Cartoon Books
The complete 1300-page epic adventure from start to finish in one volume. Three cousins get lost in a pre-technological valley, spending a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies.

"Bone is an excellent comic: strongly crafted, well-intentioned and lovingly realised. It bustles with an energy that comes in part from being made up of components that don't fit together that smoothly, a roughness that should serve it well as it seeks a greater audience in years to come. Bone impresses in panels, thrills in pages, charms in segments, and impresses as a whole."
Books Of The Year 2004, The Comics Journal #266

"Combining the instant gratification strong cartooning with the deep engagement of epic storytelling and the universal appeal of humor, Jeff Smith's Bone has becomes the best all-ages graphic novel yet published. While older readers will tune into such themes as the folly of blind fanaticism and the corrupting nature of power, the younger set will simply thrill to the adventure and delight at the huge cast of characters. Hardly a folly anymore, Bone now deserves to go from hipster cult item to mainstream literary success."
Time.com Read the full review here.

War Stories: Volume One
by Garth Ennis, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins, David Lloyd, Chris Weston & Gary Erskine
DC/Vertigo
A 240 page collection of four 56-page one-shots written by Garth Ennis telling four very different stories from World War II.

"Many in the alternative comics field still unfairly deride collaborative efforts, and to them I offer Ennis' distinctly genuine war stories, offering us perhaps the closest approximation of war's moral ambiguities as have ever been presented in the medium (with the obvious exception of Joe Sacco). If the works suffer at all, they suffer from their brevity - but as it is, there is no doubt that Ennis has mastered the short form 'graphic novella' as an excellent format for telling some truely absorbing stories."
Books Of The Year 2004, The Comics Journal #266

Same Difference & Other Stories
by Derek Kirk Kim
Top Shelf Productions
Derek Kirk Kim lives and works in San Francisco, creating and showcasing his comics on his web-site www.lowbright.com. In 2003, he self-published his first collection of stories Same Difference & Other Stories - winning him an Ignatz Award, Eisner Award and a Harvey Award! Now reprinted by Top Shelf, Same Difference is a series of sensitive and humorous short stories exploring the lives of twenty-somethings which reveals a refreshing slice of Korean-American life told through Derek Kirk Kim's self-effacing wit, ear for dialogue, and meticulous art style.

"Kim shows a lot of promise in his varied styles and subtle but subversive Asian American angle. Don't miss this impressive debut."
Time.com Read the full review here.

"Kim captures the ups and downs of early adulthood with sensitivity and gentle wit."
The Comics Journal

The Puddleman
by Raymond Briggs
Random House/Jonathan Cape
Raymond Briggs returns with another classic childrens book. The Puddleman is the story of the touching relationship between Tom and his grandfather as they go off walking to find puddles, despite the fact it hasn't rained for ages.

Kramer's Ergot 5
edited by Sammy Harkham
Avodah Books
Featuring contributions from Chris Ware, Mat Brinkman, Jordan Crane, Marc Bell, Gary Panter, Souther Salazar and Ron Regé Jr, Kramer's Ergot is a vital comics anthology featuring the cream of alternative comic creators and treats comics as a serious artform. This book deserves a place on the bookshelf of every comic reader interested in the future of the medium. Highly recommended.

"Appearing only annually, last year's giant issue established the series as the premier showcase for emerging/edgy talent by insisting on the seriousness of their endeavors with its sumptuous production values. Printed in full color on thick paper stock at a large size, Kramer's Ergot allows artists who would otherwise only know inexpensive reproduction to see their work monumentalized. This latest issue goes one better than the last by including both lesser known artists and also relative veterans whose work fits the avant-garde mold of the series. As a result Kramer's Ergot #5 stands out as not just one of the year's best anthologies, but also one of the year's most gorgeous books."
Time.com. Read the full review here.

Peanuts Vol 1: 1950-1952
by Charles Schulz
Fantagraphics Books
The first in a proposed series of 25 books reprinting the entire 50 years of Charles Schulz's classic strip, Peanuts. The first volume reprints strips from the first two and a quarter years, which have never been collected before - in large part because they showed a young Schulz working out the kinks in his new strip and include some characterizations and designs that are quite different from the cast we're all familiar with.

"For close to half a century, Charles Schulz has been contributing indelible images to our consciousness, from Snoopy's fantasized dogfights with the Red Baron to Linus's security blanket to Lucy's hopeless infatuation with the monomaniacal Schroder. Some of them even pop up and acquire new, contemporary layers of meaning, long after we thought they'd been exhausted... Peanuts is, and has always been, a daily, hand-crafted gift from one of the greatest cartoonists of all time."
Voted No. 2 in the Top 100 Comics, The Comics Journal #210

Gods' Man: A Novel In Woodcuts
by Lynd Ward
Dover Publications
A new printing of Gods' Man, originally published in 1929, the first of six wordless woodcut novels by Lynd Ward (1905-1985). With 139 images engraved on wood and printed on one side of the page, Gods' Man tells the story of an artist who bargains with Death in return for success in the art world, which the artist discovers is corrupted by money and greed, personified by a prostitute. Gods' Man sold over 20,000 copies on its original publication despite having been released during the depression era - in the very week of the stock market crash - and was in its third printing by January of 1930. Ward went on to produce five further novels in woodcuts during the 1930's - Mad Man's Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, and Vertigo.

"Ward's expert use of gestures and close-ups brings each character to life and allows this thrilling story to flow effortlessly from beginning to end."
The Comics Journal #261

The Walking Man
by Jiro Taniguchi
Fanfare/Ponent Mon
Who takes the time these days to climb a tree in bare feet to rescue a child's toy? To stop and observe the birds? To play in puddles after a storm? To go down to the sea to put back a shell? The Walking Man does as he strolls at random through urban Japan - often silent, often alone - with his vivid dreams that let time stand still.

"I love Taniguchi's The Walking Man, there's very little dialogue, it's just putting quiet moments under the microscope. It works, it's amazing. You couldn't do that in any other medium. If it was a novel, then there would be an internal dialogue as he was walking along. I think that book gets close to communicating a moment or experience which isn't tangible, and that is what art should do. This is what's so special about comics; they're alchemical. Hoo! Get you all excited, the words and the pictures and how different balances together can get different reactions! It's like a great big scientific experiment."
Andi Watson, creator of Love Fights, Breakfast After Noon, Slow News Day

"The pleasures of The Walking Man are principally in the form of Taniguchi's careful compositions, which achieve a contemplative beauty. Like a short walk of the mind, they refresh and provide exercise."
Time.com
Read the full review here.

A Blazing World: Companion to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 2
by Jess Nevins, with Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
Monkeybrain Books
Detailed, panel-by-panel annotations of the second League of Extraordinary Gentleman series containing exclusive interview with and introduction by co-creator Alan Moore, plus an interview with and additional commentary by co-creator and illustrator Kevin O'Neill.

"If anything, my appreciation for the service that Jess provides in these companion volumes has only grown over the intervening period since the issue of Heroes & Monsters. As League itself has grown more complex and ambitious since its first conception, so too have I become more obsessed with expanding the book's remit to include even the most remote and obscure corners of the fictional landscape... Without these two companion volumes, I doubt that the experience of the original work would be as complete, and I also doubt that Kevin and I would have felt sufficiently liberated or encouraged to push the concept quite as far as we currently are doing."
Alan Moore, from the introduction

True Brit: A Celebration Of UK Comic Book Artists
TwoMorrow Publications
Featuring Leo Baxendale, Frank Bellamy, Brian Bolland, Mark Buckingham, John M Burns, Alan Davis, Ron Embleton, Hunt Emerson, Dave Gibbons, Frank Hampson, Bryan Hitch, Syd Jordan, Don Lawrence, David Lloyd, Dave McKean, Mike Noble, Kevin O'Neill, Frank Quitely, Ken Ried, Bryan Talbot & Barry Windsor-Smith. True Brit celebrates the rich history of British comic book artists with a wide selection of art, photographs and interviews with the artists who have revolutionised the way comics are seen and perceived throughout the world.

"True Brit crams every page with information and imagery essential to appreciate the unique visions of British artists, past and present. The stella rollcall of those left out makes me cry out for a second volume, please!"
Paul Gravett, Comics International