Blue Pills
by Frederik Peeters
Houghton Mifflin Company
$18.95
One summer night at a house party, Fred met Cati. Though they barely spoke, he vividly remembered her gracefulness and abandon. They meet again years later, and this time their connection is instantaneous. But when things become serious, a nervous Cati tells him that she and her three-year-old son are both HIV positive. With great beauty and economy, Peeters traces the development of their intimacy and their revelatory relationship with a doctor whose affection and frankness allow them to fully realize their passionate connection. Then Cati's son gets sick, bringing Fred face to face with death. It forces him to question the meaning of life, illness, and love - until a Socratic dialogue with a mammoth helps him recognize that living with illness is also a gift; it has freed him to savor his life with Cati.

"[Frederik Peeters'] elliptical, atmospheric storytelling style creates waves of surprising emotion."
Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

"Passionate and celebratory... Profound questions are embraced in delicate details and quiet moments of pleasure."
Craig Thompson, author of Blankets

"...he is widely celebrated as the author of the autobiographical tour de force Pilules Bleues (Atrabile, 2001). For six years when people ask me 'What is the book that you think most needs to be translated from French to English?' my answer is always the same: Pilules Bleues, the true story of a young man and his romance with a woman living with HIV."
Bart Beaty at The Comics Reporter - Read the full article here.

"A landmark in autobiographical comics publishing, Peeters' Pilules Bleues is one of the most painfully honest and genuinely affecting comics ever created. Executed in a lush, loose drawing style, this book masquerades for some time as a simple love story before, just at its midpoint, not-so-subtly kicking the reader in the teeth. Yet the beauty of Peeters' tale resides not in its shock value — which is, after all, minimized by the second half of the book — but by the skilful manner in which visual metaphors are mobilized. We are drawn deeply into Peeters' reality through his magnificent use of unreality, through his incorporation of an extraordinary wit into the mundanity of everyday life. Pilules Bleues is a tour-de-force through the cartoonist's subconscious, a visual representation of the process of coping and adjusting that ranks among the best comics published anywhere in the world in the past few years."
The 20 Best European Comics You Never Read, Indy Magazine - Read the full article here.

The Museum Vaults: Excerpts From The Journal Of An Expert
by Marc-Antoine Mathieu
NBM
$14.95
An art assessor must evaluate the vast collections of the Louvre in an alternate Kafkaesque world where all is warehoused in an endless ever-deepening succession of basements levels. Mathieu marries Escher with Kafka to bring stinging irony to the pompousness of art history.

"One could perhaps say that the Coleridge poem is lacking in humour. Hunt Emerson has amply made up for that in this two hundredth (approximately) anniversary printing... We sure could have used this back in Mrs Teshner's English class."
Gilbert Shelton, from the introduction

"...my favourite of all the the books I've ever done... the text is dead straight. I didn't change anything. And I've done it all as a comic strip... Teachers just love it because they can introduce their students to the text and get them to read the stuff... it's now part of the Coleridge industry. There's only a certain amount of illustrated Ancient Mariner's around, and I'm one of the two living illustrators of the Mariner at the moment, or something like that."
Hunt Emerson, from the True Brit interview

El Diablo
by Brian Azzarello & Danijel Zezelj
DC/Vertigo
$12.99
Collecting the hard-hitting Western miniseries by Eisner Award-winning writer Brian Azzarello and artist Danijel Zezelj. Small-town sheriff Moses Stone is running from his past, and from something even worse: the legendary El Diablo, a relentless, violent gunman who has unearthed the skeletons in Stone's closet. Is El Diablo a man on a mission, or is he a spirit of atonement avenging the ghosts of the past?