Graphics for Grownups: Non-Fiction

Note: Nonfiction book about comics and graphic novels, but not a graphic novel itself.
The sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their hold on the American imagination. Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows like The Walking Dead have become among the most popular in cable history, to convention halls, best-seller lists, Pulitzer Prize-winning titles, and MacArthur Fellowship recipients, comics shape American culture, in ways high and low, superficial and deeply profound. In American Comics, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes readers through their incredible but little-known history, starting with the Civil War and cartoonist Thomas Nast, creator of the lasting and iconic images of Uncle Sam and Santa Claus; the golden age of newspaper comic strips and the first great superhero boom; the moral panic of the Eisenhower era, the Marvel Comics revolution, and the underground comix movement of the 1960s and '70s; and finally into the twenty-first century, taking in the grim and gritty Dark Knights and Watchmen alongside the brilliant rise of the graphic novel by acclaimed practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel. Dauber's story shows not only how comics have changed over the decades but how American politics and culture have changed them.

Across the decades, Americans in search of divine truths have turned to unconventional prophets for the answers. Some of these prophets have demanded their faith, fortunes, and even their very lives. In American Cult, over twenty cartoonists explore the history of these groups with clarity and empathy - digging deep to find the human stories within.

Featuring breathtaking panoramas and revelatory, unforgettable images, Battle Lines is an utterly original graphic history of the Civil War.

This graphic novel version of The Book of Five Rings, the iconic book of confrontation and victory by the famed seventeenth-century duelist and undefeated samurai Miyamoto Musashi, illuminates this brilliant manifesto, which has long inspired martial artists and anyone interested in cultivating a strategic mind. With evocative drawings and a distilled but faithful text adapted by acclaimed manga writer Sean Michael Wilson, The Book of Five Rings comes alive both as a guide to swordsmanship and strategy, and as a view into Musashi's world.

The master of the visual mash-up returns with his signature idiosyncratic take on the Constitution R. Sikoryak is the master of the pop culture pastiche. In Masterpiece Comics, he interpreted classic literature with defining twentieth-century comics. With Terms and Conditions, he made the unreadable contract that everyone signs, and no one reads, readable. He employs his magic yet again to investigate the very framework of the country with Constitution Illustrated. By visually interpreting the complete text of the supreme law of the land with more than a century of American pop culture icons, Sikoryak distills the very essence of the government legalese from the abstract to the tangible, the historical to the contemporary. Among Sikoryak's spot-on unions of government articles and amendments with famous comic-book characters: the Eighteenth Amendment that instituted prohibition is articulated with Homer Simpson running from Chief Wiggum; the Fourteenth Amendment that solidifies citizenship to all people born and naturalized in the United States is personified by Ms. Marvel; and, of course, the Nineteenth Amendment offering women the right to vote is a glorious depiction of Wonder Woman breaking free from her chains. American artists from George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Charles Schulz (Peanuts) to Raina Telgemeier (Sisters) and Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For) are homaged, with their characters reimagined in historical costumes and situations. We the People has never been more apt.

From the great cartoonist-reporter, a sweeping, original investigation of a forgotten crime in the most vexed of places Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah - cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake - reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present.

In the middle of the night in 1997, Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe André was kidnapped by armed men and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus region. For three months, André; was kept handcuffed in solitary confinement, with little to survive on and almost no contact with the outside world. Close to twenty years later, award-winning cartoonist Guy Delisle ( Pyongyang, Jerusalem, Shenzhen, Burma Chronicles ) recounts André's harrowing experience in Hostage, a book that attests to the power of one man's determination in the face of a hopeless situation.

Visit Sarah Glidden's blog for comics, essays and more.When Sarah Glidden took a “Birthright Israel” tour, she thought she knew what she was getting herself into. But when she got to Israel, she found that things weren’t quite so simple. HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL is Sarah’s memoir not only of her Israeli government sponsored trip through Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, Masada and other famous locations, but of the emotional journey she never expected to take while she was there.

Visit Guy Delisle's website for comics and animations.
Acclaimed graphic memoirist Delisle returns with a thoughtful and moving travelogue about life in East Jerusalem and his involvement with the brutal, three-week Gaza War.

From bestselling author Derf Backderf comes the untold story of the Kent State shootings--timed for the 50th anniversary. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children--a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmerand Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart.

Rick Geary tackles the most controversial case of the 20th century. Anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti were accused of robbery and murder, but so many supposedly damning pieces of evidence were questionable, their guilty verdict elicited massive protests around the world. Geary presents us with all the twists and turns, appeals and dubious evidence after presenting us the human face of the two men, demonized by many, turned to martyrs by many others in his usual unflappable way.

Visit Derf Backderf's website for his weekly comic and much more.
You only thinkyou know this story. In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer-the most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper-seared himself into the American consciousness. To the public, Dahmer was a monster who committed unthinkable atrocities. To Derf Backderf, “Jeff” was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides.

In Pekar's final memoir, he recounts the entire history of the Jews to explain how he lost his faith in the state of Israel. Pekar grew up a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, but as he became older he confronted more and more questions his parents couldn't answer.

Oak Flat is a serene high-elevation mesa that sits above the southeastern Arizona desert, fifteen miles to the west of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. For the San Carlos tribe, Oak Flat is a holy place, an ancient burial ground and religious site where Apache girls celebrate the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sunrise Ceremony. In 1995, a massive untapped copper reserve was discovered nearby. A decade later, a law was passed transferring the area to a private company, whose planned copper mine will wipe Oak Flat off the map--sending its natural springs, petroglyph-covered rocks, and old-growth trees tumbling into a void. The still-unresolved Oak Flat conflict is ripped from today's headlines, but its story resonates with foundational American themes: the saga of westward expansion, the resistance and resilience of Native peoples, and the efforts of profiteers to control the land and unearth treasure beneath it while the lives of individuals hang in the balance.

A graphic edition of historian Timothy Snyder's bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting America's arc toward authoritarianism, featuring the visual storytelling talents of renowned illustrator Nora Krug.

A landmark of journalism and the art form of comics. Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, this is a major work of political and historical nonfiction.

Activist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel. From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged. Along the way we look at key landmarks which shift our perspective of what’s ‘normal.’

An incredibly brave account of life inside one of the most isolated and fear ridden cities in the world. The Raqqa Diaries began as a series of short broadcasts on BBC Radio 4?s Today Program. Now one of the most isolated and fear ridden cities on earth, no-one is allowed to speak to western journalists or leave Raqqa, without ISIS's permission. Those caught breaking the rules face death by beheading. Despite this, the BBC's Mike Thomson, with the help of the BBC Arabic Service, found a young man who is willing to risk his life to tell the world what is happening in his city. Part of a small anti-ISIS activist group, the diaries were written, encrypted, and sent to a third country before being translated. The diarist's father is killed and mother badly injured during an air strike; he is sentenced to 40 lashes for speaking out against a beheading; he sees a woman stoned to death. They show how every aspect of life is impacted'from the spiraling costs of food to dictating the acceptable length of a person's pants.

Cartoonist Sarah Glidden accompanies her two friends--reporters and founders of a journalism non-profit--as they research potential stories on the effects of the Iraq War on the Middle East and, specifically, the war's refugees.

The long awaited follow up to Palestine. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia in 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stories that are rarely found in conventional news coverage. Here Sacco focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was beseiged by Bosnian Serbs during the war.

Beautifully adapted and rendered through piercing illustrations by acclaimed creators Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh, Nellie Bly's complete, true-to-life 19th-century investigation of Blackwell Asylum captures a groundbreaking moment in history and reveals a haunting and timely glimpse at the starting point for conversations on mental health.

Here is New York, as you've never seen it before. A perfectly charming, sidesplittingly funny, intellectually entertaining illustrated history of the blocks, the buildings, and the guts of New York City, based on Julia Wertz's popular illustrated columns in The New Yorker and Harper's.

Tired of your country's bad politics? Feeling powerless to change things? Start your own utopia instead! This nonfiction graphic novel collects the stories of 30 self-made places around the world built with a dream of utopia, whether a safe haven, an inspiring structure, or a better-run country. From the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands to the Indian rock garden of Nek Chand, the micronation of Sealand to the pirate-founded, anti-slavery community of Libertatia, here are the empowering and eccentric visions of creators who struck out against the laws of their homelands, the approval of their peers, and even nature itself to reshape the world around them.

On December 9, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report that strongly condemned the CIA for its secret and brutal use of torture in the treatment of prisoners captured in the "war on terror" during the George W. Bush administration. This deeply researched and fully documented investigation caused monumental controversy, interest, and concern, and starkly highlighted both how ineffective the program was as well as the lengths to which the CIA had gone to conceal it. In The Torture Report, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Col#65533;n use their celebrated graphic-storytelling abilities to make the damning torture report accessible, finally allowing Americans to lift the veil and fully understand the crimes committed by the CIA.

Trinity depicts in vivid detail the dramatic history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic bomb. This sweeping historical narrative traces the spark of invention from the laboratories of nineteenth-century Europe to the massive industrial and scientific efforts of the Manhattan Project.

The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation uses the art of illustrated storytelling to breathe life into our nation's cornerstone principles. Simply put, it is the most enjoyable and groundbreaking way to read the governing document of the United States. Spirited and visually witty, it roves article by article, amendment by amendment, to get at the meaning, background, and enduring relevance of the law of the land.

Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall's efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Wake tells the story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain's logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the "negro burying ground" uncovered in Manhattan.

Marchetto tells the story of her 11-month, ultimately triumphant, bout with breast cancer--from diagnosis to cure and every challenging step in between. This graphic memoir is a portrait of one woman's supercharged life in Manhattan and a wonderful love story.

Comics for Choice is anthology of comics about abortion. As this fundamental reproductive right continues to be stigmatized and jeopardized, over sixty artists and writers have created comics that boldly share their own experiences, and educate readers on the history of abortion, current political struggles, activism, and more. Lawyers, activists, medical professionals, historians, and abortion fund volunteers have teamed up with cartoonists and illustrators to share their knowledge in accessible comics form.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to its knees. When we weren't sheltering in place, we were advised to wear masks, wash our hands, and practice social distancing. We watched in horror as medical personnel worked around the clock to care for the sick and dying. Businesses were shuttered, travel stopped, workers were furloughed, and markets dropped. And people continued to die. Amid all this uncertainty, writers and artists from around the world continued to create comics, commenting directly on how individuals, societies, governments, and markets reacted to the worldwide crisis. COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology collects more than forty such short comics from a diverse set of creators, including indie powerhouses, mainstream artists, Ignatz and Eisner Award winners, and mainstream media cartoonists. In narrative styles ranging from realistic to fantastic, they tell stories about adjusting to working from home, homeschooling their kids, missing birthdays and weddings, and being afraid just to leave the house. At times heartbreaking and at others hopeful and humorous, these comics express the anger, anxiety, fear, and bewilderment we feel in the era of COVID-19.

David B. was born Pierre-François Beauchard in a small town near Orléans, France. He spent an idyllic early childhood playing with the neighborhood kids and, along with his older brother, Jean-Christophe, ganging up on his little sister, Florence. But their lives changed abruptly when Jean-Christophe was struck with epilepsy at age eleven. In search of a cure, their parents dragged the family to acupuncturists and magnetic therapists, to mediums and macrobiotic communes. But every new cure ended in disappointment as Jean-Christophe, after brief periods of remission, would only get worse. Angry at his brother for abandoning him and at all the quacks who offered them false hope, Pierre-François learned to cope by drawing fantastically elaborate battle scenes, creating images that provide a fascinating window into his interior life. An honest and horrifying portrait of the disease and of the pain and fear it sowed in the family, Epileptic is also a moving depiction of one family’s intricate history.

On the heels of explaining to his planetary leader the intricacies of human genetics in The Stuff of Life, the intrepid alien scientist Bloort-183 is charged in this sequel with covering the wider story of evolution.

From the moment President Obama signed the bill into law in 2010, a steady and mounting avalanche of misinformation about the ACA has left a growing majority of Americans confused about what it is, why it's necessary, and how it works. From how to tame the twin threats of rising costs and the increasing number of uninsured to why an insurance mandate is good for your health, Health Care Reformdispels false fears by arming you with facts.

On Mother’s Day 2001, Henny Beaumont gave birth to her third daughter, Beth. For the first four hours of Beth’s life, she seemed no different from Henny’s two other little girls. But when the doctor told Henny and her husband that their daughter might have Down syndrome, Henny thought that her life was over. How would she be able to look after this baby, who required corrective heart surgery and an overwhelming amount of care, and manage her other two children at the same time? Why did she hold such intense feelings of disappointment, resentment, and sadness toward this weak and vulnerable baby? Henny wondered if she would even be able to love her daughter. And if Henny couldn’t trust her own feelings about Beth, how could she expect other people to overcome their prejudices and ignorance about Beth’s condition? Hole in the Heart is a moving and refreshingly honest look at raising a child with special needs.

Mom records her baby's milestones, but what about her own? Where is the celebration of mom's transformation? Beginning with one-day-old mom, who may feel like she is learning a new language, Mom Milestones is a love letter to the myriad ways moms grow and adapt to motherhood. Here are significant firsts: First sleepless night. First walk with baby. First mom friend. Skills learned--how to soothe baby (sometimes); how to coax a preschooler into taking medicine. Mom's likes (adapting pop songs to lullaby format; gathering intelligence from other moms) and dislikes (emptying the lunch box with mystery smells; requests for video games). There's Bedtime: The Board Game; crafts mom enjoys (no glitter or glue, thanks!); and the ABCs of motherhood (E for ennui). While there might not be a road map for motherhood, Mom Milestones tracks both the memorable and slightly forgettable guideposts along the way--sunrises, snack plates, cuddles, laughter, and astonishment--because, as the saying goes, the days are long, but the years are short.  

Click here to visit Leah Hayes' website.
Not Funny Ha-Ha is a bold, slightly wry graphic novel illustrating the lives of two young women from different cultural, family, and financial backgrounds who go through two different abortions (medical and surgical).

Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life is the eagerly awaited sequel/ companion book to Forney's 2012 best-selling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me. Whereas Marbles was a memoir about her bipolar disorder, Rock Steady turns the focus outward, offering a self-help survival guide of tips, tricks and tools by someone who has been through it all and come through stronger for it.

From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This--a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns. In Seek You, Kristen Radtke's wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share.

A landmark work of graphic memoir and a cancer narrative that Gabrielle Bell (Lucky and Cecil & Jordan in New York) calls, "comforting, straightforward and strongly connected to life." When Jennifer Hayden was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 43, she realized that her tits told a story. Across a lifetime, they'd held so many meanings: hope and fear, pride and embarrassment, life and death. And then they were gone. Now, their story has become a way of understanding her story. For everyone who's faced cancer personally, or watched a loved one fight that battle, Hayden's story is a much-needed breath of fresh air, an irresistible blend of sweetness and skepticism. Rich with both symbolism and humor, The Story of My Tits will leave you laughing, weeping, and feeling grateful for everyday.

Click here to visit Sarah Leavitt's blog.
Sarah Leavitt reveals how Alzheimer’s disease transformed her mother, Midge, and her family forever. She shares her family’s journey through a harrowing range of emotions-shock,denial, hope, anger, frustration - all the while learning to cope,and managing to find moments of happiness.

From the National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, author of Radioactive, comes a dazzling fusion of storytelling, visual art, and reportage that grapples with weather in all its dimensions: its danger and its beauty, why it happens and what it means. Weather is the very air we breathe--it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages. This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions--Do I need an umbrella today?--to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change.

A lively, accessible, graphic novel that takes us on a highly entertaining and fascinating tour through the wonders and mysteries of the human brain--from a renowned husband-and-wife team of cognitive neuroscientists. Professors and husband-and-wife team Uta and Chris Frith have pioneered major studies of brain disorders throughout their nearly fifty-year career. Here, in Two Heads, their distinguished careers serve as a prism through which they share the compelling story of the birth of neuroscience and their paradigm-shifting discoveries across areas as wide-ranging as autism and schizophrenia research, and new frontiers of social cognition including diversity, prejudice, confidence, collaboration, and empathy.

What does it feel like to fall in love too hard and too fast, to hate yourself in equal and opposite measure? To live in such fear of rejection that you drive friends and lovers away? Welcome to my world. I'm Courtney, and I have borderline personality disorder (BPD), along with over four million other people in the United States. Though I've shown every classic symptom of the disorder since childhood, I wasn't properly diagnosed until nearly a decade later, because the prevailing theory is that most people simply "grow out of it." Not me. In my illustrated memoir, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces, I share what it's been like to live and love with this disorder.

A joyful collaboration between old friends David Byrne and Maira Kalman, American Utopia offers readers an antidote to cynicism, bursting with pathos, humanism, and hope--featuring his words and lyrics brought to life with more than 150 of her colorful paintings.

The nineteenth-century countercultures that came to define the bohemian lifestyle spanned both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from Walt Whitman to Josephine Baker, and from Gertrude Stein to Thelonius Monk. Bohemians is the graphic history of this movement and its illustrious figures, recovering the utopian ideas behind millennial communities, and covering the rise of Greenwich Village, the multiracial and radical jazz world, and West Coast and Midwest bohemians, among other scenes

Envisioning the first book of the bible like no one before him, R. Crumb, the legendary illustrator, reveals here the story of Genesis in a profoundly honest and deeply moving way. Originally thinking that we would do a take off of Adam and Eve, Crumb became so fascinated by the Bible’s language, “a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions,” that he decided instead to do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James bible.

Accompany a band of merry medieval pilgrims as they make their way-on motorcycles, of course-to Canterbury. The twenty-four tales, which range from high romance set in ancient Greece to low comedy in contemporary England, are adapted into graphic novel form by Seymour Chwast-a pitch-perfect transposition of Chaucer's pointed satire.

Sís's deeply felt adaptation tells the story of an epic flight of birds in search of the true king, Simorgh. Drawn from all species, the band of birds is led by the hoopoe. He promises that the voyage to the mountain of Kaf, where Simorgh lives, will be perilous and many birds resist, afraid of what they might encounter. Others perish during the passage through the seven valleys: quest, love, understanding, friendship, unity, amazement, and death. Those that continue reach the mountain to learn that Simorgh the king is, in fact, each of them and all of them. In this lyrical and richly illustrated story of love, faith, and the meaning of it all, Peter Sís shows the pain, and beauty, of the human journey.

The gripping origin story of Pong, Atari, and the digital icons who defined the world of video games. A deep, nostalgic dive into the advent of gaming, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master returns us to the emerging culture of Silicon Valley. At the center of this graphic history, dynamically drawn in colors inspired by old computer screens, is the epic feud that raged between Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and inventor Ralph Baer for the title of "father of the video game."  While Baer, a Jewish immigrant whose family fled Germany for America, developed the first TV video-game console and ping-pong game in the 1960s, Bushnell, a self-taught whiz kid from Utah, put out Atari's pioneering table-tennis arcade game, Pong, in 1972. Thus, a prolonged battle began over who truly spearheaded the multibillion-dollar gaming industry, and around it a sweeping narrative about invention, inspiration, and the seeds of digital revolution.

The cartoon of Brooke conducts the reader through two millennia of history-from the newspapers in Caesar's Rome to the penny press of the American Revolution and the manipulations of contemporary journalism. Gladstone's manifesto debunks the notion that "The Media" is an external force, outside of our control, since we've begun directly constructing, filtering, and responding to what we watch and read. With fascinating digressions, sobering anecdotes, and brave analytical wit, The Influencing Machine equips us to be smart, savvy, informed consumers and shapers of the media. It shows that we have met the media and it is us. So now what?

Homer's Odyssey is a tale that begs for visual interpretation, filled with mythic characters we all know well: the Cyclops, the Lotus-Eaters, the cannibal Laestrygonians, the Sirens, the monster Scylla (beside the whirlpool Charybdis), Poseidon, Athena, and Zeus.... Featuring a bold black, white, and blue interior design throughout, imbued with his own sly humor, The Odyssey brings us a dazzling new vision of one of the epic journeys.

Go behind the scenes of our most ambitious radio programs and witness an intensely creative moment in a medium that's changing the way we tell stories. Anchored by surprising characters and big questions, their stories are tightly structured, edited, and soundtracked, and they introduce us to authentic voices from every walk of life.Radio and podcasts today are entrepreneurial and DIY; there's a can-do, collaborative spirit that characterizes people working in this field, fearlessly breaking new artistic ground.

In 1976, champion player Roger Sharpe stepped up to a pinball machine in a Manhattan courtroom. He was there to challenge the citywide ban on pinball by proving this was a game of skill, not chance. Sharpe pulled back the plunger and released, and the fate of this industry and artform hung in the balance.Thus opens Jon Chad's comprehensive graphic guide to the history of the captivating, capricious--and at times infuriating!--game of pinball. Tracing pinball's roots back to the Court of King Louis XIV and right up to the present day, Chad captures not just the history of the game but also the artistry, cultural significance, and even the physics.

It is, perhaps, the perfect video game. Simple yet addictive, Tetris delivers an irresistible, unending puzzle that has players hooked. Play it long enough and you'll see those brightly colored geometric shapes everywhere. You'll see them in your dreams. Alexey Pajitnov had big ideas about games. In 1984, he created Tetris in his spare time while developing software for the Soviet government. Once Tetris emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, it was an instant hit. Nintendo, Atari, Sega--game developers big and small all wanted Tetris. A bidding war was sparked, followed by clandestine trips to Moscow, backroom deals, innumerable miscommunications, and outright theft. In this graphic novel,New York Times-bestselling author Box Brown untangles this complex history and delves deep into the role games play in art, culture, and commerce.

In 1956 Time magazine referred to Pollock as "Jack the Dripper". Pollock said that he painted "out of his conscious": the cathartic dribbled paint reflected his troubled mind. This book traces Pollock's career and discusses how his loose, individual style was used as a political weapon in the Cold War, representing America as the free, democratic nation.

Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.

"Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+" --Salon How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving.What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry's first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: "The ordinary is extraordinary."

What is "Art"? It's widely accepted that art serves an important function in society. But the concept falls under such an absurdly large umbrella and can manifest in so many different ways. Art can be self indulgent, goofy, serious, altruistic, evil, or expressive, or any number of other things. But how can it truly make lasting, positive change? In Why Art?, acclaimed graphic novelist Eleanor Davis (How To Be Happy) unpacks some of these concepts in ways both critical and positive, in an attempt to illuminate the highest possible potential an artwork might hope to achieve.

Gemma Correll's website for illustrations, sketchbooks, daily diaries, and much more.
If you're floundering in life, striking out in love, struggling to pay the rent, and worried about it all -- you're in luck! World Champion Worrier and Expert Insomniac Gemma Correll is here to assure you that it could be much, much worse. In her hugely popular comic drawings, Gemma Correll dispenses dubious advice and unreliable information on life as she sees it, including The Dystopian Zodiac, Reward Stickers for Grown-Ups, Palm Reading for Millennials, and a Map of the Introvert's Heart.