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 By Chester Brown
288 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
It’s been eight years since Chester Brown’s last graphic novel (a collection of his biographical mini-series of Canadian political leader Louis Riel), and his work has always been wide ranging, but had you told me that his new book would be about Brown’s experiences with prostitutes I wouldn’t have believed you. On the surface it sounds like a crass, flippant subject. What Paying For It actually delivers, though, is a thoughtful and interesting examination on the life of a john and on prostitution in general.
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 By Adrian Tomine
56 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
The fact that there is a television show named Bridezillas is, perhaps, an example of just how weddings can bring out the crazy in people. They’ve got that power. Everyone says they’re going to start simply, keep things from spinning out of control, but 9 out of 10 times, sooner or later… pow! The craziness kicks in, even if just for an hour. It’s with all of that in mind that I’m terribly amused about Adrian Tomine’s Scenes from an Impending Marriage, a short comic originally created as a wedding favor for his and Sarah’s guests. Because if you’ve ever planned a wedding, been near someone planning a wedding, or even thought about planning a wedding, this will ring ominously true.
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 By Vanessa Davis
176 pages, color & black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
Vanessa Davis’s comics are not, at a glance, the sort of experiences that would be universally understood. A love/hate relationship with Jewish boys, going to fat camp, celebrating the High Holy Days, a mother who uses slightly inappropriate and sexually tilted words. "That’s not me at all," you’re probably thinking. But what makes Davis’s comics in Make Me a Woman so good is that somehow, she makes everything relatable to the reader, no matter what their background. Boiling down the emotional experiences of each story to their core, there’s a lot to connect with. And more importantly, fall in love with.
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 By James Sturm
96 pages, color
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
One of the things I’ve always liked about James Sturm’s historical stories is that he is able to take events from the past and make them still pertinent to his present day readership. That’s never been more clear than with his latest book, Market Day, set in a European city near the turn of the 20th century, detailing the day in the life of a weaver taking his rugs to market for sale. What we get is not only a look into this man’s life, though, but a story that has to do with consumerism, the economy, and—most importantly—trying to create art rather than just product.
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 Written by John Stanley
Art by John Stanley and Dan Gormley
152 pages, color
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
I never really "got" Nancy. I’ve heard for years about Ernie Bushmiller’s original strips and how fantastic they were, but Bushmiller died right around the time I started paying serious attention to comic strips in the early 1980s. So I’ve never seen any of the originals, just the interpretations of other writers and artists over the years. I have, however, read some John Stanley comics in the form of Little Lulu, and I thought they were adorable. When I heard that Stanley had created stories for the Nancy comic years ago, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would finally be my introduction to the world of Nancy that so many other people had raved about.
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 Written by Lars Jansson
Art by Tove Jansson
88 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
I picked up the first volume of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip solely due to a friend of mine (also named Greg), who grew up reading Tove Jansson’s Moomin books and had utterly fallen in love with them. His descriptions over the years had intrigued me, with promises of whimsy and silliness mixed in with satire and cleverness. That’s exactly what I found in these collections of comic strips drawn for London’s The Evening News. The fourth volume, however, was the first to feature some strips written by Tove Jansson’s brother Lars Jansson, and this fifth volume published the final collaborations between Tove and Lars before Tove quit the strip entirely. This book, then, was a test. Would Lars be able to grow into the strip enough to make me want to read it once Tove was gone?
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 By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
136 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
Drawn & Quarterly, over the past few years, has dipped its toe into translating manga into English, primarily the works of creator Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Books like Tatsumi’s autobiography A Drifting Life and short story collections Abandon the Old in Tokyo have proven to be fascinating, looking at his attempts to break free of genre and industry constraints at the time. So when Drawn & Quarterly announced Black Blizzard, Tatsumi’s debut graphic novel, I was intrigued. (And not just because the creation of Black Blizzard is part of the time period retold in A Drifting Life.) What I found, though, was a creator that shows talent but was still beginning to learn his craft.
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 By Daniel Clowes
80 pages, color
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
It was in 2004 that Daniel Clowes released the last (and at this point, presumably final) issue of Eightball, and with his work in the past decade on movies like Ghost World and Art-School Confidential it was a reasonable assumption that Clowes might have been giving up on the comics art form entirely. With Wilson, though, Clowes makes a full-fledged return to the comics format, in his first original graphic novel. And perhaps because he’s been gone a while, Wilson seems designed to try and see how far it can get under the reader’s skin.
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 By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
856 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
I really have to commend Drawn & Quarterly for bringing Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s comics into English. They’ve already released three collections of his short stories, ones which reek of discomfort and alienation among every day, real people. I was a little wary, though, when I heard that their next Tatsumi project was an autobiography that ran over 800 pages long and only tackled a small fraction of his life. Could Tatsumi really have that much to say? As it turned out, I was very wrong for doubting; A Drifting Life may be set in the 1940s and 1950s, but it has quite a bit to say about here and now.
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 By Guy Delisle
272 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly
One of my favorite travel books from the past couple of years has got to be Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Traveling to the capitol of perhaps the most notoriously isolationist country in the world, Delisle shared his experiences in a graphic novel that was both fascinating and informative. When I heard that his latest book, Burma Chronicles, was about his living in the a foreign country for an entire year, I was more than a little excited. His stay wouldn’t be just for a month or two, but for such an extended period of time that it held many more possibilities. What I found? Not entirely what I expected.
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