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 By Pat Grant
96 pages, color
Published by Top Shelf Productions
I’d never heard of Australian cartoonist Pat Grant before Blue, but in a matter of pages I found myself deeply impressed by the creator. In his graphic novel, Grant does more than just tell a story about three teens on a local adventure; he brings a story together in a way that can be read with as much or as little allegory as you want and still have it provide a punch, and in a way that immerses you in the Australian culture of Grant’s youth that ends up dropping you in, wholesale.
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 By Nate Powell
304 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions
Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole in 2008 was a disturbing book in the best possible way, one that racked up its share of accolades (including an Eisner Award, two Ignatz Awards, and a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize). At long last, his major-length follow-up is here, Any Empire. And while in many regards it’s a quite-different book than Swallow Me Whole, it does share some slight similarities. Like its predecessor, Any Empire plunges the reader into the minds of three teenagers, and you might not like what you find there.
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 Written by Paul Tobin
Art by Colleen Coover
112 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions
Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover’s Banana Sunday comic from a few years ago was a great surprise, introducing me to Tobin’s writing (under the pen name Root Nibot) and showing me a different side to Coover from her adults-only Small Favors comic. The book was a great combination of funny, sweet, and clever, one of those rare books that was really meant for all ages. And while the pair have worked on quite a few comics since then (including a lot of short stories for various Marvel comics), the two creating a new graphic novel together is reason for celebration. Gingerbread Girl is a new direction for the duo, not quite like anything else they’ve created; more importantly, it’s probably their strongest collaboration to date.
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 Edited by Sean Michael Wilson
400 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions
I’ve been looking forward to Top Shelf’s Ax: Alternative Manga anthology ever since they first announced it. Between reading Secret Comics Japan back in the day (which really needs to come back into print) and the more recent "gekiga" (essentially alternative manga) releases from Drawn & Quarterly (with books like The Push Man and Abandon the Old in Tokyo), it’s been fun seeing some of the different genres and styles of manga being produced in Japan. Ax in Japan was the successor to Garo, the gekiga anthology whose founding is detailed in A Drifting Life. So the idea of a cherry-picked collection of comics from Ax over the past decade? Yes, please.
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 Written by Daren White
Art by Eddie Campbell
144 pages, color
Published by Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics
I’ve always appreciated that Eddie Campbell isn’t afraid to take on strange projects. In theory, he could have kept writing and drawn Bacchus over the years, which had a built-up audience and a reputation within comics, or stuck with his autobiographical alter ego Alec. But instead, he’s continued to pick up different oddities over the years, the latest of which is Daren White’s script about a socially awkward playwright. It doesn’t sound like something to set the pages on fire, but I figured that Campbell had agreed to it for a good reason. And, of course, he was right. For a book that should have been annoying, White and Campbell make it startlingly compelling.
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 Written by Kathryn Immonen
Art by Stuart Immonen
144 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions
One of the things I’ve come to expect from Kathryn Immonen is that she doesn’t write stories that talk down to her readers. There’s always a lot packed into her scripts, both what’s being directly stated as well as what you have to piece together and infer for yourself. The end result is a reading experience that ends up being that much more rewarding when you hit the conclusion, and that’s something on display in her and Stuart Immonen’s new graphic novel Moving Pictures.
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 By Kevin Cannon
384 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions
Do you ever feel like you’ve been faked out by a book’s presentation? I certainly did with Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden. Somehow along the way I’d mistakenly got the impression that Far Arden was a light-hearted, full-of-fun, slightly-silly adventure story. To be fair, there are certainly vast portions of the book that qualify with that description. But as the hunt for the mythical Arctic paradise of Far Arden develops, it’s only a matter of time before you start realizing that this book is definitely not all laughs and giggles.
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 Written by Alan Moore
Art by Kevin O’Neill
80 pages, color
Published by Top Shelf Productions
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Alan Moore’s career is that he’s never seemed willing to "play it safe." So with the return of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it would certainly be easy enough to follow the pattern of the first two mini-series, having the group confront a very specific problem, and call it a day. With The League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, though, Moore’s casting his net a little wider in terms of his story-telling, taking a bit of a chance—and so far it seems to be working out rather well.
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 By Nate Powell
216 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions
Looking at the cover of Swallow Me Whole, I’ll admit that my first reaction was one of unease. There’s something creepy about it, with the character of Ruth levitating around the treetops, with insects all around her body even as Ruth looks back over her shoulder. It took me a few minutes to realize what had struck me so much about it; Ruth doesn’t look so much like she’s flying, here, but rather as if she’s being carried away by someone or something beyond her control. It’s that lack of control that I think punctuates all of Swallow Me Whole, making Nate Powell’s graphic novel a journey to somewhere very uncomfortable.
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 By Mira Friedmann, Batia Kolton, Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, David Polonsky, and Itzik Rennert
144 pages, color
Published by Actus Independent Comics; distributed by Top Shelf Productions
There are some books that are really worth waiting for, and high among them is a new release from the Actus Independent Comics collective. A collective of Israeli comic artists, you never know what you’re going to find from them. It could be a box of miniature comics, maybe an anthology of stories all written by Etgar Keret, or comics where everyone’s protagonist is named Victor. I think they’re at their best, though, when they all work off a theme; their Happy End book really showed a wealth of ways to tackle that idea, and their new book How to Love shows a really varied group of attacks on just that.
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