Pittsburgh
by Frank Santoro
OK, all you comics aficionados and connoisseurs exhausting yourselves searching high and low for a comics work that will push the boundaries of the medium while stunning your senses and remaking your conception(s) of self, for a work that you can really sink your æsthetic, emotional and intellectual teeth into – you have reached quest’s end… almost. Frank Santoro’s Pittsburgh is a 224 page, beautifully printed and bound (by master printers in Latvia), full color (and what color!) hardcover published by Éditions çà et là in Paris, France (et, oui, c’est en français*). This book is comics like you’ve never seen them before. Each spread in this work is a fully realized composition in-and-of-itself, and each is then carefully woven into a tapestric, non-linear narrative that manifests an intuitive mimesis of the emotional states triggered by memories, and – crucially – by the memories of others as they are shared and represented in turn, some of which are being recalled and recreated from second- and third-hand sources, showing how memories of others memories, and of yet others’ memories, are all located in adjoining spaces in one’s own memory and when recalled come alive together in recreating and representing our subjective reality, aka life as we live it. This is painting/drawing as comics as drawing/painting, a singular work, years in the making and a lifetime in the gestating. Will there be an English language edition? Yes, certainly, but when, we do not know, and it is hard to imagine any edition surpassing this one in its production values.
*(Translation: and, yes, this book is in French [not English])
retail price – €28.00 copacetic price – $32.75
The Weaver Festival Phenomenon
by Ron Rege
The new Ron Rege, Jr. has arrived! The Weaver Festival Phenomenon is a 64 page, full color, limited-edition hardcover graphic novella that shares a story of love, loss, recovery and the uncanny strangeness of being, in the inimitable Rege fashion. The emotional volume is turned up to ten, and even silent, still moments are fraught with the sense of potential energies on the verge of kinetic conversion. Life in the Rege-verse is lived in a state of constant becoming.
retail price – $20.00 copacetic price – $15.75
Love and Rockets: Volume IV #5
by Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez
It’s here! Concluding chapter to the Maggie and Hopey reunion saga! Flashbacks! More mediated multi-generational meta-fictional family saga! ‘Nuff said.
retail price – $4.99 copacetic price – $4.44
Grip #1
by Lale Westvind
Lale Westvind’s latest – her first work done in collaboration with the fine folks at Perfectly Acceptable Press in Chicago – is a wow! An amazing 68-page risograph extravaganza – with a 3-color, screen-printed cover – Grip is a pantomime graphic novel, of which this is the first part. One work at a time, Westvind has been painstakingly developing a unique, personal and highly effective cartoon language, and Grip is a particularly outstanding instance. Perceptions, emotions, fantasies and realities bend and blur and merge in Westvind’s accomplished hands. Taken together, it’s all about the ways in which we “get a grip.” This is an edition of 600 copies. Don’t miss it!
retail price – $25.00 copacetic price – $23.75
Poochytown
by Jim Woodring
Another impeccably surreal pantomime graphic novel from the unparalleled pen of Jim Woodring that takes us once again to the uncanny world of Frank, Fran, Weathercraft and the Congress of the Animals. Written, illustrated and designed by Woodring, this hardcover edition of Poochytown is a sensual delight, while the work it transmits is an enlightening entertainment.
retail price – $19.99 copacetic price – $17.75
Copra: Round Five
by Michel Fiffe
Finally! Round Five collects issues 26 through 31 of Michel Fiffe’s epic revisioning of the superhero team. NOTE: We simultaneously received a restock of all four prior collections. So, any latecomers to the Copra saga can now start at the beginning and take it from there (while supplies last!).
NoBrow #10
edited by Sam Arthur & Alex Spiro
NoBrow is back! Volume 10 is subtitled Studio Dreams, and does double duty in also celebrating the publisher’s tenth anniversary. An international assemblage of 70 artists have delivered up their dreams, and they are all sumptuously printed here in full color, oversize, double page spreads in the trademarked NoBrow fashion. Make sure to take a look when you’re in the shop!
retail price – $24.00 copacetic price – $21.75
Inside Moebius, Part 2
by Moebius
Another 250+ pages of full color meta-Moebius comics as he continues his self-examination through comics. First time in English!
retail price – $39.95 copacetic price – $33.75
The Hookah Girl, and Other True Stories
by Marguerite Dabaie
The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories collects 17 comics anecdotes relating to the life and thought of its author, a nus-nus (you’ll learn what that is once you’ve read “The Stealth Arab”) Palestinian-American Woman who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. Family, culture, history and identity are at the core of this engaging work, which is concisely written, smartly laid out and well drawn in a variety of modes and styles, that provide a refreshing diversity. Readers will emerge from this alluringly priced collection with a broader understanding and deeper appreciation of Palestinian culture and, especially, the Palestinian-American experience. Check it out!
retail price – $6.95 copacetic price – $6.75
2001
by Blaise Larmee
2001 is a graphic novel that questions the validity of the form and probes its claims to narrative cohesion by breaking down the form of comics representation into its component parts of line and color, text, figuration, perspective. The methods of presentation are unpacked: printing, scanning, copying, screen vs. page. The question of authorship is explored through the intermingling of found objects, found texts, found images, screen shots, image searches. Other aims adhere to these formal concerns. Most obviously is the question of how can the experience of self be most effectively communicated in our current historical moment, and in which of the modes do these visual representations of experience most successfully cohere. Ultimately, cultural norms and their relation to identity are interrogated: when is a child an adult? can an adult simultaneously be a child? Can a parent also be a peer? All these answers are expected to be supplied by readers themselves. The book is intended to provide a framework that facilitates a receptive state of mind. Finally, 2001 constitutes a diffusion of consciousness at the intersection of technology and pharmacology.
retail price – $24.95 copacetic price – $21.75
Calypso
by David Sedaris
The new David Sedaris collection is here. Calypso is yet another compendium of essays (21 by our count) filled with his trademarked wit and wisdom. We will say that the wit has a distinct bittersweet flavor this time around, but is no less enjoyable a read because of it.
retail price – $28.00 copacetic price – $23.75
Barracoon
by Zora Neal Hurston
We’d heard tell that Hurston had something like this in her unpublished papers. Now, at last, 90 years after these notes were first set down on paper, Hurston scholar, Deborah G. Plant has assembled them into this volume. Barracoon is, as it’s subtitle states, the story of the last “black cargo.” We’ll let the jacket notes take it from here: In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Plateau, Alabama, to visit eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis, a survivor of the Clotilda, the last slaver known to have made the transatlantic journey. Illegally brought to the United States, Cudjo was enslaved fifty years after the slave trade was outlawed. At the time, Cudjo was the only person alive who could recount this integral part of the nation’s history. As a cultural anthropologist, Hurston was eager to hear about these experiences firsthand. But the reticent elder didn’t always speak when she came to visit. Sometimes he would tend his garden, repair his fence, or appear lost in his thoughts. Hurston persisted, though, and during an intense three-month period, she and Cudjo communed over her gifts of peaches and watermelon and gradually Cudjo, a poetic storyteller, began to share heartrending memories of his childhood in Africa; the attack by female warriors who slaughtered his townspeople; the terrors of being captured and held in the barracoons of Ouidah for selection by American traders; the harrowing ordeal of the Middle Passage aboard the Clotilda as “cargo” with more than one hundred other souls; the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War; and finally his role in the founding of Africatown.
retail price – $24.99 copacetic price – $22.22