As its point of departure, Funny Cuts takes, as its point of departure, Pop art's revolutionary referencing of comics and concludes with the most current trends in contemporary art, reflecting in many diverse ways its dialogue with the commercial and trivial picture worlds of comics and cartoons. Pop art artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were ground-breaking in their provocative confrontation with high and low art using motifs and references from popular comics. In the 1970s, American comics dealt with taboo subjects like sexuality and violence--here, for the first time, the subversive potential and the psychological content of comic worlds were used creatively in in fine art. Within the context of the punk movement, Raymond Pettibon and Mike Kelley were inspired by comics through wall-length drawings that made use of the narrative element of comics on the border between visual art and literature. And internationally today, artists question political and social realities and their own identity through the mythological potential of comics and animations. Presented here are numerous images from roughly 100 artists that visually demonstrate the various ways in which comics have become a form of high art.

Raymond Pettibon is one of the most distinctive and highly regarded American artists of his generation. In the thousands of drawings he has produced over the last two decades, Pettibon stakes out a thematic territory that combines the bright, shiny world of American mass culture with its darkly complex undertows. Pettibon's imagery largely derives from the world of cartoons and popular culture: surfers, trains, baseball players, and cartoon characters. His prolific skill lies in his ability to make powerful and poetic associations between word and image. An avid reader, he isolates a phrase or word and inserts it into his drawing, not as a commentary but as an active graphic element, often written in capitals like a caption to the image. His works range in tone from the polemical to the confessional and introspective and explore the extremes of the human condition from the abject to the sublime. Pettibon's work was originally produced for the attention of his friends-fellow artists and musicians in the punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time he combined painting, songwriting, performing, and video making for bands like Sonic Youth, Minutemen, and Black Flag. Today his works are included in the permanent collections of public galleries throughout the world, and have been shown in many solo exhibitions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM…Nozome and Nieno’s catalogs are chock-full of handy, fantastical items: Just-What-I-Need Vending Machines, Body Clock Pills, and Voice Changer Dials, among many others. However, the despair these products can bring is very real, too. Why is this mysterious duo collecting despair? What do this strange girl and her shadowy partner have in store for their unsuspecting customers…?

This 180-page, full-colour story affords Clowes the opportunity to draw some of the most exuberant and breathtaking pages of his life, and to tell his most suspenseful, surprising and affecting story yet. The story opens in 2012, when Jack Barlow returns home to find Patience, his pregnant girlfriend, murdered. Patience is an indescribable psychedelic science-fiction love story, veering with uncanny precision from violent destruction to deeply personal tenderness in a way that is both quintessentially ‘Clowesian’, and utterly unique in the author’s body of work. We meet him next in 2029, still haunted by the murder. He hears of a guy who thinks he’s invented a device that enables time travel. On the next page Jack is in 2006, watching Patience on her dates with boys. Is one of them the killer?

A Vagrant returns with all-new sidesplitting comics that showcase her irreverent love of history, pop culture and literature. Collected from her wildly popular website, readers will guffaw over 'Strong Female Characters', the wicked yet chivalrous Black Prince, 'Straw Feminists in the Closet' and a disgruntled Heathcliff. Wonder Woman! Hunks! Great men and women of history! Step aside – Kate Beaton is coming for you. The author of the smash hit Hark! Delight in what the internet has long known - Beaton's humour is as sharp and dangerous as a velocipedestrienne, so watch out!

John Caldigate, a young gentleman, gets into debt gambling and decides to try his luck in the gold fields of New South Wales. On the outward journey, he promises to marry Mrs Smith, a divorced actress who is travelling in the same ship. Returning home a rich man, John marries Hester, the sweetheart he left behind. England, 1873. Soon, Mrs Smith also returns from Australia, penniless, and claims that she is already his wife. Inspired by Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate, Dispossession embeds the reader in a uniquely wrought experience of the mid-nineteenth century, including the first ever appearance of the Aboriginal Wiradjuri language in a graphic novel. Taking unique advantage of the graphic form to conjure the material world of the Victorian era in a glittering waltz of intense colour and deep shadow, Dispossession is a virtuoso and intensely affecting graphic novel by a master visual storyteller.

In his daily cartoon for the Guardian and his long-running strip, IF, in the same paper, Steve Bell has proved that he is without equal in Britain as political cartoonist. Savage, funny, rude, constantly transgressing the rules of good taste, and of course beautifully drawn his cartoons are hated by those they lampoon and loved by everyone who likes to see authority subverted. In his new collection he covers the years of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, 2010-2015, fertile ground for Bell’s genius. From George Osborne in his bondage gear, the ‘Quiet Man’ zombie Ian Duncan Smith, Cable the elephant, Cameron the talking condom and Clegg the butler to Kipling and the IF penguins, every awful moment of the coalition years is re-run before your eyes … but Steve Bell style: ‘outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really)’ to quote John Pilger.