With The Last Vispo Anthology, Fantagraphics spotlights the intersection of art and language in this innovative new collection — without peer in English — that gathers the work of visual poets from around the world into one stunning volume. The alphabet is turned on its head and inside-out and the results culminate in a compilation of daring and surprising verbo-visual gems. The Last Vispo is composed of visual poetry (a portmanteau of the words “visual” and “poetry) from the years 1998 to 2008, during a burst of creative activity fueled by file sharing and e-mail, which made it possible for the vispo community to establish a more heightened and sophisticated dialogue with one another. The collection extends the dialectic between art and literature that began with ancient “shaped text,” medieval pattern poetry, and dada typography, pushing past the concrete poetics of the 1950s and the subsequent mail art movement of the 1980s to its current incarnation. Rather than settle into predictable, unchallenged patterns, this vibrant poetry seizes new tools to expand the body of work that inhabits the borderlands of visual art and poetic language. The Last Vispo features 148 contributors from 23 countries on five continents. It includes 12 essays that illuminate the abundant history and the state of vispo today. The anthology offers a broad amalgam of long-time practitioners and poets new to visual poetry over the last decade, underscoring the longevity and the continued vitality of the art form.

Chris Wright’s Blacklung is unquestionably one of the most impressive graphic novel debuts in recent years, a sweeping, magisterially conceived, visually startling tale of violence, amorality, fortitude, and redemption, one part Melville, one part Peckinpah. Blacklung is a story that lives up to the term graphic novel, that could only exist in sequential pictures — densely textured, highly stylized, delicately and boldly rendered drawings that is, taken together, wholly original. In a night of piratical treachery when an arrogant school teacher is accidentally shanghaied aboard the frigate Hand, his fate becomes inextricably fettered to that of a sardonic gangster. Dependent on one another for survival in their strange and dangerous new home, the two form an unlikely alliance as they alternately elude or confront the thieves and cutthroats that bad luck has made their companions and captors. After an act of terrible violence, the teacher is brought before the ship’s captain and instructed to use his literary skills to aid him in writing his memoirs. He is to serve as scribe for a man who, in his remaining years, has made it his mission to commit as many acts of evil as possible in order to ensure that he meet his dead wife in hell. As the captain’s protected confidant, finding his only comfort in the few books afforded him, the teacher bears witness to monstrous brutality, relentless cruelty, strange wisdom, and a journey of redemption through loss of faith.

Basil Wolverton is one of the greatest, most idiosyncratic talents in comic book history. Though he is best known for his humorous grotesqueries in MAD magazine, it is his science-fiction character Spacehawk that Wolverton fans have most often demanded be collected. The wait is over, as The Complete Spacehawk features every story from Spacehawk’s intergalactic debut in 1940 to his final, Nazi-crushing adventure in 1942.Spacehawk is the closest thing to a colorfully-costumed, conventional action hero Wolverton ever created, yet the strip is infused with Wolverton’s quintessential weirdness: controlled, organic artwork of strangely repulsive aliens and monsters and bizarre planets, and stories of gruesome retribution that bring to mind Wolverton’s peer, Fletcher Hanks. Spacehawk had no secret identity, no fixed base of operations beyond his spaceship, and no sidekicks or love interests. He had but one mission in life: to protect the innocent throughout the Solar System, and to punish the guilty. He was a dark — yet much more visually playful — counterpart to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.The Complete Spacehawk also includes the character’s final and rarely-seen Earthbound adventures. As the U.S. became involved in World War II, Spacehawk returned to 20th Century America to join the United States’ efforts in defeating fascism, which he does by patrolling the Earth’s stratosphere, looking for wrongdoing.

There's a rift in the flock, and everyone is choosing sides! No matter which direction the flock heads in, though, there's trouble around every corner. Itex's 'by-half plan' to reduce the world's population is already in motion, and they have no intention of letting anything - or anyone - stand in their way! While Max and her team are Europe-bound, Fang and his crew head west. Can these bird-kids of a feather survive if they don't flock together?

Already a New York Timesbest-seller, it's two firsts in one for a Big Natebook! The first Sundays-only and first full-colour Big Natecollection both debut in Big Nate All Work and No Play. Enjoy more than two years of Sunday cartoons, portraying the colourful life of Nate Wright. This spunky eleven-year-old holds the school record for detentions and is in little chance of losing that distinction, but that doesn't stop him from dreaming big! He's a self-described genius, a sixth-grade renaissance man, and a full-fledged believer in his future as a cartoonist. Equipped with a No. 2 pencil and the unshakable belief that he is No. 1, Nate fights a daily battle against overzealous teachers, undercooked cafeteria food, and all-around conventionality.

The townspeople of Calico believe in the legend of the Soul Fire - orbs of light dancing through the night sky, believed to be the souls of dead ancestors watching over the town. But when eleven-year-old Fiona Gan comes to town with her dad, she learns the amazing truth: these fireballs are actually the light from lanterns carried by mysterious rabbit-like creatures as they leap across rooftops! Leaping with them is the peculiar street boy Jaden, who rarely speaks and claims to come from the moon. But the games may be coming to an end, because Fi and her dad are not the only newcomers to Calico... when a creepy corporation starts bulldozing the nearby forests, she finds herself uncovering a whole world of secrets, and drawn into Jaden's battle for the soul of a community. Diana Thung's debut Top Shelf graphic novel is a true adventure, rooted in the diverse local traditions of Asian festival culture, with a modern sensibility and a hint of magic.