Before Jules Verne's flying machines and H. G. Wells's spaceships, there was Frank Reade, globe-trotting inventor and original steampunk hero. Frank Reade magazines were the world's first science fiction periodicals, enthralling millions of readers with tales of fantastic inventions and adventures. Now many of the spectacular images from the vintage dime novel series are being reprinted for the first time in more than a century, along with excerpts from the action-packed stories. In Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, this lost legacy of Americana is interwoven with a biography of the real Reade family-inventors and explorers who traveled the world with their helicopter airships, submarines, and robots, and who encountered figures like Geronimo and Houdini. This epic saga is brought to life in the multimedia style of the authors' previous volume, the critically acclaimed Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel. Frank Reade is part-science fiction, part-alternate history, and entirely exciting!Praise for Frank Reade: A retrofuturist visual feast. -Wall Street Journal A stunning multimedia confection of the highest order that creates a detailed and delightful world. -Publishers Weekly The book's allure owes everything to its deadpan prose and hundreds of perfectly faked photos and graphics that replicate mass-media and commercial ephemera of the Victorian era-the result of immersive research. -TheAtlantic.com Portland-based Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett are a husband-and-wife team of multimedia artists who have produced a variety of work. . Their new book, Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, is their best work yet. -io9.com

Comics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly ( Pogo), Howard Cruse ( Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker ( Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld ( A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.