George Grosz (1893–1959) was a German fine artist, cartoonist, and teacher who drew from pop culture, was active in the Dada and New Objectivist movements, and was an influence for artists like Ben Shahn. (His antiwar painting, Eclipse from the Sun, would inspire Vietnam protesters.) In this graphic biography, written and drawn by Fiske, angular art lays Kandinsky-like lines over scenes set in anything-goes, post–World War I Berlin: connecting, emphasizing, tracing movement. Curves evoke the fleshy sex of Grosz’s work. (Fiske channels the exuberance and fascination with line that typified Grosz’s work, and more generally early to mid-century art movements.) Symbolically, Fiske uses two colors—red for Berlin, a slash of Grosz’s lipstick, a flash of tie—and green for the jazz and trains of New York, where Grosz would flee from Nazi Germany. Fiske’s thoughtful Grosz is a far cry from the plodding pedantry of the graphic hagiographies that earnestly clutter library shelves; it’s a work of art in its own right.

This special collection features more than 30 EC classics from the pages of Tales From the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, Shock SuspenStories, Impact, and Crime SuspenStories. Of special note is all of Orlando’s Panic stories, including parodies of Mother Goose, TV commercials, and soap operas.

The early-1960s Gil Jordan adventure ''Ten Thousand Years in Hell'' marks asharp departure from the moody, urban detective thrillers of Jordan's previousadventures: instead it turns into a rollicking, comedic South American prisonescape yarn. ''Boom and Bust'' finds a countryside jaunt turned into an ad hocinvestigation by a spectacular vehicular washout and a suspiciously noisyenclosure. Tillieux's masterful graphic novel series remind the reader why hewas considered one of the top Franco-Belgian cartoonists of the time: of anytime.

In the second (and concluding) volume, Nanami had sworn to never see her granddaughter, Aoba, again. A despairing Kiriya had rejected his father, Tokio. Yet now both are traveling with Tokio to Engaru, where Aoba has slept and dreamt of the island of Barbara for seven years. The poltergeist phenomena becomes more intense. Can the dreamer become the dreamed, and the dreamed the dreamer?

Michael Dormer is synonymous with the California surf counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the first-ever retrospective of the artist, culled from his own archives. It collects all of his character Hot Curl's comic strips for the magazine SurfToons, his designs for his TV show, a vast selection of his fine art, and other surprises.

In 1656, Diego Velázquez, leading figure in the Spanish Golden Age of painting, created one of the most enigmatic works in the history of art: Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting). This graphic novel, written and drawn by two of Spain’s most sophisticated comics creators, examines its legacy as one of the first paintings to explore the relationship among the viewer, reality, and unreality. (It guest stars Cano, Salvador Dalí, Zurbarán, and many others.) Olivares’s art moves from clear line to expressionistic; from pen nib to brush stokes; from one color palette to another, as The Ladies-in-Waiting uses fiction to explore the ties among artists and patrons, the past and the present, institutions and audiences, creators and creativity.

Unreal City contains five highly charged stories about relationships: “Echoes into Eternity,” “Evelyn Dalton-Hoyt,” “Emordana,” “The Yellowknife Retrospective,” and “Objet d’Art.” The stories address gender, narcissism, marriage, subjectivity, objectification, and the thin line that divides love from hate. Bryant’s characters sometimes feel like they are navigating their way through the darkness in an attempt to make sense of love, sex, art, and life. Existential and elliptical, the stories play beautifully against Bryant’s precise and fully-realized artwork, which echoes such masters as Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes. In Unreal City, characters cannot walk into a room without their world turning inside out. Readers will be similarly upended by the discovery of this major new talent.

Paris, 1950s. In this graphic novel adaptation, Nestor Burma’s past comes knocking when Bélita, a young woman, leads him to the Salpêtrière hospital, where he discovers the recently deceased Abel Benoît, an old buddy from his anarchist days. While Burma has chosen to move onto the (more or less) straight and narrow as a private eye, his friend had stayed on the other side of the law as a counterfeiter and worse, until his own past caught up with him — lethally. So now it’s up to Malet to avenge his friend, and hopefully unravel a mystery whose roots run far and deep back into the past...

Poppies of Iraq is Brigitte Findakly s nuanced tender chronicle of her relationship with her homeland Iraq, co-written and drawn by her husband, the acclaimed cartoonist Lewis Trondheim. In spare and elegant detail, they share memories of her middle class childhood touching on cultural practices, the education system, Saddam Hussein s state control, and her family s history as Orthodox Christians in the arab world. Poppies of Iraq is intimate and wide-ranging; the story of how one can become separated from one s homeland and still feel intimately connected yet ultimately estranged. Signs of an oppressive regime permeate a seemingly normal life: magazines arrive edited by customs; the color red is banned after the execution of General Kassim; Baathist militiamen are publicly hanged and school kids are bussed past them to bear witness. As conditions in Mosul worsen over her childhood, Brigitte s father is always hopeful that life in Iraq will return to being secular and prosperous. The family eventually feels compelled to move to Paris, however, where Brigitte finds herself not quite belonging to either culture. Trondheim brings to life Findakly s memories to create a poignant family portrait that covers loss, tragedy, love, and the loneliness of exile.

The Customer is Always Wrong is the continuing saga of a young naive artist working in a restaurant of drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a scuzzy, low-rent warzone and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the sleaze-ball characters that sur- round her into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Mimi s life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not. Told in the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond s storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic novel. She drops readers right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for the addicts and alcoholics surrounding her while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.

The most anticipated issue to date of Seth s iconic comics digest, Palookaville 23 marks the culmination of twenty years of serialization: here, Clyde Fans comes to a conclusion. In this final chapter, we return to Simon Matchcard and the year 1957 exactly where we left off at the end of the first Clyde Fans volume. After his disastrous attempt at sales in the city of Dominion, we witness the out of body experience and ecstatic vision that sets Simon on his path of lonely isolation in the years to come. But of course that s not all an issue of Palookaville always feels a bit like coming home a comforting structure that promises new surprises and updates on old favourites. The next instalment in Seth s memoir, Nothing Lasts, follows him from late childhood to his high school years, from innocent crushes to adolescent brooding, all told with what has become Seth s signature anecdotal approach to autobiography. Readers will also be privy to highlights of Seth s exquisite fine-art practice paintings and drawings from two recent gallery exhibitions which transport us back to an era where style was snappier, moldings more ornate. As always, the three-part digest is care- fully designed by Seth in a call back to classic 1940s textural book design. From one of Canada s greatest artists, Palookaville 23 offers closure, while evoking excitement about what s to come.