Comic and Comic Art: Home

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Copiously illustrated, comprehensive encyclopedia of all the great daily and Sunday newspaper comics and their creators. This spectacular volume, edited by a highly respected international authority, presents the evolution and history of the comics and features all of America's favorite strips: Blondie, Peanuts, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Beetle Bailey, and many more. 64 pages of color comics and 300 black-and-white strips.

Guest editor Chris Ware and series editor Anne Elizabeth Moore have sought out the best stories to create this cutting-edge collection. Contributors include Lynda Barry, R. and Aline Crumb, Kim Deitch, Gilbert Hernandez, Seth, and Art Spiegelman.