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Earlier this week, you may have heard the dogs barking in your neighborhood. Perhaps all of the car alarms went off simultaneously. Perhaps you were listening to the radio, and a strange squeeling noise was heard. Perhaps a bit of dust was dislodged from the ceiling tiles over your cubicle, creating a small rain of particles.
That was me.
Generally, my squeels of joy are at the lower, Stimpson J. Cat, level. Sometimes, I might bounce up and down in my chair if I see something really cool. This week, I saw something so utterly cool and unexpected that my squeel went hypersonic.
Now, regular readers know I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff in my 40+ years on this planet. I love seeking out the strange and cool and unusual, and love sharing it with others. So, what, pray tell, could be so amazingly awesome to cause an uninhibited and automatic reflex that shakes window panes?
Let me enumerate them.
- There’s a Pipi Longstocking book I haven’t read.
- It’s been out of print for thirty years.
- It’s a collection of Pippi Longstocking comics.
- The comics were drawn by the same artist who illustrated the prose novels.
- It’s a full-color hardcover from Drawn+Quarterly.
Pippi Longstocking has been translated into 64 languages. Astrid Lindgren is one of those superheroes of literature, and pretty awesome!
- The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award pays out about $750,000 dollars (SEK 5,000,000) annualy to notable children’s writers, illustrators, and promoters of children’s literature.
- She was the second recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award.
- She will appear on the soon-to-be-redesigned 20 Kroner banknote.
- She has her own amusement park, based on her books.
- In 1978, the Russians named a minor asteriod after her. When announced, she is said to have declared “From now on you can address me [as] Asteroid Lindgren”.
- The first Swedish microsatellite was named for her, and the scientific instruments were named after her characters.
Here’s the info from the Macmillan catalog:
Pippi Moves In
Ingrid Vang Nyman (1916–1959) was a noted children’s book illustrator who worked on more than thirty books, including the original illustrations for the Pippi series.
The comics are re-imaginings of the classic chapter book stories and were originally published in the Swedish magazine Humpty Dumpty in 1957–1959, a decade after the original books. The comics spotlight both Lindgren’s brilliant writing and Vang Nyman’s bold bright colors that seem presciently and eerily modern. The original illustrator for the chapter books, Vang Nyman was an avant-garde champion of the importance of children’s literature who insisted that art in children’s books needed to meet the same aesthetic standards as art in any other medium. Sadly Vang Nyman never achieved international success, and tragically committed suicide in 1959 due to mental health issues, while Lindgren went on to become one of the world’s best-loved writers with more than 145 million books sold worldwide.
Similar to D+Q’s 2005 unearthing of the Tove Jansson’s Moomin comic strip, which has more than 100,000 units in print, these mid-century classics are waiting to be discovered and enjoyed by the world’s legions of Pippi fans, both young and old.
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So, what else is interesting from Macmillan this Fall? Well, they publish a lot of books in a variety of fields, and distribute other publishers as well. So, I scanned through the 900+ titles and pulled all the graphic novels, comics, and manga listed, as well as a few other books which might appeal to your inner geek. I set Papercutz aside, and will give them their own spotlight soon. In the meantime, enjoy these books. They should be available for pre-order from your favorite retailer, or, if you can’t afford it, ask your friendly neighborhood librarian to acquire a copy for the collection!
As always, my secret identity is that of a bookseller, so everything I post here has no connection with my benevolent corporate overlords. Also, everything you see below is from the publisher, and all information is subject to change. My opinions are noted [like this]. But for the most part, I’ll let the catalog copy speak for itself.
Please let us know what catches your eye! Maybe the Beatrix will run some previews here in the coming months!
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Sumo
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Bad Kitty for President
UNCLE MURRAY’S FUN FACTSWhat Are Primaries?Okey-dokey! Questions about politics! Now THIS is something I know about. Let me just put on my special election day hat!So, what is a primary, Uncle Murray?Well, in a primary you vote for a candidate to become a nominee.Huh?It’s easy. See, most elections have at least two political groups that want to be in charge, and these groups are called parties. But before you have an election, each group has to nominate someone they want to represent them, so they hold a primary. How do you pick the right nominee? You hold a primary.Great. So how do we hold a primary?Well, first you gotta pick your delegates.The what?Delegates. Delegates are the people who represent your party’s nominee. So, first you pick your delegates, and then you vote for your nominee, and then the person who gets the most votes gets the most delegates who will then represent him or her at the convention.Convention?Oh, yeah! Those are fun. That’s where all the delegates get together and choose their nominee for the election.So, in other words, a nominee is chosen at a convention by a bunch of delegates who go there to represent the candidate chosen as a primary…Or caucus!Caucus?!!Caucuses are awesome! Instead of primaries, some states have caucuses, which are like big meetings in which a bunchg of people try to convince each other of who would be the best nominee by standing on tables and waving flags and shouting a lot.AAAAARGH!Yeah, like that.That was just way, way, WAY too confusing.Since you all look about as bewildered as I do, kitties, let’s try something else.
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Poor Puppy and Bad Kitty
Summary: Poor, poor puppy. All he wants is to play with his pal Kitty, but she doesn’t seem in the least bit interested. So all he has to play with are…
[These would be considered “hybrid” comics, and they are hilarious!]
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The Odyssey
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A Halloween Treat
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Saint Melissa the Mottled
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New York Drawings
Adrian Tomine’s illustrations and comics have been appearing for more than a decade in the pages (and on the cover) of The New Yorker. Instantly recognizable for their deceptively simple and evocative style, these images have garnered the attention of The New Yorker’s readership and the approbation of such venerable institutions as the Art Directors Club and American Illustration.
New York Drawings is a loving homage to the city that Tomine, a West Coast transplant, has called home for the past seven years. This lavish, beautifully designed volume collects every cover, comic, and illustration that he has produced for The New Yorker to date, along with an assortment of other rare and uncollected illustrations and sketches inspired by the city. Complete with notes and annotations by the author, New York Drawings will also feature a new introductory comic focusing on Tomine’s experiences as a New York illustrator.
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The Freddie Stories
Author Bio: Lynda Barry was born in Wisconsin in 1956, and later studied at Evergreen State College. She has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found they are very much alike.
Summary: The Freddie Stories traces a year in the life of Freddie, the youngest member of the dysfunctional Mullen family. These four-panel entries—each representing an episode in the life of Freddie—bring to life adolescence, pimples and all. No matter what happens, it all seems to go wrong for Freddie—he’s set up as an arsonist, mercilessly teased in school, and bossed around by classmates. With consummate skill, Lynda Barry writes about the cruelty of children at this most vulnerable age when the friends they make and the paths they choose can forever change their lives. In The Freddie Stories every word of dialogue, every piece of narration, and every dark line evokes adolescent angst. These short, moving stories are collected from Barry’s beloved Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which was serialized across North America for two decades. Re-packaged here with a brand-new introduction from Lynda Barry, The Freddie Stories is an adult tale about just how hard it is to be a teenager, and it’s classic Barry work—poignant, insightful, and true.
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Moominvalley Turns Jungle
Author Bio: Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki, Finland, and is the Hans Christian Andersen Award–winning author, cartoonist, painter, and creator of the Moomintrolls. The Moomins are loved around the world, have been on television, and can be found in their own museum and theme park in Finland.
Summary: A crate filled with tropical seeds washes ashore, and when Moominmamma plants the seeds, a lush rainforest erupts in Moominvalley. When Stinky liberates some exotic animals from the zoo, chaos ensues, and the Moomins are forced to prove once and for all whether or not they’re related to hippopotamuses.
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Moomin’s Winter Follies
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The Wayside
Summary: Julie Morstad has long excelled at illustration, often working in tandem with children’s writers, but in The Wayside, the storytelling potential of her fantastical pictures is fully realized. Within these pages Morstad’s worlds unite, maintaining their ethereal, almost fairy-tale beauty and yet also offering a loose overarching synthesis through thematic and visual commonalities.
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Susceptible
Summary: Geneviève Castrée has long been beloved for her mini-comics, comics, visual art, and music. There is a unique quality to all of her artistic endeavors—quiet, serene, depressing. Castrée’s keen eye for detail and her fearless ability to probe the depths of her troubled past make Susceptible a stirring portrait of an artist coming into her own.
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Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is an eloquent appreciation of the time the author shared with his fiancée, Cheryl Weaver. The story is told using artifacts of the couple’s life together, including early love notes, simple and poetic postcards, tales of their travels in written and comics form, journal entries, and drawings done in the hospital in her final days. It concludes with a beautifully rendered account of Weaver’s memorial that Glen David Gold, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called “16 panels of beauty and grace.” Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is a deeply personal romance, and a universal reminder of our mortality and the significance of the relationships we build.
Originally published as a limited edition in 2006, this collection includes a new afterword written by Nilsen.
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Aya: Love in Yop City
The artist Clément Oubrerie was born in Paris in 1966 and has illustrated more than forty children’s books.
While the stories found in Aya: Love in Yop City maintain their familiar tone, quick pace, and joyfulness, we see Aya and her friends beginning to make serious decisions about their future. When a professor tries to take advantage of Aya, her plans to become a doctor are seriously shaken, and she vows to take revenge on the lecherous man. With a little help from the tight-knit community of Yopougon though, Aya comes through these trials stronger than ever.
This second volume of the complete Aya includes unique appendices—recipes, guides to understanding Ivorian slang, street sketches, and concluding remarks from Marguerite Abouet explaining history and social milieu. Inspired by Abouet’s childhood, the series has received praise for offering relief from the disaster-struck focus of most stories set in Africa. Aya is the winner of the Best First Album Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival; was nominated for the YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels list; and was included on “best of” lists from The Washington Post, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.
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Cave~In
In this wordless classic, special emphasis is placed on the power of gesture. Minimalism allows Ralph to be playful with form—Cave~In’s use of color and crosshatching speaks much more clearly to narrative shifts than is possible in a more conventional text, and the use of different panel shapes and sizes transform the rhythm and pacing of the story. Cave~In is an allages adventure story, jam-packed with monsters, bats, and all manner of unimaginable underground mystery.
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Nipper 1967-1968
Things are still fun, innocent, and wholesome in the suburbs: there’s road hockey in the streets, boys have their friends over for sleepovers, and kids play freely on their own outside, with little or no parental supervision. The pantomime strip does reference contemporary life, however, with the entire Wright family making an excursion to downtown Montreal for the 1967 World’s Fair. As always, Wright’s stellar draftsmanship, fond eye for detail, and brilliant sense of comic timing shines throughout this volume of the Nipper series.
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Raiders! : The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
Author Bio: ALAN EISENSTOCK is the author of ten books, including In Stitches, with Dr. Anthony Youn, Cancer on $5 a Day with Robert Schimmel, The Kindergarten Wars,Ten on Sunday and Sports Talk. ERIC ZALA and CHRIS STROMPOLOS are at it again, working together on a new independent film project. Chris lives in L.A. and Eric lives in Mississippi.
And they did it. Every shot, every line of dialogue, every stunt.
They borrowed and collected costumes, convinced neighborhood kids to wear grass skirts and play natives, cast a fifteen-year-old as Indy’s love interest, rounded up seven thousand snakes (sort of), built the Ark, the Idol, the huge boulder, found a desert in Mississippi, and melted the bad guys’ faces off.
It took eight years.
Along the way, Chris had his first kiss (on camera), they nearly burned down the house and incinerated Eric, lived through parents getting divorced and remarried, and watched their friendship disintegrate.
Raiders! is the incredible true story of Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos, how they realized their impossible dream of remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark, and how their friendship survived all challenges, from the building of a six-foot round fiberglass boulder to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
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The Clockwork Sky, Volume One
Meanwhile, Sally Peppers, Croach’s headstrong and brilliant niece, dreams of a life beyond manners and marriageability. When she escapes her overbearing governess on a motorized velocipede and joins a no-rules road rally through the slums, Croach sends Sky to bring her back, preferably alive.
Together, the impulsive Sally and the naive Sky crash headlong into a mystery involving rogue automatons prowling the sewers, children disappearing without a trace, and a dark secret so big it could overturn all of London. But the biggest mystery of all is why Sky is the first robot who can dream….
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Only Superhuman
Author Bio: CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT has had multiple works of short fiction published inAnalog Science Fiction and Fact as well as the online magazines DayBreak andAlternative Coordinates, and has written critically acclaimed novels based on Star Trek, Spider-Man, and X-Men, all of them with a hard science slant. Only Superhumanis his first original novel. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Summary: 2107 AD: A generation ago, Earth and the cislunar colonies banned genetic and cybernetic modifications. But out in the Asteroid Belt, anything goes. Dozens of flourishing space habitats are spawning exotic new societies and strange new varieties of humans. It’s a volatile situation that threatens the peace and stability of the entire solar system.
Only Superhuman is a rollicking hard-sf adventure set in a complex and fascinating future.
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Dracula Everlasting Vol. 2
Author Bio: Nunzio DeFilippis & Christina Weir are a husband and wife writing team who have worked in television on HBO’s Arli$$ and Disney’s Kim Possible. As veteran comic book writers, they have written such series as New Mutants and New X-Men, and numerous manga and graphic novels. They live in Southern California.
Rhea Silvan is a manga artist whose works include InVisible, Winter Demon volume 4, and contributions to Watson Guptill’s “How To Draw” series.
Nicholas Harker discovered he is heir to the legacy of an ancestor he never knew he had: Dracula. Under his progenitor’s evil influence, Nichalas has begun, with a vast fortune at his disposal, to rebuild Castle Dracula in the outskirts of Boston, leaving behind a wake of corpses.
While the love of Jill Hawthorne seems to be the only thing that weakens Dracula’s hold over Nicholas, Mason Renfield realizes he must remove her from the picture, in order to usher in the full reemergence of his dark lord. But Jill’s new friend, the fierywiccan Cate, has plans of her own—to destroy Nicholas and avenge her mother’s death.
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Dance in the Vampire Bund Vol. 13
Author Bio: Nozomu Tamaki, is the writer/artist of Dance in the Vampire Bund and the artist ofAngel Para Bellum.
Summary: Mina Tepes, the princess of the ancient covenant and ruler of all vampires, wants change. Using the vast wealth of the Tepes line, she has paid off the entire gross national debt of Japan and in so doing, gained the authority to create a special district off the coast of Japan that is a haven for vampires from all over the world.
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Girl Friends: The Complete Collection 1
Author Bio: Morinaga Milk is a much-lauded yuri manga artist whose works have been published in Comic High, Comic Yuri Hime and other manga magazines in Japan.
Summary: When it comes to grades, bookish high school student Mariko Kumakura is at the top of her class. Socially, however, she is shy and lonely, typically eating lunch by herself. Enter the charismatic and beautiful Akko Oohashi, whose goal is to befriend Mariko and burst her out of her introverted shell.
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Jack the Ripper: Hell Blade Vol. 2
Author Bio: Jetae Yoo is a Korean artist who previously worked on The Breaker and is now the author and artist of Jack the Ripper: Hell Blade.
Summary: For fans of Hellsing and Berserk comes an all new ultra-violent supernatural manga series about history’s most famous slasher, with a twist.
In the ongoing battle between between demons and demonslayer, the famed Sherlock Holmes lends Jack his help, while genuis scientist Nikola Tesla, and the superhuman Mr. Hyde join the fray.
With bold and graphic artwork in the vein of the classic vampire hunter manga series Hellsing, Jack the Ripper: Hellblade is a shocking and fascinating reimagining of the world’s most famous serial killer.
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Venus Versus Virus Omnibus 3
Author Bio: Atsushi Suzumi is the author of Haridama Magic Cram School. She lives in Ehime Prefecture, Japan.
Summary: When Sumire Takahana joined Venus Vanguard to hunt monsters known as “Viruses,” she never knew it would come to this. The ultimate battle between the crew of Venus Vanguard and their deadly Enemy is now at full tilt. The lives of Sumire and Lucia hang in the balance—not to mention the very fate of the world!
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Witch Hunter Vol. 3-4
Author Bio: Cho Jung-Man, the author/artist of Witch Hunter, lives in Korea.
In a world where witches have declared war against humanity, the surviving human population has gathered specialists with the power to hunt and destroy witches.
Tasha Godspell, also known as the “Magic Marksman,” is one of the best Witch Hunters there is. Along with his sword-wielding Jack-o’-Lantern partner known as Halloween, Tasha puts his magical training and weaponry to good use, in his constant battles against witches. And yet, he cannot bring himself to fully hate the very witches he is tasked to destroy.
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Alice in the Country of Clover: Cheshire Cat Waltz Vol. 3
Author Bio: QuinRose is a Japanese game developer who created the Alice franchise of video games, which spun-off into novels, manga, and an anime feature film.
His name is Boris, and despite his human form and piercings and tattoos, he is not your typical punk teenager. For he is the Cheshire Cat, complete with cat ears and a tail, and a penchant for riddles. Boris is in madly love with Alice, and Alice is vulnerable and lonely. But will she fall for the Cheshire Cat?
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Angel Para Bellum Vol. 2
Author Bio: Nozomu Tamaki, the writer/artist of Dance in the Vampire Bund, lives in Tokyo, Japan.
Summary: A war between heaven and hell is brewing and only a young man named Mitsuru holds the key to prevent it. Yet Mitsuru is unaware of his secret birthright and his role in the battle between angels and demons. All he knows is that his family is dead and Kyrie, the kindly woman who cared for him in his time of mourning, is not what she seems. Now, with demon attackers seeking to destroy him at every turn, his only protection are two beautiful gun-wielding angels who kick ass like nobody’s business.
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Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends, vol. 1
Itachi is a Japanese manga artist who is best known for Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends
Realizing that they have no hope of a normal social life, the two rejects decide to form a group called “The Neighbor’s Club” in order to make friends and maybe even learn a thing or two about social skills. As luck would have it, five new members join the club who are more socially awkward than they are. Will these quirky misfits ever make normal friends, or are they all doomed to social failure?
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Young Miss Holmes Casebook 3-4
Author Bio: Kaoru Shintani is an award-winning Japanese manga artist/author whose best-known works include Area-88 and Cleopatra DC.
Summary: Christie Holmes is a prodigy. At ten years old, she’s as familiar with the sciences and classics as any older student at Cambridge or Oxford. And her facility with logic is reminiscent of her uncle, the eminent Sherlock Holmes himself. So, what’s a brilliant young girl to do when her parents are away in India, leaving her behind in the care of maids and servants? Solve mysteries, of course. [Oh, that reminds me, there’s a new Ottoline book I haven’t read yet.]
Christie’s cases in this book include:
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
The Memories of Nora
The Five Orange Pips
Red-Headed League
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A Certain Scientific Railgun Vol. 6
Author Bio: Kazuma Kamachi is a Japanese writer of light novels and manga. He is best known for A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun.
Summary: Welcome to a world where mysticism and science collide, and supernatural powers are derived from either science or religion. At the heart of this world is Academy City, an advanced metropolis whose population is comprised mostly of students. The majority of students are enrolled in the city’s “Power Curriculum Program,” where they must learn to master their latent psychic powers. Out of several million students, only seven are deemed powerful enough to have Level 5 status.
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Amazing Agent Luna Vol. 8
Author Bio: NUNZIO DEFILIPPIS & CHRISTINA WEIR are a husband and wife writing team who have worked in television on HBO’s Arli$$ and Disney’s Kim Possible. Veteran comic book writers, they have written such series as New Mutants and New X-Men,and numerous manga and graphic novels. Their pirate manga adventure, Destiny’s Hand, has been nominated for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens List, 2011. They live in Southern California. www.weirdefilippis.com
As Luna delves deeper into the shadowy organization known as Knightfall, she will discover who her true friends are…but will she be seduced by the “dark side”?
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Dance in the Vampire Bund Omnibus 1
Author Bio: Nozomu Tamaki, is the writer/artist of Dance in the Vampire Bund and the artist ofAngel Para Bellum.
After millennia in hiding, Mina Tepes, the princess of the ancient covenant and ruler of all vampires, wants change. Using the vast wealth of the Tepes line, she has paid off the entire gross national debt of Japan and gained the authority to create a “special district” off the coast of Japan that will become the future haven for vampires from all over the world!
Now, on the eve of the landmark press conference announcing the existence of vampires to the world, terrorists and rival factions are plotting to assassinate Mina Tepes. With her loyal werewolf bodyguard, Akira, at her side, will the princess of vampires survive long enough to see her dream realized?
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Mayo Chiki! Vol. 1 (2nd Edition)
Author Bio: Hajime Asano is an author of light novels whose best known work, Mayo Chiki!, has been adapted into a hit manga series and an anime.
Summary: First Kashimashi, then Toradora!—now Mayo Chiki!
A fateful visit to the school bathroom turns Kinjiro’s world upside down, as he discovers the dashing and popular Konoe Subaru is actually a girl!? What’s worse, the principal’s cruel and domineering daughter, Kanade Suzutsuki, has every reason to keep this secret from leaking out, and makes it her life’s work to torment Kinjiro, while attempting to cure his gynophobia.
Is Kanade simply sadistic or does she really want to help Kinjiro overcome his fears? It makes no difference to poor Kinjiro, because his life has just become a living hell.
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Girl Friends: The Complete Collection 2
Author Bio: Morinaga Milk is a much-lauded yuri manga artist whose works have been published in Comic High, Comic Yuri Hime and other manga magazines in Japan.
Summary: Super-cute and popular high school girl Akko Oohashi has transformed her new friend Mariko in more ways than one. Not only has she inducted Mariko into a circle of new friends and helped her overcome her shyness and sense of isolation, but both girls have awakened feelings they never knew they had.
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Gunslinger Girl Omnibus 6
Author Bio: Yu Aida is best known as the writer and artist of Gunslinger Girl, and resides in Tokyo, Japan.
Summary: The Gunslinger Girl saga comes to a heart-pounding conclusion as the scattered factions of the Five Republics movement have united together under the leadership of the terrorist Dante. Utilizing a cache of stolen cruise missles, the Padanian terrorists unleash a series of devistating attacks across the Italian Peninsula and seize control of the New Turin Nuclear Plant. Their demands are simple: shut down the Social Welfare Agency or die.
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I Don’t Like You At All, Big Brother!! Vol. 3-4
Author Bio: Kusano Kouichi, is the author/artist of I Don’t Like You At All, Big Brother!!
Summary: The hilarity continues as Takanashi Nao’s massive crush on her adoptive older brother Shuusuke grows. But her best friend Iroha will not be overshadowed, as she desperately competes for Shuusuke’s affection in an ever-escalating battle.
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Jack the Ripper: Hell Blade Vol. 3
Author Bio: Jetae Yoo is a Korean artist who previously worked on The Breaker and is now the author and artist of Jack the Ripper: Hell Blade.
Summary: Jack the Ripper is not what he seems—but the truth may be more terrible than anyone imagined.
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Toradora! Vol. 5
Author Bio: Yuyuko Takemiya is a Japanese writer of light novels. She is the author ofWatashitachi no Tamura-Kun.
Summary: Ryuji Takasu thought that his ill-fated luck had turned around now that he was in Junior High sitting next to the girl of his dreams, Minori Kushieda. Ryuji was wrong; for after unwittingly crossing the most feared and fearsome girl in school, Taiga Aisaku, everything went off the deep end!
A must-have for fans of over-the-top high school comedies like School Rumble and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
The Toradora! franchise began as a long-running light novel series and spawned a popular manga, as well as a visual novel for the PSP. Its much-loved, off-the-wall characters have made cameo appearances in Japanese video games. A 25-episode Toradora! anime series ran on Japanese TV in 2009 and has been released to much acclaim in a deluxe DVD boxset in North America by anime newcomer NIS America.
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Villain School: Hero in Disguise
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The Wrinkle in Time Quintet (Slipcased Collector’s Edition)
Author Bio: Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) was the author of many acclaimed books for children and adults, including novels, collections of essays, plays, and poetry. Among her children’s books she was perhaps best known for A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal. She was also the author of several books featuring the Austin family, including the Newbery Honor book A Ring of Endless Light.
Summary: After Meg and Charles Wallace Murry and Calvin O’Keefe defeated evil and saved the universe in the Newbery Medal-winning classic A Wrinkle in Time, their adventures didn’t end. The other books in the Wrinkle in Time Quintet take readers to the deep past and distant future, to the far reaches of the galaxy and the inner workings of the human heart. A beautiful hardcover gift edition, complete with gilded pages and a slipcase, brings together the stories of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time for true fans of this iconic series.
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A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel
Author Bio: Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) was the author of many acclaimed books for children. www.madeleinelengle.com
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Legends of Zita the Spacegirl
Author Bio: Ben Hatke’s first graphic novel was Zita the Spacegirl. He has published comics stories in the Flight series as well as Flight Explorer. In addition to writing and drawing comics, he also paints in the naturalist tradition and, occasionally, performs one-man fire shows.
Summary: Ben Hatke brings back our intrepid space heroine for another delightful sci-fi/fantasy adventure. Zita is determined to find her way home to earth, following the events of the first book. But things are never simple, and certainly never easy, in space.
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Adventures in Cartooning: Christmas Special
Author Bio: James Sturm is the cofounder and director of The Center for Cartoon Studies. On the Adventures in Cartooning series, he is joined by Alexis Frederick Frost and A. L. Arnold, both graduates of CCS.
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Broxo
Author Bio: Zack Giallongo was born and raised in Massachusetts, although one half of his family lives in Indiana. Between New England and the Midwest, he’s a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. He currently lives with two cats and enjoys playing the banjo. He also likes cheese, bowling, and writing in the third person.Broxo is his first graphic novel.
Summary: In this wildly entertaining fantasy debut we meet Broxo, the only surviving member of a tribe of barbarians who once occupied a now-desolate mountain. All alone in the world, Broxo spends his time on the mountain hunting and avoiding the man-eating walking dead that periodically drag themselves out of a fetid lake.
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Sailor Twain : Or: The Mermaid in the Hudson
Author Bio: Mark Siegel was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in France. He is the editorial director of First Second and an accomplished writer and illustrator. He is the illustrator of To Dance: A Ballerina’s Graphic Novel, a Robert F. Sibert Award Honor Book, written by his wife, Siena Cherson Siegel; and author and illustrator of the picture book Moving House, published by Roaring Brook Press.
Summary: One hundred years ago. On the foggy Hudson River, a riverboat captain rescues an injured mermaid from the waters of the busiest port in the United States. A wildly popular–and notoriously reclusive–author makes a public debut. A French nobleman seeks a remedy for a curse. As three lives twine together and race to an unexpected collision, the mystery of the Mermaid of the Hudson deepens.
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Tune, Book 1: Vanishing Point
Author Bio: Derek Kirk Kim is the award-winning author of Same Difference, The Eternal Smile(with Gene Luen Yang), and Good As Lily (with Jesse Hamm). He has also contributed to numerous anthologies including Flight (Vol. 1), Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, and Bizarro World. His web-TV series, Mythomania, loosely based onTune, is currently in its first season.
Summary: Simon’s life is going nowhere, fast. He left art school with his career all worked out ahead of time, but …to say it didn’t work out is the understatement of the century. Unemployed and living with his overbearing parents, Simon struggles to keep sight of the lofty goals that once drove him. But it’s hard, even when he reconnects with his old art school crush, Yumi.
Castle: How It Works
Author Bio: David Macaulay received his bachelor of architecture degree from Rhode Island School of Design. In January 1973, Macaulay went to France to work on the first of his twenty-five books, Cathedral. He then constructed a colonial Roman town (City, 1974), erected monuments to the Pharaohs (Pyramid, 1975), dissected the maze of subterranean systems below and essential to every major city (Underground, 1976), built a medieval fortress (Castle, 1977), and dismantled the Empire State Building (Unbuilding, 1980). Macaulay is perhaps best known for The Way Things Work (1988). It was followed by Black and White (1990) for which he won the 1991 Caldecott Medal. A revised edition of The Way Things Work was published in 1998 followed by Building Big, Mosque, and most recently, The Way We Work (2008).
[An amazing illustrator, and, yes, cartoonist. Go read “Black and White”.]
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Legends of Zita the Spacegirl
Terrific! The first volume was great fun, so I’m very happy to see that there’s a sequel coming.
Never thought there would be a second printing of Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow.
Now I can stop scouring eBay for a copy I can afford.
The protagonist of Tune is Andy Go. but that aside I like this line up Definitely looking forward to Aya.