Top Shelf ’08

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Volume III): Century #1 (of 3)
by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

Beginning In 2008…

The third volume detailing the exploits of Miss Wilhelmina Murray and her extraordinary colleagues, Century, is a 216-page epic spanning almost a hundred years. Divided into three 72-page chapters — each a self-contained narrative to avoid frustrating cliff-hanger delays between episodes — this monumental tale takes place in three distinct eras, building to an apocalyptic conclusion occurring in our own current twenty-first century.

Dogs Day End
Brian Wood and Nikki Cooke

Following up on the time-honored adage “you can’t go home again”, Dogs Day End details the personal journey of 30-year-old Andrew Maguire, pulled back to the small upstate hometown of his childhood by his mother as she enters the final stages of cancer. Once back, he revisits the demons of his youth: his estranged father, resentful ex-buddies, and his jilted high school sweetheart. As the twin pressures of the past and the present threaten to bury him, Andrew makes an all-or-nothing decision to come to terms with it all.

Dogs Day End reads like an indie film on paper, reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Garden State, but with the edge of Closer and Affliction.

Junction True
Ray Fawkes and Vince Locke

“We brought down the genome patents and open-sourced the medical profession. That was us. We crashed the plastic surgery business. We paved the way for parasite chic. The body became a new kind of playground and we, celebrating the future, we became the Neumod.”

In the near-future Neumod culture of parasite addicts and hardcore one-upmanship, Dirk Brody has found love. He’ll do anything to prove himself to the woman of his dreams – even if it means blurring the boundaries of his flesh with the radical, illegal Junction True procedure.

Once he starts, he can never go back…

Too Cool to Be Forgotten
Alex Robinson

Andy Wicks is a forty-something father of two who’s making one final attempt to quit smoking: hypnosis. He’s skeptical it will work but is stunned that when he emerges from his trance, he’s fifteen years old – and it’s 1985! Is he doomed to relive the worst four years of his life or will this second go-round finally give him the answers he’s been missing all his life? If nothing else he’ll finally get to ask out Marie Simone from history class…

Infinite Kung Fu
Kagen McLeod

Infinite Kung Fu walks you through familiar corridors in the house of martial mayhem, but still smashes your face through walls of wonder and into rooms where kung fu is afraid to go.

The Martial World is ruled by a mysterious emperor whose five armies are each headed by a cruel and highly skilled kung fu master. Lei Kung, a soldier in one of these armies, grows tired of his master’s evil ways and seeks enlightenment elsewhere. However, he soon finds that he’s been chosen as the one who will put an end to the emperor’s tyrannical rule, personally! Allegiances are blurred as techniques are perfected, and Lei Kung becomes less certain who’s friend and who’s foe in each chapter!

Fists fly, limbs are lost and blood vessels burst in this tale of furious rivals, supernatural masters, walking corpses, and above all, raging kung fu!

Wormwood
Nate Powell

Wormwood is a love story carried by rolling fog, terminal illness, hallucination, apophenia, insect armies, secrets held, unshakeable faith, and the search for a master pattern to make sense of one’s unraveling. Two adolescent stepsiblings hold together amidst schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, family breakdown, animal telepathy, misguided love, and the tiniest nugget of hope that the heart, that sanity, that order itself will take shape again.

Essex County (Vol 3): The Country Nurse
Jeff Lemire

Country Nurse & Other Rural Legends, Myths and Half-Truths, the final volume of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County Trilogy, follows a day in the life of Anne Morgan, the peculiar farming communities traveling nurse. As Anne checks in on her favorite patients we are introduced to such rural legends as the boy called Jimmy-Elelphant-Ears, and the Essex Farmer’s Boxing Club! The story delves deeper into Essex County’s mythology and finally reveals how all three volumes stitch together, quilting a portrait of how loss and regret push and pull at the fabric of family in small town life. — 112 pages

Veeps
Bill Keiter and Wayne Shellabarger

It’s a tired but true cliché that every American Vice President is just a heartbeat away from the most powerful job in the world — a job they’ve often never really interviewed for. Who are these people? We all know about the one who shot his hunting partner in the face. But how about the tavern owner who once married one of his slaves and then sold her at auction when she tried to leave him? Or the one whose President went to his death regretting that he hadn’t had his Vice President hanged? Or the one who was too frequently inebriated to serve out the whole of his term? Over more than 200 years, the American voters have sent a platoon of rogues, cowards, drunks, featherweights, doddering geriatrics, bigots, and atrocious spellers to Washington D.C. to sit one bullet, cerebral hemorrhage, or case of pneumonia away from the highest office in the land. “Veeps” tells the sordid, head-scratching, perversely-entertaining stories of these men we’ve chosen to ride shotgun in the biggest rig in democracy without ever seriously considering the possibility that they might have to take the wheel.