[Servalan]

Paul Gravett macht jetzt schon auf seine Wunschtitel im Januar 2011 aufmerksam. Wer seine gesamte Blütenlese kennenlernen will, klicke bitte oben auf Gravetts Blog.
Hier nur meine persönlichen Favoriten:

Cursed Pirate Girl: The Collected Edition Volume 1
by Jeremy Bastian, Olympian Publishing, $20.00

The publisher says:
Cursed Pirate Girl is the comic book tale of a salty little adventurer traveling in search of her lost father, one of the dreaded Pirate Captains of the mythical Omerta Seas. Rendered in a stunning pen and ink style the story begins in Port Elisabeth, Jamaica in the year 1728, and quickly heads across - and beneath - the waves.

Paul Gravett says:
I’m only just catching up with this guy Bastian, having spotted his story for David Peterson’s Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard. Forget the tired tosh of Pirates of the Caribbean, this is insanely detailed and anachronistic draughtsmanship harnessed to some seriously hardcore whimsy and junior swashbuckling. Apparently it’s intended to be a six-issue run in all.

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Lynd Ward: Six Novels In Woodcuts Slipcase
by Lynd Ward, Library of America, $70.00

The publisher says:
From the eve of the Great Depression to the start of World War II, Lynd Ward (1905-1985) observed the troubled American scene through the double lens of a politically committed storyteller and a visionary graphic artist. His medium - the wordless ‘novel in woodcuts’ - was his alone, and he quickly brought it from bold iconographic infancy to subtle and still unrivalled mastery.
Gods’ Man (1929), the audaciously ambitious work that made Ward’s reputation, is a modern morality play, an allegory of the deadly bargain a striving young artist often makes with life. Madman’s Drum (1930), a multigenerational saga worthy of Faulkner, traces the legacy of violence haunting a family whose stock in trade is human souls. Wild Pilgrimage (1932), perhaps the most accomplished of these early books, is a study in the brutalization of an American factory worker whose heart can still respond to beauty but whose mind is twisted in rage against the system and its shackles. Prelude to a Million Years (1933) is a dark meditation on art, inspiration, and the disparity between the ideal and the real. Song Without Words (1936), a protest against the rise of European fascism, asks if ours is a world still fit for the human soul. Vertigo (1937), Ward’s undisputed masterpiece, is an epic novel on the theme of the individual caught in the downward spiral of a sinking American economy. Its characters include a young violinist, her luckless fiancés, and an elderly business magnate who - movingly, and without ever becoming a political caricature - embodies the social forces determining their fate.
The images reproduced in this volume are taken from prints pulled from the original woodblocks or first-generation electrotypes. The Library of America is proud to bring Ward’s masterworks to a new generation of readers, together with nine illuminating essays about his craft, including those he wrote for the long out-of-print Storyteller Without Words, a 1974 retrospective. Art Spiegelman contributes an introductory essay, ‘Reading Pictures’, that defines Ward’s towering achievement in that most demanding of graphic-story forms, the wordless novel in woodcuts.

Paul Gravett says:
After Belgium’s Frans Masereel, America’s Lynd Ward stands as perhaps one of the greatest visual storyteller using the format and rhythm of the single woodcut image per spread. Hailed by Will Eisner as a major inspiration, Ward is also re-appreciated here by Art Spiegelman, whose introduction opens both volumes. Highly prized and highly priced, Ward’s books were included in Lincoln’s fine Silent Witnesses exhibition last summer. This is superb and timely new edition makes them available for all.

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The Fracture Of The Universal Boy: A Symbolist Manifesto
by Michael Zulli, Olympian Publishing, $20.00

Paul Gravett says:
This really has been ‘years-in-the-making’. Century Guild have posted a few striking images here and have tried to sum it up in words, as follows:
It’s like reading Carlos Castaneda, or like the Anti-Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (It’s almost The Holy Mountain of graphic novels, if H. P. Lovecraft channelling Oscar Wilde had scripted Jodorowsky’s film.) It’s venom on a curved blade, and dandyism, and fear, and surrender and transcendence - and it is literally palpable.
I’m not alone in eagerly anticipating how I will react to Zulli’s long gestating, fiercely uncompromising creation.