NEW STUFF ARCHIVES
New for March 2020
Now #8
Persephone's Garden
by Glynnis Fawkes
The roles of mother, daughter, spouse, student of ancient Greece, world traveller, archeological illustrator and more intermingle here, in the 270 pages of Persephone's Garden, Glynnis Fawkes's most substantial and successful work to date. Taken together, they provide a well rounded portrait of a life well lived. The comics that fill these pages encompass a wide variety of forms: anecdote, travelogue, diary, short story, sketch, illustration, illustrated list, experimental, project notes and more. Each of these forms employ a distinct stylistic approach to their respective subject. Sharp thin pen lines here, rounded full brush strokes there. Most pieces employ a limited color palette of one, two or three colors plus black or sepia line, but full color makes an occasional appearance, as well. There is a variety of tone and mood as well. Irony and satire mix it up with earnest and heartfelt observations, reflection and assertion take turns. This diverse yet amalgamative approach works to demonstrate that there is no one right way to live, but that every day every moment demands attention, must be measured and navigated, and that each presents its own unique opportunity for creative response. Glynnis Fawkes has, here in the pages of Persphone's Garden, made the most of these opportunities to create a series of engaging comics that, taken together, make for a thesis statement endorsing an immersive, fully engaged approach to contemporary life. Here, the saying, "the proof is in the pudding," has been replaced by, "the proof is in the comics."
Duke Ellington: His Classic Collaborations 1956-1963
Some of the recordings on this 4CD box set are among the very best in Duke Ellington's unmatched career, and are therefore, by definition, among the very best in 20th century music. Duke Ellington's music has been described as being "beyond category," and nowhere is this more apparent than on the incredible range displayed in the music presented here, which sprung from collaborations with a disparate collection of stellar performers and composers, many in their prime. On these discs, collaborators range from: Johnny Hodges, Ellington's greatest performative collaborator, who spent almost the entirety of his career with Duke; Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, arguably Ellington's two greatest peers; Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, the alpha and the omega of saxophone mastery and improvisation; Mahalia Jackson and Rosemary Clooney, two great vocalists with widely differing approaches and aims; and, the one-of-a-kind collaboration between Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach on the stunning Money Jungle, one of the most singular and powerful Jazz LPs of all time. A truly classic compendium.
New for February 2020
Year of the Rabbit
by Tian Veasna
Year of the Rabbit is an effective and affecting memoir of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge during the years 1975 to 1980. While most North Americans who were alive during the Vietnam War are at least dimly aware that something bad happened in Cambodia after American forces largely left Southeast Asia at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, few are aware of the details beyond the name Pol Pot and the phrase "Year Zero," or have an understanding of what life was like for Cambodians themselves after the Communist Party of Cambodia the Khmer Rouge or, as readers of this book will learn, Angkar, which is how the Khmer Rouge referred to themselves during the early years of their rule took over the country. Those who were educated and/or members of the bourgeoisie, especially those perceived as "tainted" by outside (read: European and North American) influences were, overnight, deemed "enemies of the people" and dealt with by the regime with escalating brutality, up to and including summary execution. There are unmistakable parallels to what the Jews (and other persecuted minorities) of Europe experienced in those areas ruled and/or occupied by the Nazis during the years 1933 to 1945. Veasna, whose birth nearly coincides with the Khmer Rouge takeover, spent years interviewing his extended family to gather the details that he then employed to create this work. Running close to 400 pages in total, Year of the Rabbit manages transform the story of his family's experiences into a gripping and harrowing portrait of the period, and, ultimately, manages to create an uplifting portrait of a family overcoming the odds, meeting the challenges and surviving. This is a real achievement and an important work. It makes this period come alive to readers today, and now, thanks to publisher, Drawn and Quarterly and translator, Helge Dascher, Anglophone readers in North America will be able to discover this work, which was originally published in France, where Veasna resides, having managed to settle there with his immediate family after escaping Cambodia.
J & K
by John Pham
John Pham has, over the last decade or so, in a series of hand crafted issues of his flagship comics magazine, Epoxy, as well as numerous side-projects, established himself as one the great masters of the risograph. His meticulous work has gone a long way towards establishing the possibilities inherent to the risograph process: revealing previously undiscovered degrees of subtlety in color, tone and shading in the forging of his unique and highly personal ζsthetic. This has been miraculously translated into book form by printers in China who have delivered this amazing edition of J & K from Fantagraphics Books, that, in addition to containing 144 pages of comics printed on deluxe heavyweight newsprint, includes a host of inserts: a mini-zine (Cool Magazine: Brain Blowing Bummers!), a fold-out mini-poster, trading cards, stickers, and believe it or not a 5 vinyl single of Gaseous Nebula performing Deep Space backed with Alarum Solus Exuent, on Total Bummer Records. Need we say more?
retail price - $39.99 copacetic price - $34.75
The Man Without Talent
by Yoshiharu Tsuge; edited and translated by Ryan Holmberg
Yoshiharu Tsuges The Man Without Talent is simultaneously an elegy and a critique of a way of being, but most of all it is an immersive experience not to be forgotten. As in much of his work, Tsuge allows his own experiences to inform the tales he created for The Man Without Talent, and doing so clearly served to amplify the degree of verisimilitude and lifelikeness of the people, places and episodes depicted (and seeimngly, but perhaps ironically, simultaneously provides a commentary on the creator's sense of self worth). Tsuge dolefully, yet expertly, conjures up a vivid world of misfits and oddballs living on the edge of society in this story-cycle of six linked episodes in the life of the titular protagonist and Tsuge alter-ego Sukezo, whose life is haunted by failure and lived on the edge, continually at risk of tumbling over into the abyss. A life of quiet desperation, indeed. Time and again he is pulled back from a figurative, symbolic, or literal fall by the presence of his young son appearing over the horizon, calling out, "Daddy, its time to come home." Ryan Holmberg has done another excellent job of translation, working to find appropriate idioms that can effectively cross both culture and time, and has provided a typically erudite 20 page afterword that works to put everything in context, allowing for a fuller appreciation of this masterwork.
Fantastic Four: Grand Design
by Tom Scioli
Talk about mind-expanding youll have to make room in your brain to be able to absorb all the information contained in this single, slim but giant-sized volume by Tom Scioli. The Fantastic Four mythos was created over a full decade by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and is seen by many including many a Copacetic comrade as embodying the greatest achievement of the Marvel Age of comics as well as the fullest expression of the Kirby-Lee team/partnership/collaboration. It truly was The Worlds Greatest Comic Magazine. (although wed say it was the The Worlds Greatest Comics Magazine). Scioli pours out this mythos at firehose strength in a a relentless onslaught of panel-packed pages. Its Clobberin Time, indeed. Not only does he layout the FF mythos here, but he works to seamlessly integrate it into the overall flow of the Marvel Universe as to reveal the truly Grand Design of Jack Kirbys vision that lies at its core, bringing together The Watcher, Galactus, The Eternals, The Inhumans and Deviants, Devil Dinosaur, the Kree and more even Steve Ditko's corollary creation, Eternity. Its all here. This massive oversize Treasury Edition collects the entirety of the two-issue series along with all the variant covers, plus sketches, roughs, a couple of essays by Daron Jensen, and the added extra bonus of a Treasury Edition sized reprint of the complete Fantastic Four #51 in PiskorColor. Made in Pittsburgh! Nuff said.
The Immersion Program
by Leo Quievreux
This science fiction noir by Lιo Quievreux features page after page of dark, angular, moody, high contrast black and white art that looks a bit like it could have been executed by a sophisticated AI based on an algorithmically derived hybrid of Charles Burns and Eric Haven. Originally released in France, it has an unmistakable European feel despite its arguably American theme of techno-paranoia. Here in these 160 A4 size pages, readers will be taken on a journey through a technological meta-mind where tracking takes place through and in a "playback" of memories that can be coordinated spatially as well as temporally through a new piece of technology dubbed the EP-1, which is itself the center of the plot, making for a labyrinthian story structure. Now available in an English translation by Franηois Vigneault courtesy of the adventurous publishing arm of Portland, Oregon's Floating World Comics. Definitely worth a look.
retail price - $19.99 copacetic price - $17.75
Internet Crusader
by George Wyesol
George Wyesol transports readers back to the early days of the internet, way back in the 1990s. This cleverly conceived 160 page graphic novel will reactivate memories (some of which may be traumatic!) of all the glitches, problems and weirdness of those early days of running computers on the internet, but by providing an tangible enemy in demons in the employ of the devil, and then positing a hero to overcome them, Wyesol may have come up with a comics catharsis for the PTSD of those days. The internet back then was so different, yet its underlying structure has remained, along with its tendency to foster and nurture solipsism. Here's a chance to revisit those not-all-that-halcyon days while being distracted by unravelling the mystery of who is behind the intterface. While this book is certainly not a book for everyone, it could be for you! Check out this heavily illustrated article that incorporates an interview with Wylesol by Daphne Milner on It's Nice That, HERE, to learn more and see whether or not this might be up your alley.
retail price - $17.99 copacetic price - $16.25
The Walking Man - Expanded Edition
by Jiro Taniguchi
The Walking Man is, truly, a one of a kind work, and so we are happy to announce that it is once again available in English. It is a work where nothing happens; which leaves room for everything. Whereas most stories work through constructing a specific arrangement of time in a causal sequence that narrows the focus to follow the thread of the narrative, where A leads to B and B leads to C, and then working all the variations and permutations that causality is subject to and so inducing a sense of expectation, progress and suspense in the reader, as they wonder what will happen next, how it will turn out, how it will end... The Walking Man does not. It does not look forward nor look back, but stays in the present moment, as the titular character simply puts one foot after the other, feeling the ground beneath his feet, and the sun on his back and the breeze on his face without any thought of what happens next, instead letting his walk take him where it will go, taking you, the reader, with him on his walk, and so allowing you, too, to enter the present moment, leaving everything else behind... What we have here is the third English language edition of this amazing compendium, the prior two being both out of print. How is it different from the first two? Well, for starters, it is the first unflipped English language edition, maintaining the original right to left page orientation and reading direction. Second, it contains a bonus story not ever before published in English, and, furthermore, this new story employs color to signify temporal transition, thereby cleverly insinuating this previously absent dimension. There is also a bonus gallery that presents the covers of the two prior editions, also in full color. RECOMMENDED!retail price - $30.00 copacetic price - $26.75
Seventeen Years of Media Consumption (2002 - 2018): The books; The recordings; The films
by John W. Fail
Members of the Copacetic mailing list are more likely than not to have their identity invested fairly heavily in media consumption. Who are we? How do we see ourselves? Where does this vision of ourselves originate? How is it formed? Throughout practically all of human history our sense of selves have been formed primarily within the crucible of our interactions with family, friends and neighbors. We see ourselves in their eyes, in their manner towards us. Additionally, there have been the institutions of religion and, at least for some, formal education. Travel was the privilege of the few. While popular narrative arts, along with religious ritual, have been present for millennia, the rich world of literature was only accessible to that small segment of the population that was highly literate; with mixed results (cue Don Quixote). The dissemination of printing technology that got underway in the 16th century, was followed by and/or led to a steady increase in the availability of formal education to the masses, to whom it eventually became compulsory. This in turn led to the potential for interactions with literary embodiments of culture becoming involved with identity formation within the general population, a potential which was only fully realized with the onset of the mass media. Since the dawn of the global mass media in the opening decades of the 20th century, and accelerating through the dawn of the information age which is currently in full flower here in the early 21st century, our individual senses of selves along with our collective sense of self is ever increasingly being derived from our consumption of and interaction with the calculated constructions artful and artificial of mass media. Newspapers (including the advent of comics), radio and recorded music, motion picture and film technologies, which grew to include sound, and then broadcast in television, and eventually the internet, the web, cellular telephony and the smart phone together have brought us to a present in which we are fully immersed in mass media to the point that artfully constructed artificial representations of the world have been ever increasingly supplementing and may even now be supplanting the world itself Thus, our sense of selves is now likely to be primarily composed of our consumption of and interactions with mass media. As mass media morphs into social media, our cumulative consumption of mass media will continue to constitute the formal bases of the identities which we collectively present to one another via social media. Which leads us to John Fails three-volume magnum opus, Seventeen Years of Media Consumption (2002 - 2018): The books; The recordings; The films. Consumptions of close to 5000 individual works are documented in a work that totals well over 1000 pages. Each interaction with a particular work is noted and described. In those instances where the interaction involves and/or is dependent on and/or related to an interaction with another work (or works), this is noted, and the other work(s) is/are referenced. Taken together these three volumes provide a definitive post-modern self-portrait of a citizen of the world as media consumer, and, as such, serve as a fully articulated instance of the process which all of us are currently engaged in, to varying degrees. | Seventeen Years of Media Consumption (2002-2018): The books chronicles 875 books started and finished by the author between 1 January 2002 and 31 December 2018. All written material is cross-referenced with the other two volumes. Physical Info: 0.6" H x 9.61" L x 6.69" W (1.02 lbs) 288 pages | Seventeen Years of Media Consumption (2002-2018): The recordings chronicles 2,132 records, cassettes, and compact discs received by the author between 1 January 2002 and 31 December 2018. All written material is cross-referenced with the other two volumes. Physical Info: 0.95" H x 9.61" L x 6.69" W (1.64 lbs) 470 pages | Seventeen Years of Media Consumption (2002-2018): The films chronicles 1,756 films watched by the author between 1 January 2002 and 31 December 2018. All written material is cross-referenced with the other two volumes. Physical Info: 1.03" H x 9.61" L x 6.69" W (1.77 lbs) 510 pages
New For January 2020
The PLAIN Janes - Omnibus Edition
Bloody Stumps Samurai
Wildest Dream
Bubbles #5edited by Brian Baynes
The fifth issue of Bubbles, an Independent Fanzine About Comics & Manga is here! This issue features: Interview with Lale Westvind! Interview with The New York Review Comics heads, Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Lucas Adam; Chris Pitzer Remembers Tom Spurgeon; Comic pages by: Nate McDonough, David Lasky, Hu Nguyen, Elliot Wyat; Readers' Best of 2019 Lists (along with that of the editor/publisher, natch'); Idiotorial Thunk Piece by One of the Last Idiots to Join the Usual Gang by Marc J Palm; MORE! In other words: another great issue.
retail price - $6.00 copacetic price - $5.75
Ginseng Roots #3With the third issue of Ginseng Roots, Craig Thompson takes readers to China for a fascinating and beautifully drawn look at the history, myth and legends surrounding ginseng, and then loops back to connect this to ginseng's role in the economy of central Wisconsin, where Thompson grew up and where his parents still live, and then begins to show how the two are linked; including a bit of comparitive culture comics along the way. Another excellent issue!
retail price - $6.00 copacetic price - $5.75
This 248 page full color softcover volume is written by the renowned professor of economics, Bryan Caplan, who has previously penned The Myth of the Rational Voter, among other works, and illustrated by Zach Weinersmith, creator of the SMBC webcomic. Open Borders received a great review from The Economist, so we're sending you there to learn more about this highly informative, educational comics work that makes quite a persuasive argument.
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
retail price - $19.99 copacetic price - $16.75
These items and more may also be found at our eCommerce site, HERE.
