NEW STUFF ARCHIVES
Copacetic Arrivals: 1Q 2022
all items still available (unless otherwise noted)
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New for March 2022



C7
Crickets #7 
by Sammy Harkham
Talk about a long time coming!  Here at last is the seventh issue of Sammy Harkhams's Crickets (arriving a full five years after the sixth). This issue is not only a double-size, 64-page behemoth of an issue, it is also entirely devoted to what we now know to be the penultimate chapter in the long running "Blood of the Virgin" saga.  And what a chapter it is!  We don't want to give away too much of what's in store, but suffice it to say the storyline takes a substantial detour here, one that really stands apart from what has come before and that covers a lot of ground – both in time and space – and that it's a real treat that both long time readers and newcomers – as this can be read as a stand alone story – are sure to both enjoy and appreciate.  Starting out with a tour de force of comics formalism and moving on through an emotional roller coaster, this is an issue worth savoring one page at a time. Don't miss it!   Please Note:  We sold out of this in the blink of an eye, before we even had the chance to list it here (SORRY!) – BUT, as of this writing USA customers can still get it at Quimby's, HERE; Canadian customers can still get it at Lucky's, HERE; and UK customers can still get it at Gosh Comics, HERE – but don't delay!
retail price - $12.00  copacetic price - $12.00





MC
Mr. Colostomy 
by Matthew Thurber
The new Matthew Thurber has arrived!  In addition to, of course, appealing to pre-existent Thurber fans, the absurd humor on display in the pages of Mr. Colostomy – which collects over 200, 4-panel, one-page strips, that were originally published daily on Instagram in 2017 – mostly in black and white, but with a smattering of full color – all involving varying degrees of continuity – also stands to appeal to long-bereft fans of Michael Kupperman and Mark Alan Stamaty, along with the somewhat less bereft fans of Lisa Hanawalt and Eric Haven, to name a few fellow absurdian cartoonists (a new genre?).  Regardless, this is a book that can be picked up and read at random, or straight through, in order.  Either way, we recommend readers take their time and savor these rare delicacies... and so HERE's a cool preview to get started.  Check it out!
retail price - $24.99  copacetic price - $21.75







Now11

Now #11 
edited by Eric Reynolds, w/ Daria Tessler, Theo Ellsworth, Baptiste Virot, Tim Lane, Jesse Simpson, Justin Grandin, Natalia Novia, Ariel Lopez V., Kayla E., Chris Wright, Steven Weissman, Josh Simmons, Nick Thorburn, Stacy Gougoulis
It took a full nine months for this issue to gestate, but Now 11 has at last been delivered, and it's a little bit of everything!  While including some familiar names from across the USA and Canada, #11 is quite the international issue, with amazing contributions from Argentina, Australia, Belgium and Mexico making up over half the page count.  The centerpiece of this issue is Australian artist, Stacy Gougoulis's "Mandorla".  It's 32 pages offer up a philosophically wise and artistically insightful exploration of the ultimately subjective experience of human temporality in a highly informed way that showcases the expressive capacities of comics in a manner that intersects with the work of Chris Ware, Jon McNaught, Eleanor Davis and Kevin Huizenga, among others, but maintains a powerfully cohesive unity of form and content throughout: a masterwork of melancholy.  This story alone is reason enough to pick up this issue, but there are plenty more great comics on hand here from all over the creative map as well as the geographic one!
retail price - $12.99  copacetic price - $11.75




GB2



Good Boy Magazine #2
edited by Michael Sweater & Benji Nate, w/ Ashley Robin Franklin, Bonnie Guerra, Sean Mac, Dalton Stark, Rebecca Kirby, Alex Krokus
And here's another – and new – regularly published comics anthology.  Good Boy Magazine, published by Silver Sprocket, continues to live up to its promise with its second issue.  Here again are 136 pages of comics in full color (mostly) and duotone – along with one black & white.  All are printed with nice color absorption on off-white newsprint.  By turns cuddly, violent, fantastic, stoned, relaxed, with the spirit reigning.
retail price - $9.99  copacetic price - $9.50







HP1



Hell Phone, Book One
by Benji Nate
Sissy and Lola stumble upon a possessed phone... from hell!  Also from Silver Sprocket, the first book of Hell Phone is filled with 160 lushly colored, manga-inflected (and formatted) comics featuring an old flip phone, a box of aging VHS tapes, a mystery and a murder.  By turns cute and creepy, cuddly and freaky! Nice work, nice printing; nice package.
retail price - $14.99  copacetic price - $13.75






O1






Orochi: The Perfect Edition, Volume 1
by Kazuo Umezz
Here is the first of three deluxe hardcover volumes collecting this classic of manga horror by Kazuo Umezz.  Composed of nine interconnected stories, each a planet of its own, but all caught in the orbit of one mysterious woman.  This volume includes "Sisters", in which Orochi "affects the lives of two wealthy siblings who couldn't be more alike...or more different, and "Bones," in which Orochi helps a man come back to life after a terrible accident, but resurrection can be a deadly business...", according to the publisher's hype-up.
retail price - $26.99  copacetic price - $23.75






Tops
Tops: The Complete Collection of Charles Biro's Visionary 1949 Comic Book Series
edited by Michael T. Gilbert and featuring Charles Biro, Reed Crandall, George Tuska, Dan Barry
Hold onto your hats!  Here we are treated with an enormous (11" x 15") hardcover volume collecting the entirety of the rare and largely forgotten comic book series, Tops!  Conceived by Charles Biro (of Crime Does Not Pay fame) and published by Lev Gleason in 1949 in an oversized magazine format, Tops, was a decidedly experimental project that aimed to bring comics to a wider – and older – audience.  In fact, Biro and Gleason worked to escape the pejorative associations of the label "comics" by billing Tops as, "The Adult Magazine of Dramatic Picture Stories," and labeling the cover-feature of the first issue as a "novel-length illustory". And they backed up these claims by creating some relatively challenging, adventurous and adult(with a decided slant towards the male)-oriented comics – with titles like "I'll Buy That Girl," "You're on the Parole Board," "The Closet," "Marriage Swap Shop," "Summer Waitress," and "How You Would Live Under a World Government"(!) – scripted by Biro and a cohort of writers and drawn by first rate talents like Reed Crandall, Dan Barry, George Tuska, Bob Fujitani and Fred Kida, among others; these were interspersed with short stories and text pieces penned by non-comics writers (including one by Dashiell Hammett!). Tops was destined to be a short-lived experiment, as it lasted only two 68-page issues.  Likely due primarily to its uncategorizable nature, the fact that it was priced at a quarter at a time when practically all other comics were a dime, and the simple physical fact that it was too large to be racked with standard comics (or had to always be placed in the back row so as not to obscure all those behind it) and so was likely placed with the larger weeklies like Life, Look and Time, etc.  This was probably part of the idea behind Biro and Gleason's brainstorm: to attract the (large and untapped by comics) readership of these mainstream magazines to comics.  The failure of Tops to do so seems to confirm that comics readers are a breed apart.  Copies of these two issues of Tops have been notoriously difficult to get a hold of, due, again, in large part to their physcial size – as they can't easily be stored and/or displayed with other comics, and so tended to be stashed with Look and Life in where comics fans wouldn't think to look.  Thus, their relative inaccesability led them to have been largely ignored by comics collectors and scholars... until now!  This compilation is edited by historian and cartoonist Michael T. Gilbert and includes the entirety of both issues along with an introduction by Gilbert, as well as several other essays providing background on the creation of the series and the publisher, editors, and cartoonists who realized it.  As an added bonus, it also includes a chronicle in essay form of experimental, adult comics endeavors throughout the first half of the 20th century.  Get ready to dig into a missing chapter in comics history.
retail price - $49.99  copacetic price - $42.75


CH





New for February 2022


Hal

Halcyon

by Ron Rege
With Halcyon: Hermeneutics, or "The New Cartoon Utopia, Ron Rege, Jr. continues to build his unique brand of visionary comics.  This foray into the fantastic takes the physical form of a 112 page, giant-size (10+" x 12+"), full (flat) color, laminated hardcover volume.  Angels, devils and other celestial beings of the spirit realm dash and dart about the cosmos, both inner and outer – and while doing so, simultaneously draw parallels and equivalancies between the two (inner mind <=> outer space?). Dreams mix with visions, utopian realities are explored, and more, all in Regι's clear concise cartoon language that he has consciously evolved over his three decade comics-making career.  Here are comics like none other.
retail price - $24.99  copacetic price - $21.75





CP


Crashpad

by Gary Panter
Underground comix live!  Gary Panter's Crashpad is a classic old school underground comic book that is a comic book about old school underground comic books: what they were, what they are, what they mean, where they come from, where they're going.  Did we mention acid?  Cover to cover comics; every line drawn by Panter; 36 pages.  Black and white interior art on heavy newsprint. "Gain intuition to the endless play of becoming free."
retail price - $5.99  copacetic price - $6.00






HD

Heaven's Door: Extra Works
by Keiichi Koike
Heaven's Door
, this 200-page collection of Keiichi Koike's eye-popping, psychedelic, science fiction manga will have readers reaching for superlatives to describe the artwork on display.  We're going to start the ball rolling in that direction with,  "It's Moebius meets Otomo!"  To the best of our knowledge, only one of the eleven stories collected here – almost all of which were originally published in the 1980s & '90s – has been published before in North America and/or in English (and that was over thirty years ago).  In other words, most American readers will be experiencing Koike's work for the first time here in the pages of Heaven's Door, just released by Last Gasp.  To help give you a better idea of what we're talking about we've posted some spreads from the book on Instagram, HERE.
retail price - $19.99  copacetic price - $17.75




CJEl Viaje Mαs Caro / The Most Costly Journey
by Mark Bennett, Andy Kolovos, Teresa Mares, Julia Grand Doucet, Tillie Walden, Glynnis Fawkes, Rick Veitch, et al
Here is a collection of nineteen tales of coming to (North) America; each unique, yet all connected by the hardships that everyone of these immigrants underwent.  All of the stories are part of a collaborative project joining each Central American tale teller with a New England cartoonist who transformed the oral story to a visual one.  The stories are quite affecting.  In addition, there are multiple essays that serve to introduce, explicate and contextualize the stories, as well as presenting the concept of ethnographic cartooning, and so bring the reader closer to the material.  In the process it also provides a look at Vermont Dairy Farming and it's central role in the state.  In short: there's a lot going on here in the 240 pages of El Viaje Mαs Caro / The Most Costly Journey.  And here's Vermont's most notable cartoonist on El Viaje Mas Caro:  “It’s hard to imagine other people’s lives. It’s harder still when those lives are hidden from public view. But in this book, the unimaginably difficult experiences of migrant and immigrant farmworkers are made vividly accessible. Through their own words, and the simple, direct drawings of their cartoonist collaborators, we see how they got here, what they’ve left behind, and what their long, long days are like. The original goal of this project was to give their subjects a voice, but every North American should read this book in order to understand the disturbing degree to which we all depend on the self-sacrifice of these workers. El Viaje Mas Caro is a profound act of witness.” – Alison Bechdel
retail price - $19.95  copacetic price - $16.75



KK

Kris Kool
by Caza
At long last, here's a chance for North American readers to finally get their hands on an English language translation of this classic of psychedelic comics, originally published in France in 1970.  Kris Kool is the work that launched Caza's cartooning career in Europe.  It was not until the late 1970s that he burst into American comics consciousness, courtesy Heavy Metal Magazine, at which point in time psychedelia was no longer thought to be marketable, too bad for us!  This new, revised edition, coming fifty years after its initial release courtesy Italy's Passenger Press (and is being distributed in North America by Portland's Floating World), is a clear case of "better late than never".  It includes 16 pages of cool (or should we say "kool") bonus material.  We'll have more to say, but wanted to put it up here now that it's in stock... To get an idea of what's in store in this 96 page, full color, magazine size softcover, check out the publisher's brief preview page, HERE.
retail price - $40.00  copacetic price - $36.75




Metax

Metax
by Antoine Cossι
Antoine Cossι's latest work is a deeply felt –  and deeply cryptic – meditation on the relationship between natural resources, family dynamics and polical power that takes place in a fantastic realm that is like and unlike our own.  The work intersects at multiple points and in various ways with works as disparate as De Chirico, Chester Gould, Frank Santoro, Anders Nilsen, Joe Kesslar, Manuele Fior and Kevin Hooyman – among others.  Metax is a natural resource at the center of an empire.  Metax is a full size 292 page hardcover graphic novel, printed on flat white paper, that tells the story of the "castle intrigue" surrounding the control of this substance.  Cossι throughout employs his trademarked strong and clear line work and lush washes employing deep brown tones – along with a color section that stands out by virtue of its contrast – to bring us this story of a violent contest between corruption and freedom.
retail price - $34.99  copacetic price - $28.75




These items and more may also be found at our eCommerce site, HERE.




New for January 2022



M1Megillah #1
by Chad Bilyeu, E. S. Glenn, Eryc Why, Maia Matches, Bernie Mirault, Laurie Cook, James the Stanton, Iva Spasojevic
Megillah
 is an all new, full color comics anthology from Amsterdam.  Created, curated and edited by Chad Bilyeu (of Chad in Amsterdam fame), it features six eight-page stories, each by a different creator, all in full color.  Page size is 6 3/8' x 8 1/4" (roughly A5).  Eryc Why leads off with a dazzling  visual tour de force, "Bizy Beez & Night Xpress," that's hard to describe, but does involve racing against the clock, parenting, and a hefty sprinkling of dutch phrases amidst the English language that predominates here (and in all the stories in this issue, in case you were wondering). Next up is James the Stanton's "False Raffler" which involves reptilian standup comedians and plenty of wordplay.  This is followed by E.S. Glenn's "The Nix" where Glenn continues to do what he does best, presenting another chapter in his ongoing ligne claire saga of artist gangsters. "How I Became a Comic Artist" by Maia Matches is an engaging thumbnail account of her self-invention as a comicker that simultaneously provides a bit of a sense of the Amsterdam comics scene.  Old timers may remember Bernie Mireault, who was active in the '80s and '90s.  Here in "Isaac vs. Eli, he provides a tale of sibling rivalry via videogaming and imagination.  Laurie Cook brings this issue to a close with a zany tale of eating gone wrong (or at least weird), "El Gordo & Zombie Chicken."  Cover by Iva Spasojevic.  And there you have it.  Already looking forward to the second issue!
retail price - $12.00  copacetic price - $11.75




BB
Blubber
by Gilbert Hernandez
OK, here it is:  the complete Blubber!  This hardcover edition collects the entirety of Gilbert Hernandez's completely over-the-top six-issue comic book series that was originally published between 2015 and 2020.  We imagine most frequenters of this space have an inkling of what's between these covers, but for the uninitiated, let us just say that this series employs an extreme close-up look at sexual activities – and an even more extreme sense of the absurd.  Starting out with a series of alternative, (literally) alien sexualities, featuring ways of sex previously unseen and, perhaps, previously unimagined, as well.  These alien activities gradually, over the course of the six issue series, blend, transition and morph into a panoply of human sexual activities.  This approach serves to push readers (most, anyway) away from of any sort of pornographic comfort zone they may have previously entertained and engenders a sort of alienation from received notions concerning sex.  It can be a liberating experience.  It can be fun.  It's definitely comics!  Not for the faint of heart (also NOT for anyone under 21 years of age).
retail price - $19.99  copacetic price - $16.75





FF
by Arata Imai, Ryan Holmberg
F
, originally self-published in Japan in 2015  – in a limited edition of a mere 200 copies – by its creator Imai Arata (in cahoots with Chaos*Lounge, an arts collective), is about as Underground as it gets, as this volume's translator and co-editor (with publisher emuh ruh), Ryan Holmberg explains in his in-depth, 29 page essay accompanying this edition from Glacier Bay Books.  Written in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown that was triggered by the massive tsunami of March 2011, Imai wove a speculative tale that used as its starting point the dissatisfaction with the central government in Tokyo that was expressed in the region surrounding the reactor disaster.  He goes on to imagine that dissatisfaction metastasizing into an outright rebellion in which the Tohoku region secedes from and goes to war with Japan.  Imai further speculatively extrapolates on then-current events, when this group is infiltrated and then warred upon in turn by a group of terrorist guerillas (modelled on IS) and chaos reigns.  It is into this milleau that the character of international reporter, John Cantlie thrusts himself and his "story" becomes one with that of the manga.  Imai's art is somewhat amateurish – certainly by Japanese standards, at least – but the storytelling is solid.  Originally titled I Am John Cantlie when published in Japan, Ryan Holmberg believes that it would likely have been a highly controversial work in its home country, due to the nature of its content.  But because of its extremely limited release, it managed to slip through unnoticed by the wider public.  This extremely limited original Japanese release also provides F  with the rare distinction of being a manga of Japanese origin receiving a wider circulation in North America than in Japan!  To learn more about F and preview several spreads from the work, check out Helen Chazen's review on The Comics Journal, HERE.
retail price - $22.00  copacetic price - $19.75



5-3



No. 5, Vol. 3
by Taiyo Matsumoto
It's here, the third of the series of four two-in-one volumes collecting the entirety of Taiyo Matsumoto's adventurous – both in form and content – science fiction series from the begininning of this century.  This volume collects Books 5 & 6 of the original 8-book series; and represents both their North American premier and the first time these comics have been published in English.

retail price - $22.99  copacetic price - $20.00






FAS


For Art's Sake

by Noah Van Sciver
Noah bares his soul once again and tells it like it was, back in 2004, in this portrait of the artist as a young man waking up to the world.  Angst, embarrassment and tedium along with good times, adventures and fun fill fifty-two pages of witty, well-paced comics that are simultaneously poignant and humorous and that add up to another thoroughly enjoyable and highly memorable saddle-stapled comic book from Mr. Van Sciver.
retail price - $10.00  copacetic price - $9.75






 

These items and more may also be found at our eCommerce site, HERE.




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Want to keep going?  There's tons more great stuff here, most of which is still in stock.  Check out our New Arrivals Archives:


3Q 2021: July - September, New Arrivals
2Q 2021: April - June, New Arrivals
1Q 2021: January - March, New Arrivals
 

4Q 2020: October - December, New Arrivals
3Q 2020: July - September, New Arrivals
2Q 2020: April - June, New Arrivals
1Q 2020: January - March, New Arrivals

4Q 2019: October - December, New Arrivals
3Q 2019: July - September, New Arrivals
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1Q 2019: January - March, New Arrivals

4Q 2018: October - December, New Arrivals
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2Q 2018: April - June, New Arrivals
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4Q 2017: October - December, New Arrivals

3Q 2017: July - September, New Arrivals
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4Q 2016: October - December, New Arrivals
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4Q 2015: October - December, New Arrivals
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4Q 2014: October - December, New Arrivals
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4Q 2013: October - December, New Arrivals
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4Q 2010: October - December, New Arrivals
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2002:       January - December New Arrivals
 

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last updated 31 March 2022