by Richard Tommaso

Tommaso's first book-length work displays a handsomely quirky drawing style and an incipient talent for emotionally complex storytelling. A side trip to the racetrack (using mob money) results in a fatal misunderstanding between Trevor, a slacker hit man/courier for the Jersey mob, and his bosses, who decide he's stealing from them. Trevor goes into hiding and the Family asks his cousin Abigail, an apprentice hit chick and Trevor's former protege in crime, to find him. Abigail's search turns up Patty, a troubled mutual childhood friend, spurring a series of memory flashbacks - a familiar get-me-out-of-this-house portrait of a suffocating Italian American family-that provide the emotional backdrop for this ultimately tragic story. Despite Tommaso's efforts to portray characters trapped by fate and familial circumstance, the book's pop cultural and alternative-comics conventions (small-time wise guys screw up caper; cute, gun-toting Generation X heroine) and an ending centered on a predictable irony make the work seem slight, if entertaining and well supported by Tommaso's deftly mannered, cartoon-realist drawings.

by Paul Chadwick

All Larry Munro wanted was a tank of gas. What he got was a gun to his head. Now he's being forced to play chauffeur to a pyromaniac looking to burn L.A. to the ground! Can Concrete race fast enough to stop the bullet aimed at his best friend?

by Andrew Vacchs

In this graphic novel, dozens of comics writers and artists bring to life an assortment of Vachss' trademark life-at-ground-zero stories.

by Jason Lutes

Haunted by the death of his escape-artist brother and a failed romance, the remaining hope of washed-up magician Ernie Weiss lies in his aging mentor, Al Flosso. It's a dim hop, however, as Flosso is gradually slipping into senility. A compelling rumination on the nature of love, loss, magic, and memory, Jar of Fools is an excellent introduction to the work of Jason Lutes.

Book One was self-published by Lutes in 1994. First Printing.

by Jason Lutes

Haunted by the death of his escape-artist brother and a failed romance, the remaining hope of washed-up magician Ernie Weiss lies in his aging mentor, Al Flosso. It's a dim hop, however, as Flosso is gradually slipping into senility. A compelling rumination on the nature of love, loss, magic, and memory, Jar of Fools is an excellent introduction to the work of Jason Lutes.

Book Two was published by Black Eye Books in 1995. First Printing.

by Marisa Acocella

by Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel Maus.

by Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel Maus.

by Julie Doucet

This book collects Julie Doucet's dream stories, considered by many to be her best and most innovative work to date. Most people can't recall their dreams, but this is clearly not the case with Julie. She seems to have remembered everything, from tormenting nightmares to, as the title suggests, her most secret desires, and she has transcribed them in the form of a series of intensely-drawn comic book stories. This edition also features 20 new pages of stories that appear nowhere else, including the lavishly-colored strip A School Nightmare.

by Pat Moriarity

Strips about slimebags, dirtballs, junkies, sluts, cartoonists and other scum - from the clean-cut and well-mannered Pat Moriarity!

Fantagraphics Books, 1996.

by Ed Brubaker

A collection of stories from the early life of Ed Brubaker and his buddies.

by Terry Moore

by Terry Moore

by Terry Moore

by Howard Cruse

Harper Perennial, 1995. Winner of the Eisner Award for the best graphic album. Art and story combine powerfully in this lyrical tale of a young man caught in the maelstrom of the civil rights movement and entrenched homophobia of small town America. 212 pages. softcover, 7 x 6