Romance

Romance graphic novels

Incognegro

A fearless graphic novel that is both a page-turning mystery and a disturbing exploration of race and self-image in America.

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In the early 20th Century, when lynchings were commonplace throughout the American South, a few courageous reporters from the North risked their lives to expose these atrocities. They were African-American men who, due to their light skin color, could "pass" among the white folks. They called this dangerous assignment going "incognegro."

Zane Pinchback, a reporter for the New York-based New Holland Herald barely escapes with his life after his latest "incognegro" story goes bad. But when he returns to the sanctuary of Harlem, he's sent to investigate the arrest of his own brother, charged with the brutal murder of a white woman in Mississippi.

With a lynch mob already swarming, Zane must stay "incognegro" long enough to uncover the truth behind the murder in order to save his brother — and himself. He finds that the answers are buried beneath layers of shifting identities, forbidden passions and secrets that run far deeper than skin color.

Author: Mat Johnson

Price: €17.95

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Gemma Bovary

This clever, satirical graphic novel reimagines the Flaubert classic Madame Bovary through contemporary mores and attitudes.

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This clever, satirical graphic novel reimagines the Flaubert classic Madame Bovary through contemporary mores and attitudes. Simmonds's unique approach includes the usual panels and balloons, but also voluminous amounts of text on each page. The result is a graphic novel that reads like an actual novel. Simmonds tells the story through the eyes of Raymond Joubert, a baker in Normandy. Gemma herself is a complex character—an unsatisfied young woman who marries Charlie Bovery, a lumpish carpenter, out of apparent boredom, and then persuades him to move from London to a farmhouse in Normandy, to escape his clinging ex-wife and two children. Here, the rather unlikable Gemma begins to come into focus, her loneliness and isolation leading to her affair. Joubert, who mixes genuine concern with denial about his voyeurism, is convinced Gemma's headed down the same tragic path as Flaubert's original. Since we learn in the first paragraph that Gemma is dead, the question is who will be responsible for her demise. Simmonds's art recalls the elegance of New Yorker cartoonists mingled with the goth charm of Edward Gorey (Gemma herself is all restlessly darting pinpoint pupils). The perceptive writing is as revealing as the art, concisely capturing the monotony of Gemma and Charlie's life, the shallowness of London yuppie society and the moments of happiness that are doomed from the start. A hit in England, Gemma should hold equal charms for American readers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Price: €20.99

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Slow Storm

A firefighter in rural Kentucky, Ursa searches for her place in life, struggling to meet her own expectations.

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A firefighter in rural Kentucky, Ursa searches for her place in life, struggling to meet her own expectations. When a tornado hits her town, the ensuing chaos brings her world into sharp focus, somehow making everything clearer, and Ursa finds that she just can’t stomach the way her life is going. It is then that she meets Rafi, an illegal immigrant whose life isn’t going the way he’d pictured it either. Their encounter is the catalyst for Ursa and Rafi, who take different roads to the realization that wanting your life to change isn’t enough to make it happen.

Slow Storm stands apart as a graphic novel with its literary heart and charged, atmospheric watercolor and ink artwork. The storm builds around the characters and inside them, and moments of violence and tenderness suddenly crack like lightning. With Slow Storm, Danica Novgorodoff takes her place as a talent to be reckoned with in the literary world.

Price: €16.95

Aya Of Yop City

[Aya] wittily delves into both the political and the pop during an enchanted era when anything seemed possible.

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Abouet and Oubrerie's sequel to their 2007 graphic novel Aya is a charming comedy of manners about a group of young women — a sort of Jane Austen scenario transplanted to the Ivory Coast of the late '70s. Aya's friend Adjoua has a new baby, and everybody's pitching in to help take care of him, although he looks rather less like the purported father than like an irresponsible bounder by the name of Mamadou. Meanwhile, their starry-eyed friend, Bintou, is plunging into a new romance with a man whose urbane extravagance blinds her to his sneakiness. Mostly, though, this volume is about the cheerful, communitarian spirit of the place and time it sketches out — a moment of postcolonial African history when people didn't have a lot of resources (Adjoua is entering a beauty contest in the hopes of winning cooking oil for the fritters she sells), but had high hopes for the future. Oubrerie's scrappy, witty pen-and-ink artwork is a small delight: everybody's got exaggerated but subtly expressive body language and facial expressions, and the story's dashed-off but dead-on settings — with traffic blocked by wandering sheep and tin roofs near ambitious office buildings — make its tone of historical transition between tradition and modernization even more vivid. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Price: €19.95

Aya

Aya tells the story of its nineteen-year-old heroine, the studious and clear-sighted Aya, her easygoing friends Adjoua and Bintou, and their meddling relatives and neighbors.

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Abouet could have just wanted to tell a sweet, simple story of the Ivory Coast of her childhood as a counterpoint to the grim tide of catastrophic news, which is all most Westerners know of Africa. But in Aya, Abouet, along with Parisian artist Oubrerie, does quite a bit more than that, spinning a multifaceted romantic comedy that would satisfy even without any political agenda behind it. Set in 1970, Aya follows the travails of some teenage girls in the peaceful Abidjan working-class neighborhood of Yopougon (which they call 'Yop City, like something out of an American movie'), as they strive for love and the right boyfriend. Yop City, as detailed in Oubrerie's fluid and cartoonish black and white drawings, is a mellow place where disco rules the night and practically the worst thing these girls have to worry about is the disapproval of their parentsor in the case of the quiet title character, criticism from those who wish she were more boy-crazed and less focused on a career. It's a quick piece of work, but memorable in mood, capturing the country's brief flicker of postcolonial peaceful prosperity before descending into the modern maelstrom of corruption and violence we know only too well." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Price: €18.95

Alcoholic

Ames's first original graphic novel, tells a story at once hilarious, excruciating, bizarre and universal, about how our lives fall to pieces and the enduring human struggle to put things back together again.

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Jonathan A. is a boozed-up, coked-out, sexually confused, hopelessly romantic and, of course, entirely fictional novelist who bears only a coincidental resemblance to real-life writer Jonathan Ames, critically acclaimed author of Wake Up, Sir!, The Extra Man and What's Not to Love? For the fictional Jonathan, writing and drinking come easy. The hard parts of life are love and hope. From a touching relationship between Jonathan and his aging great aunt, to an inebriated evening with an amorous, octogenarian dwarf, to the devastating aftermath of 9/11, Ames's first original graphic novel, with gritty, poignant art by Dean Haspiel (THE QUITTER), tells a story at once hilarious, excruciating, bizarre and universal, about how our lives fall to pieces and the enduring human struggle to put things back together again. Warning: MATURE READERS

Price: €19.99

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Alice In Sunderland

Talbot's freewheeling, metafictional magnum opus is a map of the curious and delightful territory of its cartoonist's mind, starring himself in multiple roles.

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Talbot's freewheeling, metafictional magnum opus is a map of the curious and delightful territory of its cartoonist's mind, starring himself in multiple roles. The starting point is the history of his hometown, the northeast English city of Sunderland, along with his lifelong fascination with the myths and realities behind Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland-potentially dry material, but Talbot pulls out all the stops to keep it entertaining. He veers off on one fascinating tangent after another. The book encompasses dead-on parodies of EC horror comics, British boys' comics and Hergé's Tintin, walk-ons by local heroes like Sidney James, extensive analysis of a couple of William Hogarth prints, a cameo appearance by 'the Venerable Scott McComics-Expert' and even a song-and-dance number, drawing a three-dimensional web of coincidences and connections between all. It's also a showcase for the explosive verve of Talbot's protean illustrative style, with digital collages of multiple media on almost every page: pen-and-ink drawings in a striking variety of styles, photographs, painting, computer modeling, and all manner of 'found' images. The book's only real weakness is its scattered focus, but Talbot is a remarkable raconteur, even if what he's presenting is more a variety show than a story." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Price: €21.95

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Quimby The Mouse

Quimby is saturated with Ware's genius, including consistently amazing graphics.

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Quimby the Mouse is the second book from Chris Ware; his first book, Jimmy Corrigan (Pantheon, 2000), has been widely acclaimed as one of the medium's finest graphic novels in history and is currently in a fourth hardcover printing.

Cleverly appropriated old-fashioned animation imagery and advertising styles of the 1920s and 1930s are put to use in Quimby at the service of modern vignettes of angst and existentialism. As this cartoon silhouette of a mouse ignominiously suffers at every turn, the spaces between the panels create despair and a Beckett-like rhythm of hope deceived and deferred (but never quite extinguished), buoying Quimby from page to page.

Like Ware's first book, Quimby is saturated with Ware's genius, including consistently amazing graphics, insanely perfectionist production values, cut-out-and-assemble paper projects, and the formal complexity of his narratives that have earned him the reputation as one of the most prodigious artists of his generation.

Price: €14.95

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Put The Book Back On The Shelf

Put the Book Back on the Shelf is a stellar collection of independent comic creators and cartoonists who put their own spins on a cross section of Belle and Sebastian's songs.

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With their infectious brand of Scottish indie pop, Belle and Sebastian have been cult and critical favorites for years. The band's colorful lyrics and gorgeous, full bodied melodies have provided Image Comics with the inspiration for a new kind of comic anthology.

With Put the Book Back on the Shelf , a stellar collection of independent comic creators and cartoonists put their own spins on a cross section of Belle and Sebastian's songs, crafting stories inspired by the band's music, drawn from the band's entire catalog.

Author: Various

Price: €19.95

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Shooting War

The global war on terror is raging out of control and the president is popping Prozac.

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The #1 selling videogame in 2011 America is the terrorist-simulator "Infidel Massacre: Los Angeles."

On the streets of gentrified Brooklyn, videoblogger Jimmy Burns' latest anti-corporate rant is cut short by a terrorist bombing of a Starbucks...but his live feed isn't. When his dramatic footage is uploaded by Global News ("Your home for 24-hour terror coverage") and rebroadcast across the planet, the obscure blogger is transformed into an overnight media sensation. The next thing he knows he's on a Black Hawk helicopter inbound for Baghdad, working for the same mainstream media monster he once loathed.

Burns soon finds that everyone from his ratings-ravenous network overlords to Special Ops troops with messianic complexes to a charismatic band of tech-savvy "jihadists" all want to make him their pawn.

Author: Anthony Lappe

Price: €13.95

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