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From "choreomania" to coronavirus: an utterly original graphic novel about a newly urgent subject
Set in 1518, and told from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of the witnesses, The Dancing Plague tells the true story of when hundreds of Strasbourg's inhabitants were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance. Prone to mystic visions as a child, betrayed in the convent to which she flees, then abused by her loutish husband, Mary endures her life as an oppressed and ultimately scapegoated woman with courage, strength, and inspiring beauty. As difficult to interpret now (as a psychological reaction to social injustice?) as it was then (as a collective demonic possession?), the story of the "Dancing Plague" finds suitably extraordinary expression in the utterly unique mixed-media style Gareth Brookes has devised to tell it. The pioneering blend of his trademark "pyrographic" technique with sumptuously colorful - and literal - embroidery perfectly reflects, in a beautiful work of art, the enduring fragility of our human condition - from "choreomania" to coronavirus.

The much-anticipated final volume of Rob Davis's dark and inventive trilogy
The Motherless Ovenand The Can Opener's Daughtermay have raised more questions than they answered, but The Book of Forks explains everything.
Castro Smith finds himself imprisoned within the mysterious Power Station, writing his Book of Forks while navigating baffling daily meetings with Poly, a troubled young woman who may be his teacher, his doctor, his prison guard . . . or something else entirely. Meanwhile, back home, Vera and Scarper's search for their missing friend takes them through the chaotic war zone of the Bear Park and into new and terrifying worlds.
With The Book of Forks, Rob Davis completes his abstract adventure trilogy by stepping inside Castro's disintegrating mind to reveal the truth about the history of the world, the meaning of existence, and the purpose of kitchen scales.

In the British Comic Award-winning The Motherless Oven, Scarper Lee asked: "Who the hell is Vera Pike?" In the second part of Rob Davis' trilogy, we get a chance to find out. This is Vera's story.
Grave Acre is a cruel world of opportunity and control. Vera's mother is the Weather Clock, the omnipotent and megalomaniacal Prime Minister of Chance. Her father is a can opener. Charting Vera's unsettling childhood, the book takes us from her home in Parliament to suicide school, and from the Bear Park to the black woods that lie beyond. In the present day, Vera and Castro Smith are determined to see their friend Scarper again - but is he still alive? And if so, can they save him? Can anyone outlive their deathday?
Both a sequel and a darkly inventive standalone graphic novel, The Can Opener's Daughter answers many of the questions posed in The Motherless Oven, while asking plenty more of its own.

In Scarper Lee's world, parents don't make children - children make parents. Scarper's father is his pride and joy, a wind-powered brass construction with a billowing sail. His mother is a Bakelite hairdryer. In this world it rains knives, and household appliances have souls. There are also no birthdays - only deathdays. Scarper's deathday is just three weeks away, and he clings to the mundane repetition of his life at home and high school for comfort. Rob Davis's dark graphic novel is an odyssey through a bizarre, distorted teenage landscape. When Scarper's father mysteriously disappears, he sets off with Vera Pike (the new girl at school) and Castro Smith (the weirdest kid in town) to find him. Facing home truths and knife storms at every turn, will Scarper even survive until his deathday?

David B. and Filiu draw striking parallels between ancient and contemporary political history in this look at the US-Middle East conflict. The reader is transported to the pirate-choked Mediterranean sea, where Christians and Muslims continue the Crusades, only this time on water. As the centuries pass, the traditional victims of the Muslim pirates - the British, French, and Spanish - all become empire-building powers whose sights lie beyond the Mediterranean.
The second volume of Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B.'s graphic novel history of US-Middle East relations begins in the 1950s with the Eisenhower Doctrine and ends with the Lebanese War of 1982. A perceptive and authoritative account of this turbulent historical period, Best of Enemies provides an overview of the Six-Day War between Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria; the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and other Middle Eastern conflicts involving the United States.

Giddied by the prospect of promotion, Charles Singulier makes the whimsical decision to buy a bowler hat. It is a satisfying, if fanciful, purchase. But there's a problem: this particular hat once belonged to the Surrealist painter René Magritte, and by donning it Charles has unwittingly entered the artist's unbridled, off-kilter world. The choice is clear: uncover the secrets of Magritte's life and work - or be doomed to wear the hat forever. Charles embarks on an exploration of Magritte's imaginative landscape, examining the ideas and penetrating the mysteries of a paradoxical figure: a painter who didn't like to paint; an instinctive anarchist who lived a suburban, petty bourgeois existence; a lonely, melancholy soul never far from his friends and collaborators. In Magritte: This is not a Biography, Vincent Zabus and Thomas Campi paint a panoramic and revealing portrait of the great Surrealist, employing a playfulness and wit reminiscent of Magritte himself.

Typography confronts us everywhere: in books and newspapers, on road signs, product packaging and political leaflets. It is ubiquitous to the point of mundanity. But while the typeface might be secondary to the message, it remains crucial to the way we respond. Fonts spark emotions; they evoke eras and ideologies. Some, like Edward Johnson's for the London Underground, have become iconic. Others, like comic sans, are loathed. Each one has its own place in history.
The ABC of Typography traces 3,500 years of type, from Sumerian pictographs, through Roman calligraphy, to Gutenberg, the Bauhaus and beyond. Brimming with insight and anecdote, this witty and well-informed graphic guide explores the historical, technological and cultural shifts that have defined the look of the words we read, as well as introducing the artists who have marked typography's long history.

When the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated after World War I, control of the Adriatic port of Fiume (now Rieka, Croatia) was hotly disputed. Enter "Pirate King" Gabriele d'Annunzio, an Italian poet who stormed the city with 3,000 Italian nationalists. D'Annunzio declared Fiume a free republic and himself commander. He envisioned a utopian city-state, but Fiume quickly became a surreal center of violence, looting, and decadence, with shades of the Fascist movement to come. Acclaimed comics artist David B. uses this real event as a backdrop and seamlessly weaves history, hysteria, and highly stylized art into the tragic love story of a beautiful torch singer and a young soldier haunted by the horrors of trench warfare.
Praise for Black Paths:
David B. draws with the chaotic, high-contrast style he used in his best-known work, Epileptic, to capture the distressed, surreal mood of artists struggling to run the world."

"Nao Brown suffers from OCD, but not the hand-washing, overly tidy type that people often refer to jokingly. Nao suffers from violent, morbid obsessions, while her compulsions take the form of unseen mental rituals.
Working part-time in a 'designer' vinyl toy shop, while struggling to get her own illustration career off the ground, she's still searching for that elusive love - the perfect love. And in meeting the man of her dreams, she realises... dreams can be quite weird.
Nao's meditation practice is an attempt to quieten her mind and open her heart, and it's through this that she comes to understand that things aren't so black and white after all. In fact, they're much more... brown.
Special Jury Prize, Angoulême 2013"

A young boy flees a town ruled by violence and ravaged by drought. Before him lies a lifeless expanse of baked earth; beyond that, the unknown.
Hunted by a merciless gang of townsfolk, the boy is ill-equipped and unprepared. He has no food, no water. He is tormented by nightmares. One night, he crosses paths with an elderly goatherd - and from that moment, nothing will be the same again.
At once both bleak and hauntingly beautiful, Jesús Carrasco and Javi Rey's Out in the Open is a high-stakes dystopian drama about finding humanity in a world torn apart by violence.

In the distant future, Verloc Nim wakes up in the middle of nowhere, remembering nothing of his former life. But when Verloc is handed his diary by a robot-ape called Churchill, he is able to revisit his past. His life, he discovers, was a miserable one. He lost his business, his family, and his friends because he refused the technological advancements of society. The eye implants, the pharyngeal filters, the genetic modifications, he went without all these. He was astray in a society he deeply resented - that is, until his brother, Conrad, took him to another planet to retrieve a mysterious substance called aama.
Verloc Nim has traveled with his brother Conrad to the desert planet Ona(ji) to recover the mysterious biorobotic experiment aama. The planet is home to an abandoned group of scientists who have been left to their fate, and Conrad sets up an expedition to find the professor who has taken aama to another part of the planet. With the assistance of their robot-ape Churchill, Verloc and Conrad embark on a journey that brings spectacular discoveries and unsettling encounters.
Verloc Nim and his brother, Conrad, depart on an expedition to recover the mysterious substance aama, which has transformed the environment of a distant planet. As they progress through a world that is both hostile and amazing, the mystery begins to unravel but the truth about aama remains unknown and reality begins to waver.
On Ona(ji), Verloc Nim is the sole survivor of an expedition to recover Aama, the experiment that has transformed this desert planet into a landscape inhabited by lethal biorobotic creatures and plants. Having pieced together the events of his recent past - his journey to Ona(ji), his part in the deadly expedition to Aama's source - Verloc finds himself physically transformed by his confrontation with the experiment. But will his extraordinary new powers be enough for him to save his daughter?

"From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied upon." Miskatonic University, Arkham, 1908. Professor Nathaniel Peaslee collapses in front of a class of students, only coming to his senses five years later. Horrified to discover that his body has been far from inactive during the intervening period - and plagued by unsettling and outlandish nightmares - Peaslee attempts to piece together the truth behind the missing years of his life. A chilling journey through time, space and the recesses of the mind, this adaptation gives terrifying form to one of H.P. Lovecraft's final tales.

After two years of unemployment, Maggy Garrisson lands a secretarial job. Too bad her new boss is the shady, shambolic Anthony Wight: private detective and alcoholic. But a job is a job, and Maggy could use the cash. Five days into her new role, Wight is beaten to a pulp and Maggy is tasked with returning his wallet. With this seemingly innocuous request, Maggy enters a sinister underworld of bent cops, crooked businessmen and career criminals. There's a lot to investigate, from the disappearance of a family album to dodgy dealings in gold teeth. But for someone with the energy, ingenuity and enterprising spirit of Maggy Garrisson, puzzles are there to be solved - especially if there's money to be made in the process.

It's a perfect beach day, or so thought the family, young couple, a few tourists, and a refugee at the same secluded, idyllic cove filled with rock pools and sandy shore, encircled by green, densely vegetated cliffs. But this utopia hides a dark secret. When a woman's dead body is founding floating in the crystal-clear water, the thirteen strangers band together to unravel the mystery of the cove - and soon find they best concentrate on how to get out alive themselves!

Her flight to her injured husband's side interrupted by an injured elephant in the road, Carice Sorrel makes her way to the hospital where her husband Pierre - victim of a drunk driver - waits for her. There, guided by her own future corpse, Madame Sorrel has a series of increasingly surreal encounters; corpses talk, spectral babies wander the halls, and hidden truths crawl towards the light. Caught in a dreamlike path that crisscrosses time itself, a confused and frightened Madame Sorrel struggles to understand her true situation; she faces a terrifying transformation but as the aged, dead Madame Sorrel assures herself, what is frightening and tragic from one perspective can be liberating from another. Each element in the story has purpose and meaning, one that invites close examination. Peeters' is the winner of several European comics awards, and his work rises above mere period piece, offering the reader a story of painful growth and introspection. Masterfully translated by Edward Gauvin, Peeters' tale of self-discovery is enthralling; in the author's hands, Cold War paranoia and thoughtfully subverted realist art provides commentary on other kinds of secrets, other kinds of betrayals and the conflict between duty and need. - Publisher's Weekly

Somewhere in the British Isles, at the end of a neglected byway, lies a village called Lip Hook. For its inhabitants, this place is more than the end of the road - it's the end of the world. Beyond it, there is nothing but mist-shrouded marshland. Few travellers choose the road to Lip Hook.
Then two fugitives emerge from the fog, seeking refuge at the Hanged Man Inn: a dangerously beautiful woman and a man with a gunshot wound and a suitcase full of treasure. As the disruptive outsiders' influence grows, a false faith grips the community, returning its followers to ancient ways and resurrecting a secret history perhaps best forgotten.
A dank tale of rural unease from creators David Hine and Mark Stafford, Lip Hook explores the nature of belief, the responsibilities of power and the tipping point where reason, logic and humanity begin to melt into the murk.

Chicago, 1924. For jazz trumpeter Lester Lane, the 'Windy City' is about to get a whole lot windier. On the run from the mob, Lester scores a desperate gig for his trio - dapper pianist Hank Arvin, with old-timer 'Iron Willie' on drums (among other things). Only trouble is, the booking is for a funeral, over in the backwoods of Illinois - where they sure ain't never heard of Tiger Rag. What happens then proves to Lester and his band that a White Zombie is far, far more than a fancy cocktail...

A contemplative and compelling tale about growing old and what it means to be happy
Gerda stands at the window of her nursing home, looking up at the stars. A question has been haunting her for years, but until now she's managed to avoid it: Has her life been a happy one?
As she negotiates the degradations of old age and the indignity of being cared for by strangers, the past begins to seep into the present. Gerda remembers her life as a bespectacled schoolgirl, bullied for being smart. She remembers the time she spent as an aspiring astrophysicist. And she remembers, most powerfully, that one summer - the summer of her life - when she was forced to make the most difficult decision of all: between her career and her relationship.
The Summer of Her Lifeis a poetic, touching, and profound graphic novel that grapples with life's big questions. How do you know whether you've made the right choices? And what does it mean, in the end, to be happy?

"Strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through the skies. But stranger still is Lost Carcosa." The King in Yellow: a play that brings madness to all who read it. Irresistible and insidious, it lures the reader with its innocence and dooms them with its corruption. In a series of interlinked stories, Robert W. Chambers' classic work of weird fiction shows the creeping spread of the play's macabre touch. I.N.J. Culbard's deft and unsettling adaptation breathes new life into Chambers' influential masterpiece, expertly revealing the malice and mayhem that await those unlucky enough to turn the wrong page.

Admired by writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Ruth Rendell, M.R. James is the acknowledged master of the English ghost story. Disdaining gore in favour of atmosphere and suggestion, his enduring supernatural tales are masterpieces of understated horror. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Volume 1 collects graphic retellings of four spine-chilling tales by the renowned medievalist and writer. At once true to their source and powerfully reimagined for a visual medium, Leah Moore and John Reppion's subtly crafted adaptations give a new lease of life to these classic stories of vanishing children, spectral works of art and vengeance from beyond the grave. Artwork is provided by Aneke, Kit Buss, Fouad Mezher and Alisdair Wood.