A comprehensive history of a small, but important, comic book publisher, this work reflects the reading tastes of tens of millions of Americans during the Golden and Silver ages of comics (1934-1970). The earlier Sangor "Shop" reinvented itself as the American Comics Group and by 1967 had published over one thousand issues. ACG was a microcosm of the larger industry, publishing magazines in every major comic book genre. Best known titles include "Herbie" and "Forbidden Worlds." It was ACG's "Adventures into the Unknown" that sparked a new genre--horror--which led to the Comics Code Authority, and industry-wide "self" censorship.

The Hugely popular Christopher Hart simplifies professional anime art so readers can develop their own original characters. It includes templates, step-by-step demonstrations and drawing exercises. Nothing brings anime artists more satisfaction than creating original characters to use in a comic strip or graphic novel. Bestselling How-to-Draw author Christopher Hart helps them reach this goal by providing insight into the six most popular anime types: schoolgirls, schoolboys, preteens, vengeful 'baddies', humorous personalities, and fantasy figures. He supplies templates for each- an extensive array of 'menus' of head and body types, outfits, and accessories, as well as detailed, accessible, step-by-step demonstrations and drawing exercises. Plus, Hart showcases some of the best anime artists in the world for this title, including Inma R., Tabby Kink, Ayame Shiroi, Euro Pinku and Tina Francisco. It's the guide every would-be anime artist has been looking for!

Published to celebrate the life of Mike Peyton, 'the world's greatest yachting cartoonist', this second edition features personal tributes from some 12 other successful and well-known sailors (including Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Sir Ben Ainslie and Tom Cunliffe). They all recognise Mike's observational talent and comment on how sailors see themselves (or their friends) in his cartoons. Along with 80 of his incomparable cartoons, Mike Peyton recounts how he became a yachting cartoonist and his fifty years of sailing. So as well as chuckling at the cartoons themselves there is the opportunity to learn from Peyton's 50 years of experience of sailing different boats, meeting a variety of sailors, and getting into - and out of - some truly hilarious situations.

"Most public and academic libraries, particularly those with emphases on art history, American studies, American popular culture, or book collection, will want to acquire American Popular Illustration." Reference Books Bulletin

Featuring 20 exclusive, removable Adventure Time posters to delight and bewilder, this book collects a madcap array of lovingly crafted artwork by world-class artists and designers. Cover your walls with colourful visions from the land of Ooo. Pore over gorgeous, high-quality prints featuring all your favourite characters, including Finn the Human, Jake the Dog, Ice King, Marceline the Vampire Queen, LSP, and Princess Bubblegum!

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today. Batman's foe has cropped up in thousands of comics, numerous animated series, and three major blockbuster feature films since 1966. Actually, the Joker debuted in DC comics Batman 1 (1940) as the typical gangster, but the character evolved steadily into one of the most ominous in the history of sequential art. Batman and the Joker almost seemed to define each other as opposites, hero and nemesis, in a kind of psychological duality. Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. As the first volume that examines the Joker as complex cultural and cross-media phenomenon, this collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. Connecting the Clown Prince of Crime to bodies of thought as divergent as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, contributors demonstrate the frightening ways in which we get the monsters we need.

The Art of Fine Gifts: Enjoy the countdown to Christmas! Open a door every day in December and find a beautiful Christmas sticker! This advent calendar is a delight for adults and children with its sparkling glittered cover. Featuring lovely cat artwork by Lesley Anne Ivory.

A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. The Bodleian Library is one of the oldest libraries in Europe and is the main research library of the University of Oxford. It holds over 13 million printed items and these book spines are just a few examples of the beautiful objects in the Library's collection. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

A beautifully packaged collection of Tove Jansson's classic Moomin artwork showcased alongside warm, witty and mindful quotes from the original books and characters. Packed full of stunning artwork from the Moomin archive including book covers, illustrations and a detailed map of Moominvalley, this book is a wonderful introduction to the magical world of the Moomins and a must-have for any Moomin fan. Printed on sturdy, high-quality A4 card, each picture can be pulled out and framed, or the book can be read from start to finish to give a history of the Moomins and their unique world. Tove Jansson's art, creative vision and philosophy have led her to become one of the world's most treasured children's authors and illustrators. Born in Helsinki to artist parents, she worked as a celebrated artist, author, and political cartoonist, but she is best known as the creator of the Moomins, the charming and quirky inhabitants of Moominvalley whose lives are filled with adventure, warmth and kindness. Publishing to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Moomins, this gorgeous gift book is peppered with inspirational quotes and additional info alongside the artwork, and will appeal to collectors and new fans alike.

After the murder of his fiancee by a vicious street gang, a man rises from the grave to wreak bloody vengeance upon those who wronged him. Fully remastered and revised by artist James O'Barr himself, the timeless story of "The Crow" (also made into the cult movie starring Brandon Lee) returns in a new author's edition with over sixty pages of previously unseen material, including new story pages.

This transnational, interdisciplinary study argues for the use of comics as a primary source. In recuperating currently unknown or neglected strips the authors demonstrate that these examples, produced during the World Wars, act as an important cultural record, providing, amongst other information, a barometer for contemporary popular thinking.

In RADIANCE, Mallory finds the Lord ever faithful as she pushes ahead with her diamonds and design business, partnering with Diana Faulkner. David is never far from her thoughts as the five years pass, sometimes seeming to crawl and, at other times, racing by. With her equilibrium thrown off temporarily by the entrance of handsome Cy Warrington, it isn't easy for her to get back on track and live down the failure. Can the Lord give her victory and the desires of her heart? Can she keep her companies profitable and embrace the relationships the Lord has placed in her life? It seems like a lot for one so young. As her friends announce engagements and rush to the marriage altar, can she resist being caught up in the mad dash? Read Radiance and experience what the blessing of the Lord can accomplish with a surrendered life.

Due to the huge success of her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic in 2006 and its subsequent Tony Award-winning musical adaptation in 2009, Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) has recently become a household name. However, Bechdel, who has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, has been writing and drawing comics since the early 1980s. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) stood out as one of the first to depict lesbians in popular culture and is widely hailed as an essential LGBTQ resource. It is also from this comic strip that the wildly popular Bechdel Test-a test to gauge positive female representation in film-obtained its name. While DTWOF secured Bechdel's role in the comics world and queer community long before her mainstream success, Bechdel now experiences notoriety that few comics artists ever achieve and that women cartoonists have never attained. Spanning from 1990 to 2017, Alison Bechdel: Conversations collects ten interviews that illustrate how Bechdel uses her own life, relationships, and contemporary events to expose the world to what she has referred to as the ""fringes of acceptability""-the comics genre as well as queer culture and identity. These interviews reveal her intentionality in the use of characters, plots, structure, and cartooning to draw her readers toward disrupting the status quo. Starting with her earliest interviews on public access television and in little-known comics and queer presses, Rachel R. Martin traces Bechdel's career from her days with DTWOF to her popularity with Fun Home and Are You My Mother? This volume includes her ""one-off"" DTWOF strips from November 2016 and March 2017 (not anthologized anywhere else) and in-depth discussions of her laborious creative process as well as upcoming projects.

As founder of one of the first branding firms in Los Angeles, California, HOW Creative, Howard A. Lim has been building Authentic Brands for more than two decades. His passion is in supporting and empowering businesses to transform products and services into rich brand experiences that motivate and inspire from the inside culture out. He has shepherded the brands of emerging and leading Fortune 100 companies such as DreamWorks, Mattel, Xerox, Fujitsu and Honda, influencing billions of dollars in clients' profits, brand value and equity.

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine Comedy' and its artistic legacy with her unique talent for collage and printmaking. These illustrations, casting the viewer as a first-person pilgrim through the underworld, prompt us to rethink Dante's poem through their novel perspective and visual language. Owen's work, held in the Bodleian Library and published here for the first time, illustrates the complete cycle of thirty-four cantos of the Inferno with one image per canto. The illustrations are accompanied by essays contextualising Owen's work and supplemented by six illustrations intended for the unfinished Purgatorio series. Fiona Whitehouse provides details of the techniques employed by the artist, Peter Hainsworth situates Owen's work in the field of modern Dante illustration and David Bowe offers a commentary on the illustrations as gateways to Dante's poem. Jamie McKendrick and Bernard O'Donoghue's translations of episodes from the 'Inferno' provide complementary artistic interpretations of Dante's poem, while reflections from colleagues and friends commemorate Owen's life and work as an artist, scholar and teacher. This stunning collection is an important contribution to both Dante scholarship and illustration.

At once familiar and hard to place, the work of acclaimed Canadian cartoonist Seth evokes a world that no longer exists - and perhaps never existed, except in the panels of long-forgotten comics. Seth's distinctive drawing style strikingly recalls a bygone era of cartooning, an apt vehicle for melancholy, gently ironic narratives that depict the grip of the past on the present. Even when he appears to look to the past, however, Seth (born Gregory Gallant) is constantly pushing the medium of comics forward with sophisticated work that often incorporates metafiction, parody, and formal experimentation. Forging the Past offers a comprehensive account of this work and the complex interventions it makes into the past. Moving beyond common notions of nostalgia, Daniel Marrone explores the various ways in which Seth's comics induce readers to participate in forging histories and memories. Marrone discusses collecting, Canadian identity, New Yorker cartoons, authenticity, artifice, and ambiguity - all within the context comics' unique structure and texture. Seth's comics are suffused with longing for the past, but on close examination this longing is revealed to be deeply ambivalent, ironic, and self-aware. Marrone undertakes the most thorough, sustained investigation of Seth's work to date, while advancing a broader argument about how comics operate as a literary medium. Included as an appendix is a substantial interview, conducted by the author, in which Seth candidly discusses his work, his peers, and his influences.