The Box Man TP

By Imiri Sakabashira

Enter the strange world of Imiri Sakabashira whose denizens are zoomorphic creatures that emerge from one another as well as their equally bizarre environs. The Box Man follows its protagonists along a scooter trip through a complex landscape that oscillates between a dense city, a countryside simplified to near abstraction, and hybrids of the two; the theme of hybridity permeates throughout. One is unsurprised to encounter a creature that is half elderly man, half crab or a flying frog in this world where our guide apparent is an anthropomorphic, mollusk-like cat. Sakabashira weaves this absurdist tale in a seamless tapestry constructed of elements as seemingly disparate as Japanese folklore, pop culture, and surrealism. Within these panels, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the imagined, a tension that adds a layer of complexity to this near-wordless psychedelic travelogue.

Imiri Sakabashira (real name Mochizuki Katsuhiro) was born in Shizuoka, Japan in 1964, the same year that Garo, the influential manga anthology in which he would first be published, was founded.

Hicksville TP

By Dylan Horrocks

World-famous cartoonist Dick Burger has earned millions and become the most powerful man in the comics industry. However, behind his rapid rise to success, there lies a dark and terrible secret, as biographer Leonard Batts discovers when he visits Burger's hometown of Hicksville in remote New Zealand. Hicksville is where the locals treasure comics and the library stocks Action Comics #1

Stooge Pile

By Seth Scriver

Seth Scriver's work is filled with lumpy men and women plucked from rural Canada - thick mustaches, plaid shirts and winter caps exchanging non-sequiturs and one-liners. Airbrushed Garfields, packs of wild dogs, flocks of birds, and more packs of wild dogs race through Scriver's paintings and drawings. Part of a crew of Canadian doodlers (like-minded folks such as Marc Bell (HOT POTATOE, THE STACKS), Peter Thompson (LUCKY ELLO), Amy Lockhard (DIRTY DISHES) and Keith Jones (BACTER-AREA), Scriver exemplifies a modern cartoon painting aesthetic - a type of fantasy world created through a stream-of-consciousness drawing style. His drawings present a palpable view of a hectic world in which cartoon bears and hunters engage in slapstick adventures.

The Wrong Place

By Brecht Evans

Rendered in vivid watercolor where parquet floors and patterned dresses morph together, Wrong Place revolves around oft-absent Robbie, a charismatic lothario of mysterious celebrity who has the run of a city as chaotic as it is resplendent. Robbie's sexual energy captivates the attention of men and women alike; his literal and figurative brightness is a startling foil to the dreariness of his childhood friend, Francis. With a hand as sensitive as it is exuberant, Brecht Evens's first English graphic novel captures the strange chemistry of social interaction as easily as he portrays the fragmented nature of identity. Wrong Place contrasts life as it is, angst-ridden and awkward, with life as it can be: spontaneous, uninhibited, and free.

Catland Empire

By Keith Jones

Catland Empire is like a Phillip K. Dick twisted with a Saturday morning cartoon graphic novel. There will exist a future world where "human beings have become empty husks stripped of all memory when it comes to things like how to have fun and play games" or so says Mr. Space to his associate Mr. Time. The solution? Get the cats to teach humans how to have fun again. This is all the Cat People do with their lives. They are the fun and game masters. What follows is a tangled web of psychedelic science fiction blending anti-consumerism politics and intergalactic liaisons between cats and dogs-bitter enemies kept secret from each other to avoid a planetary race war. Victor Burg is plotting to wipe out all of mankind by having his brain chip implanted drones commit genocide. .

KEITH JONES is a fine artist, Canadian doodler, and cartoonist.He has exhibited all around the world and has previously published an art book called Bacter-Area with Drawn & Quarterly.

Indoor voice

By Jillian Tamaki

Jillian Tamaki has taken the visual world by storm. A sought-after illustrator, she has racked up accolades and awards from the Society of Illustrators and Society of Publication Designers and has a client list that includes the New York Times, The New Yorker and Esquire. Her breathtaking talent was further established with the debut of the graphic novel SKIM - selected by the New York Times as a Best Illustrated Children's Book of 2008 - which was written by her cousin Mariko Tamaki, and drawn with moody black and white nuance by Tamaki. SKIM completely reinvented the young adult graphic novel genre with an utterly original and sincere portrait of being a teenaged outsider.

INDOOR VOICE collects pen, brush, ink, watercolor, and collage experiments that show how Tamaki arrives at her illustration work, as well as more polished and personal comics work examining her relationship to her parents and their influence on her art. .

Wilson HC

By Daniel Clowes

Meet Wilson, an opinionated middle-aged loner who loves his dog and quite possibly no one else. In an ongoing quest to find human connection, he badgers friend and stranger alike into a series of one-sided conversations, punctuating his own lofty discursions with a brutally honest, self-negating sense of humor. After his father dies, Wilson, now irrevocably alone, sets out to find his ex-wife with the hope of rekindling their long-dead relationship, and discovers he has a teenage daughter, born after the marriage ended and given up for adoption. Wilson eventually forces all three to reconnect as a family - a doomed mission that will surely, inevitably backfire. .

The Selves

By Sonja Ahlers

Before blogs, there were zines. Before zines, there were scrapbooks. Sometimes overlooked in the quest to produce high culture, these most direct and intimate means of communication and recording memory are the tools favoured by Sonja Ahlers in the making of her art. A self-taught artist and writer, Ahlers wears her pop culture obsessions on her sleeve, professing her love for such visual icons as Princess Di, Holly Hobbie and Stevie Nicks. Focusing on found objects such as stickers, greeting cards, magazine photos collected in collage framework, complete with song lyrics hand-lettered in cursive script and heartbreaking, melancholic water colors, Ahlers explores and exposes the social construction of roles, feminine and otherwise. Beginning with incipient childhood self-awareness and traversing high school status jockeying to adult social climbing, the cultural imagery that supports and informs personal identity is given uneasy new meanings and importance in Ahlers' visual remixes. With The Selves, the schizophrenic nature of an identity foraged from modern cultural sources is laid bare.