Fantagraphics

Marvel Comics is home to such legendary super-heroes as Spider-Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man, all of whom have spun box office gold in the 21st century. But Marvel Comics has a secret history hidden in the shadows of these well-known franchises. The Secret History of Marvel Comics digs back to the 1930s when Marvel Comics wasn't just a comic-book producing company. Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman had tentacles into a publishing world that might have made that era s conservative American parents lynch him on his front porch. Marvel was but a small part of Goodman s publishing empire, which had begun years before he published his first comic book. Goodman mostly published lurid and sensationalistic story books (known as pulps ) and magazines, featuring sexually-charged detective and romance short fiction, and celebrity gossip scandal sheets. And artists like Jack Kirby, who was producing Captain America for eight-year-olds, were simultaneously dipping their toes in both ponds. The Secret History of Marvel Comics tells this parallel story of 1930s/40s Marvel Comics sharing offices with those Goodman publications not quite fit for children. The book also features a comprehensive display of the artwork produced for Goodman s other enterprises by Marvel Comics artists such as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, Alex Schomburg, Bill Everett, Al Jaffee, and Dan DeCarlo, plus the very best pulp artists in the field, including Norman Saunders, John Walter Scott, Hans Wesso, L.F. Bjorklund, and Marvel Comics #1 cover artist Frank R. Paul. Goodman s magazines also featured cover stories on celebrities such as Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Taylor, Liberace, and Sophia Loren, as well as contributions from famous literary and social figures such as Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and L. Ron Hubbard. These rare pieces of comic art, pulp and magazine history will open the door to Marvel Comics unseen history.

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi's. (His very first--rejected--comics story dealt with the subject, as does his most recent work, the two-volume Putain de Guerre.) But It Was the War of the Trenches is Tardi's defining, masterful statement on the subject, a graphic novel that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. Like Remarque, he focuses on the day to day of the grunts in the trenches, and, with icy, controlled fury and disgust, with sardonic yet deeply sympathetic narration, he brings that existence alive as no one has before or since. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. And in a final, heartbreaking coda, Tardi grimly itemizes the ghastly human cost of the war, and lays out the future 20th century conflicts, all of which seem to spring from this global burst of insanity. Trenches features some of Tardi's most stunning artwork. Rendered in an inhabitually lush illustrative style, inspired both by abundant photographic documentation and classic American war comics, augmented by a sophisticated, gorgeous use of Craftint tones, trenches is somehow simultaneously atypical and a perfect encapsulation of Tardi's mature style. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi's oeuvre. It Was the War of the Trenches has been an object of fascination for North American publishers: RAW published a chapter in the early 1980s, and Drawn and Quarterly magazine serialized a few more in the 1990s. But only a small fraction of Trenches has ever been made available to the English speaking public (in now out of print publications); the Fantagraphics edition, the third in an ongoing collection of the works of this great master, finally remedies this situation.

Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree has been a global phenomenon and perennial bestseller since the first (of four) volumes was published in 2013, spawning multiple printings, fourteen comic books, and the author's wildly popular YouTube comics channel, Cartoonist Kayfabe (with fellow cartoonist Jim Rugg). Yet the series has never been collected under one cover. Until now. This omnibus collection includes the original 360-page series with over 140 pages of extra material: a cover gallery of every HHFT book and comic book cover and back cover Piskor ever created, pages from the HHFT comic book series that have never been collected, new annotations of the entire series by Piskor, and much more. Plus a foreword by Charlie Ahearn and an afterword by Bill Adler. Hip Hop Family Tree is the entertaining, encyclopedic history of the formative years of the music genre that changed global culture. Piskor's cartooning crackles like Kirby and takes you from the parks and rec rooms of the South Bronx