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| MAX
ALLAN COLLINS & RICHARD PIERS RAYNER |
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Road
to Perdition |
| by Max Allan Collins & Richard Piers Rayner |
Paperback: 304 pages
Pocket Books
ISBN: 0743442245 |
$14.00
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| Depression-era
Chicago: a city riding a tide of liquor and blood, ruled by guns, graft,
and gangsters. At the top of the heap is Al Capone... and Capone's most
feared hitman is Michael O'Sullivan, known to friends and enemies alike
as the "Angel of Death". But when Sullivan's eight-year-old son witnesses
a gangland execution, father and son find themselves facing off against
the most merciless gangster of all time. |
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| Writer Max Allan
Collins is a two-time winner of the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus
Award for his Nathan Heller historical thrillers "True Detective" and "Stolen
Away". Award-winning artist Richard Piers Rayner spent four years working
on the artwork for "Road to Perdition", a labor of love that has resulted
in some of the most stunningly realistic drawings of 1930s Chicago ever
seen on the printed page. |
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DENNIS COOPER
& KEITH MAYERSON |
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HORROR
HOSPITAL UNPLUGGED |
| by Dennis Cooper & Keith Mayerson |
Paperback: 256 pages
Juno Books
ISBN: 0965104214 |
$24.95
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| "Trippy
and brilliant."
Attitude
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Library
Journal
Youthful
angst is rarely portrayed as this terrifying.
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| "This
book will definitely become a classic."
International
Drummer
.
Dennis Cooper, best known
for his transgressive novels of gay teen angst and brutal sexual longing,
has adapted one of his early short stories into this large-sized, punked-out
graphic novel. Tracing the early career of Trevor Machine, rock star on
the rise, Cooper manages to parody the L.A. teen scene as well as all of
popular culture. The superb, surrealistic drawings by Keith Mayerson bring
Cooper's descriptions and dialogue to new heights of demented parody and
social commentary; it is if Antonin Artaud and Keith Haring took the wrong
drugs and collaborated on a kids cartoon show. Horror Hospital Unplugged
is artistic cross-pollination of the highest order: smart, shocking, and
always just over the line. |
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| WILL EISNER |
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A
FAMILY MATTER |
| by Will Eisner |
Paperback: 76 pages
Kitchen Sink Press
ISBN: 0878166203 |
$15.95
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| Eisner,
who created the masked crime-fighter the Spirit in 1940, is one of the
few early comic-books veterans still active and certainly the only one
turning out new work more ambitious than the genre tales for which he is
best known. Eisner now mostly creates graphic novels depicting Jewish life
in America. In the latest, family members prepare to observe their patriarch's
ninetieth birthday as he sits silent and paralyzed after a stroke. |
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| Eisner
portrays the clan's ambitions, pretensions, and disappointments broadly.
At the gathering, as long-standing resentments surface, family members
face deciding how to provide for the old man, and he makes a crucial choice
of his own. Family Matter lacks the scale of some of Eisner's newer work
and features bluntly one-dimensional characters. But its depiction of how
families are held together by a force "that sometimes seems to be neither
love nor loyalty" rings true. Moreover, Eisner's drawing here, less slick
and dramatic than that of his prime, has an agreeable looseness that helps
convey the story movingly.
--Gordon
Flagg
Copyright
© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved.
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| BOB FINGERMAN |
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MINIMUM
WAGE
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| by Bob Fingerman |
Paperback
Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1560971878 |
$12.95
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| "Minimum
Wage features a cast that is full of energy and life."
--Wizard
Magazine
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| "STARK
YET HILARIOUS REALITY"
"The
sort of earthy realism so often missing from conventional prose novels."
--Entertainment
Weekly
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| BOB FINGERMAN |
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MINIMUM
WAGE
BOOK
TWO:
THE
TALES OF HOFFMAN |
| by Bob Fingerman |
Paperback: 120 pages
Seven Hills Book Distributors
ISBN: 1560972866 |
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$12.95
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| "Bob
Fingerman has grounded his stories in stark yet hilarious reality. Unlike
most writers, who bring their characters to the brink of disaster and then
veer them off into safety, Bob plunges them headlong into the maw of it.
Just like life. That's why his work resonates. That is the pendulum upon
which Minimum Wage swings."
--stand-up
comic Dana Gould, the star of his own HBO comedy specials, from the Foreword
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| Minimum Wage:
Book Two is a thoroughly enjoyable twentysomething slice of life. Even
though this is the second collection of Bob Fingerman's Minimum Wage stories,
it reads well as a stand-alone volume: all of the characters are properly
reintroduced and are distinctive enough to immediately engage new readers.
The first two of the five chapters deal with protagonists Rob and Sylvia
looking for an apartment together in New York City. Anyone who's had a
hard time looking for a place to live or who hates to move will find plenty
of humor in these pages. The fourth chapter, which centers on a comic-book
convention (Rob is a cartoonist), is chock full of funny scenes and comics-industry
cameos, which can be pretty darn funny if you're in on the jokes (if you're
not up on comics convention humor, though, the chapter may not be as engaging).
The volume ends slightly anticlimactically, leaving room for a third book,
but don't let that deter you. Minimum Wage is great reading. |
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