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I have long been a fan of Emily Carroll’s distinctive art style, which I was first introduced to in the video game The Yawhg. Her beautiful illustrations fit perfectly with Marika McCoola’s wonderful pseudo-fairytale about a young woman named Masha, called Baba Yaga's Assistant. Masha feels out of place after her grandmother passes away and her father remarries a woman who has her own daughter. So, when Baba Yaga puts out an advertisement for an assistant, Masha decides to leave and try her hand at working for the terrifying witch of Russian folklore. Masha will have to use her wits and memories from her youth to thrive in her new profession.

The story blends present with myth and memory, and these different moments are beautifully conveyed in Carroll’s pictures, with different styles for each storyline. For example, when Baba Yaga’s bear attacks Masha, she recalls fairytales from her childhood in order to figure out how to dissuade him from eating her. The style or art changes, with the panels outlined with geometric designs, and the internal images appearing as abstract watercolors. Later, when Masha remembers moments from her past, the images are frequently rendered in duller colors, creating a hazy appearance that appeals to our sense of what memory “looks” like. At other points, the panels spill over into each other, pushing the story quite literally from one section to the next.

My favorite thing about the book is Masha herself, who is plucky enough to stand up to Baba Yaga, and independent enough to pursue her own path. Read the rest

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Fuel Publishing, based in London, has carved a niche in the book world by creating books that document the small dark corners of Soviet history. You may be familiar with the series of books, Russian Criminal Tattoos, that revealed the language of body ink and the hierarchies of gulags. CCCP Cook Book uses the same obsessive attention to detail to great effect. When your country is wholly dependent on what the obshchina (collective farm) produces, what you eat is a political act. CCCP Cook Book delves deep into the history of dishes beloved by generations of Russians evolved from both the ideal of equal for all and the realities of planned food production in a country of nearly 170 million.

Visually, CCCP Cook Book adheres to Fuel’s high-minded design aesthetic. The full-page photos that illustrate the recipes are faithfully reproduced in the faded colors and garish contrasts that plagued cookbooks (regardless of origin) throughout the mid-century period.

Knowing that “Soviet” in Russian means "assembly" helps understand that Soviet cuisine isn’t necessarily Russian food. Central planners developed recipes based on projected harvests and preserved foods. Fresh herring wasn’t available in Taskent, but tinned (preserved) fish could be distributed throughout the country. Workers were fed meals at their workplaces that helped standardize recipes, as commissary cooks were required to follow the famed manual, “Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.”

That guide purposefully adapted regional dishes into new, improved Soviet recipes. Vorschmack has its roots in Jewish cuisine, but is easily recognized today as our own deviled eggs. Read the rest

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Are you done with adult coloring books but not yet ready for adult fingerpainting? Have you considered... an adult stickerbook? I don’t understand how Paint by Sticker got made — it’s such an odd idea — but it turns out that it’s unexpectedly diverting to put these pictures together. The book has 12 unpainted “paintings” on thick perforated paper, each with two dedicated sheets of stickers. The paintings are outlines of some standard subjects: a fruit bowl still-life, a cottage in the woods. Through some creative talent I can’t wrap my head around, the images have been broken down into outlined facets by color, each numbered and waiting for you to apply the corresponding sticker.

I tried Paint by Sticker out on a few guinea pigs. Test subject #1 is a nine-year-old visual artist, and she wandered away before doing very much of her project. Test subject #2 is an adult, enjoys crafts but is not particularly artistic, and got super-duper into this with a glass of wine, a pocket knife for the stickers that wouldn’t come loose, and tweezers for precise placement. The subject had a meditative blissful time putting the stickers on the water towers and matching up the shapes with the numbers, and ooooh it was so satisfying, maybe not as an expression of emotion, but as a soothing and enjoyable treasure hunt with a weird and cool final project. Test subject #3 is a teenager, was also absorbed by the task, and assembled the fox while eating dinner. Read the rest

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It's only right that Stan Lee's memoirs arrive in comic book form. The 93-year-old ambassador/mascot of Marvel Comics has been in the funnybook business since 1939 - back when they still were called funnybooks. Back then, the medium was seen as silly at best, vile at worst. But today, comics, or graphic novels as some highfalutin folks call them, have attained a status of near respectability. People of all ages read and love them, and their characters generate billions of dollars via their appearances on TV and in films. Lee, along with other key figures, has been at the forefront of this evolution. And though he's interviewed almost daily, it's interesting to hear what he has to say about his career and all the changes he's seen.

Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir by Stan Lee, penned with the help of veteran comics writer Peter David and zippily illustrated by Colleen Doran, does a fine job of charting Lee's trajectory to the top of his field. We see how the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seized Lee's early imagination, making him want to become a writer. And we observe him in his early years at Atlas Comics, the company that became Marvel, and how he, in collaboration with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, helped create the Marvel Universe.

Lee is often criticized for stealing the spotlight and not giving due credit to Kirby, who co-created the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Thor, Captain America and many others, and Steve Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and more. Read the rest

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I’m willing to bet that your relationships with significant others aren’t as convoluted or mind-boggling as the ones you will find in Weird Love, a collection of love comics from decades past. I know that because I’m also willing to bet that you are more culturally evolved than your ancestral fictional characters that populated these four-color pages culled from the heyday of making women feel bad about pretty much everything. That’s what makes this collection so ridiculous. Weird Love gives us a glimpse into a time when the needle on the social gauge floated somewhere between “rampant sexism encouraged” and “casual sexism customary.”

While these stories probably weren’t intended to be comedic at the time, the warm blanket of history has swaddled them in ludicrousness. We have no analog for the petty, unflappable dickishness of the men, nor of the frank, almost callous lack of agency of the women depicted in the pages of Weird Love. Soap opera seems only a vague comparison, for soap opera tends to be at least a little self-aware. Nor can you compare it fairly to modern prose romance, for I would have to assume that modern romance writers likely enjoy what they do. The most important thing to remember about Weird Love is that literally all of these comics were written and drawn by middle-aged white men. They were either guys who typically wrote western, crime, horror, sci-fi, and superhero comics and liked doing those, or guys for whom creating comics was just kind of a job. Read the rest

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1766. A ship named the Kraken. A little girl tied to the mast, her face darkened by the shadow of a fearsome sea monster. It’s approaching, closer, closer, its teeth just inches from her face. But none of this is real.

Pan back to reveal an audience – and that’s when we realize that we, like them, are being treated to a performance. All this comes in the first few pages of Brian Selznick’s The Marvels and it sets the tone for everything after. Stories within stories, books inside plays, real life lived out on a theatre stage.

The Marvels is a novel of two halves. Part one consists of a 400-page collection of immersive black-and-white pencil drawings that tell the story of the Marvel family. From modest roots to fame and fortune, from lucky escapes to fiery ends. Part two is a short novel in itself, picking up in 1990 with young runaway Joseph Jervis absconding from boarding school in order to search out his enigmatic uncle, Mr A. Nightingale, and then discovering the history of the Marvel family for himself.

The illustrations of part one are a real pleasure and very manageable in one sitting. With every image realized on a two-page spread, there are layers and intimate details to get lost in. A range of pencil techniques capture the story’s varied landscapes, which switch from brooding oceans to tropical forests to cobblestoned alleyways. Selznick obviously doesn’t believe in white space. Read the rest

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It was right before Christmas and I was desperate for a present for a Magic: The Gathering player. When I asked knowledgable friends if there was such a thing as a Pokédex-style guide to all the MTG cards available, I was directed towards The Art of Magic: The Gathering: Zendikar.

This coffee-table book is limited to art from the Zendikar set, the most recent card collection published by Wizards of the Coast. There is no reference book showing all MTG cards from its 20-plus year history, and this book will not scratch that itch; there are too many cards out there, thousands and thousands, for that to be a reasonable project in 2016. But if you’re someone who would like a MTG-dex to exist, then you’re going to want this on your coffee table.

The text isn’t an analysis of the artwork, but instead is closer to a nature guide to Zendikar — the plane (or planet) of this set — and a retelling of the plot behind the collection. Parts are amusingly reminiscent of Lonely Planet travel guides: “In one spot on Murasa’s towering cliffs, the Tajuru elves created a passable route over the wall. The route, consisting of steep, winding switchbacks and a few rickety wooden lifts, ins now maintained by humans and guarded by ogres, all in the service of an ogre named Kazuul. Upon reaching the top, travelers must pay tribute to Kazuul, and if the Tyrant of the Cliffs is not satisfied, he hurls them right back down the way they came as punishment for their impudence.”

A six-page appendix is the only place where the book breaks character, as Mark Rosewater — the designer of the Zendikar and Battle for Zendikar card sets — describes the years-long process by which the writers, artists, and art directors create a new world. Read the rest

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When an author who writes books for grown-ups is successful at translating his voice into books for kids it’s a win-win. Jeffrey Brown, author of graphic novels such as Clumsy and Funny Misshapen Body has done just that with his series Star Wars Jedi Academy. These graphic novels follow Roan, a young Jedi fumbling his way through middle school’s version of the Jedi Arts. This latest installation, Attack of the Journal, is part activity book part sketchbook and a great accompaniment to the series. It features familiar characters from the books, but you don’t need to have read the actual novels to enjoy the journal. Unlike many character-based activity books for children, Attack of the Journal gives the reins over to the reader. Instead of preprinted mazes and simple seek and finds, Brown’s activities are open-ended and challenge readers to try drawing new things and to write their own stories.

The book is great for elementary-aged kids, but even younger can have fun with the “Draw Your Friends As Aliens” page or attempt a self-portrait. I found it’s a great way to practice letters and words with kids in a way that is fun for everyone. Even the fact that it’s a hardback makes whatever you create inside feel more important. Jeffrey Brown’s sense of humor and kind encouragement are felt in the journal activities, helping young authors and illustrators not take it too seriously if their “Create your own Lightsaber” page looks more like a Wookie. Read the rest

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“He’s the one who makes your whole world possible. This is a world of noble heroes, and savage villains. A world where men and women of great power die everyday. And the Shaman? The Shaman is the one who brings them back.”

Ben Kahn and Bruno Hidalgo’s Shaman Vol. 1 is, on its surface, an entertaining, fast-paced, self-deprecating story about a guy who raises the dead, his young daughter who wields magic from her mystical tattoos, and a teleporting former superhero-turned-sidekick who travel around bringing back to life those whom “the personification of life itself” tells them to. Along the way, they fight skeletons and Cosmic Guardians and giant green monsters, all the while throwing down quips and wisecracks and pop culture references. It’s fun stuff all around, pulling you in and making you laugh out loud.

But coursing underneath throughout the narrative is an examination of the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, life and loss, and what it means to be a “family.” Ben Kahn’s storytelling works in the gray areas where nothing is clean cut, and everything, therefore, becomes far more interesting. What could easily be flat, one-dimensional characters are, here, complex, multi-dimensional beings whose motivations and choices are constantly examined and second-guessed. As outlandish a concept as Shaman is, it's grounded in the human reality; the reader knows these characters because the reader is these characters.

So often in comics the intent of the writer gets lost in the complexity of the artist’s choices, but not so in Shaman. Read the rest

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A is for adorable and that’s just the beginning of the attributes you’ll want to ascribe to this sweet account of anthropomorphic animals and the alphabet. Teagan White has created a charming book filled with colors awash in the glow of nostalgia, where forest critters romp across a scenic woodland, bundled in impossibly cute sweaters and tiny, striped scarves.

Adventures with Barefoot Creatures is characterized as an ABC book but its letter-themed, rhyming stanzas also follow the woodland flora and fauna through the seasons. A, B and C take place in deep winter as the critters clean out the attic and sniffle through colds. Spring arrives, with robin’s eggs and growing things twining their green vines and reaching across the pages in a riot of whimsy. Exuberant, the critters frolic in the summer’s sun, swimming in the lake and collecting ocean artifacts from the shores. As the end of the alphabet approaches, cable knit sweaters reappear and the illustrations become clotted with the changing colors of leaves and the warmth of campfires. Z arrives to find the barefoot critters snuggled together, exhausted from their delightful New Year’s festivities and tumbled together in a darling snoozefest on the couch.

ABC books are a well-explored subgenre that usually offers little in the way of novelty. Adventures with Barefoot Critters is a title that steps outside the clichéd with playful, quaint artwork that beguiles. If you enjoy the fascinating world of the quirky, imaginative Ms. White and her cast of cheery woodland companions, keep your eyes peeled for her latest book arriving in late summer, Counting with Barefoot Critters. Read the rest

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As someone who spent many misguided years of my youth drinking poorly-eyeballed gin and tonics out of coffee mugs, I never really understood: How exactly can you make cocktails "well" or "poorly"? Isn't it a simple matter of ratios – of pouring the right amount of the right things into a glass, chucking in an ice cube or two and calling it a day? Where is the mysterious opportunity in that simple process to either mess it up or do it exceptionally well? Jeffrey Morgenthaler's The Bar Book is a masterclass on that very subject.

The Bar Book is not a recipe book. Instead, it is a techniques book. Morgenthaler elevates making cocktails into a craft, focusing on finding the right recipe, using the best ingredients, and executing it all using effective techniques. While the author does include expertly curated recipes for some must-know cocktails, instead of focusing on what to mix (which can always be found with a quick Google of "how to make a Cosmopolitan"), it focuses on how, why, and when to mix it. He gives you a 360-degree education in barcraft, from what shapes cocktail shakers come in and what the differences mean to why the shape and size of your ice is important and how to make it so that it comes out of the tray clear and beautiful. He’s a big proponent of making things like mixers, garnishes and even liqueurs from scratch, so the book offers up recipes for making things like flavored syrups, infusions, and even tonic water. Read the rest

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Gappers are creepy little orange, multi-eyed, round creatures that love nothing more than to hang out on or near goats, shrieking all the while. As you might imagine, this is very stressful to the goats. They stop eating; they stop giving milk. If your family gets its livelihood from that milk, you’re in bad shape when the gappers are around. They emerge from the ocean, find the goats, and wreak their shrieking havoc.

The village of Frip is made up of three ocean-side shacks. The girl Capable and her widowed father live in one. Mrs. Romo and her sons live in the second. Sid and Carol Ronson and their daughters (who “sometimes stood completely motionless in order to look somewhat pretty”) lived in the third. In Frip, the children must check on the goats eight times per day in order to remove the gappers and return them to the sea (from which they will reemerge again and again).

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a fable about the perils of putting oneself before the community and the ultimate merits of sharing amongst a community. The gappers have bothered the three families’ goats equally for ages, until one of the smarter gappers realizes that Capable’s goats are slightly closer than the others. Once the gappers converge, Capable is unable to keep them away. She asks for help, but she is refused:

“We feel strongly that, once you rid your goats of gappers, as we have, you will feel better about yourself, and also, we will feel better about you. Read the rest

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I love the tidbits of history, the unique visual style, the subtle humor, and the breadth of coverage in Timeline: A Visual History of Our World. On each 10x29-inch page spread are whimsical curved text blocks filled with simply written – yet intriguing – historical facts. And each spread addresses one era of time. The book, which targets children 7 to 12-years old, starts with The Beginning of Life and includes a miniature image-based timeline of stromatolites, trilobites, ammonites and more. The author offers spreads dedicated to the major geological periods, as well as more brief and recent timespans. Our current decade is the last timeline covered, concluding with “As time goes by. . .” along with a person spreading black paint across the page.

The illustrations are fabulous. Goes uses a minimalist color palette that differs for each of his timelines. The Dinosaurs are on a wheat-toned page with black silhouettes accented by red and gold. The Ming Dynasty appears on a dusty rose background with dark pink and white accents, again using black as the major illustrative color. Goes' technique of black with two accent colors artfully draws the eye to visual vignettes on the page, while the curving text leads you to the next image. Wonderful. Engaging. Amusing.

This book makes for great conversational fodder. Did you know that, according to the page spread on 18th Century in Europe, “Mont Blanc was called Mon Maudit, or ‘cursed mountain,’ until the Enlightenment, when people stopped believing in curses”? Read the rest

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On October 2, 1950 a boy named Charlie Brown first appeared in American newspapers. Peanuts popularity grew steadily and on January 6, 1952, the strip’s first Sunday edition debuted. For the next 48 years, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Schroeder, and all the other players appeared in full color on the comics page.

But I wasn’t there for any of that. Rather, I found Peanuts in the early 1980s, when comics pages had already started to shrink and the famous characters of the strip were more readily accessible to kids through specials. Even then, I didn’t read the comics page as much as I did the dusty paperback collections with titles like Happiness is a Warm Puppy and A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Growing up as a fan, the single greatest headache was trying to find all the strips. I wanted to know when Snoopy changed from being a dog to being another kid in a funny costume. I wanted to know when Charlie Brown first fell in love with the Little Red Haired Girl. But it couldn’t be done. Although most had been reprinted in one collection or another, there was no single resource that had all the strips.

Enter Fantagraphics Books. Beginning in 2004, Fantagraphics collected and published The Complete Peanuts. While this series collected all the daily strips, the Sunday strips were spun off into a second series, Peanuts Every Sunday, the third volume (of ten) of which has just been released. Read the rest

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If the enormous hairy solar chimneys that these architects once built in the middle of Long Island City don’t make you smile, then your sense of play might need renovation. The fun-loving, aggressively eccentric work of MOS Architects includes some recurring motifs: canopies, unusual materials, solar chimneys, shaft lighting, and buildings that look like blocks tumbled to earth. Engaging for architects and non-architects alike, this is a book that I keep picking up: to look through the illustrations, to wonder at, to think about how to work creatively, to show something weird and wild to a friend. While there is some discussion of theory in the included essays, this is a book refreshingly light on architectural jargon.

The architectural historian Lucia Allais suggests in an included essay that one of the primary questions that the work of MOS poses is, “Is this simple or complex?” While the works presented are often simple, the reactions they provoked for me were complex, ranging from confusion to glee to disbelief. Crammed with 300 images, the just-released MOS: Selected Works demonstrates the firm’s unusual range of having produced buildings, installations, furniture, software, films, and pavilions, along with smaller works (like this book).

MOS, as a firm, is on a very serious mission to advance the limits of architecture, but without taking themselves too seriously. Their hilarious office manual is included in the book and will inspire glee in anyone who has ever worked in a corporate office, advising, “You will arrive at the Office when you are awake and ready to work. Read the rest

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Darth Vader and Son is cute, and perfect for the little Star Wars fan in your life. It playfully posits the question “What if Darth Vader had actually raised Luke?” Author and illustrator Jeffrey Brown turns run-of-the-mill parenting activities into fun moments full of Star Wars references.

This book isn’t so much a story as it is a peek into the hypothetical everyday life of Vader and Luke. Every page of the book tells its own complete story of sorts. Some pages are miniature comics while others are full-page illustrations. Brown does an incredible job of telling his story in these single images. I imagine this book would be great for children just learning to read, similar to how the Owly books help develop a sense of story without the need for lines and lines of text. If you have a child that enjoys books but isn’t yet able to read longer children’s books with more words, Darth Vader and Son is a great compromise. At 64 pages it is long enough to be engaging for an extended period of time, but you can basically jump in and out of the book at any point.

Brown’s art style is colorful and light, reminiscent of childhood crayon drawings. Darth Vader always looks slightly goofy, which goes a long way to establish the tone of the book. The drawings include a number of visual references to the Star Wars films that will delight anyone with the eye to catch them (and there’s something on almost every page, so have fun looking for everything). Read the rest

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White Heat has long been my White Whale when searching through used bookstores. I’ve wanted this book for going on ten years. The first time I heard the name Marco Pierre White I had been reading a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, wondering if I had what it takes to be a professional chef (I did not). Bourdain mentioned White’s book, saying that it was the first time he’d seen a “real” chef in a cookbook, a sleep-deprived, nicotine-fueled, mad man in the kitchen.

I thought that I’d finally found my copy when there was a re-release a few years back, but that paperback copy is the TV dinner to this 25th anniversary edition’s three-course meal. Can a home cook use any of these recipes? Maybe. The recipes are French. They’re complicated. And the ingredients include things like caviar, lobster, and pig trotter. But, the mistake is to think of this as a straight-up cookbook. You wouldn’t flip through a book on Picasso and expect to learn how to paint. This book is evidence in the argument that food can be art.

While you might not find a recipe for something to cook on a Tuesday night, you will find: Beautiful, gritty, black and white photography that makes you feel like you’re in the kitchen with this lunatic. A chef doing what chefs do, smoke. The word “fuck” on more than one page. A fresh-faced Gordon Ramsey before he started calling people “donkeys.” And a handful of recipes for dishes that allowed White to become the youngest chef to hold three Michelin Stars. Read the rest