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BooksComics + Graphic Novels
By Jeff Kinney
Amulet Books Hardcover (224 pages; 1)
 | List Price: $12.95 Lowest New Price: $5.39 Lowest Used Price: $5.39 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description:
The highly anticipated sequel to the #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestselling book!
Secrets have a way of getting out, especially when a diary is involved.
Whatever you do, don’t ask Greg Heffley how he spent his summer vacation, because he definitely doesn’t want to talk about it.
As Greg enters the new school year, he’s eager to put the past three months behind him . . . and one event in particular.
Unfortunately for Greg, his older brother, Rodrick, knows all about the incident Greg wants to keep under wraps. But secrets have a way of getting out . . . especially when a diary is involved.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules chronicles Greg’s attempts to navigate the hazards of middle school, impress the girls, steer clear of the school talent show, and most important, keep his secret safe. |
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By Jeff Kinney
Abrams Books for Young Readers Hardcover (224 pages; 1)
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Click Here | Product Description: Boys dont keep diariesor do they?
The launch of an exciting and innovatively illustrated new series narrated by an unforgettable kid every family can relate to
Its a new school year, and Greg Heffley finds himself thrust into middle school, where undersized weaklings share the hallways with kids who are taller, meaner, and already shaving. The hazards of growing up before youre ready are uniquely revealed through words and drawings as Greg records them in his diary.
In book one of this debut series, Greg is happy to have Rowley, his sidekick, along for the ride. But when Rowleys star starts to rise, Greg tries to use his best friends newfound popularity to his own advantage, kicking off a chain of events that will test their friendship in hilarious fashion.
Author/illustrator Jeff Kinney recalls the growing pains of school life and introduces a new kind of hero who epitomizes the challenges of being a kid. As Greg says in his diary, Just dont expect me to be all Dear Diary this and Dear Diary that. Luckily for us, what Greg Heffley says he wont do and what he actually does are two very different things.
Since its launch in May 2004 on Funbrain.com, the Web version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid has been viewed by 20 million unique online readers. This year, it is averaging 70,000 readers a day. |
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By Daniel H. Pink
Riverhead Trade Paperback (160 pages)
 | List Price: $15.00 Lowest New Price: $8.36 Lowest Used Price: $8.36 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Amazon.com: There's never been a career guide like The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. Told in manga-the Japanese comic book format that's an international sensation--it's the fully illustrated story of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to the Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early months as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to rethink his approach. Step by step he builds a career, illustrating as he does the six core lessons of finding, keeping, and flourishing in satisfying work. A groundbreaking guide to surviving and flourishing in any career, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is smart, engaging and insightful, and offers practical advice for anyone looking for a life of rewarding work. |
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By Alan Moore
DC Comics Released: 2008-03-19 Hardcover (64 pages)
 | List Price: $17.99 Lowest New Price: $9.90 Lowest Used Price: $9.90 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Amazon.com: The Killing Joke, one of my favorite Batman stories ever, stirred a bit of controversy because the story involves the Joker brutally, pointlessly shooting Commissioner Gordon's daughter in the spine. This is a no-holds-barred take on a truly insane criminal mind, masterfully written by British comics writer Alan Moore. The art by Brian Bolland is so appealing that his depiction of the Joker became a standard and was imitated by many artists to follow. |
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By Alan Moore
DC Comics Released: 1995-04-01 Paperback (416 pages)
 | List Price: $19.99 Lowest New Price: $10.95 Lowest Used Price: $9.49 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Amazon.com: Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since. The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the finepace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite |
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By Dean Koontz
Del Rey Released: 2008-06-24 Comic (224 pages)
 | List Price: $10.95 Lowest New Price: $10.95 Not yet published (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description: “The dead don't talk. I don't know why.” But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Odd Thomas thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, if possessed of a certain measure of talent at the Pico Mundo Grill and rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn. Maybe he has a gift, maybe it’s a curse, Odd has never been sure, but he tries to do his best by the silent souls who seek him out. Sometimes they want justice, and Odd’s otherworldly tips to Pico Mundo's sympathetic police chief, Wyatt Porter, can solve a crime. Occasionally they can prevent one. But this time it's different.
A mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world's worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like shades following him wherever he goes. Who the man is and what he wants, not even Odd’s deceased informants can tell him. His most ominous clue is a page ripped from a day-by-day calendar for August 15.
Today is August 14.
In less than twenty-four hours, Pico Mundo will awaken to a day of catastrophe. As evil coils under the searing desert sun, Odd travels through the shifting prisms of his world, struggling to avert a looming cataclysm with the aid of his soul mate and an unlikely community of allies that includes the King of Rock 'n' Roll. His account of two shattering days when past and present, fate and destiny converge is the stuff of our worst nightmares—and a testament by which to live: sanely if not safely, with courage, humor, and a full heart that even in the darkness must persevere.
From the Hardcover edition. |
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By Erin Hunter
TokyoPop Released: 2008-04-22 Paperback (112 pages; 1)
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Graystripe and Millie have finally found ThunderClan's old territory, but Twoleg monsters have devastated the forest and Graystripe fears that all of his Clanmates have been killed or captured by Twolegs. Millie insists that they keep looking, and an old friend helps point the two cats on the path that the Clans followed many moons ago. But danger still lurks around every turn, and Graystripe worries that he and Millie are lost on an impossible journey. |
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By Charles M. Schulz
Fantagraphics Hardcover (344 pages)
 | List Price: $28.95 Lowest New Price: $17.71 Lowest Used Price: $17.71 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Product Description: The newest collection of the classic strip.
As we rush toward the end of Peanuts' second full decade, Snoopy finds himself almost completely engrossed in his persona as the World War I Flying Aceto the point where he goes to camp with Charlie Brown and maintains his persona throughout the entire two-week period (much to Peppermint Patty's bafflement).
Still, Snoopy looms large, so this volume (a particularly Snoopy-heavy one) sees him arm-wrestling Lucy as the "Masked Marvel" and then taking off for Petaluma for the national arm-wrestling championship; impersonating a vulture and a "Cheshire Beagle"; enjoying golf and hockey; attempting a jaunt to France for an ice-skating championship; running for office on the "Paw" ticket; being traded to Peppermint Patty's baseball team, then un-traded and installed as team manager by a guilt-ridden Charlie Brown; as well as dealing with the return of his original owner, Lila. If you're surprised by that last one, imagine how Charlie Brown feels...
Lila makes only a brief appearance (as does Josè Peterson, a short-livedand shortstar member of Charlie Brown's baseball team), but this volume sees the appearance of what would be Schulz's most controversial major character: Franklin. (Yes, in 1968 the introduction of a Black character caused a stir.)
Peppermint Patty, working toward her ascendancy as one of the major Peanuts players in the 1970s and 1980s, also has several major turns, including a storyline in which she's the tent monitor for three little girls (who call her "Sir"a joke Schulz would pick up later with Peppermint Patty's friend Marcie).
Stories involving other characters include a sequence in which Linus's flippant comment to his Gramma that he'll kick his blanket habit when she kicks her smoking habit backfires; Lucy bullies Linus, pesters Schroeder, and organizes a "crab-in"; plus Charlie Brown copes with Valentine's Day depression, the Little Red-Haired Girl, the increasingly malevolent kite-eating tree, and baseball losses. In other words: Vintage Peanuts! |
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By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Released: 2008-03-18 Hardcover (448 pages)
 | List Price: $26.00 Lowest New Price: $14.42 Lowest Used Price: $12.99 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Amazon.com: Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: I may be alone here, but when I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a whole strata of American artists came to life for me. Ever since then I've been waiting for a book like David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague to come along and show me the contours of this world. Anyone who remembers Positively 4th Street will recognize in this new book Hajdu's peerless ability to weave first-person recollections with an acute perspective of America at a pivotal moment in its cultural timeline. The rise of comics as a mode of expression, an outlet for entertainment, and, rather tragi-comically, as a target for censorship, couldn't be more compelling in anyone else's hands. In deft narrative strokes Hajdu creates a colorful, character-driven story of our first real--and lasting--counterculture (if the burgeoning popularity of graphic novels is any indication) and shows why we embrace it still.--Anne Bartholomew
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By Frank Miller
DC Comics Released: 1997-05-01 Paperback (224 pages)
 | List Price: $14.99 Lowest New Price: $7.90 Lowest Used Price: $7.49 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 06:31 Pacific 11 May 2008 More Info)
Click Here | Amazon.com: If any comic has a claim to have truly reinvigorated the genre, then The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller--known also for his excellent Sin City series and his superb rendering of the blind superhero Daredevil--is probably the top contender. Batman represented all that was wrong in comics and Miller set himself a tough task taking on the camp crusader and turning this laughable, innocuous children's cartoon character into a hero for our times. The great Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, the arguably peerless Watchmen) argued that only someone of Miller's stature could have done this. Batman is a character known well beyond the confines of the comic world (as are his retinue) and so reinventing him, while keeping his limiting core essentials intact, was a huge task.Miller went far beyond the call of duty. The Dark Knight is a success on every level. Firstly it does keep the core elements of the Batman myth intact, with Robin, Alfred the butler, Commissioner Gordon, and the old roster of villains, present yet brilliantly subverted. Secondly the artwork is fantastic--detailed, sometimes claustrophobic, psychotic. Lastly it's a great story: Gotham City is a hell on earth, street gangs roam but there are no heroes. Decay is ubiquitous. Where is a hero to save Gotham? It is 10 years since the last recorded sighting of the Batman. And things have got worse than ever. Bruce Wayne is close to being a broken man but something is keeping him sane: the need to see change and the belief that he can orchestrate some of that change. Batman is back. The Dark Knight has returned. Awesome. --Mark Thwaite |
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