The Beats of America’s 1950s stood far apart from the duty-bound, God-and-country, organizational-man times. It didn’t take long for the commercial culture to assimilate them in a wave of berets and bongos. The poetry, novels and art of the true counter-culture known as Beat is an honest reflection of American spirit and independence, commercial culture be damned.

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The Rabbit loved superheroes as a kid but seldom identified with them. It took growing up to do that. I was well into my 20s before I realized that every mild-mannered male had a secret identity, if not a colorful leotard with or without the requisite “S.”

I was somewhere in…

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Comics are the perfect vehicle for memoir, both fictional and…well, is there any other kind? Ames and Haspiel’s The Alcoholic takes full advantage of illustration’s ability for aggrandizement and visual parody. Cartoonist Haspiel (American Splendor) draws Ames’ sodden narrative with stylistic humor and consitent exaggeration. “A.” has razor-sharp features (that nose!) and…

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A sideshow of lost personalities, Abandoned Cars follows folks who have discarded the American dream and created their own nightmare.

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The bearded visage of Ernesto “Che” Guevara is ubiquitous, gazing heavily from t-shirts and dorm room posters world-wide. Now the subject of a two-part, epic film from director Stephen Sonderbergh starring Benicio del Toro, Guevera is a potent symbol of revolutionary action and counter culture merchandising, inflaming passions on all…

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Life under military rule is an absurd mix of the comic and the tragic. Cartoonist DeLisle, whose previous books document trips to North Korea and China, spent 14 months in Burma—now the self-proclaimed Myanmar– beginning in 2005. This simply drawn memoir accounts his days there while traveling with his wife,…

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…this is as pretty and as entrancing picture book as you’ll find, something to be explored under the spell of psychedelics as much as studied when perfectly straight.

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The five stories in Leah Hayes’ hard-to-categorize collection are all a sort of noir fairy tale, dark parables with strange, hazy lessons, fables with a touch of the horrific. Illustrated in scratchboard (you may remember this technique from your high school art class). Hayes’ black-and-white pages carry tales of duck…

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You’ve heard it said, even sung: Every picture tells a story. No where is that statement more true than in comics. And no comic illustrator tells deeper, more meaningful, more entertaining, more eye-pleasing stories than Chris Ware. Ware’s comics are so innovative, so artistic, clever and literate that they bridge…

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It’s unclear what President Bush knew of Palestinian life when he visited the occupied city of Ramallah on the West Bank in January of this year. He had something of an eye opener when weather forced him to abandon his helicopter and take a motor caravan through a checkpoint in the…

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