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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The 1960s were all about consciousness raising: middle class white kids discovering the poverty and discrimination suffered by people of color, apolitical guys getting drafted and sent to the war in Asia, young women running up against the patriarchal system and nearly everybody expanding—or blowing—their minds on drugs. This lifting…

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Let’s face it: some guys are jerks. Ben Tanaka, the lead in writer-illustrator Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, is one of them. Cynical, selfish, bitter and indulgent, he’s the kind of fool who covers his sexual insecurities with a façade of righteous self-confidence and a porno collection. By any measure—and…

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Our choice for the great American novel is not about a boy named Huck, a sailor obsessed with a whale or a jazz-age millionaire. It’s about a cat–an evil, hallucinatory, blue cat–named Waldo. And it’s not a novel at all. It’s a comic.

The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Pantheon), Kim Deitch’s…

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Comparisons between famously depressive Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and raunch-and-rant cartoonist Ivan Brunetti seem a bit of a stretch. After all, Schulz never drew Lucy sporting a strap-on dildo, as Brunetti does, and having her way with Charlie Brown. But the two illustrators share a world-view. Charlie Brown never gets to…

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