Rare Graphic Novels: Various Publishers, Page 3

• Girl Genius Volume 1\/
• Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!\/
• Naruto 2008 Box Set, Vol.s 1-27

• Stitches: A Memoir\/
• Scott Pilgrim Boxset\/
• The Invisible Art

Rating: ★★★★¾ 

Girl Genius is a great steam punk series mixed in with a little fantasy. In this first book, the artists are still finding their “look” but it is still very good. This book is a short introduction into the world of Agatha Heterodyne. You just get a taste of a wide range of different aspects of this world and, by the end, you will want to know more. This is the colorized Hardcover edition and it is a beautiful book.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Little Nemo in Slumberland was the peak of McCay’s art, and Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!, edited by Peter Maresca, is the first book to do justice to it, basically because it is freaking gigantic.

It’s a luxury item—120 bucks—but it delivers: at 16 by 21 inches, it’s a coffee-table book bigger than some coffee tables. In other words, it’s the size of the New York Herald’s tabloid pages, on which “Little Nemo” was originally printed, and its gorgeous color reproduction is designed to look like the pages as they were published, on paper far nicer than newsprint but with the same background tone.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

The series is based on a one-shot comic by Kishimoto that was published in the August 1997 issue of Akamaru Jump.

Naruto is an ongoing Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto. The plot tells the story of Naruto Uzumaki, an adolescent ninja who constantly searches for recognition and aspires to become a Hokage, the ninja in his village that is acknowledged as the leader and the strongest of all.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Stitches has been reviewed by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and is a #1 New York Times Best Seller. It was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com. It was also a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

David Small’s graphic memoir, Stitches, was published in September, 2009. One day, Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that that he had been transformed into a virtual mute—one of his vocal cords had been removed. He was fourteen, and had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. Stitches tells the story of Small’s journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen who made a risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist.

Rating: ★★★★¾ 

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Boxset is a collector’s box containing all six volumes and a fold-in poster, released in North America on November 3, 2010.

The Scott Pilgrim Boxset collects the following graphic novels:
1. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life (August 18, 2004)
2. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (June 15, 2005)
3. Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness (May 24, 2006)
4. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together (November 14, 2007)
5. Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe (February 4, 2009)
6. Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (July 20, 2010)

Publishers Weekly ranked the third volume, Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness, as one of the best comic books of 2006 in a critics’ poll.

Rating: ★★★★¾ 

Understanding Comics:  The Invisible Art is a 215-page non-fiction comic book, written and drawn by Scott McCloud and originally published in 1993. It explores the definition of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used.

The book was a finalist for the 1994 Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book.