History & Price Guides

The Marvel Encyclopedia

Marvel Comics' character roster boasts some of the best known and most popular characters ever conceived-heroes that are international household names, both as comic book stars and movie stars, such as Spider-Man, the Hulk and Wolverine. This unique, one-volume encyclopedia contains more than 1000 of Marvel's greatest, with full details of their powers and their thrill-packed careers. The encyclopedia's range of spectacular art features eye-popping work by Marvel's finest artists, while the authoritative text is supplied by a team of top Marvel comic book writers. In addition, double-page features, illustrated with classic covers, trace the fascinating story of Marvel Comics through the decades. The Marvel Comics Encyclopedia is an essential book both for new fans and for those who grew up loving the excitement, heroism and humor of the Marvel Universe. Includes a foreword by Stan Lee.

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko

The first critical retrospective of the work of the reclusive Spider-Man co-creator.

In the wake of the astonishing success of Sam Raimi's three Spider-Man movies, Steve Ditko has become known as the co-creator, with Stan Lee, of the early 1960s character that helped propel Marvel Comics' popularity on college campuses and gave it much of its cultural cachet throughout that decade. But, in the context of Steve Ditko's 50-year career in comics, his creative involvement with Spider-Man is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Ditko is known among the cartooning cognoscenti as one of the supreme visual stylists in the history of comics, as well as the most fiercely independent cartoonist of his generation. His unique style and innovative spatial designs moved from the imaginatively hallucinatory landscapes of Dr. Strange to the almost plebeian earthiness of The Amazing Spider-Man.

Ditko began his career in the 1950s drawing comics for the notorious low-budget Charlton Comics (the Roger Corman Productions of the comics industry) where he developed his craft on various genre titles. He started working for Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in 1958, churning out monster/horror stories, until he was conscripted to work on Marvel's new super-hero line, for which he provided the visual conceptions of The Hulk, Spider-Man, and Dr. Strange, and plotted and drew these characters' adventures between 1962 and 1966. By 1966, Spider-Man had become a pop culture icon, and it was then that Ditko quit drawing the character over mysterious circumstances that will, for the first time, be investigated here.

He immediately created his Ayn Rand-inspired character, Mr. A, whose first story appeared in Witzend, a black-and-white pre-underground independent comics magazine edited and published by Wally Wood, another talented stylist who chafed under the constraints of the mainstream comics publishers of the time. Ditko went on to work at various publishing companies such as DC Comics, Warren Publishing, and even Marvel Comics (albeit steadfastly refusing to ever draw Spider-Man again), writing and drawing his didactic Mr. A stories, relentlessly extolling the philosophical precepts of Ayn Rand, and, more recently, bitter visual jeremiads against the moral status quo of the comics industry.

Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is a coffee table art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to his own (and Randian) principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 55 years.

Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was published in 1993, just as "Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!" articles were starting to appear and graphic novels were making their way into the mainstream, and it quickly gave the newly respectable medium the theoretical and practical manifesto it needed. With his clear-eyed and approachable analysis--done using the same comics tools he was describing--McCloud quickly gave "sequential art" a language to understand itself. McCloud made the simplest of drawing decisions seem deep with artistic potential.

Thirteen years later, following the Internet evangelizing of Reinventing Comics, McCloud has returned with Making Comics.

Designed as a craftsperson's overview of the drawing and storytelling decisions and possibilities available to comics artists, covering everything from facial expressions and page layout to the choice of tools and story construction, Making Comics, like its predecessors, is also an eye-opening trip behind the scenes of art-making, fascinating for anyone reading comics as well as those making them. Get a sense of the range of his lessons by clicking through to the opening pages of his book, including his (illustrated, of course) table of contents (warning: large file, recommended for high-bandwidth users):

Scott McCloud tore down the wall between high and low culture in 1993 with Understanding Comics, a massive comic book about comics, linking the medium to such diverse fields as media theory, movie criticism, and web design. In Reinventing Comics, McCloud took this to the next level, charting twelve different revolutions in how comics are generated, read, and perceived today. Now, in Making Comics, McCloud focuses his analysis on the art form itself, exploring the creation of comics, from the broadest principles to the sharpest details (like how to accentuate a character's facial muscles in order to form the emotion of disgust rather than the emotion of surprise.) And he does all of it in his inimitable voice and through his cartoon stand–in narrator, mixing dry humor and legitimate instruction. McCloud shows his reader how to master the human condition through word and image in a brilliantly minimalistic way. Comic book devotees as well as the most uninitiated will marvel at this journey into a once–underappreciated art form.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

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

The DC Comics Encyclopedia

As a unique, one-volume encyclopedia of more than 1,000 characters created by DC Comics, this is the book that all comic book fans have been waiting for! Featuring some of DC's most creative artists and heroes and villains from the world famous to lesser known one-offs, this thrilling, one-of-a-kind guide has comic book history exploding off every page.

The Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #38 (Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide)

The Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide is a must-have for any comic book collector. It includes more than 2,000 black-and-white illustrations throughout the text, a gallery of hundreds of color images of some of the most popular collectible comic books, and informative essays written by top experts on important comic book topics.

Key features:

·a comic-style introduction to using the book
·market review and forecast
·tips on grading and maintaining a collection
·the latest pricing information for thousands of comic books.

Watching the Watchmen

Enjoy the ultimate companion to a comics masterpiece, as award-winning artist Dave Gibbons gives his own account of the genesis of WATCHMEN in this dust-jacketed hardback volume, opening his vast personal archives to reveal never-published pages, original character designs, page thumbnails, sketches and much more, including posters, covers and rare portfolio art. Featuring the breathtaking design of Chip Kidd and Mike Essl, WATCHING THE WATCHMEN is both a major art book in its own right, and the definitive companion to the graphic novel that changed an industry.

Voted among Time magazine's 100 Best Novels from 1923 to the present, a perennial bestseller over the past twenty years and widely considered the greatest graphic novel of all time, WATCHMEN is a gripping, labyrinthine piece of comic art, which has earned an acclaimed place in modern literary history.

"I've had a great time, re-visiting the very beginnings of Watchmen and unearthing material I haven't set eyes on for many years. As a fan myself, this is the kind of stuff I eat up and I'm sure the many devotees of the graphic novel will do the same!" says Gibbons.

NOT FINAL COVER. » & © DC Comics 2008. All Rights Reserved.

The Complete Peanuts 1950-1954 Boxed Set

Good grief! The Complete Peanuts is the most ambitious and most important project in the comics and cartooning genre: over a period of 12 years, Fantagraphics Books will release every daily and Sunday strip of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts," the best-known and best-loved series in the world.

1950-52
Most everyone with an interest in its history has seen the very first strip ("Good ol' Charlie Brown... How I hate him!"), but this first volume follows it up with 287 pages (three daily strips or one Sunday per page) of vintage material in chronological order. "Peanuts" was unique at the time for portraying kids who seemed like real kids, but they also had a wisdom beyond their years, embodied especially by the lovable loser, Charlie Brown, who even in these early years has lost 4000 checker games in a row. We see him don his familiar jagged-stripe shirt for the first time (December 1950) and, at the age of 4, at his peak as a babe magnet. Shermy is the other significant boy, and the girls in their lives are Patty (not to be confused with Peppermint Patty) and Violet. Schroeder is an infant who has learned to sit up in order to play Beethoven on his toy piano. Snoopy is an anthropomorphic dog who plays baseball (April 1952) and has his own thoughts (October 1952). In March 1952 we meet a bug-eyed Lucy, who by November has been designated "Miss Fuss-Budget of 1952" and is pulling the football away from Charlie Brown (Violet had done it a year earlier). Her baby brother Linus arrives in July 1952. The book itself is beautifully packaged, the strips printed large and clear on high-quality paper and accompanied by an in-depth essay by David Michaelis, a 1987 interview with Schulz, an introduction by Garrison Keillor, and even an index of characters and subjects.

1953-54
The second volume covers 1953-54, and the visual style and character development is closer to the kids we know and love, as they try to exist in a grown-up world. Charlie Brown is no longer the object of Patty and Violet's affection--derision, more like--and his pattern of losing continues. His misery at checkers hits 5000 (June 1953), 6000 (August), 7000 (November), 8000 (still November), and 10,000 (December) consecutive games, he gets shut out on Valentine's Day (February '53), he wears his first bad Halloween costume (October '54), and he gets a form rejection slip from Santa (December '54). On the baseball diamond, though, he actually has the lead in a game (April '53, but we don't see the final score) and briefly plays catcher. By now Lucy has become the main girl in the strip, and in addition to beating Charlie Brown at checkers, she begins her romantic pursuit of Schroeder (January '53), joins the baseball team (August '54), and wins her third consecutive Miss Fussbudget of the Year title (November '54). Her younger brother, Linus, starts what will become a longstanding feud with Snoopy in the first Sunday strip of '53, shows he's a prodigy in jump rope, blocks, houses of cards, and balloon blowing, and cuddles his security blanket (May '54). Schroeder continues his obsession with Beethoven and reveals the secret to playing great literature on a plastic piano with painted-on black keys (practice and "getting the breaks"). We meet two new characters, the perpetually dirty Pig-Pen (July '54) and the loudmouthed Charlotte Braun, whose funny name wasn't enough to keep her around for long. Charles M. Schulz, whose own insecurity manifested itself in Charlie Brown (who not coincidentally draws his own cartoons), came up with his first multiple-strip storyline (starting with a four-Sunday series of Lucy joining a golf tournament coached by Charlie Brown, May '54) in this period, and provides us with a glimpse of the 1950s--deco furniture ("What in the world is a 'rocking chair'? asks CB), 3-D movies, H-bomb testing, and even what in hindsight looks like a prediction of the troubles in Vietnam (May '54). The second volume maintains the high quality of the first volume; even if it doesn't have the same extent of extra materials, it has an introduction by Walter Cronkite, a note on one strip that had to be partially reconstructed, and that handy index of characters and topics. --David Horiuchi

A boxed set of the first two volumes, just in time for the holidays, designed by the Award-winning graphic novelist, Seth! Ships shrinkwrapped.

The first volume, The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952, covers the first two and a quarter years of the strip (October 1950 through December 1952), and will be of particular fascination to Peanuts aficionados worldwide: Although there have been literally hundreds of Peanuts books published, many of the strips from the series' first two or three years have never been collected before—in large part because they showed a young Schulz working out the kinks in his new strip and include some characterizations and designs that are quite different from the cast we're all familiar with (Among other things, three major cast members—Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus—initially show up as infants and only "grow" into their final "mature" selves as the months go by. Even Snoopy debuts as a puppy!).

The second volume, The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954, begins with Peanuts' third full year and a cast of eight: Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty, Violet, Schroeder, Lucy, the recently born Linus, and Snoopy. By the end of 1954, this will have expanded to nine. Linus still doesn't speak (except, on a few occasions, to himself, à la Snoopy), but Schulz begins laying the foundation for his emergence as the most complex and arguably most endearing character in the strip: garrulous and inquisitive, yet gentle and tolerant. And he evens acquires his "security blanket" in this volume! Meanwhile, Lucy, an infant just a year ago, has forcefully elbowed herself to the front of the cast, proudly wearing her banner as a troublemaker or, in Schulz's memorable phrase, "fuss-budget." The strong, specific relationships she sets up with each character further contributes to making her central to the strip. (She has earned her cover status on this volume.) This period's significant new character is Pig-Pen, who would remain one of the main cast members throughout the decade. And then there's Snoopy. To readers unfamiliar with the early days of the strip, Snoopy's appearances here will no doubt come as the biggest surprise. Although Snoopy has started talking/thinking to himself, he does no imitations (except for one brief shark impression), he doesn't sleep atop his doghouse (much less type or fly a Sopwith Camel), and has no fantasy life—in fact, he doesn't even walk upright! But as we know, he is merely biding his time, and his evolution continues its fascinating course within these pages.

Peanuts is the most successful comic strip in the history of the medium as well as one of the most acclaimed strips ever published. (In 1999, a jury of comics scholars and critics voted it the 2nd greatest comic strip of the 20th century—second only to George Herriman's Krazy Kat, a verdict Schulz himself cheerfully endorsed.) Charles Schulz's characters—Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, and so many more—have become American icons. A United Media poll in 2002 found Peanuts to be one of the most recognizable cartoon properties in the world, recognized by 94 percent of the total U.S. consumer market and a close second only to Mickey Mouse (96 percent), and higher than other familiar cartoon properties like Spider-Man (75 percent) or the Simpsons (87 percent). In TV Guide's "Top 50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All-Time" list, Charlie Brown and Snoopy ranked #8.

The Physics of Superheroes

The Physics of Superheroesapplies the reality of physics to the fantasy of comic books. James Kakalios explores the scientific plausibility of the powers and feats of the most famous superheroes—and discovers that in many cases the comic writers got their science surprisingly right. Along the way he provides an engaging and witty commentary while introducing the lay reader to both classic and cutting-edge concepts in physics, including:

• What Superman’s strength can tell us about the Newtonian physics of force, mass, and acceleration
• How Iceman’s and Storm’s powers illustrate the principles of thermal dynamics
• The physics behind the death of Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy
• Why physics professors gone bad are the most dangerous evil geniuses! BACKCOVER: Praise for The Physics of Superheroes

“Surprisingly enough, according to Kakalios, comic books get their physics right more often than you’d think.”
—The Boston Globe

“Writing with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Kakalios looks at classic comics with a physicist’s eye. . . . Outstanding.”
—The Orlando Sentinel

“Kakalios, a University of Minnesota physicist and unrepentant comics nerd, offers up jovial, largely equation-free deconstructions of Ant-Man’s shrinking ability, the centripetal acceleration of Spider-Man’s swing, and the strength of his silk web.”
—Discover

“Wildly entertaining, yet scientifically accurate… Comprises a fairly solid introductory education in physics, sweetened with a history lesson in classic comic book superheroes.”
—Metro

“Offers a droll but sincere look at what Superman and Spider-Man can teach about physics. . . . Entertaining. . . . His explanations are lucid and smooth.”
—Science magazine

"If superheroes stepped off the comic book page or silver screen and into reality, could they actually work their wonders in a world constrained by the laws of physics? How strong would Superman have to be to ""leap tall buildings in a single bound""? Could Storm of the X-Men possibly control the weather? And how many cheeseburgers would the Flash need to eat to be able to run at supersonic speeds? Face front, True Believer, and wonder no more! Because in The Physics of Superheroes acclaimed university professor James Kakalios shows that comic book heroes and villains get their physics right more often than you think. In this scintillating scientific survey of super powers you'll learn what the physics of forces and motion can reveal about Superman's strength and the true cause of the destruction of his home planet Krypton, what villains Magneto and Electro can teach us about the nature of electricity-and finally get the definitive answer about whether it was the Green Goblin or Spider-Man's webbing that killed the Wall Crawler's girlfriend Gwen Stacy in that fateful plunge from the George Washington Bridge! Along the way, The Physics of Superheroes explores everything from energy, to thermodynamics, to quantum mechanics, to solid state physics, and Kakalios relates the physics in comic books to such real-world applications as automobile airbags, microwave ovens, and transistors. You'll also see how comic books have often been ahead of science in explaining recent topics in quantum mechanics (with Kitty Pryde of the X-Men) and string theory (with the Crisis on Infinite Earths). This is the book you need to read if you ever wondered how the Invisible Woman of the Fantastic Four can see when she turns transparent, if the Atom could travel on an electron through a phone line, or if electromagnetic theory can explain how Professor X reads minds. Fun, provocative, and packed with more superheroes and superpowers than an Avengers-Justice League crossover, The Physics of Superheroes will make both comic-book fans and physicists exclaim, ""Excelsior!"""

The Hellboy Companion (Hellboy (Graphic Novels))

Written by Steve Weiner (The Will Eisner Companion), Victoria Blake (The Oregonian, NPR) and Jason Hall (Beware the Creeper, Trigger, Detective Comics) and densely illustrated with classic images from the comics, including a handful of new drawings from Mignola, this volume offers a thorough documentation of the Hellboy universe. It compiles the many complex pieces that make up the life of the World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator into an easily understandable format and condenses Mignola's masterful storytelling into an encyclopedic reference guide--including previously unrevealed secrets! From the hidden history of Abe Sapien to the secret origin of the world, this complete compendium is every hardcore Hellboy fan's key to the mind of Mike Mignola, and the ultimate introduction for anyone looking to begin their journey in the weird and wondrous world he has created. Available in time for the release of the new motion picture, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the Companion includes up-to-the-minute coverage of the Hellboy Universe, as well as the definitive Hellboy and B.P.R.D. bibliographies!