Secret Acres

Death stalks a quartet of girls – or is it the other way around?

A simple, elemental story of a group of adorable, little girls evading the specter of Death perfectly complements Gabriel Howell’s poetic diary/manifesto/wishlist. What looks like a Victorian children’s book complete with moral lessons, depicts an internal and external tug-of-war between vulnerability and intimacy, relatability and honesty, observation and isolation. The message remains raw and uncensored: don’t hide it in a book; forget about who is or isn’t watching; Forget Me Not.

Whatever happened to Marchenoir?

Enter the Marchenoir Library, a different kind of graphic novel from A. Degen, an artist Michael DeForge (Lose, Ant Colony, Leaving Richard’s Valley) says is “one of the smartest and funniest cartoonists in the game.”  A gallery of the most beautiful covers from the beloved series, Marchenoir, is all that’s left of the mystery of Marchenoir, ex-celebrity singer/songwriter working as a superheroine to pay off her debts, and defend our dreams and reality, as she searches for a terrestrial paradise. Can you solve a book by its covers?

Have you ever gotten turned on while stuffing a turkey? Get a Little Stranger with Edie Fake.

What’s silly, scary and sexy? Edie Fake’s comics forged an entire aesthetic of art and queer culture. Since his Ignatz Award winning Gaylord Phoenix, Fake’s comics have only appeared in underground anthologies and zines. At last, these rare comics can all be found under the covers of a Little Stranger. You’ll never look at a turkey the same way again.

People and places come and go, but the after-party never stops when it's 2AM Eternal.

Your host, Eric Kostiuk Williams, captures a decade of nightlife in Toronto’s queer community, from basements to the backstage to back rooms. Collecting one hundred event posters from 2012 to 2022, short comics stories, and hand-written notes from the author, the organizers, the performers, and the crowd, 2AM Eternal makes a scene – until last call. The pandemic prompts a series of posters for cancelled events, and a pivot to digital events in the days of lockdown, before the manic, uneasy re-emergence of face-to-face, wall-to-wall living.

You have reached the end of the Motel Universe.

The Skins, a slave race once hunted for their pelts, have turned the tables on their masters, the Jeffs, making for the hottest reality show in Depression Land. Meanwhile, the Skins’ home planet of Epidermis is ravaged by inflation, a Neuro drug epidemic, and an all-controlling hyperconglomerate, the Shackler Corporation. Sounds like another uprising may be in order!

Motel Universe 3 is the final volume of a trilogy of graphic novels from Joakim Drescher, an artist Print Magazine says is “is carving a place for himself in the image world.”

"Sean Ford creates a world that's both eerie and warmly mundane. Not an easy feat." —Alison Bechdel (Fun Home)

Only Skin is an exploration of the hallucinatory and grim landscape of rural America seen through the eyes of two orphaned siblings searching for answers in a world filled with terrible questions.

Are you dating your parents? Welcome to Mount Scopus Academy, where everyone becomes who they already are.

Rivi’s been accepted to Mount Scopus Academy - but escaping Mount Scopus is like escaping your dysfunctional childhood— you end up recreating it. Is that cute boy following her, or is she dating her father? The familiar has its own gravity; just don’t fall for it. Even the best of us have daddy issues.

I Will Bite You! is Eisner Award winner Joe Lambert's debut short story collection for weird kids of all ages.

Along with several new short stories, I Will Bite You! collects the rare, self-published mini-comics work of Eisner Award winner Joe Lambert. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and Best American Comics selection, these comics reveal sophisticated, unusual, and surprising narratives about animal musicians, mischievous children, cavemen, and heavenly bodies.

"An urgent (and often very funny) attempt to explain a coocoo-rococo cosmology made up of garbled fragments of role-playing games, Transformers episodes, relaxation exercises and horror movies." — The New York Times

The Understanding Monster—Book Two follows Pharoah Tellitome, Inspector Gimble, and Master Sponko on their quest to awaken Izadore. Constructed with the same intricate, lush visuals as the first volume, the story returns to the world of time crystals, afterlife quests, thought projection resurrection and the ever-majestic Toy Mountain.

"An urgent (and often very funny) attempt to explain a coocoo-rococo cosmology made up of garbled fragments of role-playing games, Transformers episodes, relaxation exercises and horror movies."—The New York Times

The final chapter of this epic trilogy finds our hero, Izadore, awoken with his mind, body and soul reunited. The last Monks of the Imaginary Man lead him beyond Toy Mountain to discover the true nature of the relationship between imagination and reality. Not simply concluding the relentless, psychedelic plot, The Understanding Monster—Book Three explains how our creativity re-shapes our world, how we can overcome doubt through self-actualization.

Open every illuminated correspondence between two star-crossed artists yet to meet - and discover a dizzying, dazzling almost love story.

The 2018 Slate Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies sixth annual Cartoonist Studio Prize winner for Best Print Comic, the Academic Hour charts the romance between Poethel, a disgraced architecture professor, and his student, Liana. Told in a series of surreal, vibrant vignettes, and set in a fantastic, logic-defying college of shifting rooms and secret performance spaces, the Academic Hour affirms how an intense, fledgling relationship can ignite the impulse for storytelling with unbridled, ferocious creative energy.

The award winning author of monsters explores the political issues that affect our personal health in his new book, Sick.

The author of the perennial classic, Monsters (written as Ken Dahl), Gabby Schulz returns with a new graphic novel, Sick, which Hicksville author Dylan Horrocks calls "a punch in the face and well worth reading." Severely ill, uninsured, alone, and confined to his bed for weeks, Schulz was left searching—only to find himself. Sick documents his discovery in gory, glorious, water-colored detail, finally completed and collected here for the first time in a beautiful, album-sized hardcover edition. Like Monsters, Sick focuses on health and social policy, this time expanding from the subject of STDs and their stigma to the larger, hot-button issue of national healthcare. 

The deeply divided residents of Shadow Hills must face their past - or certain annihilation.

Environmental disturbances and a mysterious epidemic wreak havoc on the remote, struggling town of Shadow Hills. The rivalrous townsfolk race to find a cure and uncover the source of the threat before it destroys the entire community. Their search for answers leads them into the depths of a buried past...

Shadow Hills is the long-awaited follow-up to Sean Ford’s perennial favorite graphic novel, Only Skin. A decade in the making, Shadow Hills collects all ten serialized chapters and brings the highly acclaimed series to a new, stunning conclusion.

You have reached the end of the Motel Universe.

The Skins, a slave race once hunted for their pelts, have turned the tables on their masters, the Jeffs, making for the hottest reality show in Depression Land. Meanwhile, the Skins’ home planet of Epidermis is ravaged by inflation, a Neuro drug epidemic, and an all-controlling hyperconglomerate, the Shackler Corporation. Sounds like another uprising may be in order!

Motel Universe 3 is the final volume of a trilogy of graphic novels from Joakim Drescher, an artist Print Magazine says is “is carving a place for himself in the image world.”

People and places come and go, but the after-party never stops when it's 2AM Eternal.

Your host, Eric Kostiuk Williams, captures a decade of nightlife in Toronto’s queer community, from basements to the backstage to back rooms. Collecting one hundred event posters from 2012 to 2022, short comics stories, and hand-written notes from the author, the organizers, the performers, and the crowd, 2AM Eternal makes a scene – until last call. The pandemic prompts a series of posters for cancelled events, and a pivot to digital events in the days of lockdown, before the manic, uneasy re-emergence of face-to-face, wall-to-wall living.

Death stalks a quartet of girls – or is it the other way around?

A simple, elemental story of a group of adorable, little girls evading the specter of Death perfectly complements Gabriel Howell’s poetic diary/manifesto/wishlist. What looks like a Victorian children’s book complete with moral lessons, depicts an internal and external tug-of-war between vulnerability and intimacy, relatability and honesty, observation and isolation. The message remains raw and uncensored: don’t hide it in a book; forget about who is or isn’t watching; Forget Me Not.

Some books take the whole of a lifetime to write.

I Am Only a Foreigner Because You Do Not Understand continues Flocks, L. Nichols’s graphic memoir of growing up trans in the rural South. These comics document L.’s further transition, from living as a man to walking the middle path, facing depression, disease, divorce and death. Healing leaves scars, things fall apart, and pronouns change until there is no I, there is only us.

The deeply divided residents of Shadow Hills must face their past - or certain annihilation.

Environmental disturbances and a mysterious epidemic wreak havoc on the remote, struggling town of Shadow Hills. The rivalrous townsfolk race to find a cure and uncover the source of the threat before it destroys the entire community. Their search for answers leads them into the depths of a buried past...

Shadow Hills is the long-awaited follow-up to Sean Ford’s perennial favorite graphic novel, Only Skin. A decade in the making, Shadow Hills collects all ten serialized chapters and brings the highly acclaimed series to a new, stunning conclusion.

The Skins, slaves hunted for their hides, check out of Motel Universe, a casino galaxy, operated by a tycoon dictator!

Check in to Motel Universe, a dystopian, casino galaxy of tasteless hedonism! On a macabre jungle planet, the Skins, a slave race, are hunted for their precious hides by tycoon dictator, Barton Flump. Join the Skins as they run for their lives – but when there’s nowhere left to run, it might be time for a little revolution…

In the District of Columbia, the President authorizes covert testing of a mind-control disease, a greedy developer gentrifies the universe within the disease, and the black owner of a local tabloid threatens to expose the corruption—because his evil, white tycoon dad is the one behind it.

Winner of the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo’s Cupcake Award, and Best of Show at Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival, Adam Griffith’s Washington White is a spy thriller set in a future D.C. — and the true story of Adam Griffiths’ grandmother, Peggy Griffiths, a lawyer for the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s Appeals Review Board, best known for winning a landmark bias lawsuit against the federal government in 1977 for wrongfully being denied a promotion. In Washington White, bureaucrat Peggy Fables is denied promotion by the President who plans to install a supporter of the government’s mind-control drug program. The representation of institutionalized racism experienced by his grandmother is, to Adam Griffiths, the most important part of this work. Griffiths is an artist and activist, with a conscience and an agenda, on the rise.

Outrun giants, doppelgängers, angels and a slave-driving cat on an adventure through time to the origin of humanity in Entropy.

Aaron Costain’s Entropy follows a golem with a surprisingly modern sensibility, and an even more modern sense of style, as he backtracks through millennia to understand his own creation. Entropy takes place at the intersection of the world’s cultures. Mythologies and religions cross-pollinate, bleed into one another, and form a new soul from synthesis – or they will if our epic hero can outrun man-eating giants, a vicious army of crows, and one very manipulative cat. Entropy delivers an all-time adventure.

“You are faced with the reality of quitting or doubling down. Guess which one this is.” - Zak Sally, Recidivist

A man searches for his lost teeth to complete his masterwork. Another embraces ghosts in an act of vengeance. Children escape from a ruined house to find a revelation. A wanderer leaves everything behind and discovers the infinite. Part resignation letter, part manifesto, the stories in Zak Sally’s Recidivist IV comprise a medium-defying visual experience of the freedom in obscurity.

Return to Motel Universe!

After the Skins’ slave rebellion and assassination of tycoon dictator, Barton Flump, a lone bounty hunter, Clara Constellation, searches for Captain Littlehead and the ghost of Caligula. From Planet Pear, where screentime is all the time, to the Adonis Nebula, an empire where the Fashion Police rule with an actual iron fist, the adventure never ends!

Persephone’s Garden is a deeply personal story and inventive study of girlhood, womanhood and motherhood, through memory, history and mythology.

A children’s song inspires a love of Greek mythology in a young girl. A young woman finds a career in archeology and illustration. A young mother sees her daughter become a woman, as her own mother’s memories are lost.

We love to blame the people we don’t know and never see. Meet the forgotten people of America’s Rust Belt.

If you could talk with the animals, walk with the animals, could you ever go home? Run wild with Kingdom/Order.

Kindgom/Order wordlessly follows a nameless man as he searches for meaning in his life. Through symbols and sounds, he is reminded of his part in the greater, natural world, just as he is slowly divorced from the modern world surrounding him. Mysteriously, our hero discovers he can understand the calls of the animals around him - but how much of this is real, and how much is delusion? Whatever the case, Psaltis will leave you speechless.

Flocks is a graphic memoir of growing up trans in the small-town South.

A boy’s book report on Reconstruction Era vigilantes known as the Bald Knobbers sends him on a quest for justice.

Middle-schooler Cole’s book report on Bald Knobbers, Reconstruction Era vigilantes, bears an uncanny resonance with his life. Donning a homemade Bald Knobber mask, Cole seeks to right wrongs perpetrated by his divorcing parents, mom’s new boyfriend, the school bully and his cat, Daisy. Like the real Bald Knobbers, Cole discovers the consequences of taking the law into your own hands.

An epic journey of the creative spirit begins as a cast of characters works to reunite Izadore with his body.

In a mutating house full of growing toys, a multi-dimensional robot, a Werewolf Exorcist and a reanimated mummy attempt to rescue a complicated being named Izadore. A Lynd Ward Prize Honor Book, the Understanding Monster—Book One is an exquisite exploration into the inner workings of an imaginary world.

A gritty, brutal crime drama that focuses on a group of young hoodlums in early 60's Newark.

Iron Bound is a gritty account of life in the margins of Newark's Ironbound district in 1961. With elements of a noir crime drama, Brendan Leach's ability to evoke place and moment elevates the narrative to a complex examination of the tenuous relationships of characters mired in conflict and fear.

Part autobiogrpahy, part mythology and totally beautiful, Theo Ellsworth's much beloved perennial classic, Capacity, returns in a special edition!

Capacity tells the fantastically true and truly fantastic personal history of the artist as a young man. Theo Ellsworth's astonishing drawings, which Pitchfork describes as "a combination of Where the Wild Things Are, a fever dream, a pagan woodland ceremony, and a notebook doodle," give shape to thoughts profound and silly, bringing familiar doubts and hopes to visionary, new life. Just try to remember, this all really happened. Counted among the best books of its original publication year by the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice, the Huffington Post and dozens of others, Capacity returns in a deluxe, special edition.

A visionary, violent mash-up and retelling of key creation and apocalypse mythologies in wordless, intricate, black and white composition.

Songs of the Abyss, the evolution of Eamon Espey's critically acclaimed Wormdye, advances his obsession with grotesque spirituality. See ancient Egyptian gods giving birth to biblical giants, Santa Claus as the Devil's agent, and a scientist's sadistic experiments in search of enlightenment—all immaculately rendered in Espey's inimitable compositions.

Get Over It! traces the path from heartbreak to happiness, using humor and honesty to describe each break-up milestone.

A few, very long years ago, Corinne Mucha (Freshman: Tales of 9th Grade Obsessions, Revelations, and Other Nonsense, Zest Books) began exploring the strange behaviors of her own broken heart. Both giggle- and cringe- inducing, Get Over It! gives us all the gory, gooey details on the way to wisdom.

The award-winning Pterodactyl Hunters finds family drama in a 1904 New York where hot-air-balloonists defend their city from pterodactyls.

"Action (and angst) in the great pulp tradition, delivered with a sure hand and a dancing line. Keep your eye on this cartoonist!"—Mark Newgarden, author of We All Die Alone and Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug

Brendan Leach's Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City, a Best American Comics selection and winner of the Xeric Award and Ignatz Award for Outstanding Comic, is a story of sibling rivalry and family tradition in a rapidly changing world: a version of a turn-of-the-century New York where generations of working-class hot air balloonists take to the skies each night to defend their city from pterodactyls.

Gaylord Phoenix is the award-winning, perennial classic LGBT graphic novel from celebrated multimedia artist Edie Fake.

The Ignatz Award winner for Outstanding Graphic Novel, Gaylord Phoenix follows the danger-fraught journeys of the titular creature. Edie Fake confronts the reader with violent and unexpected manifestations of sexual connection and romantic possession as the Gaylord Phoenix searches for his lost love, his origins and his place in the world.

Reid Psaltis disturbs the Order of Things: a truly bonkers animal encyclopedia.

Join a worldwide cult phenomenon for a unique, naively erotic, geopolitically savvy adventure with Francine, the most wayward of girls.

With its fascistic imagery, pubescent sexuality, raucous humor, and complex political allegory, the anonymously posted webcomic, slechtemeisjes, became an instant cult phenomenon, hailed as the "Greatest Comic of All Time" by Comic Book Resources. Now, one of the world's most enigmatic, controversial, and provocative webcomic creators, Michiel Budel, delivers his debut graphic novel, Francine. Teens can be deceiving, and Francine is exceptionally so. She murders her bully, fakes her own death, steals her best friend's mother, and makes any situation uncomfortably sexual. She's awful. Everyone loves her. You will, too. Recommended for immature readers only.

Equally humorous and horrific, Monsters explores the physical and emotional traumas of learning to live, and love again, with herpes.

Gabby Schulz, otherwise known as Ken Dahl, cemented his status among the best cartoonists of his generation with Monsters. The multiple Ignatz Award–winning and Eisner Award–nominated graphic novel returns to print in a larger format with a deluxe, stitched binding. Part autobiography, part deranged educational film strip, Monsters is a brutally honest, frankly hilarious account of life with herpes.

This beloved, awkward series draws a truly immaculate, inhumanly perfect line to depict us at our messiest and most human.

Can Alison play with fire without getting burned? From two comics superstars comes an explosive, high school noir romance for everyone with a mind of their own. 

Everyone hates Darren, the firebug, the bad boy trouble follows everywhere. Alison finds a warmth to Darren, a spark everyone's missing. Alison knows what she's doing, but after tonight's fireworks, she'll find out who knows best. 

Palefire, the first collaboration between writer MK Reed and artist Farel Dalrymple, takes us back to high school for a hot date to the party of the year. When you're not a girl, and not yet a woman, the last thing you want is advice. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but everyone deserves a second chance—even if it goes up in flames..