Adult

While on vacation in the Florida Keys, Kit Finn meets Matt Healy, a rugged stranger she literally bumps into at her hotel. He offers to cook her dinner when they’re both back in the city. But when Kit arrives at his luxury apartment ready for the date of a lifetime, she is shocked. How could she have been taken in by the deceptions of a con man? And why has he targeted her? Now the only way out is to expose the vicious puppet master who’s turned her life upside down.

DEMOCRACY opens in 490 B.C., with Athens at war. The hero of the story, Leander, is trying to rouse his comrades for the morrow's battle against a far mightier enemy, and begins to recount his own life, having borne direct witness to the evils of the old tyrannical regimes and to the emergence of a new political system. The tale that emerges is one of daring, danger, and big ideas, of the death of the gods and the tortuous birth of democracy. We see that democracy originated through a combination of chance and historical contingency--but also through the cunning, courage, and willful action of a group of remarkably talented and driven individuals. Alecos Papadatos and Annie DiDonna, artists behind the international phenomenon LOGICOMIX, together with writer Abraham Kawa, deliver a graphic novel bursting with extraordinary characters and vibrant color, one that also offers fresh insight into how this greatest of civic inventions came to be.

In POETRY IS USELESS, Anders Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. Page after page gives way under Nilsen's deft hatching and perfectly placed pen strokes, revealing his intellectual curiosity and wry outlook on life's many surprises.
Stick people debate the dubious merits of economics. Immaculately stippled circles become looser and looser, as craters appear on their surface. A series of portraits capture the backs of friends' heads. For ten or twenty pages at a time, POETRY IS USELESS becomes a travel diary, in which Nilsen shares anecdotes about his voyages in Europe and North America. A trip to Colombia for a comics festival is recounted in carefully drawn city streets and sketches made in cafes. POETRY IS USELESS reveals seven years of Nilsen's life and musings: beginning in 2007, it covers a substantial period of his comics career to date, and includes visual reference to his books, such as DOGS & WATER, RAGE OF POSEIDEN, and the New York Times Notable Book BIG QUESTIONS. This expansive sketchbook-as-graphic-novel is exquisitely packaged with appendices and a foreword from Anders Nilsen himself.