"In the blasted ruins of what was once a picture-perfect suburb, nothing stirs--except the postman. Clad in a hazmat suit and mounted on a bicycle, he is still delivering the mail, nuclear apocalypse or no nuclear apocalypse. One family has taken refuge in an underground fallout shelter, and to them he brings--or, rather, shouts through the air vent--a series of odd, anonymous letters. They describe the family's prosperous past life, and then begin...

"Frank Santoro faces a simple but sad reality: His parents, once high-school sweethearts, now don't speak to each other--even though they work in the same building. Trying to understand, Santoro searches through his memories and builds a portrait of their lives together and apart, past and present. Using markers, pencils, scissors, and tape, drawing in vivid colors and exuberant lines, he brings to life the mundane and the extraordinary: his parents'...

"William Gropper was one of the great American cartoonists and illustrators of the twentieth century. A student of George Bellows and Robert Henri, he was a prolific newspaper cartoonist, a WPA muralist, a Guggenheim recipient, and committed political activist--the first visual artist called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, after which he was blacklisted (though he got revenge with his pen). He was also a master of visual storytelling,...

"During the Civil War, many Quakers were caught between their fervent support of abolition, a desire to preserve the Union, and their long-standing commitment to pacifism. When Charles Cox, a young Indiana Quaker, slips out early one morning to enlist in the Union Army, he scandalizes his family and his community. Leaving behind the strict ways of Quaker life, Cox is soon confronted with the savagery of battle, the cruelty of the enemy (as well as...

"Meet Bungleton Green--an anti-racist time traveler and the first-ever Black superhero created more than a decade before characters like Black Panther and Falcon. In 1942, almost a year after America entered the Second World War, Jay Jackson--a former railroad worker and sign painter, now working as a cartoonist and illustrator for the legendary Black newspaper The Chicago Defender--did something unexpected. He took the Defender's stale and long-running...

"The life of an orphaned boy is shaped by the devotion of a fantastical Gull in this lovingly rendered, entirely wordless graphic novel by a contemporary comics innovator. Joe Kessler is at the forefront of European comics. Co-founder and art director of UK's Breakdown Press, and winner of the Angoulem̂e Comics Festival's Fauve Rev́eĺation for his breakthrough Windowpane, Kessler rejuvenates the form once again with his vivid and moving The Gull...

"An anonymous official chides a man under surveillance for stepping out of view of a security camera; visitors to an underground mall are forced to form a new society when a nuclear strike may (or may not) have left them as the sole survivors on Earth; newlyweds living in an authoritarian New York City attempt to navigate the insidious hurdles of being permitted to have a child; and a Puerto Rican boxer discovers that segregation continues in America,...