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...that it is a graphic work published by a major trade house (Pantheon, an imprint of Random House). Nor will it be the luxurious quality of the production - a hardcover with a die-cut dust-jacket that lets a character peek through from the cover. Instead, "Persepolis" (153 pp.; $17.95) will zap you with its story. A memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran, "Persepolis" provides a unique glimpse into a nearly unknown and unreachable way of life. It has the strange quality of a note in a bottle written by a shipwrecked islander. That Satrapi chose...
...summer camp. Forced to go by my parents, it meant being away from television and having to participate in physically demanding, often competitive, group activities. In spite of this prejudice I came away from Michel Rabagliati's summer camp memoir, "Paul Has a Summer Job," (Drawn and Quarterly; 160 pp.; $16.95) with a warm sense of second-hand nostalgia. It has the restorative effect of a sunny day by a sparkling lake...
Each of the nine stories in Joe Ollmann's new black and white paperback, "Chewing on Tinfoil," (Insomniac Press; 155 pp.; $15.95) feature some sort of (un)lovable loser. The alienated high-school kid, office milquetoast, pretentious layabout, lapsed art student, and bowl-hair-cut kid: all these and more appear in its pages. Ollmann's work is new to me, and it has the leaps and falls of a new artist extending himself. Some of the tales are artless swipes at the usual archetypes, but enough of the stories surprise you with odd details or an unexpected twist...
...much a yarn as a boiled leather strap, "Nightmare Alley" (Fantagraphics Books; 134 pp.; $14.95) tells the story of Stanton Carlisle, who we first meet as an ambitious assistant to a phony medium on the traveling midway. As drawn by Spain, Stanton has the good looks and blank expression of a department store mannequin, and the same sense of morals. Coldy ambitious and hotly lustful, he learns the medium's secrets and begins a "two-a-day" mentalist vaudeville act with Molly, a virginal looker with a thing for daddy. Never satisfied, Stanton tricks up a house and puts...
...Cusp" (Alternative Comics; 40 pp.; $3.95) debuts the work of the fawn-like 22-year-old Thomas Herpich. The cover even has a deer with its head sticking out of leaf-covered lake. A naturalist theme continues inside with stories involving fish, werewolves, ants and people, all of whom either want to eat each other or mate or both. All of Herpich's stories have a dream-like quality - full of strange narrative logic founded in base instincts and anxieties - yet always funny...