For the first time ever, the inspiring, infuriating, and utterly insane story of comics, graphic novels, and manga is presented in four-color glory! The award-winning Action Philosophers team of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey turn their irreverent-but-accurate eye to the stories of Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Alan Moore, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Fredric Wertham, Roy Lichtenstein, Art Spiegelman, Herge, Osamu Tezuka - and more!

The inspiring, infuriating, and utterly insane story of comics, graphic novels, and manga continues in four-color glory! This issue, the award-winning Action Philosophers team of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey thrill and educate us with stories of classic comic book action, adventure, fun, funnies... and the KIRBY STYLE!

The inspiring, infuriating, and utterly insane story of comics, graphic novels, and manga continues in four-color glory! This issue, the award-winning Action Philosophers team of Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey bring you ROMANCE, WAR, and CRIME comics galore!

The graphic novel collaboration and true story of two sisters. Anaële, a writer, leaves for Palestine volunteering in an aid program, swinging between her Palestinian friends and her Israeli friends. Delphine is an artist, left behind in Liège, Belgium. From their different sides of the world, they exchange letters. Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine is a personal look into a complex reality, through the prism of the experience of a young woman writing letters to her sister about her feelings and adventures in the occupied territories. Green Almonds is an intimate story with big implications. A young woman discovers a country, works there, makes friends, lives a love story, and is confronted with the plight of the Palestinians, the violence on a daily basis that we see on our screens and read in our newspapers. Anaële's story is brought to life by Delphine's simple and evocative drawings, which give full force to the subject and evoke the complexity of this conflict, creating a journey to the everyday life of Palestinians. Green Almonds: Letters from Palestine received the Doctors Without Borders Award for best travel diary highlighting the living conditions of populations in precarious situations when it was published in France in 2011.

Kobane Calling is the autobiographical memoir of a young Italian cartoonist, writing and drawing under the nom de plume Zerocalcare, who volunteers with the Rojava Calling organization and heads into the Middle East to support and observe the Kurdish resistance in Syria as they struggle against the advancing forces of the Islamic State. He winds up in the small town of Mesher, near the Turkish-Syrian border as a journalist and aid worker, and from there he travels into Ayn al-Arab, a majority-Kurd town in the Rojava region of Syria. As he receives an education into the war from the Kurdish perspective, he meets the women fighting in the all-female Kurdish volunteer army (the Yekeineyen Parastina Jin, or Women's Defense Units), struggling to simultaneously fight off the Islamic State even as they take strides for Kurdish independence and attempt a restructuring of traditional patriarchal Kurdish society. In a story and style at once humorous and heartbreaking, Zerocalcare presents clear-eyed reportage of the fight against the Islamic State from the front lines.

The history of painters in comics goes back to the dawn of pulp magazine covers. From "The Shadow" and "The Spider" to "The Black Bat" and so many other characters, painter's works have graced the covers of comics and pulps, which have influenced many artists over the decades. This deluxe coffeetable art book, edited and overseen by Alex Ross -- one of the comic industry's most recognized painters, whose expertise has helped guide and define its contents -- is the most important, most comprehensive retrospective of the history of painters in comics, of all time.