This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about them (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability.
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by Wallace Wood and various artists
656-page black & white/color 9" x 12.5" x 2.75" two-volume slipcased hardcover set • $125.00
ISBN: 978-1-60699-744-4
"Boxed together in a deluxe two-volume set, here are the irascible voices of a medium far more outré than Hollywood blockbuster movies." –Carlo McCormick, Art News
Bomb Run and Other Stories (The EC Comics Library)
by John Severin, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder et al.
264-page black & white 7.25" x 10.25" hardcover • $29.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-749-9
"With crisp inks on heavy stock paper, Fantagraphics' BOMB RUN is a pleasure to hold and leaf through." –Spectrum Culturenbsp;
"All of these books are essential purchases for comics fans… These are the books that best show off how EC took genre stories seriously, striving to create comics that didn't treat readers as naive or ignorant." – Los Angeles Times
"Fantagraphics' current series of handsome hardcovers makes familiar material fresh by focusing on individual artists… it's never been easier to appreciate the contributions of these iconic inkslingers." – Chicago Tribune
Cork High and Bottle Deep
by Virgil Partch
184-page black & white/color 6.75" x 6.75" hardcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-716-1
"The dazzlingly demented Virgil Partch was seemingly born with a drink in one hand and a brush in the other." – Jason Sacks, Comics Bulletin
Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1 (Softcover Ed.)
by Steve Ditko; edited by Blake Bell
240-page full-color 6.75" x 9.75" softcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-739-0
"…[T]he tales in this tome are sheer pre-Comics Code Authority horror, complete with stabbings, decapitations, mutilations and disintegrations. …Ditko's talent jumps off the page and one of the benefits of reading the stories in chronological order is seeing his art evolve and improve." –Pedro Cabezuelo, Rue Morgue
"Strange Suspense offers page after lurid four-color page of Ditko's weird monsters, rubber-faced crooks, and abstracted landscapes… The book is a white-knuckle trip through Ditko's fevered imagination. [Grade] A-" –The A.V. Club