3 New Comics for New Readers – May 30, 2012

A silly story about revenge starring a cowboy who’s actually a boy, a strange story (mixing prose with comics) of two sisters and the monster of jealousy, and literature’s greatest stories adapted into comics by some of the greatest artists.

Wednesday is New Comics Day! Each week, The Comics Observer picks three brand new releases worth checking out that should be suitable for someone who has never read comic books, graphic novels or manga before. These three books are out today!

If you like what you see here, click the links to see previews and learn more about them. Then head to your local comic book store, or check out online retailers like Things From Another World and Amazon. Let us know what you think in the comments below or on Facebook.

For a full list of this week’s new releases, see comiXology and ComicList.com.

Cow Boy by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos

Cow Boy, Volume 1: A Boy and His Horse
Written by Nate Cosby
Illustrated by Chris Eliopoulos
Published by Archaia Entertainment
Genre: Western, Humor
Ages: All
96 pages
$19.95

“Justice ain’t got no age.”

Nate Cosby (Pigs, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller) and Chris Eliopoulos (Franklin Richards, Misery Loves Sherman) present Cow Boy, the story of a young bounty hunter determined to send his entire outlaw family to jail. He travels the Old West on a horse that ain’t his, and won’t stop ’til every one’a his kin’s in the clink.

Also in this volume:

Short stories by the likes of Roger Langridge (The Muppet Show Comic Book), Brian Clevinger & Scott Wegener (Atomic Robo), and Mike Maihack (Cleopatra in Space) & Colleen Coover (Jim Henson’s The Storyteller).

The Year of the Beasts by Cecil Castellucci and Nate Powell

The Year of the Beasts
Written by Cecil Castellucci
Illustrated by Nate Powell
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Genre: Fantasy, Drama
Age: 12+ / Grade: 7+
192 pages
$16.99

There’s a beast in all of us.

Every summer the trucks roll in, bringing the carnival and its infinite possibilities to town. This year Tessa and her younger sister Lulu are un-chaperoned and want to be first in line to experience the rides, the food… and the boys. Except this summer, jealousy will invade their relationship for the first time, setting in motion a course of events that can only end in tragedy, putting everyone’s love and friendship to the test.

Alternating chapters of prose and comics are interwoven in this extraordinary novel that will break your heart and crack it wide open at the same time.

The Graphic Canon Vol. 1, edited by Russ Kick

The Graphic Canon, Volume 1: From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons
Written and illustrated by various
Edited by Russ Kick
Published by Seven Stories Press
Genre: Anthology
Ages: 18+
512 pages
$34.95

The classic literary canon of Western civilization meets the comics artists, illustrators, and other artists who have remade reading in the last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century in Russ Kick’s magisterial, full-color The Graphic Canon.

Volume 1 takes us on a visual tour from the earliest literature through the end of the 1700s. Along the way, we’re treated to eye-popping renditions of the human race’s greatest epics: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey (in watercolors by Gareth Hinds), The Aeneid, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights, plus later epics The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales (both by legendary illustrator and graphic designer Seymour Chwast), Paradise Lost, and Le Morte D’Arthur. Two of ancient Greece’s greatest plays are adapted — the tragedy Medea by Euripides and Tania Schrag’s uninhibited rendering of the very bawdy comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes (the text of which is still censored in many textbooks). Also included is Robert Crumb’s rarely-seen adaptation of James Boswell’s London Journal, filled with philosophical debate and lowbrow debauchery.

Religious literature is well-covered and well-illustrated, with the Books of Daniel and Esther from the Old Testament, Rick Geary’s awe-inspiring new rendition of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament, the Tao te Ching, Rumi’s Sufi poetry, Hinduism’s Mahabharata, and the Mayan holy book Popol Vuh, illustrated by Roberta Gregory. The Eastern canon gets its due, with The Tale of Genji (the world’s first novel, done in full-page illustrations reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley), three poems from China’s golden age of literature lovingly drawn by pioneering underground comics artist Sharon Rudahl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Japanese Noh play, and other works from Asia.

Two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays (King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and two of his sonnets are here, as are Plato’s Symposium, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Renaissance poetry of love and desire, and Don Quixote visualized by the legendary Will Eisner.

Some unexpected twists in this volume include a Native American folktale, an Incan play, Sappho’s poetic fragments, bawdy essays by Benjamin Franklin, the love letters of Abelard and Heloise, and the decadent French classic Dangerous Liaisons, as illustrated by Molly
Crabapple.

And much, much more.