Introducing New York Review Comics

New York Review Books is pleased to announce New York Review Comics, a new series of books at the union of art and literature. Comics has been one of our liveliest art forms for over a century, but many of its greatest works are no longer available, or have never appeared in English. In the tradition of NYRB Classics, NYRC will present new editions and new translations of some of those overlooked gems—unique, powerful, and surprising books that will appeal both to longtime comics fans and to the newly curious.

NYRC will publish comics of all sorts, from intimate memoirs to absurdist gags, lyrical graphic novels to dizzying experiments, united in their affirmation of the strange and wonderful things that only comics can do. Some will be in paperback, some in hardcover, and trim sizes will vary.

The series will begin on March 22, 2016 with Mark Beyer’s Agony, a darkly humorous depiction of urban despair originally published in 1987, now with an introduction by super-fan Colson Whitehead. This will be followed by the beautiful historical saga Peplum, by the acclaimed French cartoonist Blutch, in a new translation by Edward Gauvin (April 19); and Almost Completely Baxter, a judicious collection of new and selected work by the beloved, inimitably hilarious artist Glen Baxter (May 24).

It will continue in Fall 2016 with Soft City, a majestically surreal tour of an office dystopia by Norwegian pop artist Pushwagner, drawn and then lost in the early 1970s, with a new introduction by Chris Ware; Belgian artist Dominique Goblet’s searing experimental memoir Pretending Is Lying, translated from the French by Sophie Yanow—Goblet’s first book to appear in English; and What Am I Doing Here?, a long out-of-print collection by postwar America’s forgotten master of the existential gag, Abner Dean.

NYRC is co-edited by Gabriel Winslow-Yost, an assistant editor at The New York Review of Books who has written on comics, video games, and other subjects for The New York Review, The New Yorker, and n+1, and Lucas Adams, a cartoonist who has drawn for The Believer, Mental Floss, The Toast, and Atlas Obscura, was recently named as one of Brooklyn Magazine’s “30 Under 30,” and is a former intern at New York Review Books.

For more information or to arrange an interview with Gabriel or Lucas, please contact Nicholas During at 212-293-1641 or nduring@nybooks.com.