So, it’s the holidays, and maybe you’re looking for gift ideas. Here are a dozen. All of these-- and many, many more-- are available from your pals at Comic Relief, contact info listed below. These are excisions from longer Artbomb reviews.

1. From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
…To pigeonhole FROM HELL as just about Jack the Ripper does Moore and Campbell's work a great disservice, however. Across its pages, Jack becomes a death-metaphor for the modern era, weaving a legacy of madness and bloodshed across gaslight streets and the sullen masses living therein; indeed, across time itself. A polemic on the nature of murder and violence for the 20th century.

Buy for: Smart Dads & Moms. That Uncle who’s a professor somewhere. The moody kid into true crime and forensics shows. Fans of SEVEN and NPR.

2. Palomar, Love and Rockets: X. Gilbert Hernandez
Gilbert Hernandez weaves an intricate tapestry of lives, invents such a fully realized world that it's impossible to engage PALOMAR casually. If the medium has produced a masterpiece, this is it.

Or, if the heft of price tag of PALOMAR spooks you, try X. X explodes across a meandering (at first glance) tale of race and music in Los Angeles shortly before the Rodney King riots of 1993. A taught, masterful ensemble drama that bursts forth from the page with an urgent honesty. Potent and prophetic.

Buy for: Kids that can’t wait to get out of town and go to college. Gabriel Garcia Marquez fans. Lit majors. Anyone that likes reading.

3. Black and White, Taiyo Matusmoto
In the sprawling Japanese metropolis of Treasure Town as a Disney-esque corporate empire is slowly gentrifying the darkest of its corners, Black and White live like insane Lost Boys, twin cat-shamans of the city and yin to one another's yang… BLACK AND WHITE reads like unfettered comics joy, full of vigor and energy to spare off of every page and panel. (Three volumes, start with the first.)

Buy for: Matrix fans. Video game junkies.

4. The Alec Suite, Eddie Campbell
Warren: “This is one of the great instinctual masters of the medium taking everyday life and showing it beinglived, showing people achieving and losing and changing and loving and hating, making the living of life glorious and riveting - life as we remember it when we look back on it.” (four volumes. Start with The King Canute Crowd.)

Buy for: People that like to drink; people that used to use “party” as a verb but don’t anymore.

5. Why I Hate Saturn, Kyle Baker.
Kel says: “Anne's a disillusioned alcoholic magazine columnist living in New York. Her sister Laura is a health-nut from the West Coast, who shows up unexpectedly with a bullet in her body and the delusion that she's actually from Saturn. Anne spends the rest of the book trying to determine whether she wants to murder Laura, protect her or become her. I defy you to find one contemporary urban woman who can't relate.”

Buy for: women with family issues; people that like laughing. Fans of Whit Stillman and Wes Anderson films.

6. Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco.
Never before has Harvey Pekar's maxim that "Comics are just words and pictures; you can do anything with words and pictures," been provided so beautiful an example. Sacco knows exactly what his hybrid style allows him to accomplish and he fires on all cylinders as he stitches together the recent history of Gorazde… Sacco's work coalesces into a new milieu, a new grammar for the entire medium of comics. Look! Look at what comics can do.

Buy for: news junkies; war buffs.

7. The Frank Book, Jim Woodring
With THE FRANK BOOK, Jim Woodring does something almost alchemical. These wordless, universally accessible cartoons transmit strange moods and evoke uneasy tones so brilliantly, so gorgeously, they'll leave you boggled and astounded by their beauty and horror.

Buy for: the creepy neice/nephew in all the art classes with the weird hair; Adult Swim fans.

8. Domu: A Child’s Dream, Katsuhiro Otomo.
When twenty-five residents of a low-income housing project die of apparent suicide, police eyebrows begin to rise. Investigating this near-invisible community united by poverty and misery, they find these suicides to be unrelated, unconnected, and actually physically impossible to have been accomplished. Something horrible is playing with the minds of the residents of the Tsutsumi Public Housing Complex, and the cops have no idea how to stop it. A supernatural horror story saturated by urban creepiness...

Buy for: anime and manga fans; science fiction and action types.

9. David Boring, Dan Clowes
DAVID BORING tells the strange tale of David and what just might be the end of the world. Or not.

Clowes pulls off an atmosphere of dread and uncertainty permeated with paranoia and the surreal without the standard mealy-mouthed navel-gazing... Sex fetishes and romantic obsessions; movies, magazines, and comic books wrack our young hero as he navigates the maybe-apocalypse and his own emotions, spinning out of control as wildly as the world itself while holding out very desperately for hope. Profound and sharply complicated.

Buy for: those people that always read the Times on Sunday; Dave Eggers-David Foster Wallace fans.

10. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware.
JIMMY CORRIGAN tours us through three generations of the Corrigan Men, studying how the emotional sins and scars of the father are irrevocably passed down to the son. And while not always a pleasant place to visit, Ware imbibes Jimmy with a (naïve, arguably) hope that perseveres through his physical and emotional trials. Ware weaves a cold detachment with an absolutely wrenching purge of rage and regret seamlessly.

This book is as gorgeous to read as it is to look at.

Buy for: Fans of THE CORRECTIONS; Carver fans.

11. Maus, art spiegelman
Warren says: “This is the story of Art Spiegelman's father, who survived Auschwitz and Dachau... All Nazis are depicted as talking cats. The Poles, pigs. And the Jews, mice. It's a Krazy Kat level of separation. But it works. It works visually because it makes all the emotions big and transparent, and makes the reader consider the horror rather than react to its surface. And because it speaks directly to the way the Nazis dehumanised everything around them... This relentlessly emotional story became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Buy for: anyone that can handle it.

12. Queen & Country, Greg Rucka and Various.
Warren says: “QUEEN AND COUNTRY is a spy story where every single bullet has consequence, and where every single step you take in your job will come back to haunt you. Watching the horrible tumble of dominos set off by troubled spy Tara Chace's one solitary gunshot makes QUEEN AND COUNTRY perhaps the most compelling thriller comic of the last year.

Lesser writers, the Tom Clancys and the like, deal with their new worlds of spies and technoporn by jingoistically shoving other nationalities into the shoes of Evil Empire, so that they can play the same simple games. Greg Rucka is not a lesser writer. As an author, he thrives in political, moral and emotional complexity...” (Five volumes to date. Three reviewed so far.)

Buy for: Dads, women that're into espionage and assassination, BOURNE IDENTITY fans.

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These books and many more are available at
COMIC RELIEF: THE Comic Bookstore
2138 University Ave. @ Shattuck Ave.
Berkeley, Ca. 94704-1026
V 510/843-5002
F 510/843-3137
info@comicrelief.net
www.comicrelief.net

And the next five or so folks that place an order there and tell me about it get a copy of LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS and KILLING DEMONS from me as a sign of thanks.