One year later, the Houston-based, women-owned DramaQueen has a catalogue of nine titles that includes Korean manhwa, boys' love and more sexually explicit yaoi material. Books sell for $11.99 and $12.99. Their manhwa title, Vision from the Other Side, is now on volume 2. Two Korean manhwa titles, Audition and DVD, both by Young Chon Kye, were released in July and are currently sold out. The company will publish a serialized anthology of original non-Japanese boys' love called RUSH every two months, starting this fall.

DramaQueen books are distributed through wholesaler Baker & Taylor and to the direct market through AAAAnime. DQ books are also available in the European market through independent comic book stores like Forbidden Planet in the U.K. and online at www.archonia.com. DQ is in negotiations with a new distributor but because of the books' explicit content, not all stores are comfortable with its titles. Barnes & Noble will special order DramaQueen's books and sells them online through BN.com.

This collection of short stories lacks some of the artistic sophistication of most books from art comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly—the drawings are, in fact, about as bare bones as it gets—but it still manages to be completely engrossing. Paradoxically, the stories are interesting—even addictive—because Bell has such a flair for communicating a specific brand of postcollegiate ennui. Her day-to-day existence is a litany of dilapidated rental apartments, low-paying jobs, yoga classes and artistic frustration, but Bell’s straightforward storytelling reveals a true poignancy amid the tedium. Far from being depressing, these snippets of daily life in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y., are comforting in their frankness and familiarity; by settling into the rhythm of the artist’s daily life, the reader experiences the heft of small victories and simple pleasures. Never laugh-out-loud funny, brief tales of yoga roommate miscommunication, ignorant comics buyers, the anguish of nude modeling, and sex-obsessed, adolescent art students radiate good humor and are sure to resonate with a certain stripe of well-educated, underemployed 20-something comic reader. Lucky is yet another sophisticated, nuanced pleasure. (Sept.)

As one of the original generation of 1960s underground cartoonists in San Francisco, Melinda Gebbie contributed to such classic anthologies as Anarchy and Wimmen’s. Moving to London in the 1980s, she met writer Alan Moore (after an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and the two began collaborating on Lost Girls, as well as, eventually, a personal relationship. Sixteen years in the making, this erotic reinvention of classic literary characters is a spectacular showcase for Gebbie’s meticulous, fine arts-based style.

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