Much like last year, MQP plans to launch the book with a high-profile public interview at the New York Public Library—but this time Robert Crumb will interview Aline on Valentine's Day. Need More Love will include more than 40 years of Aline Crumb's funny and seminal autobiographical comics (in black and white and in color), many featuring Bunch, the nickname she often used for herself in her comics, as well as the collaborative comics (Dirty Laundry Comics) she has created over the years with R. Crumb. The book is likely to bring media attention, new readers and more public interest to Aline and her pioneering work in both underground comics and the genre of comics memoir long before the autobio comics movement of the 1980s.

Our top story in that first issue was about acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley and Maximum Fantastic Four, Mosley's inventive notion to create a combination conceptual art project and tribute to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their seminal superhero team. We're quick to note this because this unusual book has been nominated for a Quill Book Award.

Every medium should be lucky enough to have a taxonomist as brilliant as McCloud. The follow-up to his pioneering Understanding Comics (and its flawed sequel Reinventing Comics) isn’t really about how to draw comics: it’s about how to make drawings become a story and how cartooning choices communicate meaning to readers. (“There are no rules,” he says, “and here they are.”) McCloud’s cartoon analogue, now a little gray at the temples, walks us through a series of dazzlingly clear, witty explanations (in comics form) of character design, storytelling, words and their physical manifestation on the page, body language and other ideas cartoonists have to grapple with, with illustrative examples drawn from the history of the medium. If parts of his chapter on “Tools, Techniques and Technology” don’t look like they’ll age well, most of the rest of the book will be timelessly useful to aspiring cartoonists. McCloud likes to boil down complicated topics to a few neatly balanced principles; his claim that all facial expressions come from degrees and combinations of six universal basic emotions is weirdly reductive and unnerving, but it’s also pretty convincing. And even the little ideas that he tosses off—like classifying cartoonists into four types—will be sparking productive arguments for years to come. (Sept.)

Bill Willingham's acclaimed series Fables chronicles the adventures of well-known fairy tale characters after their happily-ever-after moments. The series recounts the modern-day adventures of characters like Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf and others as they struggle for their homeland against an unknown and unseen adversary. Coming in October, Willingham's newest work, Fables: 1,001 Nights of Snowfall, is an original graphic novel which takes Snow White to the fabled pantheon of the Arabian Nights.

• Adventures Of Red Sonja (Dynamite Entertainment)
• The Anubis Tapestry: Between Twilights (Komikwerks)
• Best American Comics 2006 (Houghton Mifflin Company)
• Chicanos (IDW Publishing)
• Chickenhare: House Of Klaus (Dark Horse)
• Daughters Of The Dragon: Samurai Bullets (Marvel)
• Don't Cry (Kettledrummer Books)
• Good Witch Of The West Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Magic Bottle (Fantagraphics)
• Otherworld (DC/Vertigo)
• Superman: Up, Up And Away (DC)

• NYCC Adds Additional Guests
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• Marvel and Guiding Light Team Up
  
• VIZ Announces Titles For Fall Release
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• UVC To Launch In Spring
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• Random House Includes Graphic Novel Submissions In Scholarship Competition Creators
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• DriveThruComics.com Launches