Zahra's Paradise
Amir and Kahlil (Roaring Brook/First Second)
An Iranian blogger goes missing and his family enters a hellish twilight zone of obfuscation in a story that captures the uncertainty of living under religious dogma.
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Day Tripper
Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon (DC/Vertigo)
Using a series of important events in the life of one man, this stunning work repeatedly uses his death at the end of each of these events to propel the readers into a new and illuminating excursion through another aspect of the man's life.
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Hark! A Vagrant!
Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)
Jane Austen, the Great Gatsby, and Napoleon are all satirized with a knowing line in this very funny collection from the acclaimed Web comic.
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The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld (Norton)
Host of NPR's On the Media, Gladstone uses a cartoon persona to take the reader on a thoughtful and entertaining excursion through the history of the media from ancient Rome to the rise of digital technology.
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Love and Rockets: New Stories #4
Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
Even in a long career of masterpieces, Jaime's story about missed opportunities for happiness is a revelation, while Gilbert continues to cement his place as the Jorodowsky of comics with a vampire tale.
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Infinite Kung Fu
Kagan McLeod (Top Shelf)
The traditional martial arts saga gets a lively comics updating with this tale of Lei Kung, who must defeat the heads of the emperor's five armies to free a land.
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Finder: Voice
Carla Speed McNeil (Dark Horse)
In this epic work of science fiction, Rachel Grosvenor, an outcast in a world ruled by a complex network of clans, looks to find a place for herself by attempting to join a very exclusive clan.
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Big Questions
Anders Nilsen (Drawn & Quarterly)
A massive meditation on the meaning of life unfolds as a flock of cartoon birds deal with the questions raised when an unexploded bomb lands among them.
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Farm 54
Galit & Gilad Seliktar (Fanfare Ponent Mon)
Created by a brother and sister team, these three haunting, semiautobiographical stories follow a young Israeli girl as she grows up in the 1980s and later during her military service in the occupied territories.
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Habibi
Craig Thompson (Pantheon)
Two escaped slaves find themselves prisoners of others' desires in a sea of Islamic-inspired calligraphy and lines in this lyrical fantasy.
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