Kirjahaku

Being an emperor in ancient Rome was a dangerous business. Most of the nearly 100 emperors from the dawn of the Roman empire to its fall died violently—often the victims of assassination, battle wounds or gruesome maladies. A sly work of cartoon history, with a touch of dark wit, Et Tu, Brute? is an irreverent, illustrated compendium of the deaths of all the Roman emperors. Here Nero stabs himself in the throat, Tiberius is smothered in his sleep, Caligula is stabbed by his own praetorian guard and Claudius is fed poisonous mushrooms by his wife.

In this work of cartoon revisionist history, Jason Novak explores the little-talked-about dead ball era of baseball—from 1900 to 1920, when a single ball was used for an entire game—and the men and women who shaped its course. Ranging from mischievous in-game antics to the racial barriers being crossed well before Jackie Robinson, these miniature biographies highlight the joys and struggles, both on and off the field, of the unsung heroes who played pro ball before it was a profession.

Ernest Hemingway, as the author of this graphic adaptation acknowledges, may be culturally out of fashion, but his short stories, especially those that appeared in the first 1924 version of in our time, are timeless. The stories from that edition are, as the cartoonist Jason Novaks writes in his introduction, "the shortest Hemingway ever wrote. Most of them could more properly be described as vignettes. Any one of them taken alone might be better classified as a prose poem; it is only when read together that they achieve a cohesion as 'stories'. In this new adaptation, Novaks finds the graphic equivalent of Hemingway's lean, muscular prose -- stark, punchy, beautifully composed panels that illustrate the understated poetics of those early, famously groundbreaking stories.