Brian Ralph

You wake up in the rubble and see a ragged, desperate one-armed man greeting you. He takes you underground to a safe space, feeds you, offers you a place to sleep, and then announces that he'll take the first watch. It's not long before the peril of the jagged landscape has located you and your new-found protector and is scratching at the door. What transpires is a moment-to-moment struggle for survival-The Road meets Dawn of the Dead. Daybreak is seen through the eyes of a silent observer as he runs from the shadows of the imminent zombie threat. Brian Ralph slowly builds the tension of the zombies on the periphery, letting the threat-rather than the actual carnage-be the driving force. The post-apocalyptic backdrop features tangles of rocks, lumber, I beams, and overturned cars that are characters in and of themselves. Drawing inspiration from horror movies, television, and first-person shooter video games, Daybreak departs from zombie genre in both content and format, achieving a living-dead masterwork of literary proportions. When released in 2011, Daybreak was a critical success, a YALSA Great Graphic Novel for Teens, and a TLA Maverick Graphic Novel. Read the book before the Netflix Original series starring Matthew Broderick hits the small screen.

Hang out with a young robot hero in his fortress of not-so-solitary solitude What if Osamu Tezuka's beloved hero Astro Boy was a young robot with endless enthusiasm who lived with a bumbling sad-sack robot friend, a self-centered wise-cracking cat, and a well-meaning but forgetful inventor? Why, then he'd be Reggie-12! Reggie-12 is classic Japanese adventure manga cartooning reworked in Brian Ralph's trademark style and told with the episodic wit and structure of the contemporary American sitcom. Laughs explode from the page (and the reader's belly) as mishap follows caper follows disaster. Ralph (Daybreak, Cave In) first presented this hilarious pop-culture send-up of the infallible boy hero in the back pages of the seminal Asian culture magazine Giant Robot, and it instantly became one of the magazine's most popular and enduring features. Come along for a wild ride with Reggie-12, Casper, and Professor Tinkerton as they eat pizza, play video games, and get dissed by bad guys.

A FANTASTICAL, WORDLESS VOYAGE THROUGH SUBTERRANEAN MAZES A rat darts across the opening pages, into a hole, and down a long tunnel, stopping under a hammock. A mole man stretches and wakes up, leading the rat and the reader deeper into the tunnel. What follows is a series of dreamlike sequences, each stranger than the last. Brian Ralph, author of the New York Times Graphic Novel Bestseller and YALSA Great Graphic Novel for Teens Daybreak, was a founding member of the influential Providence, Rhode Island, Fort Thunder art collective, which was renowned for the way its members' work intermingled lowbrow and highbrow art forms--drawing inspiration from comics, video and roleplaying games, and contemporary art. Fort Thunder created the alternative adventure comic and the comic book as artist's book. Cave In was seen as the first example of this new approach. In this wordless classic, special emphasis is placed on the power of gesture. Minimalism allows Ralph to be playful with form--Cave In's use of color and crosshatching speaks much more clearly to narrative shifts than is possible in a more conventional text, and the use of different panel shapes and sizes transform the rhythm and pacing of the story. Cave In is an allages adventure story, jam-packed with monsters, bats, and all manner of unimaginable underground mystery.

"A storytelling tour de force by turns creepy and poignant . . . One of the best books of the year." --Jeff Jensen, Entertainment WeeklyYou wake up in the rubble and see a ragged, desperate one-armed man greeting you. He takes you underground to a safe space, feeds you, offers you a place to sleep, and then announces that he'll take the first watch. It's not long before the peril of the jagged landscape has located you and your newfound protector and is scratching at the door. What transpires is a moment-to-moment struggle for survival--The Road meets Dawn of the Dead. Daybreak is seen through the eyes of a silent observer as he follows his protector and runs from the shadows of the imminent zombie threat. Brian Ralph slowly builds the tension of the zombies on the periphery, letting the threat--rather than the actual carnage--be the driving force. The postapocalyptic backdrop features tangles of rocks, lumber, I-beams, and overturned cars that are characters in and of themselves. A New York Times Graphic Novel Bestseller and YALSA Great Graphic Novel For Teens, Daybreak is an art-house take on the classic zombie genre.