Hillary Chute

Over a hundred page-long comics from around the world, documenting humanity's retreat into COVID-19 lockdown and imagining our eventual, boisterous reemergence, from the founder of the Brooklyn Comic Arts festival and owner of beloved indie comic shop Desert Island. On April 1, 2020, the Instagram account of Desert Island, Brooklyn's celebrated alternative comics shop, put out a call. By then, the shop had shuttered indefinitely, and the world's major cities had locked down as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic took hold: "We all need something positive to think about, and a lot of us have time on our hands," the post read. "Who wants to make something?" Hundreds of short comics from over fifty countries poured into Desert Island's inbox. Some came from notable cartoonists. Most, astonishingly, came from amateur artists just looking for an outlet to create in the midst of tragedy--for a chance to join the rescue party that leads us out of isolation. Collected here are one hundred fifty notable entries from the Rescue Party project, capturing the loneliness and the surprising comforts of early lockdown; the mania of its middle days as the mind begins to fray; and the branching paths of humanity's future, as we re-enter a world wracked with injustice. Bracing, beautiful, and conspicuously optimistic, Rescue Party is part graphic diary, part time capsule, and part field guide: a grassroots project that tells the collective story of lockdown from a chorus of global voices, and charts a course to a more just future.

A richly illustrated book in which leading cultural critics, authors, and academics reflect on the radical achievement and innovation of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Maus'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal___________________________________________________________________________It is hard to overstate Art Spiegelman's effect on postwar American culture. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is one of our most influential contemporary artists, and his masterpiece Maus has shaped the fields of literature, history, and art. Collecting responses to the work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status, Maus Now is a new collection of essays that sees writers such as Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and others approaching the complexity of Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions.Offering translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus for the first time, this collection edited by American literary scholar Hillary Chute - an expert on comics and graphic narratives - assembles the world's best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.___________________________________________________________________________'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New Yorker on Maus'No summary can do justice to Spiegelman's narrative skill' Adam Gopnik on Maus'Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect' Philip Pullman on Maus