5 Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels edited by Tom Devlin & various artists, Drawn & Quarterly, May
It's almost 800 pages long. Really. And all to celebrate the publisher who gave us Seth, Adrian Tomine and Chester Brown. This huge tome includes essays by Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood and new work from the likes of Kate Beaton, Michael DeForge, Ruto Modan and Jillian Tamaki. All behind a cover from Scotland's very own Tom Gauld. Clear some space on your coffee table.
8 Killing and Dying, Adrian Tomine, Drawn & Quarterly, October
And while we're in the vicinity of dirty realist cartoon strips, here's one of the masters. Tomine celebrates 20 years of his Optic Nerve comic with this new collection of six stories in full colour. One for every ageing arts graduate with a complicated emotional life. That covers most of us, right?
