I'm psyched. I'm totally psyched. I'm not a loser... Who the hell am I kidding?

Life sucks for Dave Miller -- he's broke, girlfriendless, and stuck in a dead-end job. Really dead-end: Dave is the night manager at the Last Stop, LA's finest vampire-owned and operated, all-night convenience store. Facing an eternity of turning hot dogs and restocking blood broth for his crappy boss and Vampire Master, the future looks about as appealing as the sunrise. It's bad enough that Dave is clinging to his days as a vegetarian and refusing to feed off humans, leaving him weak as a kitten. But when he finds himself competing with psychotic surfer-vamp Wes for the affections of Rosa, a beautiful mortal flirting with the dark side, unlife gets about as sucky as it possibly can.

Originally published in 2008, Fantagraphics is proud to bring this YA classic back into print with a new edition. Veteran comics creators Jessica Abel (Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars), Gabe Soria (Batman '66), and Warren Pleece (Incognegro) have crafted a timeless goth love triangle/coming-of-age story that garnered awards and accolades when initially published, including the 2009 YALSA Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens list.

A Library Journal Best Book of 2015

Go behind the scenes of seven of today's most popular narrative radio shows and podcasts, including This American Life and RadioLab, in graphic narrative.

Every week, millions of devoted fans tune in to or download This American Life, The Moth, Radiolab, Planet Money, Snap Judgment, Serial, Invisibilia and other narrative radio shows. Using personal stories to breathe life into complex ideas and issues, these beloved programs help us to understand ourselves and our world a little bit better. Each has a distinct style, but every one delivers stories that are brilliantly told and produced. Out on the Wire offers an unexpected window into this new kind of storytelling--one that literally illustrates the making of a purely auditory medium.

With the help of This American Life's Ira Glass, Jessica Abel, a cartoonist and devotee of narrative radio, uncovers just how radio producers construct narrative, spilling some juicy insider details. Jad Abumrad of RadioLab talks about chasing moments of awe with scientists, while Planet Money's Robert Smith lets us in on his slightly goofy strategy for putting interviewees at ease. And Abel reveals how mad--really mad--Ira Glass becomes when he receives edits from his colleagues. Informative and engaging, Out on the Wire demonstrates that narrative radio and podcasts are creating some of the most exciting and innovative storytelling available today.

A gold mine of essential information for every aspiring comics artist. Highly recommended. --Scott McCloud

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures is a course on comic creation - for college classes or for independent study - that centers on storytelling and concludes with making a finished comic. With chapters on lettering, story structure, and panel layout, the fifteen lessons offered - each complete with homework, extra credit activities and supplementary reading suggestions - provide a solid introduction for people interested in making their own comics. Additional resources, lessons, and after-class help are available on the DW-WP website.

Go from overwhelmed, anxious, and stuck, to consistent, clear, and in control of your creative life.If you feel like you're floundering in the deep end (Not waving, drowning!), and anxiety over the complexity and enormousness of your creative projects overwhelms you, stop scrambling to fit everything in and feeling stretched thin.DIVE DEEP AND SWIM

• Sustain the energy you feel when thinking of how awesome your projects could be.
• Value your own creative work as highly as work you do for other people.
• Build a reusable structure and process that will consistently get you to the finish line.
• Blast through your stuck-ness.
• Focus. Finish. Move on to the next project.

You're a creative person. Even if you have a hard time calling yourself a writer or an artist in public, making your creative work is core to who you are and how you see the world. You may be harboring a big, ambitious idea for a project. Possibly a lot of them.And it's killing you.You lie awake thinking about it...and hating yourself for not doing more to make it real. And then in the morning you're exhausted, and you can't believe you wasted more time on this stupid idea. Who ever told you you were creative anyway? You try to shove your idea away, to forget it. But your creative work is what keeps you sane. You can't not do this. So you live with guilt and anxiety all the time.You've tried to carve out the time and attention you need to devote to your creative work. You've made ambitious goals, you've written lists, you've scheduled calendars...you've installed shackles on your desk chair. But chaining yourself to your work only seems to make you more distractible and more miserable. (And those unsightly leg sores!)Maybe you've even tried to borrow time-management tips from the business world. Get things done! Build seven habits! Eat that frog! But following business-minded productivity systems just doesn't work for you. The issue isn't simply getting things done, it's allowing yourself to devote precious time and attention to the vital, self-generated creative work that builds toward your vision for the future.The problem is, the life you're living is already full. You've made a lot of promises, to yourself, your family, your friends, and your community, that you'll be there for them. You probably have a job; you may have kids. You may well have many competing ideas for your creative work. Where, exactly, can you find that mythical Creative Focus Unicorn?In Growing Gills, you'll discover that the power is already within you to make your work.The biggest obstacles to your getting your important creative work done lie in the unknowns you're facing.Growing Gills takes you step by step through the process of pinning down exactly what's stopping you from finishing your beautiful, inventive, and potentially game-changing projects.Using the power of conscious decision, you'll build your own unique system for fitting creative work into your existing life, taking into consideration how you work best.Like a custom-designed, powered exoskeleton, your personal system will bolster and support your creative practice day in and day out, so that you can grow up and grow old while continuing to make your creative work...without chucking out all the other connections to your family and the world that make your life rich and worth living.GROWING GILLS: Breathe in the deep end.With your purchase of the ebook or print edition, you'll also get:

• The Growing Gills Workbook for free
• A checklist to identify what specifically stands in your way
• An invitation to a 5-day free minicourse where you'll build a plan to overcome those obstacles.

From the Harvey and Lulu award-winning creator of Artbabe comes a riveting story of a young woman's misadventures in Mexico City.

Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to find herself. She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good--humored about Carla's reappearance on his doorstep--until he realizes that Carla, who spends her days soaking in the city, exploring Frida Kahlo's house, and learning Spanish, has no intention of leaving.

When Harry and Carla's relationship of mutual tolerance reaches its inevitable end, she rejects his world of Anglo expats for her own set of friends: pretty-boy Oscar, who sells pot and dreams of being a DJ, and charismatic Memo, a left-wing, pseudo-intellectual ladies' man. Determined to experience the real Mexico, Carla turns a blind eye to her new friends' inconsistencies. But then she catches the eye of a drug don, el Gordo, and from that moment on her life gets a lot more complicated, and she is forced to confront the irreparable consequences of her willful innocence.

Jessica Abel's evocative black-and-white drawings and creative mix of English and Spanish bring Mexico City's past and present to life, unfurling Carla's dark history against the legacies of Burroughs and Kahlo. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and the consequences of trusting easy answers, La Perdida--at once grounded in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal--is a story about finding oneself by getting lost.

A new course of material to accompany First Second's widely acclaimed 2008 comics textbook.

In their hotly anticipated follow-up to 2008's comics textbook Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, School of Visual Arts cartooning professors Matt Madden and Jessica Abel bring their expertise to bear on the second semester of a course of study for the budding cartoonist.

Covering advanced topics such as story composition, coloring, and file formatting, Mastering Comics is a vital companion to the introductory content of the first volume.

by Jessica Abel
Soundtrack collects the best of Jessica Abel's self-published Artbabe series, one of the most exciting comic books to emerge in the late-1990s. The first four were self-xeroxed efforts, and led to a prestigious Xeric Grant in 1996, enabling her to publish a more professionally packaged fifth issue. This volume presents the best of these five comic books, as well as other short strips, to a larger audience for the first time. Abel's stories are peppered with hipsters, fashion, and trendy locales - all of which have contributed to her considerable appeal - but don't let the generational trappings fool you. Her intuitive ear for dialogue and characterization have made Artbabe a hit amongst people of all ages, especially women.
TP, 120pg, b&w