European Masters

This collection features four comics auteurs from across the European continent. Yvan Alagbé, one of France’s most revered cartoonists, confronts the nation’s history of colonialism with power and grace. Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures includes short stories drawn over the course of two decades, each exploring issues of race, immigration, and love with elegant, innovative brushwork. Christian Hincker, better known as Blutch, is another French master often hailed as one of the greatest comics artists alive. In his hands, says the New York Times, “a simple pencil takes on the qualities of a magic wand”—and there’s no better proof than Peplum, his dreamlike, Shakespearean saga of a bandit hauling a woman encased in ice across the Roman Empire.

In Voices in the Dark, the award-winning Austrian graphic novelist Ulli Lust brings to life the haunting story of a sound engineer employed by the Nazis and his eventual entwinement with the Goebbels family. This striking, full-color adaptation of Marcel Beyer’s novel The Karnau Tapes is the work of an illustrator unafraid to tackle the darkest aspects of human nature, with a keen eye for color and emotion. And Soft City, by the Norwegian pop artist Hariton Pushwagner, is a long-lost masterpiece first unearthed in 2002, nearly three decades after its completion. Introduced by comics legend Chris Ware and presented in a gorgeous, oversized hardcover edition, it’s a surreal dystopia that takes urban malaise to epic proportions.