The following suggestion of Brian Chippendale's If 'N Oof (Picturebox, 2010) comes from Matthew Derby.
The titular characters in Brian Chippendale's eye-popping picaresque comic If 'N Oof just want to get back to their farm, where they raised birds and collected bugs with If’s Uncle Ouch. But they’re lost inside a vast crater populated by freakish clans of melting figures and oddball villains, and the landscape keeps giving way to outlandish funhouse dreamscapes. Only those might not actually be dreams they're having, and it is entirely possible that If, who looks like a Power Ranger with an enormous koala bear head, is the product of an experiment conducted by the despotic scientist Dr. Payne. You've probably read a million books like this, but what distinguishes If 'n Oof from your standard episodic graphic novel set in a robotic cloudworld stocked with roving assassins is the deadpan intimacy Chippendale employs to render his characters. When they’re not being held at gunpoint by a creepy boy in short pants or tumbling from a levitating citadel, If and Oof prefer to roll about in flower gardens and hunt for snack food, and Chippendale lingers devotedly on these domestic vignettes to hilarious and moving effect. If ‘N Oof poses as an action-packed adventure story – and there are plenty of skirmishes - but Chippendale’s focus on the mundane artfully diffuses the genre’s propensity toward muscle flexing and beatdown porn to make way for something warmer, funnier, and more human.
Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times: Stories (2003 Back Bay Books). 
His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, and Guernica, as well as the Anchor Book of New American Stories and The Apocalypse Reader. His story “January in December” was a notable selection in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009. His writing has also appeared in The Believer, where he served as Interviews Editor from 2004 to 2007.
"The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy died one hundred years ago on November 20, 1910. Although eulogized by many writers, one of the best tributes to Tolstoy came two years before his death when Leon Trotsky wrote this article on Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday. It was first published in German in Die Neue Zeit on September 18, 1908; then in a Russian translation in Volume 20 of Trotsky’s Works in 1926; and finally in an English translation by John G. Wright in the journal Fourth International in May-June 1951 under the title, “Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel.” Minor revisions have been made to the original English translation. Several of the endnotes have been adapted from the 1926 Russian edition."
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/tols-d02.shtml
Posted by: Sverdlov | December 02, 2010 at 10:04 AM