New Releases by Mark Alan Stamaty

A collection of legendary absurdist comic strips about life in 1970s New York City, now available in print for the first time in over thirty years. Every week, from 1978 to 1980, The Village Voice brought a new installment of Mark Alan Stamaty's uproarious, endlessly inventive strip MacDoodle St. Centering more or less on Malcolm Frazzle, a blocked poet struggling to complete his latest lyric for Dishwasher Monthly, Stamaty's creation encompassed a dizzying array of characters, stories, jokes, and digressions. One week might feature the ongoing battle between irate businessmen and bearded beatniks for control of a Greenwich Village coffee shop, the next might reveal a dastardly plot involving a genetically engineered dishwashing monkey, or the frustrated dreams of an irascible, over-caffeinated painter, or the mysterious visions of a duffle-coated soothsayer on the bus. Not to mention the variable moods and longings of the comic strip itself.... And somehow, in the end, it all fits together. MacDoodle St. is more than just a hilarious weekly strip; it is a great comic novel, a thrilling, surprising, unexpectedly moving ode to art, life, and New York City. This new edition features a brand-new, twenty-page autobiographical comic by Stamaty explaining what happened next and why MacDoodle St. never returned, in a unique, funny, and poignant look at the struggles and joys of being an artist.

Sam’s love of donuts takes him to the Big City where he makes friends with Mr. Bikferd, a world class collector of donuts. But when Mr. Bikferd falls in love with Pretzel Annie, the prophecy of an old homeless woman comes true: “Who needs donuts when you’ve got love?” Mr. Bikferd bequeaths his donut collection to Sam, who uses it to save the old homeless woman from drowning in a basement flooded with coffee. This is a reissue of Mark Alan Stamaty’s masterpiece of the absurd, first published 30 years ago and out of print nearly as long. With an illustration style that mixes a benign Hieronymus Bosch with an urban Where’s Waldo?, Stamaty’s off-the-wall humor is on target for little kids and big kids today.

FOR HIS EIGHTH birthday, Mark Alan Stamaty’s parents gave him his very own radio. Little did his mother realize that that innocent-looking plastic box would one day be the gateway for a new kind of sound that would “rock” her nearly out of her mind. . . . Mark first heard the howling thunder of Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” on the radio one lazy day and his life was forever changed. Soon he was styling his hair like the King and practicing his dance moves with a tennis racket as his pretend guitar in front o f the mirror. But his mother lived in constant fear that her son’s new love of rock ’n’ roll would turn him into a juvenile delinquent. Could Mark’s performance at his Cub Scout talent show change her mind?

The inspiring story of an Iraqi librarian's courageous fight to save books from the Basra Central Library before it was destroyed in the war. It is 2003 and Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of the Central Library in Basra, Iraq, has grown worried given the increased likelihood of war in her country. Determined to preserve the irreplacable records of the culture and history of the land on which she lives from the destruction of the war, Alia undertakes a courageous and extremely dangerous task of spiriting away 30,000 books from the library to a safe place. Told in dramatic graphic-novel panels by acclaimed cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, Alia's Mission celebrates the importance of books and the freedom to read, while examining the impact of war on a country and its people.

Le jeune Sam vit avec toute sa famille dans une charmante maison. Il a un grand jardin et un tas d’amis. Seulement voilà, il lui manque quelque chose: assouvir sa passion pour les donuts, ces beignets typiquement américains, rapportés en France par les Simpson. Il désire plus de donuts que son père et sa mère ne peuvent lui en offrir. Vêtu de son costume de cow-boy, Sam enfourche son tricycle pour se rendre à la ville. Perdu dans la grande cité, il finit par rencontrer Monsieur Bikferd, le plus grand collectionneur de donuts du monde. Tous les deux parcourent les rues folles et spectaculaires à la quête de nouveaux donuts. Sam est le plus heureux du monde, jusqu’à ce que, par accident, son ami tombe amoureux de Madame Pretzel, et laisse Sam seul à nouveau, traînant sa charrette pleine de donuts sans saveur. “A quoi bon ces donuts maintenant ?!”, lui demande une vieille femme triste. Trouvera-t-il la réponse à la fin du livre? Publié pour la première fois en 1973, Who needs Donuts? de Mark Alan Stamaty est un best-seller aux Etats-Unis. Inédit en France, ce livre culte constitue une impressionnante prouesse graphique, de par la foultitude de détails, la drôlerie et un splendide bestiaire imaginaire. Toutes les vitrines, les pancartes et autres inscriptions sont autant de jeux de lettres, de jeux de mots absurdes (Cloporte Shop, marchand de porte au porte à porte ; Pêche interdite jusqu’au prochain carrefour ; Transmettez mes amitiés à votre femme, Transmettez ma chaussure à votre grand- mère...).

A time-travel novel that involves Roger getting some much-needed baseball tips from the Babe himself.

When Henry's favorite pet, a hippopotamus, disappears, he follows a trail of clues hoping to find it and meets a lot of nice people along the way.

Convinced by her sister in their childhood that buying seven boxes of macaroni daily will prevent bad luck, Minnie, now grown up, is not pleased to find out her sister was only fooling.

A small stranger comes riding into town just in time to save it from the tortuous tickling techniques of Dirty Deke and his gang.