Two probing conversations between Prometheus and the Eagle ranging from the deep past to the present day, including an answer to the question: "A 'phone?' What is a 'phone?'". And Astrid explores the mysteries of the cube.

, Benni Bodker A tongue-in-cheek guide to the beasts to watch out for during a cozy Christmastime. In the wintry season, when we all delight in joyful thoughts of family, presents, and sugarplums, we mustn't forget that the night is dark and full of terrors. Thankfully, bold adventurers Benni B dker and John Kenn Mortensen have journeyed far and wide to comb through ancient tomes, listen to folk tales, and spy upon loathsome lairs to catalog the most frightful creatures of the netherworld that appear around Christmastime. A Christmas Bestiary is an essential guidebook to all the horrors that await us during the darkest time of the year, from common creatures such as Baba Yaga and the Krampus to the less encountered (but quite deadly) Yule Wight and Gryla. B dker's brief text entries include the lore and background of each creature, plus handy info such as danger level that will help you survive (but no guarantees!). Mortensen's gothic, pen-and-ink renderings bring these bone-chilling beasts to life on the page. Eerie, playful, and practical, A Christmas Bestiary is the perfect collection for the ones who love - or fear - the things that go bump in the night. John Kenn Mortensen is a Danish cult illustrator celebrated by fans around the world for his incredibly detailed illustrations of monsters. Benni B dker is one of Denmark's leading writers of YA horror fiction.

The Goddess of Love...and SF horror: The eagerly anticipated single volume collecting the 10 rare issues of the overstuffed Venus comics! In the late 1940s, the first half of the Venus series from Marvel Comics predecessors Timely and Atlas Comics was published as a lighthearted romance comic about the goddess Venus taking a job on Earth at a beauty magazine. Never a company to miss a trend, Atlas began introducing more science fiction elements in the 1950s, and eventually turned Venus' dating adventures into a straight-out horror anthology. Collected here, 70 years later and for the first time ever, is that swift-changing second half of the 19-issue run. Future Marvel stars Bill Everett (seven issues) and Werner Roth (three issues) take Venus to heights of four-color weirdness and pre-Code horror ghastliness. Everett is given free rein and seizes the opportunity: writing, drawing, and lettering twenty ghoulish and goofy masterpieces, including classics like "Hangman's House," "The Day Venus Vanished," "The House of Terror," "The Sealed Spectors," Tidal Wave of Terror," and the phantasmagorical "Cartoonist's Calamity!" These stories showcase the brilliant draftsmanship and storytelling of Everett, one of the giants of the 1940s and '50s comic book industry. His slick, fluid line rendered at Timely/Atlas, from his seminal god-child Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, to the atomic age Marvel Boy, is some of the finest pre-Code horror this side of E.C.'s Graham Ingels. Series editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo assisted in the compilation of Venus for Marvel 13 years ago, and Fantagraphics is delighted to publish the horror half as the second title in The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library.

Continuing Fantagraphics' project to reprint Marvel Comics' 1950s genre titles, this volume compiles the first of what became the industry's largest line of war books. Produced by veterans of WWII, the eight issues here feature future mainstream comics stalwarts such as Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, and more. Forged in the crucible of the Korean War, and produced by veterans of the Second World War, this volume's eight issues present the brutality and grimness of armed combat by some of Atlas' most notable war artists and future comics stars including Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Dave Berg, Jay Scott Pike, Mike Sekowsky, Vern Henkel, Allen Bellman, Pete Morisi and Norman Steinberg. Propaganda abounds from the very first story, published in War Comics #1 in September 1950: "Peril in Korea," a primer explaining why the U.S. joined the conflict. Other highlights include Colan's "The Chips are Down" and "Victory," Heath's "Alone" and "No Survivors," Maneely's "Stormy Weather," Henkel's "Total Destruction," and Berg's "The Infantry's War." Originally a trial spun off from the publisher's "Men's Adventure" publications, in the nine years to follow Atlas went on to produce 533 comic book issues with war content, across 34 different titles. War Comics is where it all began, unseen in decades, scanned from the original books, restored, and packaged as one large, beautiful hardcover volume.

When a pair of bohemians descend upon a neglected working-class neighborhood in search of cheap rent, they soon discover something sinister lurking behind the walls of their new home. BTTM FDRS (pronounced "bottomfeeders") offers a vision of horror that is gross and gory in all the right ways. Funny, scary, and thought provoking, it confronts the monstrous forces that are displacing cultures in urban neighborhoods today.

Josh Simmons (Black River) returns with a harrowing and genre-bending collection of more than two dozen short stories. The individual stories in Flayed Corpse stand on their own and also complement each other in ways that only heighten the anxiety and dread pouring from the pages. Flayed Corpse also collects several collaborations between Simmons and other cartoonists, including James Romberger, Anders Nilsen, Tara Booth, Eroyn Franklin, Tom Van Deusen, and Eric Reynolds, amongst others.

, Bob Powell, Jack Cole, Reed Crandall, Mike Peppe, Lou Cameron, Basil Wolverton, Manny Stallman, John Giunta, Sid Check, Harry Lazarus, Jack Katz, Howard Nostrand, Al Williamson, Warren Kremer, Wally Wood Of the myriad genres comic books ventured into during its golden age, none was as controversial as or came at a greater cost than horror; the public outrage it incited almost destroyed the entire industry. Yet before the watchdog groups and Congress could intercede, horror books were flying off the newsstands. During its peak period (1951-54) over fifty titles appeared each month. Apparently there was something perversely irresistible about these graphic excursions into our dark side, and Four Color Fear collects the finest of these into a single robust and affordable volume. EC is the comic book company most fans associate with horror; its complete line has been reprinted numerous times, and deservedly so. But to the average reader there remain unseen quite a batch of genuinely disturbing, compulsive, imaginative, at times even touching, horror stories presented from a variety of visions and perspectives, many of which at their best can stand toe to toe with EC. All of the better horror companies are represented: Ajax-Farrell, Atlas, Avon, Charlton, Comic Media, Fawcett, Fiction House, Gilmor, Harvey, Quality, Standard, St. John, Story, Superior, Trojan, and Youthful. Artist perennials Jack Cole, Steve Ditko, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wallace Wood contribute both stories and covers, with many of the forty full-sized covers created by specialists Bernard Baily, L.B. Cole, William Eckgren, and Matt Fox. Editors Benson and Sadowski have sifted through hundreds of rare books to cherry-pick the most compelling scripts and art, and they provide extensive background notes on the artists, writers, and companies involved in their creation. Digital restoration has been performed with subtlety and restraint, mainly to correct registration and printing errors, with every effort made to retain the flavor of the original comics, and to provide the reader the experience of finding in the attic a bound volume of the finest non-EC horror covers and stories of the pre-code era.

A career-spanning comics project 24 years in the making, Josh Simmons creates a deeply personal fantasy drama infused with psychological horror. Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland, Jessica Farm opens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse. Once inside, we track our titular heroine (she is a person, not a place) as she bounds out of bed on Christmas morning and goes about her routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread as we discover that Jessica's increasingly nightmarish house - where the inside seems bigger than the outside, like Snoopy's doghouse - is filled with creatures around every corner: some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing, and some malevolent. Most terrifying of all is Jessica's father. Will she even get to open the presents under the Christmas tree? Taking place over a single Christmas Day, Jessica Farm is a career-spanning comics project in which Simmons has been drawing one page every month for the past 24 years, starting in January 2000. This is a horror-fantasy-psychodrama that will appeal to fans of Charles Burns, David Cronenberg, and Dario Argento.

Reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Bernie Wrightson, a collection of spine-chilling line drawings of the creatures that haunt our dreams when night falls. When the sun goes down, our minds invent all manner of horrors that may lurk in the darkness. Danish cult illustrator John Kenn Mortensen (Sticky Monsters) draws inspiration from this shadowy realm, and his pen skillfully conjures these eerie visions on paper. Open this book (if you dare) to encounter a frightful horde of sepia-toned spooks - witches, wraiths, goblins, giant spiders, wild boars, evil clowns - and countless other unspeakable creatures. Hairy, hooded, or horned, they peer at you ominously through dead eyes, their fangs bared. By turns playful, wicked, stunningly imaginative, and masterfully rendered, the compositions in Night Terror are like a combination of Edward Gorey and Bernie Wrightson - and the monsters themselves are as formidable and menacing as those that The Witcher might hunt down. A deliciously creepy collection of pen-and-ink drawings for those who find themselves beguiled by the things that go bump in the night.

For horror fans of all ages, a spinetinglingly creepy and darkly comedic picture book. Fantagraphics' third release in English from Danish cult illustrator John Kenn Mortensen. Gruesome, spindly figures gather outside a house, then spirit away a dreaming youth, bed and all. The stage is set for 32 skin-crawling poems imagining various children's nightmares, all with sequential illustrations by Danish horror master Mortensen. His eerie visions fade to black at the edges, like a dreamer unable to shift their focus, and inspire delicious terror all by themselves. Similarly, the short poems each evoke a distinct sense of dread for the sleeping imagination to expand upon; together, the words and pictures conjure a nightmarish world tinged with pitch black humor. The sequences splay across double-page spreads, evoking Edward Gorey gone grand scale, and grand guignol. For those of a nervous disposition, read in bright sunlight. For those in search of a nervous disposition, take two before bed.

This collects six wildly inventive short comics stories that might collectively be dubbed "speculative memoir." Schrauwen's deadpan depictions of his and his offspring's upcoming lives include alien abduction, dialogue with future agents, and coded messages in envelopes at breakfast.

This stocking-stuffer sized collection features two Christmas-themed stories from the 1960's created for national magazines. From 1963, 'Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking' features the entire Peanuts cast of the time, each with a joke or reflection about the season. 'The Christmas Story' (1968) focuses on Lucy and Linus explaining the meaning of the holiday to Snoopy. Also included are notes on the provenance of the stories and a pocket-sized biography of Schulz. A perfect gift item for the season!

, Jerome Mulot, Olivier Schrauwen Guy is a mediocre mariner, able enough, but also a lazy, thieving, lying drunkard. All of which makes him more real than the swashbuckling Hollywood heroes that grace most pirate narratives. This tour de force of sea-faring gallows humor is also an international event in modern comics, teaming for the first time three titans of the field: Belgian comics master Olivier Schrauwen (Parallel Lives, Arsene Schrauwen) and the acclaimed French duo, Ruppert & Mulot (The Perineum Technique).