Weekly Top 10

1. What The Hell Are You Doing: The Essential David Shrigley (Norton) $35.00 – “By turns hilarious, satirical, and brilliant, David Shrigley’s full-page illustrations-a combination of drawing, comics, photography, and sculpture-are sui generis: uproariously funny, pleasantly unnerving, and, most of all, really, really cool. Neither “graphic novel” nor “art book,” What the Hell Are You Doing? celebrates the surreal world of the artist who created Ants Have Sex in Your Beer and To Make the Meringue You Must Beat the Egg Whites Until They Look Like This.

2. Optic Nerve #12 by Adrian Tomine (D&Q) $5.95 – Two pitch-perfect stories of rejection, imperfection, and relationship drama, each ending on a surprisingly uplifting note. “Hortisculpture” pushes Tomine into a stylistic camp with Sammy Harkham, Jordan Crane, Chuck Forsman and Kevin Huizenga – perhaps more than ever before. The story works with a “Chalky White”-ish suburban everyman and his tempered ambitions, but camps up the visual style into a Marmaduke-y newspaper strip aesthetic. The effect is similar to the trickiness of his wedding planning comics. The second half is a repolishing of his “Amber Sweet” college girl mistaken for porn star plot. Plus we get a glimpse into Tomine’s sad-sack mailbox, and some self-aware griping about putting out comics issue by issue.  -EF

3. Habibi by Craig Thompson (Pantheon) $35.00 – Hotly anticipated new work from the author of Blankets and Goodbye Chunky Rice.

4. Crap Hound #8 Superstition $12.00 – Clip art galore, collage style. Once you open it you can’t put it doooowwwnnn, superstitious theeeeeemed in time for Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeen!

5. Caroline Paquita 2012 Calendar  (Pegacorn Press) $10.00 – Thanks to everybody who came out last night for the release event for Pegacorn Press!

6. Future Tense  (Pegacorn Press) $8.00 – Ditto! A fabulous comics anthology.

7. Mark Twain’s Autobiography 1910-2010 byMichael Kupperman (Fantagraphics) $19.99 – Yes, with text. Yes with illustrations. And oh yeah, yes with Mark Twain as porn star, drifter and grifter.

8. Bitch #52 $5.95

9. Prompts-Prompted Spr 11 The Creative Writers Guild $5.00 – Those art students! Bein’ all literary and stuff.

10. Maximumrocknroll #341 Oct $4.00