From the back cover: In 1992 legendary writer Jim Shooter and newcomer artist David Lapham teamed up to reinvent a staple of comic book storytelling - the superhero team genre. Their darker approach more realistically portrayed superpowered teenagers. The characters behaved like real people, blurring the line between good and evil. The heroes were flawed and sometimes loathsome, while the villains were often noble and frighteningly identifiable.
In 1974, legendary Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee approached underground pioneer Denis Kitchen and offered a way for them to collaborate. Their resulting series was called Comix Book and featured work by many of the top underground cartoonists including Joel Beck, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman (first national appearance of Maus), Skip Williamson, and S. Clay Wilson. The Best of Comix Book showcases 150-pages of classic underground comix (printed on newsprint, as they originally appeared), many never before reprinted.
1987’s classic origin story for the World’s Mightiest Mortal is back in SHAZAM: A NEW BEGINNING 30TH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION! He was one of the greatest heroes of comics’ Golden Age—a square-jawed colossus with a child’s optimistic spirit. Then a great crisis came that destroyed his world and erased his adventures from history. But even during the grim and gritty era that followed, this force of pure goodness continued to shine through the gloom like the bolt of lightning that strikes whenever young Billy Batson says the magic word… SHAZAM! Then, in 1987, the celebrated saga of the orphaned boy with godlike powers began anew. Under an all-new creative team, DC’s Captain Marvel was reimagined as a 15-year-old teenager—one who is fated to grow up much faster than he’d hoped. Arrayed against him are some of the most menacing villains the world has ever seen: Dr. Sivana, a scientific genius as evil as he is intelligent; Captain Nazi, an Aryan übermensch bent on building a new American reich; and Black Adam, a 5,000-year-old tyrant with the same powers as Captain Marvel and the cold-hearted ambition to rule the world! SHAZAM!: THE NEW BEGINNING 30TH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION presents the complete Shazam! stories from legendary comics author Roy Thomas, his co-writer and wife Dann Thomas and acclaimed artists Tom Mandrake, Rick Stasi and Rick Magyar. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this special hardcover edition reveals a unique and never-before-reprinted chapter in the history of one of the most beloved and enduring superheroes of all time! Collects SHAZAM!: THE NEW BEGINNING #1-4 and the Captain Marvel stories from ACTION COMICS WEEKLY #623-626.
A word is spoken, lightning strikes and out emerges young Billy Batson with the powers of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury. The wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury with the sound of one word, SHAZAM! After a series of terrible events with no guidance left behind, Billy Batson was headed down a dark path until a new path magically appeared... a path that would change his life forever.
One of the most popular and critically acclaimed graphic novels of all time, Neil Gaiman's award-winning masterpiece The Sandman, is finally being collected for the first time in deluxe hardcover format. Illustrated by an exemplary selection of the medium's most gifted artists, the series is a rich blend of modern and ancient mythology in which contemporary fiction, historical drama, and legend are seamlessly interwoven. This first book collecting Neil Gaiman's genre-defining series about the Dream King in a new deluxe edition series featuring an oversize hardcover format and bonus content. Collects the first two paperback volumes of the critically acclaimed series Sandman, issues 1-16, and Sandman Midnight Theatre 1.
Correct word identification and processing is a prerequisite for accurate reading, and decades of psycholinguistic and neuroscientific research have shown that the magical moments of visual word recognition are short-lived and markedly fast. The time window in which a given letter string passes from being a mere sequence of printed curves and strokes to acquiring the word status takes around one third of a second. In a few hundred milliseconds, a skilled reader recognizes an isolated word and carries out a number of underlying processes, such as the encoding of letter position and letter identity, and lexico-semantic information retrieval. However, the precise manner (and order) in which these processes occur (or co-occur) is a matter of contention subject to empirical research. There’s no agreement regarding the precise timing of some of the essential processes that guide visual word processing, such as precise letter identification, letter position assignment or sub-word unit processing (bigrams, trigrams, syllables, morphemes), among others. Which is the sequence of processes that lead to lexical access? How do these and other processes interact with each other during the early moments of word processing? Do these processes occur in a serial fashion or do they take place in parallel? Are these processes subject to mutual interaction principles? Is feedback allowed for within the earliest stages of word identification? And ultimately, when does the reader’s brain effectively identify a given word? A vast number of questions remain open, and this Research Topic will cover some of them, giving the readership the opportunity to understand how the scientific community faces the problem of modeling the early stages of word identification according to the latest neuroscientific findings. The present Research Topic aimed to combine recent experimental evidence on early word processing from different techniques together with comprehensive reviews of the current work directions, in order to create a landmark forum in which experts in the field defined the state of the art and future directions. We were willing to receive submissions of empirical as well as theoretical and review articles based on different computational and neuroscience-oriented methodologies. We especially encouraged researchers primarily using electrophysiological or magnetoencephalographic techniques as well as eye-tracking to participate, given that these techniques provide us with the opportunity to uncover the mysteries of lexical access allowing for a fine-grained time-course analysis. The main focus of interest concerned the processes that are held within the initial 250-300 milliseconds after word presentation, covering areas that link basic visuo-attentional systems with linguistic mechanisms.
