Bolstered by a stellar line-up of the comics industry 's most feted talents, this set of 14 interviews offers both a candid and entertaining insight into the process and experience of writing a comic book. Interviewer Salisbury has done well to assemble a set of interviewees that represent some of the industry's greatest successes (Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman), convention-challenging leaders (Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis) and pioneers of superhero comics (Dan Jurgens, Peter David, Chuck Dixon). Fans will immediately question the absence of the industry's biggest name: Alan Moore. However, Salisbury is quick to note that his absence was down to "sheer volume of work" (Hooray!). Besides, nearly every interviewee cites Moore's gargantuan influence, so he is hardly missing. Gaiman comes across as incredibly well read, while Morrison's approach is either spectacularly ambitious or just plain bonkers. Thanks to Salisbury's probing interview technique, we get an excellent behind the scenes look at the trials and tribulations of a craft that is both challenging and rewarding, in an industry that is not as open to creativity as you might think. As you would expect, there is no clear path to success, beyond the obvious aptitude. However, the most common thread is a rapacious love of the medium and sheer bloody-minded tenacity (often masquerading as bare-faced arrogance in Frank Miller's case!). Aspiring British writers will quickly notice that legendary Brit comic 2000 ADwas the breeding ground for much of the current top talent and is the first stop for US talent scouts. Insightful for professionals, mouth-watering for fans and wonderfully inspirational for wannabe scribes, roll on Volume Two! —Danny Graydon

Volume 1 of two-volume set. Total of 1566 extracts reveal full range of Leonardo’s versatile genius: his writings on painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, mining, inventions, music. Dual Italian-English texts, with 186 plates on mss. pages, over 500 additional drawings faithfully reproduced.

The classic story by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli is released in an all-new deluxe hardcover edition! A young Bruce Wayne spent his adolescence and early adulthood traveling the world so he could hone his body and mind into the perfect fighting and investigative machine. But now as he returns to Gotham City, he must find a way to focus his passion and bring justice to his city. Retracing Batmans first attempts to fight injustice as a costumed vigilante, we watch as he chooses the guise of a giant bat, creates an early bond with a young Lieutenant James Gordon, inadvertently plays a role in the birth of Catwoman, and helps to bring down a corrupt political system that infests Gotham. This edition includes new introductions by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, development art with commentary by Mazzucchelli, script pages, thumbnails, promotional art, samples and a look at Richmond Lewiss groundbreaking color.

A work more disturbing than fiction from "the father of graphic novels" (New York Times).

 Will Eisner, the great American master of comics, has undertaken what he regards as his most powerful work yet. The Plot examines the outrageous fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be the actual blueprint by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Hatched as an anti-Semitic plot by the tsar's secret police to deflect widespread criticism of the government, the Protocols, first published in 1905, succeeded beyond the propagandistic ambitions of its originators; the lie became an internationally accepted truth. Presenting a pageant of historical figures including Tsar Nicholas II, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler, Eisner exposes the twisted history of the Protocols from nineteenth-century Russia to modern-day Klan members to Islamic fundamentalists. The Plot unravels one of the most devastating hoaxes of the twentieth century.

Before his disgrace and removal to solo deniable duties, combat magician Sergeant Major William Gravel was part of SAS team Alpha One Four. He hasn't seen his teammates since his fall. He knows only that they're still in the job, doing the things he used to do. Which doesn't remotely explain why, while he's moonlighting in New York, the Alpha One Four team should be seen blowing away a newly elected mayor - a military man himself - and then vanishing into thin air... This series digs deep into William Gravel's magic past and begs an answer to one of the greatest combat magician secrets, what is the Body Orchard?

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has unnerved readers since its original publication in 1959. A tale of subtle, psychological terror, it has earned its place as one of the significant haunted house stories of the ages.

 Eleanor Vance has always been a loner—shy, vulnerable, and bitterly resentful of the 11 years she lost while nursing her dying mother. "She had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words." Eleanor has always sensed that one day something big would happen, and one day it does. She receives an unusual invitation from Dr. John Montague, a man fascinated by "supernatural manifestations." He organizes a ghost watch, inviting people who have been touched by otherworldly events. A paranormal incident from Eleanor's childhood qualifies her to be a part of Montague's bizarre study—along with headstrong Theodora, his assistant, and Luke, a well-to-do aristocrat. They meet at Hill House—a notorious estate in New England.

 Hill House is a foreboding structure of towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and rooms within rooms—a place "without kindness, never meant to be lived in...."

 Although Eleanor's initial reaction is to flee, the house has a mesmerizing effect, and she begins to feel a strange kind of bliss that entices her to stay. Eleanor is a magnet for the supernatural—she hears deathly wails, feels terrible chills, and sees ghostly apparitions. Once again she feels isolated and alone—neither Theo nor Luke attract so much eerie company. But the physical horror of Hill House is always subtle; more disturbing is the emotional torment Eleanor endures. Intense, literary, and harrowing, The Haunting of Hill House belongs in the same dark league as Henry James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. —Naomi Gesinger

The 14th volume of the critically acclaimed Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series is a 556-page behemoth combining 44 of the best stories and eight of the best poems from 2000. Editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling provide long, thorough, and insightful summaries of their fields, horror and fantasy, respectively. If that isn't enough, the anthology includes Edward Bryant's detailed and evenhanded "Fantasy and Horror in the Media: 2000," Seth Johnson's concise and knowledgeable "Comics: 2000," and James Frenkel's "Obituaries: 2000."

 The stories and poems in this volume are as strong as the title claims; a few are very good, and most are excellent. The contributors include literary greats like John Crowley, Harlan Ellison, and Louise Erdrich; genre giants like Ramsey Campbell, Charles de Lint, and Tanith Lee; acclaimed young-adult authors like Francesca Lia Block and Jane Yolen; excellent foreign authors better known in their native countries, like Australia's Terry Dowling and Bolivia's Claudia Adria'zola; and terrific new talents like Susanna Clarke, Andy Duncan, and Kelly Link.

 With a volume this massive, it is difficult to describe all the stories, or even representative examples of the many different subgenres. Here are summaries of two selections from each editor:

 In Louise Erdrich's tragicomic tall tale "Le Mooz," a prideful Ojibwa woman wrecks her marriage after a moose hunt goes awry. In Kathe Koja's chilling and startling "At Eventide," a serial killer tracks down the woman artist who escaped him and sent him to prison. "The Man on the Ceiling," a metafiction by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, is a brilliant, moving, autobiographical exploration of the physical, emotional, and creative lives of two writers. In Susanna Clarke's witty, beautifully written fantasy of manners, "Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower," a poor, handsome young priest learns his new parish overlaps Faerie, discovers a shocking ancestral secret, and makes covert marriage proposals to five beautiful sisters.

 The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror is a great and generous collection, perfect for most, but not all, horror and/or fantasy fans. It includes both supernatural and nonsupernatural horror, but it doesn't have anything for the "splatterpunk" fan. Also, while the horror selections are drawn from both genre and nongenre publications, most of the fantasy selections are taken from nongenre magazines, anthologies, and other sources. If you want fantasy drawn largely or exclusively from genre sources, and particularly if you want only heroic/adventure/sword-and-sorcery fantasy, then you should skip the entire Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series. Those subgenres make no appearance in this volume, and have never had much of a presence in this series; it's as if only magic realism, fairy tales, and mythic/folkloric fantasy of a rather sensitive, measured, and grown-up sort need apply (even when it's young adult fiction). Also, extreme, graphic horror may be out of fashion, but its raw, adolescent energy will doubtless reappear in future volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror whenever great graphic-horror stories are published. —Cynthia Ward

Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."

 Pandora gets her sexy vampire initiation at the fangs of handsome Marius (who later inducted Rice's famed vampire Lestat). Pandora tells how a nice Roman girl became a vampire in modern Paris, but mostly the book celebrates the sights and sounds (and philosophical bloodlettings) of the classical world. Pandora is more like Robert Graves's sublime I, Claudius than Rice's The Complete Vampire Chronicles.

 Yet Pandora is a logical extension of Rice's work, and Pandora is a combination of her past vampire heroes and the nakedly, horrifyingly autobiographical heroine of Rice's 1997 novel Violin. Now, Violin is remarkably messy, but it captures the volcanic passion that erupts in her best work—Rice calls it "a study in pain."Pandora is really a dramatized debate between passion and reason, which Pandora calls "male reason." She teases her vampire mentor: "Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he [would] tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational, irrational, irrational!" (To hear how close Pandora's voice is to her passionate creator, listen to the 1997 audiocassette Interview with Anne Rice.)

 Rice's research gives fresh blood to her storytelling. Even her chronic third-act problem scarcely slows down this brisk romp of a novel. Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.