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Big bucks, no whammies. This is how we roll. Roll Big or Go Home is at #10 this week.

1. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf (Abrams ComicArts) – Don’t miss Derf here on Thursday (Aug 9th) at 7pm, where he’ll take about this graphic novel he did about his experiences knowing Jeffrey Dahmer in high school!

2. The Baffler #20 $10.00 –  In this summer issue, decomposing cities that tremble with vibrancy, art museums where cash-and-carry aesthetics is the rule, journalists on the endless education of the president, and imperial foundations and their pet broadcasters on public radio. Where else can you learn why Ira Glass’s This American Life is so damn annoying, or take in the lame, postideological pantomiming of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or admire the performance art of Harvard fraud Adam Wheeler and laugh at the Ivy mothership’s efforts to smite the pretender down?

3. Sweetmeats #1 by Edie Fake $2.00 – This is the story I did for Max Morris’ awesome anthology Vacuum Horror last winter, reprinted as a little mini so I have something to offer when folks wanna trade zines. -EF

4. Lucky Peach #4 Sum 12 The American Food Issue – The McSweeney’s food rag rampages on with the American Food Issue. Less cranky then issue 3, this round has a sprawling Tex-Mex choose your own adventure, plenty of odes to diners and, unsurprisingly, the movie Diner, Cambodian American doughnut culture, Harold McGee being typically delightful and loads of recipes looking that scrummy kinda yummy you know tastes fine. -EF

5. Real Life: A Magical Guide to Getting Off the Internet by Maranda Elizabeth and Dave Cave $3.00

6. Womanimalistic #1 by Caroline Paquita $5.00 – “Amazing Amazing Amazing. Recipes for Fire Cider and Krotchbucha. Ridiculously funny comics about Vajazzling, punker health fiascos (such as the ol’ “Hash Brown Cure”) and urban hiving. Gorgeously patterned comics about love and loss and coming down with a case of The Going Crazies. I’ve been reading the Carson McCullers comic that opens this book over and over and over again – it keeps bringing me close to tears. Highest honors. Lovingly risographed in blue.” -EF

7. Night Riders by Matt Furie (McSweeney’s) $15.95 – Where’s Matt Furie been lately? Apparently he’s been squirreled up drawing a truly stunning and mind-bending wordless children’s book for McSweeney’s, and I couldn’t be more excited about the fruits of his labors. Night Riders is truly awesome – cool animal-monsters staying up all night on a journey through a glowing nocturnal world, rendered in some ultralush colored pencil jewel hues. I love the chillpill laffs of Boy’s Club aplenty – however this is a different trip altogether: magic and riches with perfect delivery. A great kid’s book, and a great graphic novel to boot. -EF

8. Elephant Ear #1 by Jeremy Tinder $8.00 – Jeremy Tinder launched this beast at CAKE a few months ago: deluxe stories of slipping, surreal illness and alone time. Paced a little like a Murakami story, I’d say- the richness of a character staring into space, the practicality of the mothman stealing batteries, the resignation to finding a tooth in your eyesocket. -EF

9. Dig Deep #4 by Heather $1.00 – Local-based perzine by a rad librarian.

10. Roll Big or Go Home by Rio Safari $2.00 – Cute lil love letter to fantasy, D&D and punk nerdery. Rad title, too. -EF

This most recent issue of Remedy (#9, featuring the them of escape) is at #10 this week.

1. Office Girl by Joe Meno (Akashic) $15.95 – Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1999?

2. Lucky Peach #4 Sum 12 The American Food Issue – The McSweeney’s food rag rampages on with the American Food Issue. Less cranky then issue 3, this round has a sprawling Tex-Mex choose your own adventure, plenty of odes to diners and, unsurprisingly, the movie Diner, Cambodian American doughnut culture, Harold McGee being typically delightful and loads of recipes looking that scrummy kinda yummy you know tastes fine. -EF

3. The Baffler #20 $10.00 –  In this summer issue, decomposing cities that tremble with vibrancy, art museums where cash-and-carry aesthetics is the rule, journalists on the endless education of the president, and imperial foundations and their pet broadcasters on public radio. Where else can you learn why Ira Glass’s This American Life is so damn annoying, or take in the lame, postideological pantomiming of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or admire the performance art of Harvard fraud Adam Wheeler and laugh at the Ivy mothership’s efforts to smite the pretender down?

4. The Believer #91 $12.00

5. Lose #3 by Michael DeForge (Koyama Press) $5.00 – Lose has the same doomsday “joy” of early Dan Clowes or Chris Ware: pathetic characters trapped in a endless plummet of unaware-over-self-awareness that cuts straight to the heart of a modern crisis of meaning. Perhaps an interesting distinction here is that while D.C. and C.W. were dishing out their snarkiest and perhaps crassest work as absurd technology and media alienation was revving up, DeForge’s fined-tuned portraits of apocalyptic failure are being produced in sync with a deep cultural wallow in the bitter joke of “first world problems”. Whatever the case, his self-absorbed characters attempting (and failing) to toddle through their collapsed and bombed out trash cities unscathed is consistently scary and resonating. With each issue, his rotwater post-apocalypse hauntscape looks more and more like the 4 month pasta salad leftovers back of my fridge, but somehow it keeps you hungry for more. -EF

6. Boys Club #1 by Matt Furie (Buenaventura Press) $6.00 – A collection of Matt Furie’s mini-comics featuring teenage monsters Andy, Brett, Landwolf and Pepe: drinkin;, stinkin; and never thinkin’.

7. Acme Novelty Library by Chris Ware (Pantheon) $27.50

8. Even the Giants by Jesse Jacobs (Adhouse) $9.95 – Jesse Jacobs bursts onto the comic scene with his first published work EVEN THE GIANTS. The work beautifully captures the isolation of the Great White North while also giving the artist a sequential canvas to explore and experiment. This book will be printed in three Pantone spot colors. Jesse’s work has been nominated for the Doug Wright award and has won the Gene Day award.

9. Nurse Nurse by Kate Skelly (Sparkplug) $15.00 – Description from the back of the book: “It is a comic book about the future. It is a prediction about television. It is a cautionary tale about butterflies. It is science fiction for all kinds of people. It collects all seven issues of the mini-comic series and the never-before-seen eighth issue. Please have an adventure….Love is real. NURSE NURSE this.”

10. Remedy Quarterly #9 Escape $9.50 – From the Remedy website describing this issue of this popular food zine: Issue 9 will leave you ready to make you’re own great escape—hopefully to your kitchen. Inside we’ve got a Q&A with Bonnie Slotnick of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks in New York City (one of my personal favorite escapes), we’ll take you the countryside of Italy where you’ll learn to enjoy the sound of silence in Italy, and get adventurous at a Louisiana crab boil complete with a trip to the bayou. Plus recipes, tips & tidbits, and more!

1. The Baffler #20 $10.00 – In this summer issue, decomposing cities that tremble with vibrancy, art museums where cash-and-carry aesthetics is the rule, journalists on the endless education of the president, and imperial foundations and their pet broadcasters on public radio. Where else can you learn why Ira Glass’s This American Life is so damn annoying, or take in the lame, postideological pantomiming of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or admire the performance art of Harvard fraud Adam Wheeler and laugh at the Ivy mothership’s efforts to smite the pretender down? This 172-page issue also offers poems, stories, graphic art, and, just for kicks, the first-ever look at Christopher Lasch’s 1972 novel. Contributors include Thomas Frank, Jed Perl, Steve Almond, Chris Lehmann, Jim Newell, Eugenia Williamson, Heather Havrilesky, Kim Phillips-Fein, Emma Garman, Chris Bray, Matt Hinton, Will Boisvert, Seth Colter Walls, Tod Mesirow, David D’Arcy, and The Homeless Economist, who has a timely suggestion: “Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers.

2. Office Girl by Joe Meno (Akashic) $15.95 – Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1999?…And don’t  miss Joe Meno at the Empty Bottle this coming Thursday (July 26th) at 9pm.

3. Razorcake #69 $4.00

4. Bust Aug Sep 12 $5.99

5. Fallen Words: Eight Moral Comedies by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (D&Q) $19.95 – “In Fallen Words, Yoshihiro Tatsumi takes up the oral tradition of rakugo and breathes new life into it by shifting the format from spoken word to manga. Each of the eight stories in the collection is lifted from the Edo-era Japanese storytelling form. As Tatsumi notes in the afterword,the world of rakugo, filled with mystery, emotion, revenge, hope, and of course, love, overlaps perfectly with the world of gekiga that he has spent the better part of his life developing. These slice-of-life stories resonate with modern readers thanks to their comedic elements and familiarity with human idiosyncrasies. In one, a father finds his son too bookish and arranges for two workers to take the young man to a brothel on the pretext of visiting a new shrine. In another particularly beloved rakugo tale, a married man falls in love with a prostitute. When his wife finds out, she is enraged and sets a curse on the other woman. The prostitute responds by cursing the wife, and the two escalate in a spiral of voodoo doll cursing. Soon both are dead, but even death can’t extinguish their jealousy. Tatsumi’s love of wordplay shines through in the telling of these whimsical stories, and yet he still offers timeless insight into human nature.”

6. R. Crumb’s Blues Jazz and Country by R. Crumb $21.95 – Finally back in print! Comes with CD.

7. Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life $5.00

8. Inferno: A Poets Novel by Eileen Myles (OR) $16.00 – “Inferno” is one of the best books I have ever read. Myles’ writing here wraps the brute force of a memoir within words so gorgeously warm, honed and unstoppable you have no choice but to keep reading. Her prose barrels forward, simultaneously demolishing and defining the identities her life is tethered to. It’s a book that’s simultaneously sexy, cranky, funny, dishy, insightful and human. As suspicious as I can be of poetry, this book is undeniably poetic – and an honest-to-goodness tour de force. Beyond recommended, friends- I think this one should be required. -EF

9. Hologram For the King by Dave Eggers (McSweeneys) $25.00 – In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter’s college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment.

10. Juxtapoz #139 Aug 12 $5.99