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When the Wind Blows, by British comics creator and children’s author Raymond Briggs, was published as a hardcover simultaneously by Hamish Hamilton in Great Britain and by Shocken Books in the United States in 1982. It was then published by Penguin Books as a paperback in 1983. The book was reprinted each following year during the 1980’s. When the Wind Blows has also enjoyed publication in several languages, including Chinese, Finnish, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Thai. The book’s title was taken from the nursery rhyme and lullaby “Rock-a-Bye Baby.”

The publication history of Fritz the Cat is a complex one. The first published story appeared in Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine in January, 1965. Further strips appeared in Help! and Cavalier magazine between 1965 and 1968, and individual panels and sketches can be found in Robert Crumb’s Sketchbook 1966-1967, which was published in Germany by Zweitausendeins in 1981. Further major stories were then published in Head Comix in 1968 and R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat: Three Big Stories in 1969.

The title of the book He Done Her Wrong is taken from a line in the ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” which had been popular in various versions since the beginning of the 1900’s. In the song, which was loosely based on an actual murder case, Frankie kills her man, Johnny, because he “done her wrong.” The plot of Gross’s story, however, has little or nothing to do with the song, and Gross’s subtitle (The Great American Novel—And Not a Word in It) indicates his intention to produce a visual novel with no text. It was first published in 1930, and, as such, it is often regarded as the second American graphic novel. The more serious God’s Man: A Novel in Woodcuts (1929) by Lynd Ward is widely considered to be the first; indeed, He Done Her Wrong can be viewed as a reaction to the deeply serious tone of Ward’s novel.

Originally published in 1950 as the first of a proposed series of what St. John Publications called “picture novels,” It Rhymes with Lust, written by Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller (as Drake Waller), was part of a short-lived experiment in creating a mature comic book series for adults, using a small paperback format. As such, it is seen by some as the first graphic novel, particularly as it combined text and images in a way that precursors of the form had not. The book remained out of print for many years, making it a valuable rarity that commanded a high price in The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. As interest in the graphic novel and its development grew, the book was reprinted by Dark Horse Comics in 2007, in a close facsimile edition with short biographies of Drake, Waller, and illustrator Matt Baker and an afterword by Drake.