Ballpoint Beauties

Frank Cho's first book collecting his major ballpoint pen art while also revealing his step-by-step ballpoint pen techniques.

Pencil and Ink is a new collection of Frank Cho's personal works that focuses primarily on his exceptional pencil and ink drawings. Filled with over 120 pieces from the last two decades, it contains works not published in Frank's previous book, The Art of Frank Cho. This companion title features his most recent ballpoint-pen women, nudes, sketches and studies of the figure. This reveal Frank's passion for the human form, crosshatching and the line as well as his love of storytelling. Also included are recent Sherlock Holmes and monster drawings, along with Jungle Queen commissions done over the years. With a wide range of both completed and unfinished creations, this collection gives you the opportunity to view the artist's craft through its many stages. A few pieces include both the completed and preliminary work to show Frank's thought process when making his visions. Featuring a new fifty-question interview, this book also answers many of the questions frequently asked by Frank's followers and fans. A self-taught artist, he offers advice to those starting out in the industry by sharing his own experience and disclosing information about what inspires his process. Frank also answers intimate questions and shares new insight on how he transitioned to becoming a professional in the field.

A group of little people find themselves without a home in this horror fantasy classic Newly homeless, a group of fairies find themselves trying to adapt to their new life in the forest. As they dodge dangers from both without and within, optimistic Aurora steps forward to organize and help build a new community. Slowly, the world around them becomes more treacherous as petty rivalries and factions form. Beautiful Darkness became a bestseller and an instant classic when it was released in 2014. This paperback edition of the modern horror classic contains added material, preparatory sketches, and unused art. While Kerascoët mix gorgeous watercolors and spritely cartoon characters, Fabien Vehlmann takes the story into bleaker territory as the seasons change and the darkness descends. As with any great horror, there are moments of calm and jarring shocks while a looming dread hangs over the forest.

The triumphs and the trials of the men who invented the modern ballpoint pen as they battled corporate greed, dark eras--and each other. Laszlo Biro's last name is, in much of the world, a synonym for his revolutionary writing tool. But few people know that Biro began his career in interwar Budapest as a journalist frustrated with spotty ink; that he escaped fascism by fleeing to Paris and, finally, to Buenos Aires; that a fellow Hungarian, Andor Goy, also played a vital role in the pen's development--and that, in a tragic twist of shared fate, business pressures and politics ultimately deprived both men of their rights to the ballpoint pen. Taking us from Hitler's Europe in 1938, to Argentina, where Biro settled, and to Communist-era Hungary, where Goy lived out his life, "Ballpoint" is a painstakingly researched, absorbing narrative that reads simultaneously like a work of history and a novel.

The Art of Frank Cho presents Frank's first full career overview in this 20-year retrospective featuring over 400 pieces of art. They include his early student works, personal paintings and a section on his creator-owned properties, followed by an extensive overview of his adventure and superhero work completed for the major and independent comic publishers. Frank provides fresh commentary throughout to reveal insight into his art. An interview covers his recent projects with a revealing look at his working process. Frank picked many of his favorite comic covers and interior pages to share for this book. Preliminary pencil sketches from his archives are revealed for the first time. A range of art shows the finished inks direct from the original art as well as final published colored versions. Step-by-step stages are included for selected works, showing the initial concept to the final form for reproduction. Extensive scanning and photography of the originals has been done over the course of a year to provide the best reproductions possible. Art examples are highlighted from independent comics, along with Frank's creator-owned properties, such as Jungle Queen, Liberty Meadows, Skybourne and Zombie King. Other features include behind-the-scenes selections from his titles in development, such as Autumn, Fight Girls, Guns and Dinos, War Wytch and World of Payne. The best of his recent Baker Street Irregulars Sherlock Holmes journals material is also included.

This stunning book is the first compendium of art made with ballpoint pens. Ballpoint drawing has evolved into a thriving art form since the pen emerged as a writing tool in the 1940s, when the Hungarian journalist and inventor László Bíró fled war-torn Europe and began manufacturing the pens in Argentina. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, as the ballpoint became cheaper and more accessible, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Nam June Paik, Louise Bourgeois, and many others, sketched with the pens. Today, those who make art with ballpoint pen are no longer confined by size or style. They draw on sculpture, wallpaper, canvas, architecture, and 50-foot sheets of paper, depicting a wide range of subjects – from psychologically charged portraits to mutant animals to abstract scribbles. This book features 30 artists from around the world who are currently creating masterpieces with ballpoint, and discusses their methods, the messages in their work, and their personal connections to the pen.

In this loose retelling of Howard's End, Zadie Smith considers the big questions: Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful? Set in New England mainly and London partly, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families—the Belseys and the Kippses—and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kippses, the confusions—both personal and political—of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.

He had both martial arts and medical skills, and went down the mountain to carry out the tasks assigned to him by his master. However, in the city, there were too many grudges and conflicts of influence. The youth that just left the mountain relied on his medical skills and ancient martial arts to protect his master's daughter from harm!

A rich and imaginative discovery of how ink has shaped culture and why it is here to stay. Ink is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted, yet its invention was as significant as the wheel. Ink not only recorded culture, it bought political power, divided peoples, and led to murderous rivalries. Ancient letters on a page were revered as divine light, and precious ink recipes were held secret for centuries. And, when it first hit markets not so long ago, the excitement over the disposable ballpoint pen equalled that for a new smartphone—with similar complaints to the manufacturers. Curious about its impact on culture, literature, and the course of history, Ted Bishop sets out to explore the story of ink. From Budapest to Buenos Aires, he traces the lives of the innovators who created the ballpoint pen—revolutionary technology that still requires exact engineering today. Bishop visits a ranch in Utah to meet a master ink-maker who relishes igniting linseed oil to make traditional printers' ink. In China, he learns that ink can be an exquisite object, the subject of poetry, and a means of strengthening (or straining) family bonds. And in the Middle East, he sees the world's oldest Qur'an, stained with the blood of the caliph who was assassinated while reading it. An inquisitive and personal tour around the world, Ink asks us to look more closely at something we see so often that we don't see it at all.