Although Top Shelf has featured webcomics on its website in the past, including Matt Kindt's critically-acclaimed Superspy, the relaunch promises a leap forward in both artistic scope and ambition. “One thing that hurt the momentum of our last webcomic program was a slow, irregular update schedule, so the goal of the new jam is to post early and often,” Walton said. This time around, the site will update every weekday, with content ranging from a full chapter or short story to the occasional one-page gag.

The collection of Cotter's serial comic book is a meditation on the pains and anxieties of childhood and the way the fantasy lives of kids bleed over into their day-to-day existence, and it's played anything but straight: every image and incident is translated into a set of resonant visual metaphors. Cotter's protagonists are a pair of anthropomorphic cats (as opposed to the real cats who show up partway through the story)—Midwestern kids, bored and frustrated with the humiliations of school, imagining their lives in the language of superheroes, dinosaurs and giant robots, furious about the religious guilt that's been indelibly pounded into them. The early sections owe a major debt to Chris Ware, with their mocking reconstructions of cheery comic-book ads and minutely observed pathetic loathing, but by the end, the book becomes a genuinely insightful observation of the way commercial fantasies can shape young, lonely people's personalities. The squat, putty-like characters and settings that Cotter constructs with wobbly but meticulous cross-hatched textures give his story a lovely sense of gnarled intimacy, and it doesn't take long to start parsing his peculiar visual grammar: the sequences in which one character's migraines are shown as a locust that slowly descends into her head are devastating. (May)

DC's Minx imprint has made a splash recently by bringing prose authors in to write graphic novels aimed at teen girls. Now author Rebecca Donner is making her graphic novel debut for the imprint. Donner is best known for her novel Sunset Terrace, the colorful story of a broken family living in Southern California. She has also taught writing at Wesleyan, Columbia, Barnard, and the New School. In contrast, Burnout moves from the vibrant and energized backdrop of California to a small town where a love story is set against hard, real life issues.

• Life Sucks (First Second)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer Vol.2: No Future for You (Dark Horse)
• Welcome to Tranquility Vol. 2 (DC/ Wildstorm)
• Blood Plus Vol. 2 (Dark Horse)
• This is as Bad as It Gets (Andrews McMeel Publishing)
• Amazing Spider Girl Vol. 3: Mind Games (Marvel)
• 2 Guns (Boom! Entertainment)
• Milk Teeth (Drawn & Quarterly)
• Potential (Touchstone)
• Aria Vol. 2 (Tokyopop)
• Switch Vol. 2 (Viz Media)
• Shoulder a Coffin Kuro Vol. 1 (Yen Press)
• Kingdom of the Winds Vol. 1 (NetComics)
• Toto: The Wonderful Adventure Vol. 1 (Del Ray Manga)
• Kamisama Kazoku Vol. 1 (Go! Comics)

• Manga by the Navy
  
• PWCW Needs Interns!
  
• New Katy Keene GN
  
• PW The Beat: Gene Colan Ill; Speed Racer
  
• The News in Comics
  
• Lynda Barry in NYT
  
• Mother's Day Comic in NYT