Another Dark Horse offering, The World Below by Paul Chadwick the writer/artist behind Concrete explores a mysterious sinkhole in rural Washington that leads to a secret underground realm. In a series of short adventures, six treasure-hunters risk life and limb to scour the perilous landscape for potentially profitable new forms of technology. Along the way, they’re attacked by all kinds of bizarre creatures from a giant robotic stove to a race of squidlike symbiotes to an alien society that wants to breed humans as pets. Naturally they’re also constantly endangered by their own conflicting personalities and inter-group tensions. Chadwick has likened the book to the TV series Lost, and it’s a fitting comparison.

Dark Horse is a reliably weird publisher, so it’s no surprise to find a couple of odd offerings coming from them. Ten years in the making, Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor collects a number of graphic-novel interpretations of Ellison’s short stories. They’re adapted and drawn by top-notch artists such as Curt Swan, Paul Chadwick, Mark Waid, Gene Ha, Steve Rude and Steve Niles. An eerily lifelike Ellison stares out from the cover drawn by Brian Boland; between stories, the author introduces and contextualizes his works. The stories themselves range from one-joke shorts to more elaborate thought experiments.

A more luscious and painterly surrealism can be found in God Save the Queen, written by Mike Carey and painted by John Bolton. It’s the story of an evil faery queen and a half-human changeling who finds herself pulled into a deadly circle of stylish, heroin-addicted faeries. Every page revels in its own incredibly lush but unsettlingly realistic beauty. And the story pulls no punches it’s a dark, spooky and weirdly sexy treatment of grim themes, including addiction, peer pressure, family loyalty, responsibility, forgiveness and taking loved ones for granted. In other words, this is no children’s fairy tale.

Billed as the Lost Prequel to Jimbo in Purgatory, Jimbo’s Inferno by Gary Panter is as beautiful as it is bizarre. It’s a tall, skinny book whose giant, creamy pages are crammed with Panter’s chaotic line drawings in tidily arranged square panels. A companion volume to the equally engrossing Jimbo in Purgatory, Inferno sees its intrepid hero he of the flattop haircut and musclebound torso plunging into the vile netherworld of Focky Bocky, a vast gloom-rock mallscape filled with all manner of frightened and frightening creatures. The sheer genius of transforming Dante’s vision of hell into a shopping mall allows for plenty of absurdist brilliance, most of which plays out in the hilariously over-the-top incongruity of the dialogue. In one panel, Jimbo turns to his tour guide/parole officer, Valise, and asks, Another river: is it boiling blood? But no, Valise assures him: It’s REALLY hot Dr Pepper. Think the archaicism of Dante spliced with the aggression of, say, Pulp Fiction. But in a really pretty, gorgeously put-together volume with a cool cover.

The latest book by Tony Millionaire is strange. The title character of Billy Hazelnuts is a Frankensteinian boy assembled by rats out of garbage, houseflies and mint. He and the young lady of the house, brainy Becky, set out to rescue the moon (which has disappeared over the horizon). They’re pursued by one of Becky’s suitors, a mad scientist in a galleon captained by mutinous robotic bird skeletons and seeing-eye skunks. Yep. Billy’s an odd but well-spoken little beast; unsuccessfully interviewing falling stars about the moon’s location, he protests, These blasted celestials can’t even get a story out before they explode in a flash of fire! It all takes place in Millionaire’s creepy sock-monkey universe, with its dizzying lines and button eyes and jam-packed black-and-white panels. His ever-shifting landscapes seem free of gravity, and outer space is always visible just beyond rooftops.

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi also uses a visual medium to comment on visual arts, and it does so in a similarly bizarre fashion. The young painter Georges Braque seeks the patronage of the famous Leo and Gertrude Stein; quickly invited to join their salon, he learns that the Steins are terrified. A mysterious blue demon-lady has been prowling the streets of Paris at night, murdering artists and gallery owners. Then comes the weird part: To hunt down this killer, the salon’s members (including Picasso, Apollinaire and others) drink blue absinthe, which allows them to enter any painting they choose. They’ve deduced that the killer is Paul Gauguin’s mistress, and she’s hiding out in his paintings. The book is vivid and dynamic, all strong lines, intense blues and greens and punchy dialogue. His take on Picasso as a volatile, childlike savant is priceless. Best of all are the Frenchified sound effects: instead of bang! or kapow! you have clonque! and kique!

In the far-future world of Glacial Period, by Nicolas de Crecy, the European continent has iced over and everyone’s moved south. A band of intrepid explorers has set out to find architectural and anthropological clues about the frozen continent’s vanished culture. Guided by genetically enhanced talking dogs that look an awful lot like pigs, the explorers stumble onto the ruins of the Louvre. Using famous paintings as evidence, they try to piece together a narrative describing the people of Europe. The works of art themselves eventually speak up, correcting and augmenting human interpretation of their significance. Author/artist de Crecy worked in collaboration with the Louvre to create this beautifully painted book an appendix lists each of the works re-created within the comic’s panels. Doubling as an analysis of the way images store and transmit knowledge, it’s about as high art as you can get in a graphic novel.

Tired of being embarrassed every time you take your less-savvy friends or clueless parents out to see the latest action-hero blockbuster adapted from a comic book? Hide your face no more now you can school those newbies in the nicest way possible. The gorgeous new Comic Book Encyclopedia has the lowdown on just about every comic book ever created, as well as the folks who created them. From Archie to X-Men, from R. Crumb to Art Spiegelman, you’ll find long-lost histories and little-known details about all the important heroes, villains, artists and writers in the comics world. Open the book to any page, and KAPOW!, you’ll find glossy, gorgeously reproduced artwork and a spirited mini-essay on some aspect of comics. The book covers everything from early progenitors like Ned Pines’ Thrilling Comics to more recent milestones like DC’s infamous Superman #75, containing the much-publicized and of course temporary death of the Man of Steel. There are sections on underground comics (with nods to Mad’s Harvey Kurtzman and Basil Wolverton and Zap’s Robert Crumb) and graphic novels (including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal Watchmen and Frank Miller’s unparalleled Batman epic The Dark Knight Returns) that whet the reader’s appetite and provide a roadmap for further exploration. Goulart’s affection for the medium is obvious. A lifelong aficionado and acknowledged expert, he writes with exactly the right combination of authority and irreverence, never looking down at his subject but making it clear that sometimes, certain plot developments cross the perilously thin line between innovative and just plain silly. The book makes an excellent reference work, but most of all, it will make you want more. You’ll be tempted to rush to your local comics shop and dig through the back-issue boxes for hours, searching happily for the sources of the magic preserved in its pages. Becky Ohlsen taught the rest of us at BookPage everything we need to know about comics.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams receives hundreds of e-mails every day from disgruntled workers want-ing to share their office horror stories. These tales of corporate cluelessness are sprinkled throughout Adams’ hilarious new book, Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel, which exposes the selfish, greedy, “weasel” ways of office workers and managers in all their undisguised glory. But don’t worry, Adams assured us in a recent interview, “Everyone is a weasel except you and me.” Whew.

Adams had plenty of opportunities to observe weasel tendencies during his own stint in corporate America. After earning an M.B.

A. from the University of California at Berkley in 1986, he worked at a San Francisco bank and later “in a number of jobs that defy description” at Pacific Bell. Using his doodles of co-workers as a starting point, he launched the Dilbert comic strip in 1989 and finally quit his day job in 1995 to be a full-time cartoonist. We asked Adams to tell BookPage readers about the ways of the weasel and the special joys of the holidays in Dilbert’s world: Explain the Weasel Zone. Where did the idea come from? It was this growing realization that everybody in authority seemed to be a weasel. So everybody who had an opportunity to steal money was in fact stealing it or rigging something or cheating in some way. Every few years my personal respect for humanity goes to a new low, and I know it’s time to write another Dilbert book.

Do you consider yourself to be a weasel? No one considers themselves to be a weasel. I don’t think there would be as much weaselness if people didn’t think that they had some God-given right to get a little extra.

Does Dilbert decorate his cube for Christmas? Decorate might be overstating it. He might put on a holiday screen saver, but even that would be banned by the company, so it wouldn’t last long.

What’s the best thing to wear to the office Christmas party? I can’t imagine Dilbert’s office having a Christmas party. The concept of a Christmas party is, first of all, you can’t have any alcohol in the office. And second, you’re forced to be with the people you would least like to be with, eating food that is not your first choice of food. I would think that the only way you could make that better would be wearing uncomfortable underwear. Just to bring up the average.

What’s the ideal present for your boss? The ideal present for the boss would be something you pilfered from the office itself. Maybe matching salt and pepper shakers from the company cafeteria or a stapler from Wally’s desk. That sort of thing.

What should you tell your boss if he wants you to work late on Christmas Eve? Tell him that you’ll be at the office for many hours after he leaves, as far as he knows.

Does Dilbert take time off during the holidays? Dilbert tries to. He lives in dread that the last five minutes of work before his vacation starts, his boss will come into his office with a new impossible assignment. He tries to take vacations, but he’s a little like me in the sense that he goes to the Grand Canyon and he looks at it and says, “That’s a big hole. That looks nice. Now what do we do?” So he’s not easily impressed.

In your days as a corporate drone, what kind of boss were you? I probably was a bad boss, even though I thought I was a good boss. My theory is that everyone thinks they’re a good boss, but most people aren’t, so there must be some sort of weird blindness built into the job that you think you’re doing a better job than you are. My guess is that I was a bad boss.

Why? I am insufficiently evil. All leadership is a form of evil because the point of leading is to get people to do things they don’t want to do. You want people to work a little extra for the same amount of pay, that sort of thing. I couldn’t get past the fact that if I didn’t understand why they would want to do it, I couldn’t figure out how I could make them do it. I ended up being a fairly lenient boss just so they would like me at least I would get something out of the deal.