“Jewish gangster” isn’t a term you hear much about these days, but when the Dodgers played in New York and licorice cost a penny a bag, Brooklyn corners were lousy with semitic young toughs looking for adventure and excitement – none more so than in Brownsville. The graphic novel Brownsville: the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc. by Neil Kleid and Jack Allen shows the intertwined lives of Allie Tannenbaum, Abe Reles and scores of hoods organized by Louis Lepke Buchalter into the deadliest hit operation in Mafia history, “Murder, Inc.”, as they escape mean streets and lonely tenements, making themselves into the most dangerous men in America, only to eventually send their best friends and closest allies up the river. This work is now available in a new edition just released by About Comics.
Previous editions published by NBM drew praise from the book field (Booklist called it “smart, absorbing” while Publishers Weekly said it was a “beautifully moody evocation of a bygone Brooklyn inhabited by Jewish gangsters”) as well as respected creators. Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Carla Speed McNeil says that the book covers organized crime history “with grace, style and power. This book carries history. Read it.” Harvey Pekar, writer of American Splendor, said “This taut and suspenseful drama takes people to an era that no longer exists. I’m not saying Jews are untainted by crime these days – but at least they’re not out knockin’ heads like they used to be!”
Brownsville: the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., is written by Neil Kleid, the Orthodox Jewish graphic novelist acclaimed for his works Ninety Candles, The Big Kahn, and Nice Jewish Boys. Artist Jake Allen has been drawing comics for 30 years, and has brought his Joe Kubert School-trained abilities to his own barbarian comic Rengor (Outland Entertainment).
- 6.5″x9″ black-and-white paperback
- 208 pages
- ISBN 978-1-949996-97-5
, who provides “unsolicited advice on how not to play bridge.”
Cartoonist H.T. Webster may be best known for his decades of chronicling the adventures of the “Timid Soul” Casper Milquetoast, but he repeatedly chronicled in cartoon form the foibles of players of card games, most notably poker and bridge. Here we have fifty of his poker cartoons, matched with some light writings on the game by pulp writer George F. Worts and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Algonquin Round Table member Marc Connelly, a guide to the rules by game expert R. F. Foster, and a foreword by noted Chicago chronicler George Ade.
from Amazon!
from Amazon!