BrickJournal, Compendium #4: Issues 8-9

Neil Strauss, Bernard Chang

How to Make Money Like a Porn Star

Claudia Corvette. From her tousled bedroom hair to her name-all the porn stars in this world take their names from supermodels and sports cars-she is adult entertainment's prototypical femme fatale. Her life is the collision of countless troubled-childhood cliches and grown-up wet dreams, projected onto her as surely as her videos project their blue light onto lonely men around the world. From its first panel, How to Make Money Like a Porn Star draws the reader into the dark world of girls like Claudia, the men who fantasize about them, and the monsters who control them. In the hands of Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss and illustrator Bernard Chang, this adult graphic novel weaves together black humor and blacker reality. Like all great American stories, it features humble beginnings, life-changing tragedy, stripping, abuse, implants, fame, addiction, bigger implants, abduction, gunplay, downfall, and even bigger implants. Not to mention a thousand shades of latex and L'Oreal. Part parody, part morality tale, here is the truth about the porn life, its outsized visual splendor captured in a comic parade of doe-eyed centerfolds, its essence distilled in a story that will haunt ...

Mark Crilley

Autumn

Is their secret safe? It's autumn, and Miki Yoshida's life is finally settling into a routine. She and Hiro are spending all their time together, and Miki couldn't be happier. There's just one problem. Hiro's breaking all the rules to be with Miki, and the more time they spend together--and the more they fall for each other--the more there is at stake. With jealous Reika on the prowl, Miki knows they can't hide forever.

Marjane Satrapi

Embroideries

From the best-selling author of Persepolis comes a gloriously entertaining and enlightening look into the sex lives of Iranian women. "Bold, bewitchingly humorous and politically astute." --ElleEmbroideries gathers together Marjane's tough-talking grandmother, stoic mother, glamorous and eccentric aunt and their friends and neighbors for an afternoon of tea drinking and talking. Naturally, the subject turns to love, sex and the vagaries of men. As the afternoon progresses, these vibrant women share their secrets, their regrets and their often outrageous stories about, among other things, how to fake one's virginity, how to escape an arranged marriage, how to enjoy the miracles of plastic surgery and how to delight in being a mistress. By turns revealing and hilarious, these are stories about the lengths to which some women will go to find a man, keep a man or, most important, keep up appearances. Full of surprises, this introduction to the private lives of some fascinating women, whose life stories and lovers will strike us as at once deeply familiar and profoundly different from our own, is sure to bring smiles of recognition to the faces of women everywhere--and to teach us all a ...