2013 Eisner Award Nominee: Best Graphic Album — Reprint; Best Short Story ("Rainbow Moment")

Named a 2013 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize Honor Book: "Each story is exquisitely crafted, demonstrating both a compelling literary style and a rich, engaging design sense that can seem deceptively naïve or childlike on first glance but in context reveals striking sophistication and complexity."

2013 Stumptown Comic Arts Award Nominee: Best Colorist; Best Publication Design

Named to the 2012 Shortlist for Slate's Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Graphic Novel of the Year

Ranked #7 on The AV Club's Best Graphic Novels and Art Comics of 2012 - Top 10 Fiction

One of Drawn.ca's "Favourite Comics, Art Books and More of 2012"

One of NPR Monkey See's "2012 In Review: 4 Great Graphic Novels We Haven't Told You About Yet"

Ranked #2 (tie) on Boing Boing's "Best Damn Comics of the Year" survey

Named one of the best reprint/reissue comics of 2012 by Robot 6's Chris Mautner

The creator of 2008’s acclaimed graphic novel The Lagoon — named to many annual critics’ lists including Publishers Weekly and USA Today’s Pop Candy — is back with a stunningly designed and packaged collection of some of the most poetic and confident short fiction being produced in comics today. These stories, created over a period of five years, touch on ideas of flip sides, choices, and extreme ambivalence.

Carré’s elegant short stories read like the gothic, family narratives of Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers, but told visually. Poetic rhythms — a coin flip, a circling ferris wheel — are punctuated by elements of melancholy fantasy pushed forward by character-driven, naturalistic dialogue. The stories in Heads or Tails display a virtuosic breadth of visual styles and color palettes, each in perfect service of the story, and range from experimental one-pagers to short masterpieces like "The Thing About Madeline" (featured in The Best American Comics 2008), to graphic novellas like "The Carnival" (featured in David Sedaris’ and Dave Eggers’ 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading, originally published in MOME), to new work created for this book.

23-page excerpt (download 12.4 MB PDF):

Video & Photo Slideshow Preview (view in new window):

"Most of these stories are concerned with alternatives — overlapping realities, different explanations of a single phenomenon, evolving contradictions... As a graphic artist, Carré carries forward the design tradition that stems from the gossamer surrealism of Cocteau; as a verbal artist, she may be the most successful prose poet going... Her Wanda Gag-meets-Gene Deitch drawing style and new-weirdness literary bent make her work acutely interesting to both read and scrutinize." – Ray Olson, Booklist (Starred Review)

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