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PG Previews:
September 2012
What a month this is turning out to be! It doesn’t get a lot better than this, with new works from major imaestros Burns, Moore, Morrison, Tardi and Ware and a mammoth chunk of Crumb & Kominsky’s collaborations, exciting innovators like Nina Bunjevac, Glyn Dillon, Sammy Harkham, David Nytra and Tobias Tak, and classy reprints of George Herriman, Wally Wood and Simon & Kirby all coming up, plus other treats historical and contemporary, English-language and translated, to look forward to. Here are my PG Tips for some of the very finest in graphic narratives coming your away in September, or thereabouts. Happy reading!
Abelard
by Régis Hautière & Renaud Dillies
NBM
$19.99
The publisher says:
The charm of Renaud Dillies strikes again: after the mouse of Bubbles and Gondola, here is another dreamer, little chick Abelard. To lure pretty Epily, Abelard sees only one solution: to catch the moon for her! So off he goes to America, the country which invented flying machines. Armed with his banjo and his proverb-sharing hat, he launches out on the country roads, meets Gypsies, then Gaston, a grumpy bear with whom he will share a good bit of his way… As opposed to dreamer Abelard, Gaston has his feet firmly planted on the ground. With this funny animal road-movie where the absurd becomes poetry, Régis Hautière and Renaud Dillies offer us another small jewel. Here’s a link to see some sample pages.
Blacklung
by Chris Wright
Fantagraphics
$24.99
The publisher says:
Chris Wright’s Blacklung is a story that lives up to the term graphic novel: densely textured, highly stylised and wholly original. In a night of piratical treachery when an arrogant teacher is accidently shanghaied aboard the frigate Hand, his fate becomes inextricably fettered to that of a sardonic gangster. Dependent on one another for survival in their strange and dangerous new home, the two form an unlikely alliance as they alternately elude or confront the thieves and cutthroats that bad luck has made their companions and captors.
Building Stories
by Chris Ware
Pantheon Books / Jonathan Cape
$50.00 / £30.00
The publisher says:
After years of sporadic work on other books and projects and following the almost complete loss of his virility, it’s here: a new graphic novel by Chris Ware. Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple, possibly married, who wonder if they can bear each other’s company another minute; and the building’s landlady, an elderly woman who has lived alone for decades. Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason.
Drawn Together: The Collected Works of R. and A. Crumb
by Robert Crumb & Aline Kominsky
WW Norton / Knockabout
$29.95 / £20.00
The publisher says:
Rumored for years, Drawn Together finally charts the daily exploits and erotic craziness of this “First Couple” of comics. Who could have imagined that in 1972, when Aline Kominsky, a Long Island escapee and bodaciously talented artist, broke her foot one rainy fall day, it would result in the most unique collaboration in comics history? Laid up in her house, she was persuaded by R. Crumb, her nerdy, neurotic boyfriend, to pass the time drawing together a “two-man” comic. The result is a jaw-dropping yet tender account, not only of the joys and challenges of a legendary marriage but also of the obstacles faced by struggling female artists. In Drawn Together, our foremost male-female cartooning couple recall their success at shocking America with Weirdo magazine, the life-altering birth of their precocious daughter Sophie, and their astonishing move to the safe haven of France. With an irresistible introduction and a striking four-color section, Drawn Together becomes a graphic cause-célèbre and a must-have for any comics devotee.
Everything Together
by Sammy Harkham
PictureBox
$19.95
The publisher says:
Sammy Harkham is one of the most influential cartoonists and comics editors of his generation. After a decade of work and groundbreaking anthologies, Everything Together collects his short-story comics, which condense vast amounts of emotion and information into nuanced cartoon narratives. Harkham’s classic style is both articulate and expedient. At the center of the book are two vastly different tales: “Poor Sailor,” a sea-faring myth of a man gone to find wealth for his love; and “Somersaulting,” a kind of fever dream of teenagers in love, wiling away the summer. Alongside these stories are shorter comic strips tackling everything from Napoleon as a tortured artist to touching examinations of Jewish mysticism and life in a shtetl, to satires on contemporary university life. Throughout these tales, Harkham maintains a light touch and emotive wit. The works in this book confirm his place among the best storytellers of his generation.
Fashion Beast 1 (of 10)
by Alan Moore, Malcolm McClaren, Antony Johnston & Facundo Percio
Avatar Press
$3.99
The publisher says:
Alan Moore’s unearthed screenplay comes to life as an incredible comic book series almost three decades later! The mid-80’s were a stunning period of brilliance for Alan Moore, seeing him create true masterpieces including Miracleman, Watchmen - and Fashion Beast Working with Malcolm McLaren (Sex Pistols), Alan Moore turned his attention to a classic re-telling of a fable through his unyielding and imaginative vision. The two developed a story that redefined Beauty and the Beast in a dystopian future city dominated by a fashion house, which Moore then fully-scripted into a huge screenplay. Never previously published, this epic work is now adapted for comics by long-time Moore collaborator, Antony Johnston (Courtyard) preserving every scrap of Moore’s original dialogue. All ten issues have been lovingly illustrated by Facundo Percio (Anna Mercury) and finally a true historical and visionary masterpiece is finally released to the World.
Fashion Beast introduces young Doll Seguin, a spirited and sassy coat-checker working at a trendy nightclub. While the world outside fears an oncoming nuclear war, Doll escapes into the carefree lifestyle of music and decadence, a fantasy inspired by the fashion designs of the mysterious Celestine. Catching the deformed recluse’s eye, Doll is drawn helplessly into a sordid tale of tragic lies, false identities, fear, and violence.
The project came to be when Malcolm McLaren, the impresario and fashion designer best known for founding the Sex Pistols, approached him with the offer to write for film, a first for Moore. He eagerly accepted McLaren’s Fashion Beast concept and set to the task of writing its almost 200-page script. “I wanted to work with Malcolm McLaren,” recalled Moore in a 2000 interview. “He’s somebody that I (had) a lot of admiration for and, you know, it was a laugh”. “The screenplay that I turned in was just what he wanted,” said Moore. Renowned for his dense comic scripts, he added, “I remember him saying that I really ought to leave something for the director to do, because I was writing the screenplay the way I would one of my comics, where you’re talking about camera angles, you’re talking about composition. But yeah, it was fun.”
Gaboon’s Daymare
by Tobias Tak
Alternative Press
£12.50
The publisher says:
Gaboon’s Daymare is the new book of collected short stories by Tobias Tak, the follow-up to Upside Down. Here are various stories in different drawing styles but all with Tobias usual surreal fairy tale themes, drawn between 2003 and 2011 for various publications. A not earlier published sequential is a dark and original take on some of the classic Nursery Rhymes such as Humpty Dumpty and Old King Cole. Gaboon the clumsy wizard - a regular character of Tobias comics - is now encountering the strange Poompele, his dream-maker, a little guy who creates his dreams. In Gaboon’s Daymare, Poompele introduces some of these weird dreams, like the story of Mister More-On, who goes on a shopping spree and ends up with nothing, and a tale about a strange dog who looks like a fish in a world of class differences and snobbery, or a short story starring Piff the prancing pixie, who is in desperate need of an audience for his awful dance routines. Eventually Gaboon and Poompele encounter a terrible dream-eater who threatens to trap them in a nasty day-mare forever….
Goddamn This War!
by Jacques Tardi
Fantagraphics
$24.99
The publisher says:
Tardi’s most recent war-themed graphic novel tracks an unnamed soldier’s experiences. Created 15 years after the completion of his Eisner Award-winning World War I masterwork It Was the War of the Trenches, Tardi’s Goddamn This War! is no mere sequel or extension, but a brand new, wholly individual graphic novel that serves as a companion piece to Trenches but can be read entirely on its own. Vastly different sequentially (eschewing Trenches’ splintered narrative, Goddamn is split into six chronological chapters, one for each year of the war), graphically (Tardi deploys his more recent pen-ink-and-watercolor technique, with the bold colors of the early chapters fading into a grimy near-monochrome in the later ones as the war drags on), and narratively (all of Goddamn is told, with insight, dark wit and despair, as a first-person reminiscence/narration by an unnamed soldier), Goddamn This War! shares with Trenches its sustained sense of outrage, pitch-black gallows humor, and impeccably scrupulous historical exactitude. In fact, Goddamn This War! includes an extensive year-by-year historical text section written by Tardi’s frequent World War I research helpmate, the historian and collector Jean-Pierre Verney, including dozens of stunning rare photographs and visual documents from his personal collection
Happy 1 (of 4)
by Grant Morrison & Darick Robertson
Image
$2.99
The publisher says:
Meet Nick Sax - a corrupt, intoxicated ex-cop turned hit-man, adrift in a stinking twilight world of casual murder, soulless sex, eczema and betrayal. With a hit gone wrong, a bullet in his side, the cops and the mob on his tail, and a monstrous child killer in a Santa suit on the loose, Nick and his world will be changed forever this Christmas. By a tiny blue horse called Happy…
Heartless
by Nina Bunjevac
Conundrum Press
$20.00
The publisher says:
Powered by an expressive black and white drawing style, reminiscent of Robert Crumb and the meticulous pointillist technique of Drew Friedman, the dark undertone of Bunjevac’s humour brings into light the range of socio-political issues her comics deal with, such as gender, nationalism or urban alienation, always from an ironic feminist perspective. Her chain-smoking, slightly alcoholic and manically depressed character Zorka may just be today’s ultimate antiheroine. A Balkan immigrant in the Brave New World, working in that same meat factory for the last twenty years, tormented by family constraints and her own secrete desires… we simply can’t get enough of her.
Library of American Comics Essentials Vol. 1: Baron Bean
by George Herriman
IDW
S19.99
The publisher says:
Introducing a new series that will reprint early daily newspaper strips that are essential to the history of comics. Each volume will contain a full year of dailies. By reproducing the strips one per page in an oblong format, it allows us to have the experience of reading the comics one day at a time. The inaugural volume of LOAC Essentials features Baron Bean by one of the greatest of all comic strip stars: George Herriman. The creator of Krazy Kat drew Baron Bean for three years beginning in 1916. Included in this volume is the first year. Two additional books will complete the series. Future LOAC Essentials titles include The Gumps and Polly and Her Pals. The Library of American Comics is the world’s number 1 publisher of classic newspaper comic strips, with 14 Eisner Award nominations and three wins for best book. LOAC has become “the gold standard” for archival comic strip reprints…The research and articles provide insight and context, and most importantly the glorious reproduction of the material has preserved these strips for those who knew them and offers a new gateway to adventure for those discovering them for the first time.
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
by Sean Howe
Harper
$25.99
The publisher says:
In the early 1960s, Marvel Comics introduced a series of bright-costumed superhero characters - including Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and the Amazing Spider-Man - that would evolve into a modern American mythology for millions of readers. Over the last half-century, these characters have been passed along among generations of brilliant editors, artists, and writers who struggled with commercial mandates, a fickle audience, and, over matters of credit and control, one another. Written by Sean Howe, former comic book reviewer and editor at Entertainment Weekly, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a gripping narrative of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and beleaguered pop cultural entities in America’s history.
Jonathan Lethem says:
Sean Howe’s history of Marvel makes a compulsively readable, riotous and heartbreaking version of my favorite story, that of how a bunch of weirdoes changed the world… That it’s all true is just frosting on the cake.
Chuck Klosterman says:
Exhaustively researched and artfully assembled, this book is a historical exploration, a labor of love, and a living illustration of how the weirdest corners of the counterculture can sometimes become the culture-at-large.
The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song
by Frank M. Young & David Lasky
Abrams ComicArts
$24.95
The publisher says:
The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song is a rich and compelling original graphic novel that tells the story of the Carter Family - the first superstar group of country music - who made hundreds of recordings and sold millions of records. Many of their hit songs, such as Wildwood Flower and Will the Circle Be Unbroken, have influenced countless musicians and remain timeless country standards. The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song is not only a unique illustrated biography, but a moving account that reveals the family’s rise to success, their struggles along the way, and their impact on contemporary music. Illustrated with exacting detail and written in the Southern dialect of the time, its dynamic narrative is pure Americana. It is also a story of success and failure, of poverty and wealth, of racism and tolerance, of creativity and business, and of the power of music and love. Includes bonus CD with original Carter Family music.
Art Spiegelman says:
What a fine marriage of form and content! Humble and moving - straightforward with occasional breathtaking bravura passages - this book echoes the Carter Family’s rough-hewn sounds. It tells of the lives, sorrows, and values of a lost America in short episodes like a giant stack of old 78s. Using the vocabulary of comic strips like Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley, it’s as obsessive in its dedication to vernacular craft and hard work as A.P. Carter himself. Frank Young and David Lasky have spun a work of visual music that will replay in your head and heart well after you’ve finished reading it.
The Hive
by Charles Burns
Pantheon Books / Jonathan Cape
$21.95 / £12.99
The publisher says:
From the creator of Black Hole (“The best graphic novel of the year.” - Time; “Burns’s masterwork.” - The New York Times Book Review), the second part of a new epic masterpiece of graphic horror in brilliant, vivid color. Much has happened since we last saw Doug, the Tintin-like hero from X’ed Out. Confessing his past to an unidentified woman, Doug struggles to recall the mysterious incident that left his life shattered, an incident that may have involved his disturbed and now-absent girlfriend, Sarah, and her menacing ex-boyfriend. Doug warily seeks answers in a nightmarish alternate world that is a distorted mirror of our own, where he is a lowly employee that carts supplies around the Hive. The second part of Charles Burns’s riveting trilogy, this graphic narrative will delight and surpass the expectations of his fans.
The Nao of Brown
by Glyn Dillon
SelfMadeHero
$24.95 / £16.99
The publisher says:
“Things aren’t so black and white after all.” Nao Brown is ‘Hafu’: half Japanese, half English. She suffers with OCD, but not the hand-washing, overly tidy type that people joke about. Nao suffers from violent morbid obsessions and a racing, unruly mind. She works part time in a ‘designer’ vinyl toy shop, whilst struggling to get her own design and illustration career off the ground. She’s looking for love - the perfect love. But in meeting the man of her dreams, she realises that… dreams can be quite weird. Nao meditates in an attempt to quieten her mind and open her heart and it’s through this that she comes to realise that things aren’t so black and white after all. In fact, they’re much more… brown.
The Secret of the Stone Frog
by David Nytra
Toon Books
$14.95
The publisher says:
In a magical world unlike any you’ve seen before… When Leah and Alan awaken in an enchanted forest, they have only each other and their wits to guide them. In a world of pet bees and giant rabbits, they befriend foppish lions and stone frogs, learning to confront danger as they find both their own independence and the way home. Newcomer David Nytra’s breathtaking pictures break the boundaries of imagination, sending the reader on a wild flight of fantasy while experiencing the most universal of stories: growing up.
The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction
by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby
Titan Books
$49.95
The publisher says:
The Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction spans more than 20 years, beginning with the first stories Joe Simon and Jack Kirby ever produced together (beginning in June 1940) - their ten-issue run of Blue Bolt adventures. Then the Cold War years will be represented by Race For the Moon, featuring pencils by Kirby and inked artwork by comic book legends Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres, and Al Williamson. Including an introduction by Dave Gibbons, the award-winning co-creator and illustrator of Watchmen, this is an historic volume no comic book aficionado will be able to live without
Series editor Steve Saffel says:
Joe Simon was one of the industry’s greatest innovators - he commissioned stories from some of the greatest talents of the time. Thanks to his efforts, we have exclusive access to more than 80 pages of original artwork from the 1950s. Stories by all four artists appear in all of their stunning detail. This was a book Joe wanted the world to see.
Tripwire 20th Anniversary Special
edited by Joel Meadows
Tripwire Publishing Ltd
£14.95
The publisher says:
Celebrate Britain’s longest-running comics and genre magazine’s 20th anniversary with this unique book. Featuring rarely seen and new art from a who’s who of modern comics and genre, including Frank Quitely, Mike Mignola, Drew Struzan, Mike Perkins, Joe Kubert, Duncan Fegredo, Chris Weston, Phil Hale, Walter Simonson and Howard Chaykin, it will also include articles looking at trends of the last twenty years, creators who have come to prominence since 1992 and the best and worst Hollywood superhero movies 1992-2012. It also represents many of Tripwire‘s classic interviews from over the years with top names like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Peter Milligan and many more. This book will be a must-have for fans of comics and genre.
Woodwork
by Wallace Wood
IDW
$59.99
The publisher says:
Wally Wood is one of the most celebrated comic artists of all time. His legendary career runs from the glory days of EC Comics extraordinary line of science fiction titles to the brilliantly subversive MAD Comics (and, later, Magazine). He produced extraordinary illustrations for magazines like Galaxy after EC folded, and worked on the some of the most fondly remembered stories published by Marvel Comics in the mid 1960s. He also co-created the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and was a pioneer in self-publishing. This massive tome is the American edition of a museum catalogue that accompanied a gigantic career retrospective on display in De Palma Spain in 2010, the largest such exhibit ever devoted to this incredible artist.
