a small snippet from a starry sky spread i worked on all day. i’m almost 90 pages done! this is surreal.
things are very much back in business here at the studio. i eat most of my meals here. living and breathing drawing and colouring.
Ordinary Victories volume 2 “What is Precious” was placed in Comic Book Resources top 100 at #36:
“[The two volumes] taken together offer a glimpse of the world that is not heavy handed or soft pedaled, but in its greatest moments, like any great work of art, it is possible to hold the pages up and through them, see the world.”
And Dungeon Monstres vol.1 is recommended by Library Media Connection.
Our sister company Papercutz is publishing, in March, Gahan Wilson’s adaptation of The Raven and other Edgar Allan Poe poems. We thought you’d like to know. It’s presently being solicited at comics stores. You can see more here. You can also order through us at 800 886 1223, M-F 9-6 ET or by mail with check/M.O. made out to NBM.
About Metronome by Veronique Tanaka:
“A bold pushing of the formal envelope, it bills itself as a ‘visual poem’, but with its regimented film-like frames and hypnotic four-four repetition, it evokes music and stroboscopic cinema.”
The Boston Phoenix
ARLENE’S HEART
Victoria FRANCES
The fantasy artist famous for the FAVOLA series of books is back with a metaphor for hope in the shape of a fable where child-like fantasy contrasts with the feeling of isolation and alienation which invades our every day life. Lyrically and suggestively painted, a visual poem of fascinating sensuous gothic beauty. For mature readers.
81/2 x 11, 80pp., full color jacketed hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-56163-552-8
From Terry:
We’ve just shipped a book I fell in love with.
Oh, it’s hard love, ’cause it’s about a thorny issue but it’s done so sensitively and the art rendered so beautifully in simple comic form, I just thought we have to see this in the States.
“Why I Killed Peter”, by Alfred and Olivier Ka, is an autobiographical book where the writer (Ka) had a mentor, a role model, a man he looked up to fondly, a priest. A very liberal priest who did not proselytize. Then, one day, he asked something of the kid that was improper. We’ve seen the news, a lot of this happening in many churches here. Well here’s the living of it.
BUT, before you go “Oh, God, I can’t read that”, what’s remarkable about this book is how the author does NOT get up on a soap box, or beat his breast looking for your pity or especially excoriate the priest as total evil. As a kid, the incident did not happen again, he continued to look up to him and continued to go to his summer camp for years. It’s absolutely remarkable that we can actually almost understand the priest’s point of view as ill-advised as it was.
However as he grew up the resentment and anger built up in him and he finally after many years gathers the courage to visit him with his friend, the artist (Alfred) of this graphic novel, and confront him, only to find a shriveled old little man crushed by his anger.
It’s just incredibly insightful and remarkably carried off. Another book NBM and its ComicsLit imprint likes to publish that moves this artform we all love forward. See the book here.
Hey, when you read it come back here and tell me what you think!
Happy Hooligan’s been getting some great press out there right before Christmas:
Andrew “Capt. Comics” Smith for the nationally syndicated Scripps News:
“Happy Hooligan” was one of the most successful comic strips in the golden age of that medium, starring a happy-go-lucky bumbler with a tin can for a hat. Frederick Burr Opper, dubbed “the Dean of Cartoonists” at the apex of the Yellow Journalism era, also created “Alphonse and Gaston” and several other memorable strips, but it was “Happy Hooligan” (1900-1932) for the Hearst newspapers that was his high mark. In “Hooligan” he formalized the visual “language” of comic strips, abandoning text blocks completely for word balloons, and throwing his stories into ever-faster forward motion. Which makes the “Forever Nuts Vol. 2: Happy Hooligan” collection ($24.95, NBM) required reading for anyone who takes comic strips as seriously as they deserve — and likes to laugh, too.
Related: The first volume in the Forever Nuts series, “The Early Years of Mutt & Jeff.” Also serious fun.
From The Onion’s site:
“Following last year’s stellar collection The Early Years Of Mutt & Jeff, NBM’s “classic screwball strips” series Forever Nuts returns with a well-chosen anthology of Frederick Burr Opper’s early-20th-century newspaper comic Happy Hooligan.
The joy of the strip is in the way Opper sets up his dominoes before knocking them down. Opper delighted in filling the frame with as many figures and objects as he could, and then figuring out how to put them all to good use… B+”
“You’re more likely to be distracted, anyway, by a remarkable skill Opper has in comic storytelling. Often, there are two things going on at the same time, and by the end of a mere six panels, they converge. At a time when comic strips were in their infancy, that’s a remarkable talent.” —Rod Lott
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