Hey, folks – Neil Kleid here. Wrote BROWNSVILLE with Jake Allen for NBM and am now moving through production on my next book, THE BIG KAHN, with artist Nicolas Cinquegrani.

I wrote this book a while back, before BROWNSVILLE, but hadn’t found the right artist for it until Nico came along. It’s the story of what happens when a New Jersey rabbi dies and at the funeral, his family and congregation of forty years discover that he’s been conning them: he isn’t even Jewish. The book follows the family’s struggle with grief, betrayal and their faith as the town begins to examine them and they begin to examine themselves.

The graphic novel is roughly 172 pages, will be presented in both hard and soft cover, and should be released this summer

Here are a few untoned pages:

A small Moresukine bonus story that didn’t make it into the compilation – primarily because as the only self-motivated story in the whole book, it would have felt a bit out of place.

Unfortunately, it’s still in German, but you can find the English translation below! (…pardon my pidgin…)

LEFT PAGE

1.1 For my company farewell party, my colleagues invite me to a peculiar kind of restaurant.

1.2 Placed in ships, people fish their main courses out of the surrounding water ponds.

1.3 At dinner, my boss once again recounts his business trip to Düsseldorf.

RIGHT PAGE

1.1 In the evening?

1.2 - – I’m in a French restaurant with the CEO – - we get onto the subject of World War II.

3.1 And we chat along, and suddenly he says to me:

3.2 We’d better not talk about these things around here…

5.1 “…LET’S GO GRAB A PIZZA!”

6.1 Everyone breaks out into laughter, while – as if in time to it -…

6.2 …accompanied by the fish’s subtle aftertwitches.

So what I’m working on is a book about Turkmenistan where I was a Peace Corps volunteer for a year and a half.  It’s a dictatorship and while I was there the dictator was Turkmenbashy. He regularly made Parade’s top ten best dictator list (which is really the only real measuring stick for dictators). Before I went I heard Turkmenistan described as 1984 meets Disney World meets hallucinogens, which I found out is kind of accurate. My goal is to capture what it is like to live in this kind of a place. The story is really just about one Turkmen and his dreams of getting rich and marrying the prettiest girl in town, but I’m trying to cram everything in. I got a couple of crazy cab rides, one involving a back seat full of raw goat meat, another ending up stranded in the desert. Drunken nights, black eyes. A mysterious murder. A guy who thinks he’s Chuck Norris. English grammar jokes (no really)(they’re hilarious)(well maybe not)(but they’re as funny as count and non-count nouns can be). Hopefully I’ll get it all in by the end of March.

This blog really couldn’t have better timing for me. I’m about half way finished with the comic i’m currently working on. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to draw a single page the past two or so months because I’ve spent all my time* painting for an art show. (See all that stuff here.) Anyway, my goal for december is two pages a day of Graylight:

Hopefully I’ll be done with this in January.

Oh, and T? I don’t like swedish meatballs. (My favourite types of food are polish and korean.) This is my first Thanksgiving in three years spent in Europe though, so I’m a little sad. No pumpkin pie … Stockholm used to have two specialty stores for American food where I’m sure they had it but they both closed down. SAD.

I think that’s all from me for now. I’ll be posting snippets and updates of my work as I go.

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* And I mean ALL OF IT, except for that one day when I was locked out of the studio due to a stupid misunderstanding. We had to call a locksmith. There was drama. It could’ve gotten ugly.