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 FAVOLE 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
The ships that make the two-day run from Mombasa, Kenya, to Somalia carrying vital humanitarian supplies are frequent targets of pirate attacks — and have been for more than a decade. How have ship’s crew adapted? Same way the pirates have adapted over the years: with simple technology and no-nonsense tactics.
On Wednesday, the small cargo vessel Semlow, an old veteran of the Somali humanitarian route that was hijacked by pirates and held for 110 days back in 2005, prepares for a Sunday run to Mogadishu carrying hundreds of tones of split peas and other foodstuffs. Captain Edward Kalendera gives me a tour of the bridge. In the small, wood-paneled map alcove on the starboard side, he points out the green-and-black screen of a simple ranging radar. Kalendera says he uses it to spot incoming boats. If he decides they’re hostile, he can turn tail and open the throttle.
According to experts in Mombasa, you need to exceed 20 knots to outrun pirates. It’s not clear that rickety old Semlow can make that speed.
Stealth is a more reliable tactic. Kalendera lays out a detailed chart of the waters around Mogadishu and traces the most dangerous zone with his finger. When Semlow breaches this zone, he said, it will be night — and he will rig the ship for silent running. That means turning out all the lights and minimizing noise. Rigged like that, Kalendera says, a pirate can pass within yards and not even know Semlow’s there.
But if they are detected, and there’s no chance of outrunning the attackers, there’s one last measure. Kalendera crosses the bridge to the port side and opens a door to the closet-size radio room. He pops open a tiny cabinet. Inside is a white plastic device shaped like a garage-door opener. This, he says, is the panic button. Press this, and it alerts Semlow’s owners, by radio, that the vessel is under attack.
Now, alerting the owner won’t save the ship from being captured. But it will speed the process of ransoming the ship and crew, and hopefully head off any desperate, violent acts by impatient, panicky kidnappers.
(Photo: me)
Kennedy Mwale, 32, pictured, is a freelance tour guide in Mombasa’s old port, a claustrophobic melange of Arab and Portuguese architecture with one small stone pier. A week ago Monday, three small cargo ships were tied to the pier. Scores of shirtless stevedores lugged bags of cement and tossed them into the ships’ holds. The stevedores might earn a couple dollars for hours of hot, back-breaking work. That’s just enough to survive in Mombasa. Mwale, by comparison, earns up to $15 for an hour tour.
Five years ago, Mwale escaped Mombasa’s maritime economy. He had been a fisherman, plying the waters as far north as the Somali borderland in search of tuna and other big fish. But with piracy taking root in lawless Somalia, fishing and sea trade were becoming riskier and less profitable by the day for the small operators. One of the final straws for Mwale was a close call, in 1999, with a band of 14 pirates that sneaked up on the 11-man refrigerator ship where Mwale was the chief engineer. (The reefer ships follow behind the fishing boats to store fresh catches.)
They came at night, as the ship was anchred near Mdoa island, surprising the sleeping crew and their one Somali bodyguard. When the pirates failed to wrestle away the guard’s rifle, a standoff ensued. The pirates demanded the crew’s money and possessions, plus all the diesel fuel stored on deck — and wanted the ship sailed to the Somali port of Kismayo. If the crew didn’t comply, the pirates would start killing people, they said. The crew coughed up all their cash — just a few dollars for most, but around $700 in the case of the ship owner’s secretary — and handed over possessions including a new boom box stereo. But the captain refused to give up the diesel or to sail to Kismayo. He would not allow the ship to enter in to captivity, nor strand it at sea. The captain had only as much leverage as was afforded by his one armed guard, but it was enough. The pirates compromised. They agreed to go to Mdoa and continue negotiations.
That apparently was a clever bit of strategizing on the captain’s part, for he had called at Mdoa earlier, seeking the ruling committee’s permission to fish Somali waters. The committee had endorsed the expedition. And when the pirates rolled in with Mwale and his shipmates in tow, the committee immediately branded the captors criminals and had the local militia seize their weapons and return everything they’d stolen. They gave back the boom box, but denied taking anything else. The penniless Kenyans now were free to sail home.
This story has a happy-ish ending, but for Mwale, it was another near-miss in a career full of them. Every day the arguments mounted against working at sea. Already, three of his friends had been killed by sharks. And with piracy making profitable fishing a dicey venture, Mwale soon decided he’d had enough. He went ashore, for good, and for five years was unemployed on Mombasa’s sweltering streets.
Today, as a tour guide, he survives, and surely does better than many of the city’s 700,000 residents. Not that freelancing for curious tourists is an easy way to make a living: it’s just a Hell of a lot safer than grappling with Somali pirates.
(Photo: me)
In May 2009, NBM Publishing brings back one of the 20th century’s great comic strips. George McManus’ BRINGING UP FATHER is the third and latest in NBM’s FOREVER NUTS series of classic screwball strips.
In 1913, cartoonist George McManus started a comic strip about Jiggs and Maggie, a lower-class couple who came into money. “While the snobbish Maggie and beautiful daughter Nora (referred to various
times as Katy and Mamie in the strip’s early days) constantly try to ’bring up’ Father to his new social position,” comics expert Clark Holloway has said, “Jiggs can think of nothing finer than sitting
down at Dinty Moore’s restaurant to finish off several dishes of corned beef and cabbage, followed by a night out with the boys from the old neighborhood. The clash of wills that ensued often resulted
in flying rolling-pins, smashed crockery, and broken vases, all aimed in the general direction of Jiggs’s skull.”
This classic strip, BRINGING UP FATHER, became the 20th century’s second longest running strip.
Now, FOREVER NUTS presents all the dailies of this classic comic strip’s first two years, many of which have not been reprinted since they first appeared nearly a century ago. Discover why McManus became known as one of the greats in the field.
George McManus’ BRINGING UP FATHER will be a jacketed hardcover, 11″ x 6 ½ inches, with black-and-white interior art – the same handsome format as the previous FOREVER NUTS books, Mutt and Jeff and Happy Hooligan.
