Something For The Weekend! Signing, Toys, Adventures of a Japanese Businessman

Three thoughts for the weekend: Firstly; don't forget the signing tomorrow. Saturday 15th 1-3pm Warren Pleece and Gary Pleece will be signing copies of The Great Unwashed. It's a great collection of vignettes - some Brighton-centric - which counts fans in the likes of Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis and Ed Brubaker. And me.

Secondly; there's the Adventure Time toy promotion. While stocks last we'll be giving out a Free Comic Book Day edition of Adventure Time #1 to each customer who purchases something from out Adventure Time toy range (and yes we have the Finn's Golden Sword of Battle!). Mathmatical!

And thirdly; yet another (see previous post) book from NoBrow has arrived in store. Adventures of a Japanese Businessman by Jose Domingo is a charming, inventive work following a Japanese businessman as he attempts to walk home after a hard day at the office. Each page is uniformly divided into four panels and the action in each panel flows from top left corner to bottom right brings structure to an adventure that goes from the sublime to the ridiculous and beyond. All in an enormous, hardback edition. A real treat.

Whatever you do, have a lovely weekend...

Swoon Now! Space Race & Megaskull

 

This week saw the release of another of Nobrow's justifiably popular Leporello series - double-sided, concertina works of art. For Space Race, Tom Clohosy Cole depicts two versions of the developments in Space exploration: one from a US perspective and one from USSR. It's a charming, beautifully balanced piece of work with gorgeous colouring that belie the deceptively simple illustrations. See here for Cole's website.

And on a completely different note (who says Nobrow have a house style?) Kyle Platts takes time away from his skateboard to produce quite possibly the brightest book you'll see this year. In florescent yellow, pink, blue we have Megaskull filled with short tales of irreverent humour developed from his Megaskull blog (see here). By the way; no picture I could find online truely captured the brilliantly garish nature of the colouring.

Swoon Now! SelfMadeHero

Last year I wrote about the publisher NoBrow (see here) who ended up the recipient of the Daves Comics Publisher of the Year Award for 2010 for some beautiful and challenging art books and graphic novellas (there was a gold statue and everything but I think it got waylayed in second class post).

This year SelfMadeHero is pushing hard for the coveted top spot. As with NoBrow there is strong consistency of product strengthening their profile not only in terms of quality but also in format (all books are of similar size and price point). They begun in 2007 focusing on literary adaptations, expertly picking on novels in the tough-going classics category such as works by Edgar Allen Poe and Franz Kafka as well as the Manga Shakespeare line which relocated the plays to settings more accessible to teen readers.

Adaptations, whether they be from a movie or a novel have historically been of a variable quality at best usually because they are side projects for publishers. But with the company focusing solely on this genre the books were receiving good word and by 2010, having added the Sherlock Holmes adaptations to their cannon, they moved into another rather maligned genre: Biography. Procuring the rights to Johnny Cash: I See Darkness, it was critical success and - once again carefully choosing its subjects - has been followed by Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson, Kiki De Montparnasse and Baby's In Black (regarding Stuart Sutcliffe).

Throw into the mix beautiful Dance By The Light Of The Moon - based on a true story - and we're only just getting to their first fictional graphic novel soon-to-be-released Hair Shirt by the talented Canadian artist Patrick McEown.

Securing their own place in the shop, SelfMadeHero is in the ascendancy. We occasionally receive signed copies of their books so pop in and check out.

Swoon Now! Nobrow

We're big fans of the publisher Nobrow so there was considerable excitement in the shop for the latest delivery. Nobrow #3 (£11) has arrived with all its glorious summer colour and arresting abstract visuals. Also in is another piece from Blexbolex (read of our affection for Abecederia here) entitled Dogcrime (£8), cyclical storytelling in Ouroboros (£8.50) by Ben Newman - whose style put me in mind of Samurai Jack for some reason - and a beautiful little hardcover book entitled Birchield Close (£9) by Jon McNaught which at first glance could have been designed by Seth. Finally there's Rise and Fall (£9) by Micah Lidberg, a wonderful concertina landscape picture charting the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. Listed below are other examples of the artists work.Ben Newman
Jon McNaught
Micah Lidberg