The Gosh! Authority 01/07/09

Here’s the latest from Gosh! – The comic shop with air-conditioning.

Having arrived at the tail end of Thursday and missing blog-deadline, Gilbert Hernandez’s Luba hardcover is at the front of the pack today. ‘The Picasso’ of the Hernandez Brothers (so says Mario) has at long last delivered the collected sequel to the incredibly popular Palomar. The book is made up of over 100 stories – from one-pagers to several-pagers – that were originally printed in different comics then reprinted in a trilogy of enormous paperbacks (Luba in America, Luba: The Book of Ofelia, and Luba: Three Daughters) which are now finally roped together in one big brick of a book. This one. And it’s on the shelf already. I can see it from here.

Also denied a mention last week was The Spirit #30 written and drawn by Michael Avon Oeming of Powers fame. There’s a preview here, and Oeming talks about it with CbR. The upshot of a late mention is that I now theoretically get to include reviews but I can’t find any. Life’s rubbish sometimes.

Now to this week’s stuff. The Tempest is a lovely looking graphic novel marred only by its use of Comic Sans. It features the full text of the Shakespeare play adapted into comics by the fantastic Oscar Grillo, who has worked in advertising and animation for almost fifty years and was the visual supervisor on the movie Monsters Inc. He is however much better known in this country as the man responsible for the “Too Orangey For Crows” Kia-Ora advert.

The next instalment of the occasional anthology Strange Eggs has a laundry list of creators you like. Here’s the original premise of the series straight from the mouth of the guy who made it up, Chris Reilly:

Strange Eggs #1 included a fictitious back-story claiming that the comic book was based on a now-cancelled television show produced by “The Christian Learning Network.” The premise of this supposed show—and therefore the premise of all the comics stories in Strange Eggs #1—was the following: The young twins Kip and Kelly Hatcher live with their father, a scientist, on a farm in rural Maine. In each story, deliveryman Roger Rogers delivers the twins an egg and they are forced to deal with whatever hatches forth. Creators can have virtually anything hatch out of the egg, and have the twins deal with it in pretty much any fashion.

He talks about the new Strange Eggs Jumps the Shark and that episode of Happy Days here. If you like Roger Langridge (and who doesn’t), Jhonen Vasquez (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac), Eisner-nominated Ben Towle (Midnight Sun), James Turner (Rex Libris, Warlord of Io) to name a mere handful, you’ll probably like this anthology too.

Lots of issue #1s out this week so here we go:

It was hinted in the recent Captain America #600 that there might be a way to bring Steve Rogers back from the dead (still some of those around if you missed it, though ah...spoilers in that bit I just said) and thanks to Ed Brubaker (Criminal) – the man who offed him in the first place – it looks like he’ll make it in time for Independence Day. That’s all in Captain America Reborn #1 (of 5) illustrated by Bryan Hitch (The Authority, The Ultimates). Newsarama do a quick re-Cap (see that?) if you’ve not been paying attention. Preview!

Greek Street #1 is the latest from Vertigo and much like the recent Unwritten #1 it will only cost you 75 of your shiny pennies. Peter Milligan (Human Target, X-Statix, Shade: The Changing Man) and Davide Gianfelice (Northlanders) are bringing Greek mythology to modern-day Soho played out by strippers, gangsters and the like. Milligan (who recently worked on a Hellblazer piece with that other Greek mythology bloke) says of the series:

“Greek Street is a very strange beast. I think of it as The Long Good Friday meets Agamemnon.”

More of that and preview pages here and here now with added boobs.

You’ll see more of London’s underbelly in Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels #1 (of 5) which sees Mike Mignola team up with Ben Stenbeck (B.P.R.D.) in a story about nineteenth-century occult investigator Edward Grey’s very first case as an agent of the queen. Mignola says:

“I've always been a big fan of English Victorian supernatural literature, and especially Victorian-era occult detective stuff. This is my ham-handed, very American attempt at pulling that off. It's fun, it's got seances, it's got Jack-the-Ripper-like murders, it's got cops in those helmets with the little bull's-eye lanterns running around through gas-lit alleys. It's probably informed more by old movies about that kind of stuff. Even the color treatment has almost a black-and-white feel to it. I wanted something that was so atmospheric and touched on all the peculiarities of Victorian-era stuff because there isn't a plan to do another one of these Ed Grey stories in London, so I wanted to make sure we got all that stuff, all that feel, clearly established as an Englishman in London. I wanted to make sure we got all of that stuff in this one series.” (more) Preview.

Another mini-series begins in Justice League: Cry For Justice #1 (of 6). Written by James Robinson (Starman, Superman) and illustrated by Mauro Cascioli (Trials of Shazam) the series sees Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Supergirl, Atom, Shazam, Congorilla, and Starman crying for justice after the death of Batman. A preview! And while we’re mentioning six-parters, Deadpool: Merc With a Mouth #1 (of 6) is illustrated by the best name in comics, Bong Dazo.

If you’re gearing up for Blackest Night you’ll want to get your mitts on Green Lantern Corps #38 by Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason/Rebecca Buchman. It’s the conclusion to Emerald Eclipse and leads directly into Blackest Night (checklist here). Preview!

Marvel’s big Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men crossover continues in this week’s Uncanny X-Men #513 by Matt Fraction. It’s part two of Utopia (which began in last week’s DAX Utopia not-so-one-shot) so you can cross it off your checklist. Preview here.

The Comics Journal #298 is worth a look if you’re a fan of the Umbrella Academy or the Perry Bible Fellowship. They’ve got interviews with stars Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá on self-publishing and who does what, as well as Nicholas Gurewitch talking about the joys of being an envelope artist, and even Trevor Von Eeden. There are wee excerpts of both big interviews
and because it’s the Comics Journal there’s way too much other stuff to cram into a weekly mail-out. If you missed the last issue we’ve still got some of those too, featuring Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey/Hi & Lois) and Emmanuel Guilbert (of Alan’s War and more recently The Photographer).

And last new thing for the week: You’ve no doubt seen M. Sasek’s This is London poster in the Gosh! window. Or maybe you missed it because of the throng of tourists posing next to it. Whatever the case, another facsimile edition of a 60s classic by the same bloke has taken its place on our new shelf. This is the Way to the Moon will take you to Cape Canaveral and give you a nostalgic look at the electronic brains that put a man in space. Somewhere near it you might also see My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill which is a book that came out a while ago but we haven’t had it in for some time. This is just a heads up to say We have some now, honest! and they are rather oddly and unpredictably signed by the author, Emile Bravo.

In other news worthy of a How Late?! mention we've got a couple of cracking new Gosh! Signed Bookplate Editions coming up. David Mazzuchelli's Asterios Polyp is the triumphant return (ten years in the making!) of one of comics' greatest talents, and Darwyn Cooke's The Hunter is a hardboiled graphic novel you'd be a fool to miss. Get your name on our reserve list now!

Gosh! Favourite Lord Hurk has gone and “re-imagined” (that’s what they call it in Hollywood these days, no?) a Jack Kirby classic. And how! If you like the look of that we’ve still got some of his cracking mini-comics Urgent Telex (a Gosh! Exclusive) and Meat Hill on our small press shelves.

Kevin O’Neill’s original LoEG art was on our walls for a bit but it has been packed up and shipped off home to the man himself. If you’re missing it, there’s another O’Neill exhibition at The Illustration Cupboard on Bury Street until the end of August featuring thirty drawings and paintings not exhibited in England before. And as a rare treat, according to the flyer you can even buy his artwork from the 8th of this month.

And finally, in the Non-Shop and Stuff Purloined from Boing Boing news category:

Comics writer Mark Sable was detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for carrying a script for an upcoming comic book about a writer who is detained and intensively questioned by the TSA for writing a comic about terrorism. (more)

Oh dear.

-- Hayley