The Gosh! Authority 03/02/10

After the book-heavy blog you were dealt last week you’re definitely due a comics one. There’s a few bits of note but first here’s a word from our very own Barnaby Richards on the new shipment of American indie rarities. It should be noted that Barney’s own colourful indie delights are readily available here at Gosh! and we reckon you should have a look at them. Eddie Campbell (Alec: The Years Have Pants) recommends them too.

Without further ado, here’s him:

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The American Indie comic book scene arrived with a big SMASH! this week courtesy of PictureBox. We’ve got Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce and Brian Chippendale’s Maggots for starters. Now if you don’t know about this stuff here’s Frank Santoro to talk to you about Multiforce.

The newspaper print-sized zine is a format favoured by these guys. We have a load in. Let me point out Ken Kagami’s SnooPee, an innocently drawn snigger-fest which might well provoke a wistful blush or two – you might remember Kagami from his collaboration with the excellent Deerhoof. We have many similar paper marvels for you, each for a paltry £2.

Also in newspaper format comes Comics Comics, a really brilliant comic book review which features stuff like Sammy Harkham interviewing Guy Davis (issue 3) and a great Mike Reddy comic, last seen in the bumper 3-1 Buenaventura Press Collection from the other week. Comics Comics appears to be predominantly online these days. If you like this stuff you’ll want to click here and add it to your favourite blogs.

And if like me you can hardly wait for the next instalment of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs you’ll want to get hold of Core of Caligula, which comes in at a whopping £1.50. If you don’t know Powr Mastrs, ask me - I’ll show you and evangelise. The Ganzfeld is a beautifully produced anthology for smart people who like to look at the world (and comics) correctly.

Finally, we really must mention our own Jon Chandler. Okay, so he’s from Saxmundham but PictureBox stock him and if you like Brinkman, C.F. and Chippendale then you’ll want to know him too. We have issues 3, 4 and 5 of Boobytrap. A good title to end on.

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And you’re back in the room.

Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan follow up their hugely popular DEMO with another chunk of short stories. Demo Volume 2 #1 sees a woman haunted by a recurring premonition but don’t expect any old characters to recur in the series. “They’re all original. That’s actually a line I don’t think I’ll ever really cross. I feel like that really undermines the integrity of not only the actual concept of DEMO, but also the integrity of the old stories,” says Wood in an interview with Comic Book Resources. There’s a few preview pages there for you as well.

The Question #37 is the final of the Blackest Night Resurrected titles, a week late but still very welcome. Written by Greg Rucka (Detective Comics), it’s talked about at length over at Newsarama with the legendary Dennis O’Neill who revamped the series in 1987 with Denys Cowan who provides the art on this new one too, with Bill Sienkiewicz on inks.

Gosh! Favourite Ian Edginton’s (Hound of the Baskervilles) offering this week is Aladdin: Legacy of the Lost #1 (of 3) which you can see previewed here. It takes the old classic and turns it into ‘a thundering sword and sorcery epic’, or so CbR tells me.

"This isn't really an adaptation as such. I've used the core story from the original Middle-Eastern folk tale as a springboard, and then expanded it out from there. The story of Aladdin, the evil sorcerer, the search for the lamp and the discovery of the Djinn and so on, is covered in the first two issues. What follows afterwards is a much larger adventure. I've been something of a magpie, pulling in influences from other myths and fables as well as my favourite pulp fantasy novels and movies." More of that here.

And finally, Jeph Loeb’s Ultimate Comics X #1 is the latest in the unwieldy octopus that is the Ultimate Universe.

It’s bimonthly to adjust to the schedule of its top-flight regular artist Arthur Adams, who’s doing his first full-length comic work in years. It’s previewed at CbR and is unfortunately one of the titles affected by some bad news. Here ‘tis:

Due to a serious accident involving the truck transporting Marvel Comics titles from the printer to Diamond's Distribution Centres in the US, several Marvel titles were damaged or lost. Diamond are making sure every comic shop gets a percentage of what they ordered so that no shop goes completely without. Consequently, some tiles may sell out on the shelves quicker than expected after being swallowed up by the usual standing order customers. If there’s anything in particular that you can’t do without and don’t already have on your standing order let me know by email (info@goshlondon.com) and I’ll try and make sure there’s one aside for you. Those titles affected are:

Indomitable Iron Man Black & White One-Shot
Invincible Iron Man #23
Siege #2 (Of 4)
Siege Embedded #2 (Of 4)
Ultimate Comics X #1
Wolverine Weapon X #10

We are promised that the remaining copies will either be delivered in the next week, or the week after. So don’t worry about missing out entirely.

Ending on that would be rubbish so here’s something unexpected and good. For the first time in fifteen years the JD Salinger-style-reclusive recluse Bill Watterson (he of Calvin and Hobbes, obviously) is interviewed about the much-loved series.

“By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.”


-- Hayley