The Gosh! Authority 11/08/10

It’s a relatively small week but the enormous whale in this new one from Fantagraphics more than makes up for it. You read Moby Dick once and this stuff invariably gets to you:

I’d never heard of Drew Weing until this morning but I’ve very quickly decided he’s brilliant, and not just because of the whale. According to our friend The Internet he’s best known for his webcomic Pup on Serializer and various self-published comics which I have thus far failed to read. At this point I’ll stand aside and let Avoid the Future’s interview with the man himself fill in the blanks.


Fantagraphics quite rightly place his style “somewhere between Gustave Doré engravings and E. C. Segar’s Popeye” and he gets top points for crosshatch in this debut graphic novel Set to Sea. It’s about a “a big dude with a big nose”, an aspiring poet with romantic ideas about the seafaring life that are soon proven to be bogus when he gets stuck on a clipper bound for Hong Kong and has run ins with pirates, bad food, unceremonial funerals and the like. There’s a Gosh! approved manhandling video and a PDF preview here. Loads more images over at his blog too. Highly recommended. Arr.

Speaking of A+ crosshatching, we’ve got two new Edward Gorey arrivals and an Edward Gorey arrival should never go unheralded, doubly so if there are two, obviously. The Utter Zoo is an alphabet of non-existent animals, and The Awdrey-Gore Legacy a murder mystery. They are both predictably lovely.

Another lovely thing is Felix the Cat: The Great Comics Book Tails from comics historian Craig Yoe. There’s over 200 pages of Golden Age stories along with rare art and ephemera. I know I don’t lavish such specific compliments all that regularly, but even the barcode on this thing is something to be celebrated. No, seriously. A+.


Somewhere next to that you’ll find the new Art of Toy Story Postcard Set which is much like the Art of Pixar Set we had ages ago. I hear they’re lovely but I’ve not looked at them. I’m yet to see Toy Story 3 and no one can guarantee a spoiler-free perusal.

Then there's Mike Cary and Peter Gross’ Unwritten TP Volume 2: Inside Man collecting issues #6 to #12, beside which you’ll find the brand new Unwritten #16. Preview of that one here.

Garth Ennis’ war stories are here again in Battlefields TP Volume 5: The Firefly and His Majesty, the second story featuring Sergeant Stiles. Says Ennis:

“Part one saw Stiles gaining a little intel from a ravaged American armored unit, but the rest of the story is a straight cat-and-mouse duel between two tanks and their crews. I do enjoy writing Brits and Yanks interacting, especially at a time in history when they weren't as familiar with each other as they are now, culturally speaking – there's a lot of fun to be had with the notion of 'two nations divided by a common language.'” More of that at Comicbook Resources.

And over on the 2000AD shelf you’ll find Complete Harlem Heroes by Pat Mills, Tom Tully, Dave Gibbons and Massimo Bellardinelli. It’s the year 2050 and the game Aeroball has swept the world. Incidentally, this thing comes courtesy of Gibbons who posted it on the twitters:

What if the Avengers movie was made years before the actual comic book?



(Thanks Matt!)

In comics you’ve got a new BPRD miniseries, Hell on Earth – New World #1 (of 5), which begins a new direction for the title (preview) and the second issue of Scott Morse’s Strange Science Fantasy which was previously seen on the Gosh! Blog here, around the time the brothers Ba and Moon were in town. Speaking of whom, the penultimate Daytripper will be with us on Thursday so don’t miss it. Here’s a preview. They’re gearing up for the final part and promise to deliver a big pay-off. What’ll it be? "Wait for it. Wait for it," Moon said with a smile. "Be patient and wait for it." (via Newsarama)

Paul “The Man at the Crossroads” Gravett invites you to attend a new gallery exhibition Hypercomics: The Shapes of Comics to Come at the Pumphouse Gallery in Battersea Park. Adam Dant, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Dave McKean, Warren Pleece all contribute and you can read about it here. They’re holding an exhibition preview tonight if you can make it, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Go and tell them we sent you. Brownie points in the bank.

The Neil Gaiman/Eddie Campbell/Fourplay Sydney Opera House Thing happened over the weekend. If you’ve not been paying attention Bleeding Cool has a video of Gaiman explaining the Sydney Opera House Thing. In short, he read his story The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, a tale of murder and a Scottish midget to sell-out crowd at the Sydney Bloody Opera House which is this enormous thing here for the record:

Astonishing, and by all accounts it went marvellously. Here are some photos from the night:

Says one blogger, “I attended the performance, it was very good. I particularly enjoyed the Q and A with Eddie Campbell, he had a great sense of humour, he was not happy that the dwarf/midget and his wife are responsible for killing 12 Campbells in the dead of night.”

In fairness though, history has it that us Campbells are a right bunch of bastards anyway. So, y’know. Fair dos.

-- Hayley