The Gosh! Authority 25/08/10

Lots of strange arty books lurking on the new shelf this week so I’d wager the blog’s going to be fairly jpeg-heavy. Brace your internets.

Rift is the latest from James Jean, the man responsible for the first seventy or so Fables covers, Process Recess and those XOXO Hugs & Kisses postcards we still have by the counter. It’s an accordian-style fold-out book, postcard sized again, which even works in a MAD Magazine fold-IN way too. Fancy. Says the man himself...

“–each card can stand alone as a single image or the set can be folded to reveal new images hidden within the larger landscapes. There will be a few metallic accents on the flying fish and in the rain.”

You ‘eard. Metallic accents! Here’s a preview from someone who likes fiddling about in Photoshop.

Mark Ryden’s Snow Yak Book HC collects pieces from his acclaimed 2009 solo exhibition at the Tokyo’s Tomio Koyama Gallery along with his own photographs from the show. It’s white, woolly, wintry and weird. There’s 64 pages of it (sketches, commentary, miscellaneous photos included) but you can see much of it online here.

There’s a new Claire Wendling book out called Daisies, collecting her artwork for regional French festival posters from 2006-08 which you won’t have unless you actually went to the festivals in question and pinched a poster off the wall. You’ll also be glad to know there’s the usual bevy of preliminary sketches and notes to keep you up past your bedtime. I should mention that Wendling’s book Desk is now safely back in stock having been sadly missed for some time.


Also back in stock are Volumes 2 to 5 of Inside Moebius along with a new sixth volume.

If you missed them the last time they’re kind of sketchbooky, far less polished than other Moebius stuff you’ll know and they’re all in French so get our your dictionaries. This Spanish reviewer says it’s his “most intimate and mentally masturbated work” which if nothing else is an interesting way of putting it. There are some preview bits on Moebius’ site. And we’ve got his 40 Days in the Desert back in the shop too. Conveniently this one’s entirely silent so it doesn’t matter if they only two languages you speak are good English and bad English.

In the same delivery we received the final three volumes (that’s 10, 11 and 12) of the handsomely priced Storm series by Don Lawrence (Trigan Empire). It’s the only way they’re available for now and in fairness they are mighty fine.

The Boy in the Oak HC is an odd and delicate picture book by Jessica “sister of Damon” Albarn that has been exclusively available at Liberty’s for the last couple of months to coincide with a gallery exhibition there. But now we’ve got it too. Dazed have an interview with Albarn alongside some preview sketches, and the Independent has a better one. The book itself is about a boy and an oak tree but it’s definitely something to see rather than be told about.

Also falling into the category of odd is yet another Edward Gorey book (they’re like buses). Three Classic Children’s Stories collects the Gorey illustrated/James Donnelly penned fairy tales Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant-Killer and Rumpelstiltskin. All in colour too! Have a preview.

Were you at the Comica Comiket over the weekend?

If you were you would no doubt have run into the lovely Paul “Man at the Crossroads” Gravett, just as you would have done if you’d been on the small press scene in the 80s. Artist Ed Pinsent was part of Gravett’s Escape gang, along with people like Eddie Campbell (Alec: The Years Have Pants, From Hell) and Glenn Dakin (Abe: Wrong For All the Right Reasons), and even edited the Fast Fiction magazine for some years. Up until now his work has remained scattered in various self-published comics so if anyone asked for his stuff I couldn’t help them at all. As of this week there’s a great big book I can point them at called Magic Mirror: 354 pages of stories personally selected by Pinsent himself who provides a commentary on them too. They’re scanned from the original artwork so you’ll be seeing them at their original size for the first time rather than shrunk down to fit folded photocopied pamphlets. Pinsent’s got a bunch of sample pages up on his website.

Speaking of the Comiket, we picked up a brand new one from Self Made Hero, a graphic novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the very same one that inspired Apocalypse Now, kiddies). It’s written by David Zane Mairowitz (whose previous work includes Kafka, the Robert Crumb illustrated biography of the novelist) and illustrated by Swedish/Kenyan illustrator Catherine Anyango in murky pencil. Worth a look.

The Tango Collection is a 264-page softcover anthology featuring the selected best bits of the titular Australian romance anthology of which there have been nine volumes since it began in 1997. There are over fifty creators from Australia and New Zealand crammed into the 264 pages including Dylan Horrocks (of Gosh! Favourite Hicksville) and Nicki Greenberg, whose surreal graphic novel adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is I’m told, a masterpiece, but for copyright reasons is unavailable in the UK. In the meantime you should all head over to her website and check out her comics -- they’re excellent and you’ll be glad you did. The hilarious Never Go To Bed Angry actually appeared in Tango originally, and this one I’ll point at simply because it’s a tribute to Herman Melville which means she scores infinity points from me. For a full list of Tango creators head this way.

Archie: The Classic Newspaper Comics HC Volume 1 collects the very first Archie strips from 1946 to 1948, being Bob Montana’s original take on the characters before Dan DeCarlo stepped in and modernised them in the 50s. They’ve never been reprinted before so chances are you’ve probably never read them either. This blog has some scanned panels so you can see how weird they look. In fact, Archie’s so grotesque in that third one down it looks like a Dan Clowes drawing, cartoon sweat beads and all. Look!

Also hitherto unreprinted are Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s Science Dog back-up stories from Invincible. If you’ve only been reading the series in trade collections you will have missed these entirely. Fear not, they’re collected for you this week in a one-shot special. Kirkman talks about it with CbR and there’s a preview here too.

There’s a handful of trade-paperbacks out this week that deserve a mention. Ian Rankin’s Dark Entries and Brian Azzarello’s Filthy Rich (both from the Vertigo Crime line) have arrived, as well as the totally mental Strange Tales, the three-issue anthology series in which indie hotshots re-imagined classic Marvel characters.

Dodgem Logic #5 has landed. In it you’ll find all sorts of delectable nonsense by Tom Pickard, Josie Long, Robin Ince, Kevin O’Neill, Steve Aylett, Steve Holland and its bearded captain Mr Alan Moore. You know the drill.

Here’s one you can expect to see on our shelves very soon. Louis: Night Salad is the latest graphic novel from the Eisner and Ignatz award-nominated Franco-Scottish duo metaphrog aka John Chalmers and Sandra Marrs. It was a staff pick in Previews and you can read their review of it here. Otherwise, sit back and watch their book trailer.



Want it on your order? Let us know.

And lastly, big huge thank yous to everyone who came along to the Bryan Lee O’Malley signing last week. Amazingly, O’Malley managed to sign for everyone in the line before being whisked away to the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World premiere in Leicester Square so no one missed out. Here’s him:

And here’s you:


The film is now OUT so you should go see it. But go see it because you want to see it and not because of Jamie McKelvie’s empty threats on the internet:

If you're in the UK and aren't planning to see Scott Pilgrim when it comes out this week, then I don't think we can be friends.

He said it. I didn't say it.

-- Hayley