The Gosh! Authority 02/09/10

People of Gosh! Hello! This dispatch comes to you a day later than usual thanks to the unlikely addition of a nice and sunny bank holiday to your usual week. Consequently everything has been bumped along the calendar but we’ve dealt with this before; it’s all perfectly normal so there’s no need to panic.

Our pick of the tardy week is The Amazing Screw-On Head & Other Curious Objects by Mike Mignola, a collection of bizarre diversions from the mountain of Hellboy stuff he’s been pumping out over the years.

"The Screw-On Head stuff is me trying like hell to put what is exactly inside my head onto paper -- this funny, weird nonsense world that's made entirely of odd characters and architecture and all this stuff I love."

In it you’ll find the two Eisner Award-winning short stories; the titular Amazing Screw-On Head (obviously) plus The Magician and the Snake, a collaborative effort with his seven-year-old daughter, Katie. That one’s still floating about on the internet but the fifty or so pages of brand new material are not. Comicbook Resources have an interview with Mignola for you.

We’ve also got a truckload of Scott Pilgrim T-Shirts of various sizes and designs. You know what T-shirts are for so there’s no need for me to elucidate. We have an epic amount of shirt. Come and see them before your friend gets one and then you have to buy the one you didn’t want as much so you don’t end up having an embarrassing matching outfit situation. I foresee this happening in my crystal ball.

There’s a nice pile of interesting things from Fantagraphics this week. Firstly there’s Drunken Dream & Other Stories HC by the legendary Moto Hagio, whose acclaimed shōjo (girls’ comics) are seeing print in English for the very first time. There are ten stories in this collection which spans an entire career of work (Hagio’s been at it for over 40 years) along with an interview and a foreword by underground comix icon Trina Robbins. Here’s a PDF preview, and you can have a video too.

If you’re as much of a fan of the Fantagraphics video as we are you’re in for a treat today. We’ve got no less than four new Ignatz releases from Coconino Press and they’ve all been manhandled on camera. Grotesque #4 is the final chapter of Sergio Ponchione’s bizarre masterpiece (video), Interiorae #4 is the final glimpse you’ll get into the lives of everyone in the apartment building (video), but Niger #3 is not the end (video) and nor is Sammy the Mouse #3 (video). Handsome books. And they always smell nice.

In trade-paperback this week you’ll be getting Atomic Robo Volume 4: Other Strangeness which collects the Atomic Robo and the Revenge of the Vampire Dimension mini-series. This reviewer reckons it’s a good jumping-on point if you’ve never delved before, so delve, jump, and verb away. Along with the core mini-series you'll also be getting the Free Comic Book Day short story from last year and a whole bunch of mini-comics that have never seen print before. More than yer average.

The Big Book O’ Ditko SC is the sixth collection from the folks over at Pure Imagination. It’s in the same line as the three volumes of the Steve Ditko Reader, Steve Ditko’s The Thing & Other Stories and the more recent, Steve Ditko: Edge of Genius. It collects some of his best and little-known work and you can find a full list of the stuff reprinted over at Ditko-Fever.com.

Comics! DC’s spending September revisiting some of their most illustrious war comics from the 50s, 60s and 70s beginning with Our Army At War, a one-shot by DC editor Mike Marts and Victor Ibanez. Here’s what you can expect in the next few weeks:

Weird War Tales, by Ivan Brandon and Darwyn Cooke
Our Fighting Forces, by B. Clay Moore and Chad Hardin
Star-Spangled War Stories, by William Tucci and Justiniano
G.I. Combat, by Matt Sturges and Phil Winslade

Cooke and Brandon talk about it with Comicbook Resources here. Want ‘em on your order? Let me know.

Three new X-titles begin this week and there’s a Gosh! Favourite in all of ‘em. Laurence Campbell pencils Deadpool: Pulp #1 (of 4) written by Mike Benson and Adam Glass, a pulpy adventure story that carries the same nuclear war paranoia as the classic noir flick Kiss Me Deadly (a cracking film, that) but with your usual dose of Deadpool humour. Campbell’s art is predictably brilliant, and Benson’s a fan too:

“…Laurence's books are little Michael Mann films. Dark, but slick. He's able to really create a mood that brings such rich texture to the world he draws. That's what makes Laurence so ideal for a book like this. Adam and I are truly in awe of his talents.”

More of that interview and a preview.

Andrew’s bromance with Jason Aaron (Scalped) is still as strong as ever so I’ve been told to point out Wolverine #1 with art by Renato Guedes (Superman), and Wolverine: Road to Hell One-Shot by Aaron, Rick Remender and more. Preview of that one here. There’s a Q&A with Aaron over at CbR where he’ll tell you what ties into what and who’s going to Hell but he won’t tell you who gets out. Yet. Speaking of Remender, the final issue of Last Days of American Crime (#3 of 3) hits the shelves tomorrow, along with Greg Rucka’s final Stumptown (#4 of 4).

I wasn’t going to mention this one but I will anyway because I rather like Harry Clarke. There’s a slim softcover volume out this week called Nightmares in Decay collecting all of the illustrations he did for Edgar Allan Poe stories. They’re like Aubrey Beardsley illustrations only grotesque and filled with hairy beasts, rotting corpses and rats. This is a very good blog post rounding up many of his illustrations. Anyway, the real reason for my mentioning it is that in my travels in the wilds of the internets I also found this site from which you can purchase thongs (UK thongs, not Australian thongs) bearing Harry Clarke illustrations in the groinal region (obviously). Classy, that’s what that is.

And finally, the lovely Set to Sea by Drew Weing is now back in stock! Weing is now selling the original art on the internet and I only heard about it from Sarah McIntyre (who has recently embarked on a Comics Jam with our very own Barnaby Richards) after she had cunningly secured her favourite page already. You can see them all here and if anyone wants to buy me the one with the big whale in it feel free.

-- Hayley