The Gosh! Authority 06/01/11

Happy New Year, folks. It’s the sixth of January so your New Year’s resolutions have undoubtedly fallen by the wayside along with my own half-hearted notions of self-improvement. If one of those was to “spend less money on stuff” it’s just as well they’ve been abandoned because there’s a few good’uns in this week’s batch, including a long out of print Chris Ware thing.

You might have missed the post I put up a couple of days ago announcing our Daytripper TP Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition, as signed by our Brazilian pals Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. It won’t be with us until early next month but you can get your pre-order in now if you like.

Already on the shelves is Julie Doucet’s My New New York Diary, which isn’t a new edition of her old New York Diary but something else altogether. This book is what became of Michel Gondry’s idea to collaborate on a film with the award-winning cartoonist.

“The French director proposed to make a film that would make Doucet the centre of the story as she had done before with her autobiographical comic-book novel My New York Diary, but with her drawings as the film's setting and vehicle. As they talked, the process of making the 20-minute film ended up as its very plot.”


It’s a book with a DVD tucked in the back of it and you can see some images from it at Cool Hunting, the original home of the above stolen quote.

Rian Hughes (previously seen on the Gosh! Blog here) has a new one out called Cult-ure. It’s a book about how and why we communicate, ideas and symbols and stuff. Hughes himself puts it thusly:

“This takes the narrative possibilities not of illustration, but of graphic design, and is a kind of "graphic graphic novel". The closest comparison I can make is probably The Medium is the Massage. This began life in a request many years ago by Shelly Bond at DC for me to send her proposals. I think I just confused her when I pitched what ultimately became this book, as it's not really a comic at all. But it does explore the way meaning and language are articulated through images, and sets out to explore the nuts and bolts of the visual language that designers manipulate for their ends. It's subtitled "Ideas can be dangerous!" and should cause a few waves I hope.”

Whatever it is it’s an incredibly well designed object. You can see some of its pages over at Fiell.

The long out of print Acme Novelty Library Volume 18.5 Portfolio is back. It contains oversized prints of all four of the Thanksgiving covers Ware did for the New Yorker back in 2006, along with the fifth that had originally only appeared online. Drawn & Quarterly adds that “if that’s not dreary enough” you’re also bagging yourself a brand new supplementary strip. This is the Lower East Side version of the long-gone Upper East Side version (of which only 175 incredibly pricey editions were produced). This guy has put up some pictures of the original edition so you can see its innards.

I’ve already mentioned Ware so the following newsbite is in no way shoehorned in with an increasingly unsuccessful addition to my cringe-worthy portfolio of terrible segues: Ware’s done a nice big mural somewhere in San Francisco. It adorns the front of 826 Valencia, being the writing school for kids between 6 and 18 founded by Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s). Eye Magazine have a great feature on it and 826 themselves have a less than brilliant photo of it. If you’re in San Francisco please go and take some photos and put them on the internet. That’s what the internet is for – so we can share pictures of Chris Ware things and blow them up real big to a readable size. “It's a very complex mural, and requires its most devoted viewers to study it for about an hour, from the middle of Valencia Street, by far the best vantage point.” If you’re mowed down by a car I had nothing to do with it. [EDIT! Graham Linehan retweeted a brill photo of it here.]

Quebecois cartoonist Pascal Girard’s last offering was the highly-lauded Nicolas, consisting of a series of autobiographical vignettes taking place after the death of his younger brother, when Girard (the elder) was just nine. Bigfoot is his new one, a book about a teenager called Jimmy who becomes a reluctant local celebrity when his so-called-friends put up a YouTube video of him dancing. There’s a PDF preview here, and also a semi-review on the D&Q blog which is worth a read if only for the link to that amazing Star Wars Kid from years ago, who is still funny in case you’d forgotten.

Nicolas De Crecy’s Glacial Period goes very well here at Gosh! so chances are you’ll like his new one too. Salvatore Volume 1: Transports of Love is the first part of his new series starring a dog auto repair mechanic who up and moves his garage to a distant mountain peak where he can build a mode of transportation to get him to his far away beloved. It’s beautifully drawn, weird, absurd and funny too. Worth a look if you’re into strange European comics.

Emitown is the first annual 400-page collection of the online sketchbook diaries of Portland-based cartoonist Emi Lenox. You can tell by her style she was brought up on a diet of manga thanks to her Japanese mum and there are Scott Pigrim-y elements to it too. Lenox has a back-up story in an upcoming issue of Sweet Tooth, and another in a new Madman special. Definitely one to keep an eye on. Here’s a preview and you can see more stuff over at her blog.

Before the ongoing Buffy Season 8 series Joss Whedon and his team of writers put out a whole slew of Buffy comics wedged into MySpace/Dark Horse Presents anthologies, one-shots and numerous miniseries which have so far been languishing unreprinted ‘til today. There’s stuff in this hardcover collection by Gene Colan, Tim Sale, Becky Cloonan (DEMO), Cameron Stewart and more. Preview over at Comicbook Resources.

Also collected for the first time is David Tischman’s 2004 cult-favourite series Fraction about four young toughs who drunkenly steal the components of a high-tech suit of battle armour. If you didn’t catch it at the time there’s a review of the first issue by a comixfan.

As for comics, there’s a Starman/Congorilla One-Shot written by James Robinson with art by Brett Booth. It ties into the whole JLA Omega storyline that’s been running in recent issues of the Justice League of America. It’s the Pick of the Week over at iFanboy.

Another one-shot for the pile is Steel by Steve Lyons (Doctor Who novelist and occasional writing partner of Paul Cornell) and Ed Benes. It marks the beginning of a crossover event focusing on the return of the villain Doomsday, killer of Superman, and continues in Outsiders #37, Justice League of America #55, and Superboy #6. Lyons talks to Newsarama and there’s a preview here.

Lastly, Weird Worlds #1 is the first of a six issue anthology series from DC full of monsters, ghouls and general weirdness. You’ll get three stories per issue (ten pages a chapter): Lobo by Kevin Van Hook (Superman and Batman Vs. Vampires and Werewolves) and Jerry Ordway (Crisis on Infinite Earths), Garbageman by Aaron Lopresti (Justice League: Generation Lost), and Tanga by Kevin Maguire (Doom Patrol). There’s a preview here and over at Project Fanboy Maguire talks about his new creation.

To end the first Gosh! Authority of the new year, here’s a brilliant wee wordless comic by Ryan Andrews who finished it only two days ago. If one of his new year’s resolutions was to “finish something” he’s at least one up on me.

-- Hayley