The Gosh! Authority 01/03/11

Before I launch into the regular weekly list of stuff that you might like to stick on your shopping list, there’s a thing about this week’s delivery that you should know and that thing is this:

For some reason we won’t receive many of this week’s scheduled comics (including all Marvel and DC periodicals) until some time on Wednesday morning, which when babelfished from Delivery Man Speak might well mean “Wednesday afternoon”. So if you were thinking of collecting your comics on Wednesday morning/lunchtime it might be worth waiting until later in the day, or perhaps you’d like to pretend it’s the olden days and turn up on Thursday just for kicks. The titles affected are as follows:

Annihilators #1 (Of 4)
Avengers Academy #10
Avengers Thor Captain America Official Index Marvel Universe #11
Azrael #18
Batman Beyond #3
Batman Confidential #54
Batman Streets Of Gotham #20
Boys #52
Brightest Day #21
Bring The Thunder #3
Captain America And Falcon #1
Clint #6
Daken Dark Wolverine #6
DC Comics Presents Superman Doomsday #1
DC Universe Online Legends #3
Deadpool #32 Point One
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep #20 (Of 24)
First Wave #6 (Of 6)
Freedom Fighters #7
Giant Size Atom #1
Green Lantern #63
Heroes For Hire #4
House Of Mystery #35
Incognito Bad Influences #4
Joe The Barbarian #8 (Of 8)
Jonah Hex #65
Marvel Previews March 2011
Marvel Zombies Supreme #1 (Of 5)
Powers #7
Previews #270 March 2011
Secret Six #31
Stand No Mans Land #2 (Of 5)
Sweet Tooth #19
Thor Spotlight
Tick New Series #8
Ultimate Comics Captain America #3 (Of 4)
Usagi Yojimbo #135
Vampirella Masters Series TP Vol 3 Mark Millar
Wolverine Best There Is #4
Wolverine Hercules Myths Monsters And Mutants #1
X-Factor #216

So that’s the admin part over. Here’s what else you can expect to find on the shelves whenever you chose to darken our doorstep:

Mad cross-hatcher and half of the band Lightning Bolt Brian Chippendale has a new book out through PictureBox called If ‘n’ Oof, a sort of buddy-movie style horror/comedy/adventure about two dudes in search of a home and snacks: “It’s a gin-you-wine, cheesy little love story between these guys,” said Chippendale. The Comics Journal said in a 2006 review of his previous work that his stuff had a tendency to be a little hard to process, but the man himself reckons this is his most accessible work to date:

“If people can’t read this book by me, then forget it. For me, at least. If you can’t read this book, you just can’t read comics. But Christopher [Forgues, aka Powr Mastrs cartoonist C.F.] read it, and I kept being like, “Christopher, it’s just the most simple thing in the world,” and he was like, “Uhhh…I don’t know if it’s simple…” [Laughs] I guess it is still a little tricky, but as far as readability goes, it’s goddamn readable."

More of that interview at Comicbook Resources and a preview at PictureBox.

Nick Bertozzi is a multiple award-winning cartoonist you’ll probably know best from the online comics collective ACT-I-VATE, and its real-life hardcopy ACT-I-VATE Primer a couple of years back. More recently he was responsible for Andrew’s favourite storyline in Marvel’s Strange Tales series …AND CALL MY LOVER M.O.D.O.K! which was as mental as it sounds. This time he graces the Gosh! shelves with Lewis & Clark, the first in a series of graphic novels from First Second about famous explorers (he’s doing Shackleton next).

“I was initially attracted to the story just as a formal exercise. I'd wanted to draw a mini-comic of the journey, in which the Westward portion of the trip was drawn on the top half of the comics' pages, and when the reader came to the last page of the comic, they'd flip it over and read the Eastward, return trip printed on the bottom half of the pages. That led to some research and eventually to the book as it is now,” he said.

Bertozzi guest-blogged at the First Second website about how to make comics, and how to make this comic in particular. Loads of pictures to see there but if you’re still after more you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Walking Shadows HC by Neil Bousfield is an amazing looking wordless graphic novel in woodcuts, reminiscent of Lynd Ward (Mad Man’s Drum) or Frans Masereel (The City: A Vision in Woodcuts). It’s about an English working-class family in the present day struggling to make ends meet: a grim and bitter match for the hyper-detailed Expressionist artwork. There are over two hundred woodcuts in the book, full of pubs, chip shops, housing estates, marauding youth and other things that might make you push your keys through the gaps in your fingers in your pocket as you walk home late at night. I’ve not read it properly yet, but it seems very Mike Leigh. The Rumpus has a great review by someone who knows more about it than I do.

Craig Yoe’s endless fountain of enthusiasm has produced another great retrospective collection: Popeye Volume 1: The Best Comic Stories by Bud Sagendorf. Sagendorf got his start in comics as assistant to Popeye creator E.C. Segar on Thimble Theatre and Sappo, eventually taking over many of the Popeye comics a few years after Segar’s death. This volume collects his stuff from the ‘40s and ‘50s, featuring the old classic characters like the Sea Hag, Bluto, Olive Oyl, Wimpy, and Sweepea, along with some of his own creations. I can’t find any previews hanging about but Yoe’s stuff is always impeccably reproduced so you don’t really need one.

Caricaturist Drew Friedman of RAW, Esquire, The New Yorker, MAD, and all those other periodicals that need not be mentioned because you already know who I’m talking about, has a new collection of grotesquery for you: Sideshow Freaks. It’s a series of paintings of legendary characters from the time of Barnum and Bailey and the golden age of sideshow. You might recognise some of them from Tod Browning’s excellent and totally un-PC film, like Johnny Eck the Half Boy and Schlitzie the pinhead. Boing Boing have a few images along with a history of the freaks themselves (they’re hidden in those thumbnails up the top that I didn’t notice the first time round), and there’s a review of the book here.

In hardcover this week you can grab Grant Morrison’s Batman: Time and the Batman which collects issues #700 - #703, post-Batman R.I.P. David Finch, Tony Daniel, Andy Kubert and Frank Quitely provide the pictures. Over at Comicbook Resources they’ve got issue by issue reviews for the pedantic. Protip: scroll the the bottom for the later ones.

Tri-named collaborators Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming (both of Powers) launch the first part of their new all-ages graphic novel series tomorrow: Takio. “It’s the story of a multiracial, adoptive family. There are two sisters who are really getting on each others nerves. They have an overprotective mother who makes them stay together all the time, and they drive each other crazy," said Bendis to Comicbook Resources. "Accidentally, as it often happens in these things, they get super powers and become the first super heroes in the world. But because their over protective mother would kill them if she finds out, they have to be home by 6 - no matter what." Check out the preview at iFanboy.

Lots of classic stuff is out in trade-paperback this week such as SuperPatriot: America’s Fighting Force, being pre-Invincible Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s epic miniseries featuring Erik Larsen’s aging superhero SuperPatriot. The Daily Blam have a preview. Incidentally, if you’re a fan of Larsen you should pick up this week’s Herculian: a collection of short stories and one-shots from all over the place. There’s Reggie the Veggie from the Popgun anthology, his 24-Hour comic Guy Talk, some other old stuff and some unexpected new stuff too. "There ended up being some new stuff in it just because I did the pagination wrong and I thought I had 48 pages worth of stuff, but it turns out I didn't. I'm sitting there putting it all together and I'm like, 'Holy crap, I'm short. What do I do?' So I ended up coming up with some new stories for it." More of that interview at CbR, and Newsarama have another one.

All six issues of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s re-coloured Thor: Tales of Asgard are on the shelves in a paperback collection, as is WildC.A.T.S. Version 3.0 Year Two TP by Joe Casey, Dustin Nguyen, Sean Phillips and Duncan Rouleau. There’s Captain Britain Volume 5: Endgame TP by Alan Moore, Jamie Delano and Alan Davis, and you can grab some more classic Delano in the newly reprinted Hellblazer Volume 1: Original Sins.

A couple of small press things have made the shift from the shelf downstairs to the one upstairs by virtue of being talked about loads on the internet: Fall of the Wolfmen is a lycanthropic graphic novel by Dave West and Andy Bloor which one reviewer described as Reservoir Dogs meets The Howling. Kieron Gillen (Phonogram) called it a 'A Dark Jewel in British Indie Comics.' Bloor links to a bunch of other reviews on his blog.

Then there’s Fallen Heroes, a comic adaptation by Mark Conaghan and Steve Penfold of the novel by Geek Syndicate’s Barry Nugent. They talk about it on a panel at the Cardiff International Comic Expo and more over at their blog. The first printing has already sold out but we’ve still got some of them. Who wants one?

Jeff Lemire pops up twice in our delivery this week: there’s the latest issue of his ongoing series Sweet Tooth as well as Giant-Size Atom, a one-off bumper-sized special in which he concludes the story he began in Adventure Comics #521. If you’d like to pick up Giant-Size Atom but missed the previous bits, Lemire fills you in at CbR.

As for Number Ones, here’s a round up:

Annihilators #1 (of 4) by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning sees Silver Surfer, Gladiator, Quasar, Beta Ray Bill and Ronan the Accuser team up against some baddies. “Though it grows out of the [Thanos Imperitive] continuity we have established, [Annihilators] is also very much a new start, a great new place to jump on and get to know the cosmic books. It’s a bold new direction to take. If it’s successful, well then we will do some more. It all depends on how well it’s received.” More of that at Newsarama and a preview at CbR.

Axe Cop: Bad Guy Earth #1 (of 3) is the brand new miniseries following on from the success of the hit webcomic written by a six-year-old and illustrated by his thirty-year-old brother that was later collected into a book – I wrote about back here on the Gosh! Blog. “Bad Guy Earth was written over the span of a month and is our first attempt at a “feature length” Axe Cop story that is in 3 Act structure. It is insanely epic. The people who have had a look at it have loved it. It is sort of a whole new level for Axe Cop because so much work went into it. It was not just farted out. It is the product of hours and hours of real play time, and it is the most epic Axe Cop story yet. It is a three part miniseries, all one story titled Bad Guy Earth.” There’s an interview with Ethan Nicolle (the elder brother) over at Strange Kids Club about all sorts of things, and a preview at Dark Horse of the new three-parter.

The Intrepids #1 is a new ongoing from Image by Kurtis J. Wiebe and illustrator Scott Kowalchuck about a collection of runaway teenagers who have been taken in by an aging inventor. "At the surface, it's a bizarre, high action series," said Wiebe to CbR. "A whole bunch of homeless kids have been taken in by an inventor, who sends them on missions that involve taking down mad scientists. That's what it looks like when you take a look at the preview pages, but there's a heart as well: it's basically about these kids who are trying to find their identity while going out and fighting battle baboons." Said preview pages and the rest of that interview can be found at Comicbook Resources.

Carbon Grey #1 is a series about four beautiful sisters, descendants of a mythical hero of their nation’s golden era. When the ruler they were sworn to protect is assassinated, one of the sisters is the prime suspect. “Without giving too much away, for me the story is about the potential in us to be either creative or destructive. At the core of it, it’s about family, traditions and honours. Carbon Grey is our creation myth, and hopefully that grand statement will make more sense as the series progresses,” said videogame artist Hoang Nguyen (Punisher: War Zone, Alien Legion), who illustrates the series. More of that interview at Newsarama and a preview at the Daily Blam.

That’s all for this week’s delivery but that ain’t it, news-wise. Westminster Libraries are holding a competition called Little Big Stories which is all about telling stories in pictures. Submission guidelines and details are over on their blog. You’d best get cracking: the deadline is the 11th of March.

Here’s a rare treat that you should leap on immediately: Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti (of Chimera, and Fantagraphics’ recent Stigmata) will be appearing in conversation with Dave McKean on the 12th of March. He’ll be discussing his entire career to date which includes a book of illustrations to accompany Lou Reed’s concept album The Raven, due out this Summer (here’s a picture of the two signing some books). Tickets are already on sale through the Comica website so avoid tears and grab ‘em while you can. It’s happening just after closing time at the London Comic and Small Press Expo so you should head along to that too. David Hine and Shaky Kane (Bulletproof Coffin) are going to be there, and you can say hello to the likes of all-round lovely human Sarah McIntyre (Vern & Lettuce Gosh! Bookplate Edition), David O’Connell of Tozo fame, and Lizz Lunney whose recent delivery of small press stuff is currently on the shelves.

Speaking of meeting comics creators, Richard Cowdry decided The Comix Reader launch drink-up at Gosh! local The Crown was such a success that he’s going to do it on the first Wednesday of every month. It’s basically a bunch of people having a drink and talking about underground comics of the past, present and future unless they’re talking about something else. You’re welcome to join them. The first one’s tomorrow tonight. See you there?

-- Hayley