Gosh! Comics Blog

2011-09-24T17:11:00.002+01:00

Hello folks,

this old, tired blog is now defunct and the Gosh! Authority, new comics updates, and much much more has moved over to a proper website! It's at:

http://www.goshlondon.com

So update your bookmarks if you want to continue getting all the news and chatter about what's come out this week and what exciting events we will be hosting at our new digs in Soho (1 Berwick Street, W1F 0DR).

Dear Internet, change your bookmarks.

2011-06-28T15:56:00.005+01:00

We're shifting all of our blogging over to our new website. The weekly Gosh! Authority will no longer appear here so change your RSS feeds, browser bookmarks or simply replace this memorised web address in your head with a new one.

-- Hayley

Due to Arrive 06/07/11

2011-06-28T15:38:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

15 Love #2 (Of 3)
50 Girls 50 #2 (Of 4)
Adventure Comics #528
Anita Blake Circus Damned TP Vol 1
Astonishing Thor #5 (Of 5)
Batman And Robin #25
Batman Beyond #7
Batman Knightfall TP Part 1
Broken Bat New Ptg
Blue Estate #4
Broken Trinity TP Vol 2 Pandora's Box
Cap And Thor Avengers #1
Captain America First Vengeance TP
Captain America Hail Hydra TP
Cars 2 #2 (Of 2)
Chew #19
Classic Next Men TP Vol 1
Conan Legacy Frazetta Cover #8 (Of 8)
Conan TP Vol 5 Rogues In The House
Danger Girl Campbell Sketchbook HC
Dark Tower Gunslinger Battle Of Tull #2 (Of 5)
DC Comics Presents Superman #4
DC Universe Online Legends #11
Doctor Solar Man Of Atom #7
Elephantmen #32
Fear Itself #4 (Of 7) Fear
Fear Itself Uncanny X-Force #1 (Of 3) Fear
Fear Itself Wolverine #1 (Of 3) Fear
Fear Itself Youth In Revolt #3 (Of 6) Fear
Flashpoint #3
Flashpoint
Abin Sur The Green Lantern #2 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Batman Knight Of Vengeance #2
Flashpoint Secret Seven #2 (Of 3)
Flashpoint The World Of Flashpoint #2 (Of 3)
Gladstone's School For World Conquerors #3
Godzilla Kingdom Of Monsters #4
Gotham Central TP Vol 2 Jokers And Madmen
Green Arrow HC Vol 1 Into The Woods
Green Wake #4 (Of 5)
Halo TP Blood Line
Hellboy The Fury #2 (Of 3)
Heroes For Hire #9 Fear
Heroes For Hire TP Control
House Of Mystery #39
Hulk #36
Infinity Inc HC Vol 1 The Generations Saga
Intrepids #5
Iron Siege TP
iZombie #15
Jonah Hex #69
Kull TP Vol 2 Hate Witch
Locke & Key HC Vol 4 Keys To The Kingdom
Locke & Key TP Vol 3 Crown Of Shadows
Mad Harry Potter Special #1
Magic Knight Rayearth Omnibus Vol 1
Magnus Robot Fighter #7
Marineman #6
Memoir #4 (Of 6)
Moon Knight #3
Moriarty #3
Mysterious Ways #1 (Of 6)
Northlanders TP Vol 5 Metal
Ozma Of Oz #8 (Of 8)
Red Skull #1 (Of 5)
Reed Gunther #2
Repulse One-Shot
Revolver TP
Rodd Racer One-Shot
Scarlet Prem HC Vol 1
Screamland Ongoing #2
Secret Six #35
Shinku #2
Solomon Kane Red Shadows #4 (Of 4)
Spider-Girl #8
Suicide Girls #4 (Of 4)
Superboy #9
Supreme Power #2 (Of 4)
Sweet Tooth #23
That Hellbound Train #2 (Of 3)
Thunderbolts #160 Fear
Titans Annual 2011 #1
Trailblazer One-Shot
Transformers 3 Movie Adaptation #4 (Of 4)
True Blood Tainted Love #5
Uncanny X-Men #540 Fear Itself
Usagi Yojimbo Ltd HC & TP Vol 25 Fox Hunt
Vengeance #1 (Of 6)
Walking Dead Survivors Guide #4 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #27
Wolverine And Black Cat Claws 2 #1 (Of 3)
X-23 #12
X-Files 30 Days Of Night TP
X-Men #14

The Gosh! Authority 28/06/11

2011-06-28T14:42:00.017+01:00

In the words of Professor Farnsworth, “Good news, everyone!” Gosh! has outgrown its wee shop at 39 Great Russell Street so WE’RE MOVING to new, bigger premises at No. 1 Berwick Street, Soho – the first time this has happened in just over 25 years. Our fancy new shop is being kitted out by Callum Lumsden whose work you might have seen Mary Portas praising on telly. That alone is all very exciting – but there’s MORE! Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill will be joining us for a signing on the 30th of July to celebrate the release of their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 and to tread biscuit crumbs into the carpet I will no longer have to hoover. The new shop opens on Saturday the 6th of August and we’ve got more signings and events to dribble out in bite-size chunks over the coming weeks.

I’ve just read an interview with Peter Maresca, the man who accidentally became a publisher just because he wanted to show off his collection of classic strip comics. With a stash that included Little Nemo and Walt & Skeezix who wouldn’t? The latest from Maresca’s Sunday Press is Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900 – 1915 and it gets top billing this week not just because it dwarfs everything beside it, but because Maresca puts so much effort and love into these mammoth books that probably daunt most retailers. They’d probably be easier to set sail on than get home on the tube. In this new one you can find The Kin-der-Kids, Wee Willie Winkie’s World, and The Explorigator by Henry Grant Dart, Nibsy the Newsboy by George McManus, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend Sundays by Winsor McCay, and dozens of other bits from John Gruelle, Gustave Verbeek, Herbert Crowley, John R. Neill and more. There’s also this one:

“Many pages display a "steampunk" sensibility 100 years before it became a popular comics sub-genre. Charles Forbell's Naughty Pete (1913) is unlike any comic strip of its day, with a look that is decades ahead of its time. In theme and design you can sense the work of Frank King, Charles Schulz, Jules Feiffer, Bill Watterson, and, of course, Chris Ware.”

Preview pages run alongside that interview but there are a few more over at Sunday Press.

From Top Shelf you can have Lucille, the English translation of an award winning French graphic novel by Ludovic Debeurme. Two complexly traumatised teenagers who have inherited strange and terrible problems from their families embark on a bold trip across Europe to try and overcome them. Clocking in at 550 pages you can expect this one to weigh you down a bit. So far, Debeurme’s stripped-back line art universally reminds every reviewer of John Porcellino, Anders Nilsen or early-Chester Brown indie comics – it’s not his set style though, as I discovered when I delved further into the Internet and discovered these frankly creepy illustrations. There’s a preview of Lucille here (though I’ll warn you they’re not the cheeriest 15 pages of comic you’ll read today) and a review here and here.

Marvel are going through their bottom drawers again and just like the Grant Museum finding a dodo they never knew they had, they discovered some Steve Ditko pencils they never got round to publishing. In the introduction, Karl Kesel writes about how he had too much on his plate back in 1986 so had to pass on inking some other Ditko job, but he gets another go at it in Incredible Hulk & Human Torch: From The Marvel Vault #1 and is pretty astounded and thankful about it too. Read all that in the online preview. Next to it on the shelf you can also grab the Incredible Hulks Annual #1 written by John Layman of Chew fame. Preview here.

Kesel is revelling in it this week – he also gets to see his work next to Jack “King” Kirby. Captain America Rebirth is a one-shot collecting Tales of Suspense #63, #65 – #69 by Stan Lee and Kirby, in which the origins of Captain America and the Red Skull are revealed. The issues are all fully remastered and re-coloured and Kesel writes and draws a new framing sequence. Don’t forget you can get more Captain America in the All Winners Squad: Band of Heroes #1 (of 8) by Paul Jenkins and Carmine Di Gidandomenico where it’s WWII and Cap heads up a top-secret all-hero unit of the military. The Daily Blam has a preview.

Speaking of WWII, Fabien Nury and John Cassaday’s (Planetary) I Am Legion HC is a supernatural take on the event. “I've always been a bit of a WWII buff, and the way Fabien inserted the supernatural element into a wartime thriller made it an easy choice,” said Cassaday back in 2008 to Comicbook Resources. “I didn't want to be a part of any cliché run-of-the-mill horror story. There's nothing out there quite like it, at least not in comics.”

Paul Cornell is one of the most English men in England so it’s little wonder he swung it at DC so he could stage the entire first issue of Knight & Squire entirely at the pub. The six-issue miniseries illustrated by Jimmy Broxton (The Unwritten) is collected in trade-paperback this week. Here’s an old interview I linked to before the comic landed.

There are some fairly horrific things in comics this week, not least of which is Something Monstrous by grim-doings enthusiast, Mr Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and R.H. Stavis. Illustrated by Stephanie Buscema (who started out as an inker for her grandfather John Buscema), it’s about something mysterious killing all the old people in town. Buscema’s cartoon retro art is the hook on this one – head over to her blog to see what I’m on about.

Robert Kirkman’s new Image imprint Skybound sees is flagship title hit the shelves this week. Witch Doctor #1 (of 4) is a book Warren Ellis has simply called “mental”. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, writer Brandon Seifert said “[artist] Lukas [Ketner] and I are both big fans of series that blend horror and SF with other genres — Lukas loves The Goon, I love Buffy, and we both love Hellboy and Doctor Who. Those are all series where you can do a variety of stories with a variety of tones, and Witch Doctor is sort of our own personal equivalent. More specifically, I love the idea of the occult doctor, the doctor who investigates the supernatural. That’s an idea that’s been around almost as long as horror fiction, but I’d never seen it played straight. I wanted to see a hero who approached monsters the way a doctor would, instead of being played as a generic monster hunter or mystic. Lukas and I both love jerky, snarky anti-hero types, and we thought it’d be fun to make our occult doctor sort of a Dr. House type. So that was another element. The last thing, the final ingredient, was the monsters. Pretty soon into thinking about Witch Doctor, I realized the monsters all needed to be crossed with actual diseases and awful stuff from real biology. For me, that’s when everything finally came together, and we had our comic." Preview and a review over at Comicbook Resources.

The Sixpenny Murder is a one-shot about Victorian street crime that was made as part of a 16-week program for modern-day youths involved in gang culture and the like. It’s written by John A. Short, publisher at Kult Creations, and illustrated by David Hitchcock (Springheeled Jack). Review and preview at Escape From Tomorrow.

Richard Moore of Boneyard gives you a new four-part series with Gobs #1 about a bunch of goblins who, after being kicked out of their old favourite pub, set up a new one in the hollowed-out body of a dead giant. As you do.

In the Marvel camp you can get Marvel Universe Vs The Punisher -– the four-issue miniseries by Jonathan Maberry and Goran Parlov in trade paperback, as well as Marvel Universe Vs Wolverine #1 the first of another four-parter by Jonathan Maberry, this time with Gosh! Favourie Laurence Campbell on art duties. Preview of that one here.

One Month To Live was a five-part series penned by four different writers (Rick Remender, Rob Williams, Stuart Moore & John Ostrander) and illustrated by even more artists (Andrea Mutti, Koi Turnbull, Shawn Moll, Shane White, Graham Nolan & Jamie McKelvie) As for the plot: “This was a concept that [Wacker] had come up with after dealing with some personal issues... It’s a unique story in the Marvel Universe exploring things that we all can relate to, an examination of mortality, somewhat akin to ‘The Death of Captain Marvel’ but with an everyman bestowed powers. [Main character Dennis Sykes] is sort of like any of us in this situation... We all think we have 70 to 80 years to mess around; Dennis realizes he’s only got 30 days. It boils down to him discovering what is truly important to him, and what kind of mark he wants to leave on the world.” The rest of that interview and preview pages are here.

Here’s an odd piece of news. Pat Mills (2000AD) has penned a series of comic strips to launch the game inFAMOUS by PS3. The strips are a series of moral dilemmas featuring celebrities like Beyonce, Jay-Z, Cheryl Cole, Lady Gaga and the like, illustrated by a bunch of UK comics creators you’ll no doubt recognise. You can see them over at the inFAMOUS website.

And finally, Eddie Campbell has started blogging again. If I were you I’d get amongst it NOW because you never know when he’ll chuck a strop again and disappear from the Internet. Heads up for those in Australia: he’s doing at talk at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Graphic festival, at which Robert Crumb is a guest too! Can someone give Crumb a piggyback on my behalf?

-- Hayley

P.S. RSSers! This is the last post I'll be doing at the blogspot. Please change all your bookmarks etc over to our website.

In Store 23/06/11 - 29/06/11

2011-06-28T14:39:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

2000 AD #1739 & #1740
Judge Dredd Megazine #312
27 TP Vol 1 First Set
American Vampire #16
Angel Omnibus TP Vol 1
Aquaman Death Of A Prince TP
Artifacts #8 (Of 13)
Avengers Childrens Crusade #6 (Of 9)
Batman Arkham City #3 (Of 5)
Batman Incorporated #7 (Morrison)
Batman Knight And Squire TP (Paul Cornell)
Detective Comics #878
Butcher Baker Righteous Maker #4
All Winners Squad Band Of Heroes #1 (Of 8) (Di Giandomenico)
Captain America
- America’s Avenger #1
- First Vengeance #4 (Of 4)
- Rebirth One-Shot (Jack Kirby)
Creepy Comics #6
Danger Girl Army Of Darkness #2
Daomu #5
Daredevil Yellow TP (Tim Sale)
Death Of Zorro #5
Dr Who Insider #4
Drums #2 (Of 4)
Dungeons & Dragons HC Vol 1 Shadowplay
Fear Itself Black Widow #1 Fear Itself
FF #5 (Jonathan Hickman)
Flashpoint Green Arrow Industries One-Shot
Flashpoint:
- Hal Jordan #1 (Of 3)
- Project Superman #1 (Of 3)
- Canterbury Cricket One-Shot
Forgotten Fantasy: Sunday Comics 1900-1915 HC
Gobs #1 (Of 4) (Richard Moore)
Goon #34 (Eric Powell)
Gotham City Sirens #24
Green Hornet Strikes #8
Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #11 (War of the GLs)
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Hal Jordan One-Shot
Heavy Metal Summer 2011
I Am Legion SC (John Cassaday)
Incorruptible #19
Incredible Hulk & Human Torch: From Marvel Vault One-Shot (Steve Ditko)
Incredible Hulks Annual #1
Iron Age #1 (Of 3)
JSA 80 Page Giant 2011 #1
Justice Society Of America #52
Knights Of The Dinner Table #175
Lucille GN
Mad Magazine #510
Magdalena #7
Marvel Previews July 2011
Marvel Universe Vs Punisher TP
Marvel Universe Vs Wolverine #1 (Of 4) (Laurence Campbell)
Marvel Zombies Supreme #5 (Of 5)
One Month To Live TP (J. McKelvie)
Previews #274 July 2011
Project Superpowers Black Terror TP Vol 3
Ratchet And Clank TP
Red Robin Hit List TP
Rocketeer Adventures #2 (Of 4)
Scalped #50 (J. Aaron/D. Haspiel)
Secret History #15
She-Hulks TP Hunt For Intelligencia
Simpsons Super Spectacular #13
Sixpenny Murder One-Shot
Sixth Gun #12
Something Monstrous GN (S. Niles)
Amazing Spider-Man #664
Amazing Spider-Man Big Time One-Shot
Spider-Man Original Clone Saga TP
Strange Case Of Mr Hyde #3 (Of 4)
Super Dinosaur #3
Marvel Masterworks Mighty Thor TP Vol 3
Thor TP Blood And Thunder
Thunder Agents #8
Transformers Heart Of Darkness #4
Ultimate Comics X #5 (Art Adams)
Vampirella Scarlet Legion #2
Venom #4
Walking Dead #86 (R. Kirman)
Walking Dead Weekly #26
Witch Doctor #1 (Of 4)
Wonder Woman #612
Deadpool Dead Head Redemption TP
Uncanny X-Men #539 (K. Gillen)
Wolverine Best There Is #7
X-Force TP Sex And Violence
X-Men Prelude To Schism #4 (Of 4)
X-Men Second Coming Revelations TP
Xombi #4(Frazer Irving)

Air Gear GN Vol 18
Yakuza Moon True Story Of Gangsters Daughter GN

Due to Arrive 29/06/11

2011-06-21T15:22:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

27 TP Vol 1 First Set
All Winners Squad Band Of Heroes #1 (Of 8)
Amazing Spider-Man #664
Amazing Spider-Man Big Time #1
American Vampire #16
Angel Omnibus TP Vol 1
Aquaman Death Of A Prince TP
Avengers Children's Crusade #6 (Of 9)
Batman Arkham City #3 (Of 5)
Batman Incorporated #7
Batman Knight And Squire TP
Broken Trinity TP Vol 2 Pandora's Box
Butcher Baker Righteous Maker #4
Caniff HC
Captain America Americas Avenger #1
Captain America First Vengeance #4 (Of 4)
Captain America Rebirth #1
Chew #19
Conan TP Vol 5 Rogues In The House
Creepy Comics #6
Daomu #5
Daredevil Yellow TP
Deadpool Dead Head Redemption TP
Detective Comics #878
Drums #2 (Of 4)
Dungeons & Dragons HC Vol 1 Shadowplague
Elephantmen #32
Fear Itself Black Widow #1 Fear
FF #5
Flashpoint Green Arrow Industries #1
Flashpoint Hal Jordan #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Project Superman #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint The Canterbury Cricket #1
Godzilla Kingdom Of Monsters #4
Goon #34
Gotham City Sirens #24
Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #11
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Hal Jordan #1
Incredible Hulk & Human Torch Marvel Vault #1
Incredible Hulks Annual #1
Iron Age #1 (Of 3)
JSA 80 Page Giant 2011 #1
Justice Society Of America #52
Mad Magazine #510
Magdalena #7
Magic Knight Rayearth DH Omnibus Ed Vol 1
Marineman #6
Marvel Adventures Avengers TP Captain America Marvel Universe Vs Punisher TP
Marvel Universe Vs Wolverine #1 (Of 4)
Marvel Zombies Supreme #5 (Of 5)
Mice Templar Vol 3 #5
Marvel Masterworks Mighty Thor TP Vol 3
One Month To Live TP
Ratchet And Clank TP
Red Robin Hit List TP
Rodd Racer One-Shot
Sam & Twitch Complete Collection HC Vol 1
Scalped #50
She-Hulks TP Hunt For Intelligencia
Something Monstrous GN
Spider-Man Original Clone Saga TP
Strange Case Of Mr Hyde #3 (Of 4)
Suicide Girls #4 (Of 4)
Super Dinosaur #3
Thor TP Blood And Thunder
Thunder Agents #8
Transformers Prime TP Vol 3
True Blood Tainted Love #5
Ultimate Comics X #5
Uncanny X-Men #539
Usagi Yojimbo #138 & Ltd HC & TP Vol 25
Venom #4
Walking Dead #86
Walking Dead Weekly #26
Witch Doctor #1 (Of 4)
Wolverine Best There Is #7
Wonder Woman #612
World Of Archie Double Digest #8
X-Force TP Sex And Violence
X-Men Prelude To Schism #4 (Of 4)
Xombi #4

The Gosh! Authority 21/06/11

2011-06-21T14:10:00.024+01:00

Exciting things are afoot! We have a brand new website designed by our very own Julia Scheele (with a Meet The Staff page and everything, hello how do you do) so make sure you switch your RSS feeds and bookmarks, etc. Also we’ve also got ten pieces of original art from Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s upcoming League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 on our walls. They’ve been there for about a week and already loads of you have come and gazed up at them with longing and downright impatience.

We may be biased but we highly recommend popping in for a real life preview if you haven’t already, and while you’re here you can reserve your bookplated copies with our handy standing order service. I will keep going on about this until you do, yes.

Top of the pops this week is the Scary Godmother Comic Book Stories TP by Gosh! Favourite Jill Thompson (Beasts of Burden, soon to be a motion picture don’t you know). It differs from the most recent Scary Godmother hardcover in that it’s a collection of the comic book stuff rather than all of her children’s books stuck together. There are also nineteen pages full-colour sketchbook which – if sitting beside her and watching her sketch for hours at a Gosh! signing is anything to go by – should be a compendium of ridiculously beautifully and polished artwork of a calibre rarely found in bonus sketchbook sections. She really is an excellent artist and a lovely lady too. Here’s a preview courtesy of Dark Horse.

Chester 5000 VXY is a book I wouldn’t suggest doing a Google image search on if you’re positioned at, say, the front door of a comic book store: it is rude, ladies and gentlemen. “Chester was originally a seven-page story for one of the Eros anthologies,” says creator Jess Fink over at Sequential Tart. “It was just a little idea I had, I was really inspired by the Tijuana Bibles which were these little eight-page illegal porn comics sold on the street during the '30s and '40s.” Formerly a webcomic, it’s a wonderfully drawn silent story set in 1885 in which a busy inventor creates a robot called Chester to keep his sexually frustrated wife occupied. It gets a funny review over at The Comics Journal by someone who has handled more comic book pornography than I knew existed. This preview comes courtesy of Top Shelf and carefully skirts around the ruder pages which (if you’re curious) you can find for yourself. If I stick one the Gosh! Blog I will be summarily fired.

Also dragged in from the wilds of The Internet is Gingerbread Girl by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover which was serialised in the lead-up to its Top Shelf collection. “At heart,” Tobin told CbR, “it’s a strange bird of a character study focused on the main character, Annah, with a changing group of narrators (including a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a magician, a pigeon, a thug, a store clerk, a doctor, an English bulldog, and many more) searching for the truth behind our ‘Gingerbread Girl,’ who believes that her mad scientist father extracted a part of her brain (the Penfield Homunculus) and used it to create a sister for Annah.” Comics Alliance have an 18-page preview.

The McSweeney’s logo on my oft-worn giant squid vs. colossal squid T-shirt has had some subliminal effect on our books-ordering dude and we now have a McSweeney’s shelf here in Goshland. They’re not new books but we’ve never had them before so I thought I’d do a guide to our red-faced and screaming corner of the bookshelf (I’m making a newborn baby analogy right there). If you have no interest at all in McSweeney’s I won’t be the least bit offended if you skip this bit in which I probably come off sounding like some Southern preacher man. I now give you Five Paragraphs In Which Your Regular Gosh! Blogger Gets To Legitimately Poke About On The McSweeney’s Website For Ages During Work Hours And Likes It:

While looking for a review or some pictures or in fact anything to give you good people at home some sort of idea of what to expect from Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid I came across this half-review/half-personal account of what it’s like to be an intern at McSweeney’s. I offer you a snippet, now:

“If there’s one truth I uncovered in my time as an intern for a McSweeney’s publication, it’s that the people there love getting together, writing a silly book, and publishing it under a ridiculously and undeniably false assumed name… This stems, I think, from the noble fact that they do not care whether or not their business loses money. When I began my internship with The Believer last year, an old poetry professor who once conducted an interview for them cornered me in his office (no homo) and demanded to know how they manage to stay afloat. My answer to him then, which, accrued with all of the “insider” knowledge I have gathered since, is also my answer to you now, is this: I have no idea. What I observed was that the Believer and McSweeney’s teams devote all of their effort to quality and an overwhelming desire to appeal to their own left-of-center sensibility… and for that reason they ought to have sunk. But they didn’t and that’s the McSweeney’s miracle.”

Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid is supposedly by Dr. & Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey and the ex-intern reviews it after the above (as an aside, I’m think I’m a fan of this guy’s book blog in which he talks amusingly, boldly and italicly about Pekar, Millar, Ware et al). By the same Haggis-on-Whey and in the same illustrated, hardcover vein you can also have Giraffes? Giraffes! which is about, well, y’know, and Cold Fusion which is about one of the most controversial scientific pursuits that can be conducted in a bathtub.

Timothy McSweeney (He’s Only Taking You Hiking Because He Can’t Afford Dinner) collects reviews of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences and interviews him too, which might sound a little in-housey but there are some books that can only exist in the sheltered sphere of oddball anthology fans and I reckon this is one of them. The Secret Language of Sleep (discussed over at The Guardian) is a square hardcover for you and your honeybee to have lighthearted fights over, and Poets Picking Poets is a sort of chain-mail poetry collection as this reviewer explains.

McSweeney’s #37 sees their quarterly anthology publication (featuring the likes of New Yorker regular Jonathan Franzen) return to book-form in a typically McSweeney’s way: it’s a book designed to look like a book! they boast (and it is, in M.C. Escher-esque 2D 3D), and if you’re a fan of their graphic design there’s always the Art of McSweeney’s to keep you happy. Finally, Read Hard is a paperback collection of essays and articles from the Believer magazine, reprinting such gems at Jonathan Lethem’s (Fortress of Solitude) essay on the American writer Nathanael West and if I wasn’t currently trying to read the longest novel in the history of everything you’d probably have to fight me for it.

Non-believers, I invite you back into the room.

A couple of big art books have landed on our doorstep this week. The Art of Doug Sneyd HC collects nearly 300 full-colour, full-page cartoons (some previously unpublished) by Sneyd who has been Playboy’s gag cartoonist since 1964. “Many people have always said that they read Playboy for the ‘articles,’ so I thank Doug Sneyd because I have always been able to say, ‘I read Playboy for the cartoons,’” writes this journalist who conducted a short interview with the man himself a couple of years back. Dark Horse has a preview.

There’s also Awful/Resilient: The Art of Alex Pardee HC showcasing the insane art of Californian Pardee – a bunch of monsters, visions of nightmare and the occasional decapitation. Ginko Press tell you what it’s all about.

Agonizing Love: The Golden Era of Romance Comics SC is by Michael Barson who had “already worked [his] way thorough big collections of superhero things and war comics and other manly pursuits” before a big collection of 40s/50s era romance comics landed in his lap and he fell in love with them. Barson talks about the melodramatic, tear-stained minidramas with NPR where there are some preview pictures too, and the NY Journal of Books has a review.

While the comics showcased in Agonising Love were mostly by men, Miss Fury – the first female superhero, predating Wonder Woman by eight months – in her skintight black catsuit was created, written and drawn by a lady called Tarpé Mills, using her non-gender specific middle name for print. “It would have been a major let-down to the kids if they found out that the author of such virile and awesome characters was a gal,” she said. Trina Robbins has picked the best of the stories and there’s even an unpublished, unfinished Miss Fury graphic novel from 1979. Preview over at Comics Beat.

If cowboys are more your thing you can pick up Roy Rogers: The Collected Newspaper Dailies and Sundays in hardcover, giving you the entire 12-year run of one of the most widely read newspaper strips of the 1950s. I don’t really need to give it any more of a push than to just say: Alex Toth.

Metal Hurlant Collection Volume 1 HC is the first of two planned collections reprinted short stories from the titular anthology by people like Geoff Jones (Green Lantern) and Ryan Sook (Batman: Return of Bruce Wayne). And there’s more old stuff rounded up in Dr. Strange: Into The Dark Dimension HC by Roger Stern, Paul Smith, Bret Blevins and Mark Badger – collecting Dr Strange #68 – 74 from 1974 in which the cosmic balance is thrown outta whack.

First Wave HC collects the pulp noir mini-series from a couple of years ago by Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets) and Rags Morales. “We’re moving Gotham. Where do you think Gotham City is? New York? Nah, how would you feel about L.A.? The sun sets in L.A. just like anyplace else. And I’m really kind of focusing on L.A. in the ’40s, when it was a new town in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ’40s. It’s pretty much a new place. There was certainly a bit of lawlessness going on. And there was a huge, huge divide between rich and poor. And I think that really works well for this.” Old interview and preview pages over at CbR.

In new comics this week you can have Dark Horse Presents #2 featuring – among other notables like Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, Paul Chadwick, Carla Speed McNeil and Richard Corben – my much-missed pal on the other side of the world, Patrick Alexander. He contributes (I think) eight pages featuring his character The Wraith (He stalks the night, like a moose!) and you can see some of it here.

Vertigo Resurrected: Sandman Presents Petrefax reprints a Sandman spin-off you might have missed if you weren’t there on the day. Written by Mike Carey (The Unwritten) and illustrated by Steve Leialoha, it was a four-issue miniseries all about Petrefax the young undertaker at the World’s End.

Speaking of undertakers, one might be required in this week’s Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #160 if everything goes wrong for the webslinger. It’s a top-secret polybagged affair but Bleeding Cool have spilled the beans and for those who want spoilers – here they are.

Outsiders has been retitled for its final issue to include the man who was there at the start. Batman and the Outsiders #40 even features a cover homage to that first issue back in 1983, as this blogger points out.

And lastly, Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search #1 is the first of three issues detailing the fallout of that event and the integration of John Constantine and Swamp Thing into the DC Universe. DC are being mighty shady on this one so no previews, but here’s the cover.

That’s your lot. Come visit our pop-up art gallery. It’s nice.

-- Hayley

In Store 16/06/11 - 22/06/11

2011-06-21T14:07:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Archie Babies GN
B & V Friends Double Digest #215
Jugheads Double Digest #171
Agonizing Love: The Golden Era Of Romance Comics SC
All Nighter #1 (Of 5) (David Hahn)
Art Of Doug Sneyd HC
Avengers Vs Pet Avengers TP
Secret Avengers #14Fear Itself
Secret Avengers Prem HC Vol 2 Eyes Of Dragon (Ed Brubaker)
Ultimate Avengers Vs New Ultimates #5
Awful/Resilient: The Art Of Alex Pardee HC
Batman And The Outsiders #40
Batman Gates Of Gotham #2 (Of 5)
Batman Red Hood The Lost Days TP
Black Panther Man Without Fear #520
Black Widow TP Name Of Rose
Brightest Day Aftermath The Search #1 (Of 3)
Captain America #619
Captain Easy: Soldier Of Fortune HC Vol 2 1936 - 1937
Carnage #5 (Of 5)
Cars 2 #1 (Of 2)
Disney Pixar Presents Cars 2
Chester 5000 HC (Jess Fink)
Cinefex #126 May 2011
Conan Road Of Kings #6 (Of 6)
Creepy Comics TP Vol 1
Dark Horse Presents #2 (N. Adams/H. Chaykin/P. Chadwick et al)
Darkness Origins TP Vol 3
DMZ #66 (B. Wood)
Dr Strange HC Into Dark Dimension (Paul Smith)
Dracula Company Of Monsters #11
Echo TP Vol 6 Last Day (T. Moore)
Fables #106
Fantastic Four Last Stand One-Shot
First Wave HC (Brian Azzarello)
Flashpoint Kid Flash Lost #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Lois Lane & Resistance #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint The Outsider #1 (Of 3)(James Robinson)
Flashpoint The Reverse Flash #1
Gingerbread Girl GN (P. Tobin)
Girl Genius TP Vol 10 Agatha H & Guardian Muse
Green Arrow #13
Guild Bladezz One-Shot (F. Day)
Hellboy Library Edition HC Vol 4 Crooked Man (M. Mignola)
Hounds Of Hell GN
Impossible Man TP
Incredible Hulks #631
Infestation Outbreak #1 (Of 4)
Iron Man 2.0 #6 Fear Itself
Janet Evanovich Troublemaker TP
Justice League Of America #58
Juxtapoz #126
Kane And Lynch TP (Ian Edginton)
Last Phantom #7
Marvel Zombie Christmas Carol #2 (Of 5)
McSweeney’s Books
- Animals Of The Ocean HC
- Cold Fusion HC
- Everything That Rises SC
- Giraffes? Giraffes! HC
- McSweeney’s #37 HC
- Poets Picking Poets SC
- Read Hard SC
- Secret Language Of Sleep HC
Metal Hurlant Collection HC Vol 1(G. Johns/R. Sook et al)
Mighty Thor #3 (Fraction/Coipel)
Miss Fury HC (T. Mills)
Mission #5
Mystery Men #2 (Of 5)
Namor First Mutant #11
Next Men #7 (John Byrne)
Next Men HC Vol 1
Power Girl Bomb Squad TP
Rage #1 (Of 3)
Red Sonja: Revenge Of The Gods #4 (Of 5)
Roy Rogers Collected Newspaper Dailies & Sundays HC
Runaways TP Vols 5 & 6 New Ptgs
Vertigo Resurrected (Mike Carey)Sandman Presents Petrefax
Scary Godmother Comic Book Stories TP (J. Thompson)
Sigil #4 (Of 4)
Bart Simpson Comics #60
Silver Surfer #5 (Of 5)
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man Prem HC Death Prelude
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #160
Spirit #15
Stan Lee's The Traveler #8
Star Wars Jedi Dark Side #2
Suicide Girls #3 (Of 4)
Action Comics #902
Superman #712
Terminator TP 2029 To 1984
The Lengths #2 Pay As You Go
Thunderbolts #159
Transformers 3 Movie Adaptation #3 (Of 4)
Vampirella #7
Walking Dead Weekly #25
Deadpool #39
Mystique By Sean Mckeever Ultimate Collection SC
New Mutants #26
NYX TP Vol 1 Wannabe TP New Ptg
Wolverine #11 (Jason Aaron)
X-Factor TP Vol 11 Happenings In Vegas
X-Men Legacy #251
X-Men Second Coming TP

MANGA

20th Century Boys Vol 15 (Naoki Urasawa )
Avatar Last Airbender TP Vol 1 Lost Adventures
Negima Omnibus GN Vol 1
Phoenix Wright GN Vol 1

Due to Arrive 22/06/11

2011-06-14T16:36:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

Action Comics #902
All Nighter #1 (Of 5)
Avengers Vs Pet Avengers TP
Batman And The Outsiders #40
Batman Gates Of Gotham #2 (Of 5)
Batman Red Hood The Lost Days TP
Black Panther Man Without Fear #520
Black Widow TP Name Of Rose
Brightest Day Aftermath The Search #1 (Of 3)
Broken Trinity TP Vol 2 Pandora's Box
Buffy Omnibus TP Vol 3 New Ptg
Captain America #619
Carnage #5 (Of 5)
Choker #6 (Of 6)
Conan Road Of Kings #6 (Of 6)
Dark Horse Presents #2
Darkness Origins TP Vol 3
Deadpool #39
DMZ #66
Drums #2 (Of 4)
Elephantmen #32
Fables #106
Fantastic Four Last Stand #1
First Wave HC
Flashpoint Kid Flash Lost #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Lois Lane & Resistance #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint The Outsider #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint The Reverse Flash #1
Green Arrow #13
Guarding The Globe #5 (Of 6)
Guild Bladezz One-Shot
Impossible Man TP
Incredible Hulks #631
Infestation Outbreak #1 (Of 4)
Iron Man 2.0 #6 Fear
John Byrne Next Men #7
Justice League Of America #58
Kane And Lynch TP
Locke & Key Clockworks #1 (Of 6)
Magdalena #7
Marineman #6
Marvel Zombie Christmas Carol #2 (Of 5)
Mice Templar Vol 3 #5
Mighty Thor #3
Miss Fury HC
Mission #5
Mystery Men #2 (Of 5)
Mystique By Sean Mckeever Ult. Collection TP
Namor First Mutant #11
New Mutants #26
Next Men HC Vol 1
NYX TP Vol 1 Wannabe New Ptg
Power Girl Bomb Squad TP
Rage #1 (Of 3)
Rocketeer Adventures #2 (Of 4)
Runaways TP Vol 6 Digest New Ptg
Saga Of The Swamp Thing HC Vol 5
Secret Avengers #14
Secret Avengers Prem HC Vol 2 Eyes Of Dragon
Sigil #4 (Of 4)
Silver Surfer #5 (Of 5)
Spirit #15
Star Wars Jedi Dark Side #2
Super Dinosaur #3
Superman #712
Thunderbolts #159 Fear Itself
Ultimate Avengers Vs New Ultimates #5 (Of 6)
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #160
Vertigo Resurrected Sandman Presents Petrefax #1
Walking Dead Weekly #25
Wolverine #11
X-Men Legacy #251
X-Men Second Coming Revelations TP
X-Men Second Coming TP
Young Justice #5
Zatanna #14

The Gosh! Authority 14/06/11

2011-06-14T15:42:00.022+01:00

Everybody stop what you’re doing and set up a standing order for THIS: The League of Gentlemen III triptych bookplate set. That’s a fancy way of saying Kevin O’Neill is retroactively adding a bookplate to the already-published-and-probably-already-in-your-house Century: 1910, and doing two more for the upcoming volumes (the next due in late July with the final one expected in summer next year so you’ve got something to read in the likely event you missed out on Olympics tickets). Don’t get pre-emptively stroppy if you already own a copy of Century: 1910 – it’s all taken care of. Read the blog post.

Joe Porcellino sent us a big care package of small press stuff from his side of the world. They’re sitting neatly (well, we’re trying – they’re funny-shaped) beside his own offerings of last week: The Game and the Monologuist Paper Blog Update. Along with issues of his own King-Kat Comics and Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man, there are a handful of issues of late 90’s work by Tim Lane (Abandoned Cars) in his series Happy Hour in America.

The Jeffrey Brown influence is very strong in stuff like the AOA diary comics by Melinda Boyce, and Ten Thousand Things To Do by Jesse Reklaw. Diary and autobiographical comics account for most of the swag – L.A Diary by Gabrielle Bell, the Noah Novella by Noah Van Sciver (whose Blammo #6 and #7 are here too), and My Alaskan Summer by Corinne Mucha. Blindspot #1 is by Joseph Remnant, someone who has evidently spent a long time looking at the crosshatched panels of Robert Crumb. Bound & Gagged is the result of Tom Neely asking all the artists, cartoonists and writers he knows to do one-panel gag comics which could have been disastrous.

There are Clutch comics by Clutch McBastard, Jin & Jam by Hellen Jo, Asthma by John Hankiewicz, and one of the biggest of the lot – I Want Everything To Be Okay by Carrie McNinch. There’s Ruts & Gullies: Nine Days in St. Petersburg by Phillipe Girard, and bagged and ribboned comicbook diaries with Post-Its saying “Open me in private” by I-don’t-know-who because I’m sticking to the rules and can’t see inside them. There are several issues of Tugboat Press's award-winning anthology series Papercutter, which is dedicated to showcasing underexposed and emerging artists but you’ll most definitely know at least a few of them -- Nate Powell (Swallow Me Whole), Jim Rugg (Afrodisiac), and Drew Weing (Set to Sea) are all here.

As for the rest of it – there are anthologies from countries I can’t locate on a map, like Latvia, which has also produced some big fold-out posters and bundles of colourful mini-comics from the their own equivalent of Nobrow. Some of them aren’t even in English (I’m looking at you, Colibri #2) but they look cool, so whatever. There’s a big anthology called Cyclops collecting an array of contemporary narrative art from people in Canada. I’m pretty sure I know where Canada is.

Speaking of which, here’s something nobody outside of Toronto has seen yet – except for this preview. Welcome to Oddville is a hardcover collecting all of (phenomenally talented and eye-wateringly busy animator and cartoonist) Jay Stephens’ all-ages weekly newspaper comic strip about an eight-year-old girl called Jetcat that originally appeared in the Toronto Star between 2003 and 2006.“It's pretty crazy, they tell me,” says Stephens to Comicbook Resources. “You'll meet a Ghost Pumpkin, Talking Bandage, Gangs of Apples and a very rude snail.”

Anya’s Ghost is another graphic novel by an animator, Vera Brosgol, who currently lives in Portland and does storyboard and concept art for Laika Entertainment – the company that produced the Henry Selick adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book, Coraline. As Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing said in his review, “Anya’s Ghost starts out as a simple young adult story about a girl who's having a hard time fitting in at school, moves smoothly into a lighthearted story about an awkward girl and her ghostly BFF, and then slides precipitously (and scarily) into a no-fooling ghost story that'll have you jumping out of your skin while you finish it off.” It’s Brosgol’s debut book (previewed at First Second) and if I were you I’d head over to her sketch blog to see what else she’s up to.

Also from First Second is Level Up by Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese) with art by Thien Pham (a man who is the president of his own fan club) about a guy whose parents want him to become a doctor but all he really wants to do is play video games. Preview at :01, and review over here. The cover of this book makes me miss my old Game Boy like nobody’s business.

Seeds is a graphic novel by Ross Mackintosh, who grew up in Yorkshire. In this, his first book (having spent the time between growing up in The North and Now as a graphic designer) Mackintosh charts the autobiographical story of how his own father’s unsuccessful battle with cancer affected him and his family. "Until the events in the book happened, I'd not really thought how it might feel when I get to the end of my life; who will be there, what will cause it, how I might react and how it will feel," Mackintosh said at CbR, alongside preview pictures. "I have young children myself and feel at the prime of life – at the beginning of something – but seeing my dad as a dying parent made me realise that's just what I am, albeit 40 years younger." It’s already been optioned for an animated film, says Geek Syndicate. That was quick. It’s £6.99 and a share of the proceeds will go to cancer charities.

Mark Schultz: Various Drawings Volume 5 is one of the best looking books on the shelf this week and also the proud bearer of the most pretentious blurb in my own living memory: “Schultz has never stopped expanding his visual vocabulary, never shied away from experimenting, never slowed in his relentless pursuit of graphic Nirvana.” But ignore that – this book is full of pulp and noir femme fatales, pin-ups, dinosaurs and scary ladies, spaceships and more, and it’s very good indeed. Most of the art is unseen stuff from private collections and commissions, as well as a few previously published bits so brilliant they warranted a second outing. Head to Flesk for some preview pages. It comes in both a limited hardcover edition and a softcover too.

Two art magazines full of old and beautiful illustrations this week courtesy of Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr (The Comics Journal archive now includes a piece on his whole unlikely publishing enterprise). There’s the Vadeboncoeur Collection of Images #12, showcasing stuff by Lejaren A. Hiller, Henry Clive, Sigismund de Ivanowski, J. C. Leyendecker, Arthur Rackham, Frank Godwin, Heinrich Kley, René Vincent, Willy Pogany, Gustav Tenggren, Charles Robinson, Eric Pape, Herman Vogel, Sarah Stilwell Weber, and Erich Schutz. Then there’s the Black & White Images Fifth Annual Collection which includes Daniel Vierge from the French L'Image of 1897, part two of Railton's Haunted House and Helen Stratton's Little Mermaid (both from 1899), comic art (shot from the originals, obviously) by Will Crawford and more.

Teen Angels & New Mutants by horror comics guru Steve Bissette (Taboo, Swamp Thing) originally began, as Forces of Geek said in their review, “as a companion article for the aborted, hardcover edition of [Rick Veitch’s] Brat Pack. It quickly expanded into a total dissemination of the sidekick phenomenon –considering every sociological condition that contributed to the real world environment that indulged them. Way more than a loving tribute to the work of a dear friend, this is the absolute, authoritative text on the subject, and should be required reading in every Sociology of Media program.” It’s a history of the boy sidekick, traces juvenile delinquency through the ages, is “a 400-page crash-course on teen pop culture, the fetishism of childhood, [...] the impact of the independent press on sequential publishing” and covers every ancillary topic that pops up along the way, however uncomfortable they may be. In other words: far too thorough and far-reaching a thing to sum up in a paragraph. In short, it looks worthy of your pocket-money.

In trade paperback this week you can have Walking Dead Volume 14: No Way Out, and Sam Keith’s original Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: Madness which is both reviewed and previewed over at CbR. Ed Brubaker’s Captain America: Red Menace Ultimate Collection in softcover collects the entire story arc that followed Winter Soldier, featuring Russian General Aleksander Lukin and Cap’s eternal nemesis the Red Skull. The creator-centric Fantastic Four collections continue with Fantastic Four by Waid and Wieringo Ultimate Collection Volume 1 which means this might be one of those weeks where I totally lose the ability to say “ultimate”.

As for comics, there’s a new Alpha Flight eight-part series by Fred Van Lente and Greg Pak which ties into the whole Fear Itself thing (preview here) and no less than four Flashpoint titles to cross off your checklist. Assume the prefix Flashpoint is a given here so I don’t have to keep saying it. Deadman and The Flying Graysons #1 (of 3) by J.T. Krul and Mikel Janin is written about and previewed on the DCU Blog. There’s the Grodd of War One-Shot by Sean Ryan and Ig Guara, Legion of Doom #1 (of 3) by Adam Glass and Rodney Buchemi, and Wonder Woman & The Furies #1 (of 3) by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, with art by Scott Clark and David Beaty – none of the aforementioned being even remotely previewable anywhere on the Internet.

That Hellbound Train #1 is the first of a three-part miniseries based on Robert Bloch’s (Psycho) Hugo-winning short story of the same(ish) name. Joe and John Lansdale (30 Days of Night: Night, Again) are taking care of the words, while Dave Wachter (The Guns of Shadow Valley) is on art duties. Wachter talks about cover art on his blog and you can see some interiors over at Chris Ryall’s site.

Godzilla: Gangsters and Goliaths #1 (of 5) by John Layman (Chew) and Eisner-nominated artist Alberto Ponticelli is tailor-made for those of you who aren’t getting enough rampaging monster in Eric Powell, Tracy Marsh and Phil Hester’s series. “I'm very into Asian cinema, arguably moreso than American cinema, which mostly bores the crap out of me,” said Layman. “I wanted to fuse two of my favourite Asian cinema genres -- the monster movie with the hard-boiled gun-fu cops and gangsters movie. So the story is about a framed cop, wanted by the underworld and the police force, trying to clear his name, trying to protect his family, and trying to get revenge. He gets some help when he gets hold of the Mothra Twins, and starts using Mothra to systematically eliminate the families of the Tokyo criminal underworld.” More of that at CbR.

In other news, we’ve got more Paying For It on the shelf, a book which is still causing comics reviewers to have arguments with themselves. Read this at The Comics Journal and see what I mean. And we’ve still got some signed copies of Chico & Rita hanging about, but sadly none of them include this Mariscal strip which landed in my inbox a couple of days ago and cheered me up no end:

-- Hayley

In Store 09/06/11 - 15/06/11

2011-06-14T15:37:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Archie & Friends Double Digest #6
2000 AD #1738
Al Williamson Archives SC Vol 2
Alpha Flight #1 (Of 8) (F. Van Lente)
Anya’s Ghost GN
Astronaut Academy Zero Gravity GN
Avengers #14 Fear Itself
Avengers Academy #15
Avengers Infinity Quest #1
Marvel Adventures Avengers TP Digest Hulk
Batgirl #22
Arkham Asylum Madness TP (Sam Keith)
Batman #711
Black & White Images Fifth Annual Collection SC
Captain America First Vengeance #3 (Of 4)
Captain America Red Menace Ult. Collection SC (Brubaker)
Chap Magazine #57
Cinderella: Fables Are Forever #5 (Of 6) (Chris Roberson)
Conan Island Of No Return #1 (Of 2)
Crossed 3D HC Vol 1
Crossed Psychopath #3 (Of 6)
DC Universe Online Legends #10
Deadlands One-Shot
Deus Ex #5 (Of 6) (Robbie Morrison)
Dr Who Magazine #435
Dungeons And Dragons #8
Fantastic Four By Waid & Wieringo Ultimate Collection TP Vol 1
Fear Itself Home Front #3 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Youth In Revolt #2 (Of 6)
Flashpoint Deadman & The Flying Graysons #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Grodd Of War One-Shot
Flashpoint Legion Of Doom #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Wonder Woman & The Furies #1 (Of 3)(Dan Abnett/Andy Lanning)
Gladstones School For World Conquerors #2
Godzilla Gangsters & Goliaths #1 (Of 5) (John Layman)
Graveyard Of Empires #1 (Of 4)
Green Hornet #16
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Abin Sur One-Shot
Hellblazer #280 (Peter Milligan)
Hulk #35
Hulk TP Gray (Tim Sale)
Incorruptible TP Vol 4
Invincible #80 (R. Kirkman)
Invincible Iron Man #505 Fear Itself
DC Comics Presents JLA Black Baptism #1
Justice League Cry For Justice TP
Kirby Genesis #1 (Busiek/Ross)
Legion Of Super Heroes #14
Level Up GN (Gene Yang)
Li'l Depressed Boy TP Vol 1 She Is Staggering
Mark Schultz Various Drawings Vol 5 Ltd HC & SC Editions
Mini-Comics! A whole miscellany of US & Finnish small press too long to list here.
Northlanders #41
Power Girl #25
Red Sonja Blue One-Shot
Ruse #4 (Of 4)
Seeds GN (Ross Mackintosh)
Bart Simpson Prince Of Pranks SC
Simpsons Comics #179
Sixth Gun TP Vol 2
Skaar King Of Savage Land #4 (Of 5)
Stan Lee Soldier Zero #9
Star Wars
- Adventures TP Vol 5
- Blood Ties TP Vol 1
- Old Republic TP Vol 2
Supergirl #65
Superman Batman #85
Teen Angels & New Mutants SC(Steve Bissette)
Teen Titans #96
That Hellbound Train #1 (Of 3)
Undying Love #3 (Tomm Coker)
Vadeboncoeur Collection Of Images #12
Vampirella Masters Series TP Vol 4
Walking Dead TP Vol 14 No Way Out (R. Kirkman)
Walking Dead Weekly #24
Warlord Of Mars Dejah Thoris #4
Welcome To Oddville HC
Witchblade #145
Daken Dark Wolverine #10
Deadpool HC Vol 7 Space Oddity
DeadpoolMAX #9 (Kyle Baker)
Generation Hope #8 (Kieron Gillen)
Uncanny X-Force Prem HC Deathlok Nation
Uncanny X-Men #538
Uncanny X-Men TP Quarantine
X-Factor #221
X-Men #13
X-Men Prelude To Schism #3 (Of 4)

MANGA

Amnesia Labyrinth GN Vol 2
Certain Scientific Railgun GN Vol 1
High School Of The Dead GN Vol 1 & 2
Spice And Wolf GN Vol 4

League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 - Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition

2011-06-09T14:33:00.016+01:00

We’ve been waiting so long for this book that not only has the dinner gone cold and been thrown in the bin, we’d very nearly turned out the lights and gone to bed. To celebrate its long awaited and very welcome arrival on our doorstep we thought we’d do something mighty special indeed.

The latest installment of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s hit series is on the presses as I type and due to be on a boat leaving Hong Kong on the 19th of June. It should be in all UK book and comic shops in the week of the 25th of July providing no pirates or fans gone mad with impatience inexpertly commandeer the ship and crash it on foreign shores, littering the sea with psychedelic colours and leagues of extraordinary gentlemen.

Gosh!’s Bookplate Editions are usually limited to just the one volume of a series or stand-alone graphic novel. Never before have we done what we’re about to do. The talented Mr O’Neill is busy illustrating a triptych of mini-prints for each part of the current series, available exclusively at Gosh! and limited to 1000 copies of each. It’s a mighty hike up from the usual 200 copies but that’s just because the demand for this thing is so deservedly huge, and we hate to see disappointment on your wee faces.

Each plate is A5 format. 210cm x 148cm

Details on how you can get your mitts on all three prints after this other bit of exciting news: a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen art exhibition right here in Gosh!

When O’Neill handed in the first 20 pages of the third and final part of the book (he is currently at his desk drawing the next batch) he also dropped in 10 internal pages of Century: 1969 -- the volume currently being printed in Hong Kong. From Monday the 13th of June you’ll be able to see those pages on the walls of Gosh! which I’m sure you’ll agree is far more interesting than a regular old Internet preview. Pay us a visit, have a sneak peek at the new book, and while you’re here you can put your name down for a reserved copy.

So, here are the details on the bookplates and how you can get them:

Plates for Century: 1910 and Century: 1969 will both be released on the same day (the week of July 25th) and given away free with a purchase of the book while stocks last. If you already have a copy of Century: 1910, you can request a separate bookplate for it when you’re putting your name down for the next bookplated volume, Century: 1969 (though we will ask for an extra £2 to cover our costs).

To ensure you don’t miss out on the third and final volume, Century: Let It All Come Down (currently slated for summer 2012) leave us with your contact details so we can get in touch with you when it arrives.

All customers who have a standing order for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at the time of Century: 1969’s release will automatically receive the first two plates for free (ie. no extra £2 for the first bookplate) and be at the top of the list when the third plate arrives. So if you’ve been thinking about starting a standing order with us, perhaps you’d best get on it.

Confused? Here’s all that broken down for monetary clarity:

League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910 with mini-print - £5.95

League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 with mini-print - £7.99

League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 with first 2 mini prints – £9.99

If you'd like to reserve a copy send us an email saying so to info@goshlondon.com.

There’ll be more League news in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on the Gosh! Blog, add us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our RSS feed or camp under our window if you’re that way inclined.

Only available in store at Gosh! (no mail orders on this one, sorry) and from the looks of it: only available for a ridiculously limited time. Pirates willing.

Due to Arrive 15/06/11

2011-06-07T17:07:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

Alpha Flight #1 (Of 8)
Arkham Asylum Madness TP
Avengers #14 Fear
Avengers Academy #15 Fear
Avengers Infinity Quest #1
Batgirl #22
Batman #711
Captain America Corps #1 (Of 5)
Captain America First Vengeance #3 (Of 4)
Captain America Red Menace Ult. Collection TP
Cinderella Fables Are Forever #5 (Of 6)
Conan Island Of No Return #1
Daken Dark Wolverine #10
DC Comics Presents JLA Black Baptism #1
DC Universe Online Legends #10
Deadlands One-Shot
Deadpool Prem HC Vol 7 Space Oddity
DeadpoolMax #9
Deus Ex #5 (Of 6)
Dungeons & Dragons HC Vol 1 Shadowplague
Dungeons And Dragons #8
Fantastic Four By Waid & Wieringo Ultimate Collection TP Vol 1
Fear Itself Home Front #3 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Youth In Revolt #2 (Of 6)
Flashpoint Deadman & Flying Graysons #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Grodd Of War #1
Flashpoint Legion Of Doom #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Wonder Woman & Furies #1 (Of 3)
Generation Hope #8
Gladstones School For World Conquerors #2
Godzilla Gangsters & Goliaths #1 (Of 5)
Graveyard Of Empires #1 (Of 4)
Green Lantern Brightest Day HC
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Abin Sur #1
Hellblazer #280
Hero Comics 2011 One-Shot
Hulk #35
Hulk TP Gray
Invincible #80
Invincible Iron Man #505
John Byrne's Next Men #7
Justice League Cry For Justice TP
Legion Of Super Heroes #14
Li'l Depressed Boy TP Vol 1 She Is Staggering
Mad Magazine #510
Marvel Adventures Avengers TP Digest Hulk
Miss Fury HC
Next Men HC Vol 1
Northlanders #41
Power Girl #25
Runaways TP Vol 5 Digest New Ptg
Ruse #4 (Of 4)
Skaar King Of Savage Land #4 (Of 5)
Supergirl #65
Superman Batman #85
Teen Titans #96
Trailblazer One-Shot
Uncanny X-Force Prem HC Deathlok Nation
Uncanny X-Men #538
Uncanny X-Men TP Quarantine
Undying Love #3
Walking Dead TP Vol 14 No Way Out
Walking Dead Weekly #24
Witchblade #145
X-Factor #221
X-Factor TP Vol 11 Happenings In Vegas
X-Men #13
X-Men Prelude To Schism #3 (Of 4)
Zombies Vs Robots Undercity #3 (Of 4)

The Gosh! Authority 07/06/11

2011-06-07T15:55:00.025+01:00

The shelves are almost buckling like a knackered Ikea bookcase under the weight of excellent new stuff – lemme rush through them before they snap.

Dave McKean – whose Cages Bookplate Edition can account for a considerable part of the bookshelf bend – gives us his first solo graphic novel since that aforementioned weighty tome. It’s called Celluloid and it’s got rude bits in. “There are so many comics about violence. I’m not entertained or amused by violence, and I’d rather not have it in my life. Sex, on the other hand, is something the vast majority of us enjoy, yet it rarely seems to be the subject of comics. Pornography is usually bland, repetitive and ugly, and, at most, ‘does the job.’ I always wanted to make a book that is pornographic, but is also, I hope, beautiful, and mysterious, and engages the mind.” Comicbook Resources have a big interview with McKean and lots of preview pages too, but if you need more you can find them at Fantagraphics’ Flickr.

Two new things from Nobrow this week – and I say things because one of ‘em ain’t a book. There’s The New Ghost, a softcover comic by Rob Hunter (whose work you’ll have seen in A Graphic Cosmogeny) about a ghost’s first day being a ghost. Canadian arts blog Squidface & The Meddler (which is a good one to keep an eye on, incidentally) has a short review along with a preview. “Rob Hunter’s art runs against many of the strong currents in the world of comics…how often do you come across a comic that’s light as air, dreamy and poetic?”

The other Nobrow offering is Flesh and Bone: A Colouring Concertina by John Sibbick, who in his long career illustrating natural history books and designing things for London’s Natural History Museum probably has a lot to do with what the dinosaurs in your head look like. As a long-standing fan of dinosaurs (the Stegosaurus is the best one, by the way) and basically everything’s skeletal insides – this is my pick of the week. It’s a double-sided fold-out, much like Micah Lidberg’s Rise and Fall: A Concertina of Life – a black and white panorama of animals on one side (monkey, sloth, lizard, whale et al) with the exact same composition on the back with flesh and fur now gone and only skeleton remaining. Give it to a kid to colour in or stick it on your bedroom wall like I’m about to. Preview at Nobrow.

Jim Woodring’s follow-up to last year’s Weathercraft has landed. In Congress of the Animals Frank’s left home and is dealing with all manner of horrific realties, though I don’t see him crying over his tax returns in the preview. "The story Congress of the Animals is one I've wanted to tell for a long time. In a lot of ways it's the most personal of the Frank stories and it breaks some aspects of the Frank mold," Woodring said to Comicbook Resources. "There's a lot going on that may not be apparent, but I operate on the theory that is, there is something there people will pick up on it even if they don't see it directly. And that if they are sufficiently interested in puzzling it out, the meaning will become apparent.” In the same interview Woodring talks about wielding a massive nib pen he made called the Nibbus Maximus, an impractical illustration tool which he didn’t use on a single panel in this book but it’s a funny and absurd story worth a read anyway.

Shaun Tan’s got another typically lovely looking book on the shelf already: The Bird King, being a collection of sketches from all over the place – preliminary book designs, theatre stuff, and drawings from life. There’s 128 pages of it – including Tan’s written explanations – and he has a preview over on his website.

Our own Barnaby Richards has teamed up with Tanya Meditzky (most recently of The Man Who Clapped with Matt Abbiss) and come up with a book called Two Sentences. The two exchanged sentences for the other to illustrate – an experiment in seeing how they would each interpret the other’s words and worlds. As Barnaby writes in his blog preview, they did this five times and the result is the beautiful hand-stitched book currently looking mighty swish on the new release shelf.

There are two strange self-published things from Anders Nilsen (Big Questions) you might like, none of which take the usual book form: There’s The Game, which reprints the three-page strip Nilsen did for the now long-out-of-print and ridiculously eBayable Kramers Ergot #7 in 2008 as a poster, along with a previously unpublished fourth page. The Monologuist Paper Blog Update is a mini-comic with a bunch of postcards, a sticker and a Big Questions trading card. Pictures of The Game and The Monologuist Paper Blog Update are available here and here.

Jason (I Killed Adolf Hitler) has enlisted a writer for the first time in Fabien Vehlmann, a well known name in France but the Sean Phillips illustrated Seven Psychopaths is his only translated work so far, except for this new one of course. "I expect to run out of ideas at some point, and then I will have to work with a writer, so I tried it out now to see how it felt,” said Jason to CbR. "I was a bit surprised by the darkness of the story, since I figured it to be an all-ages book. I think my stories can be dark occasionally, but Fabien went much further than I had expected when the story reached the island. Like the scene with the parrot in the dungeon, it was almost like a Treasure Island film suddenly being directed by David Lynch." It’s about pirates, obviously. There’s a preview at Fantagraphics.

Another one from Fantagraphics is Disney’s Mickey Mouse Volume 1: Race to Death Valley, a hardcover collecting old strips all fully remastered and shot directly from the proof sheets of Disney and private collections. They’re by Floyd Gottfredson, who was employed at Disney as an apprentice animator and in-betweener in the early ‘30s. He was temporarily put on the Mickey Mouse strip and somehow ended up drawing it for the next 45 years. Check out his work at Fantagraphics.

Gosh! Favourite Ian Edginton (Scarlet Traces, Sherlock Holmes) has another classic adaptation on the shelf in the form of Pride and Prejudice from SelfMadeHero. Art on this one is by Robert Deas, whose work you’ll most recently have seen in A Tale of Two Cities and Le Morte D’Arthur. The preview function on the SelfMadeHero site is becoming the bane of my existence so if I were you I’d head straight to Deas’ own site where he gives you full pages of artwork to peruse at your leisure, rather than the infuriating enforced slideshow of the aforementioned.

London Walks by Badaude is an illustrated guided journey around this old city of ours that starts and ends at the famous Foyles, on Charing Cross Road. “I’m not a Londoner born and bred. When I first moved here, I’d just finished a degree in English Literature. I’d spent all my life building up a mental map of the city through books but, although I’d visited a few times, I’d never experienced the city day-in, day-out. It was interesting to draw a map of personal experiences on top of the map of everything I’d read. And, after living in different parts of the city for several years, I found parts of my experience crossed other parts, like lines drawn on a map, some hard and some faint, each erasing and distorting others I’d made. I wanted to draw attention to and replicate this multilayered, four dimensional experience of being in a city.” Interview and preview pages at Design Week.

That’s it for new books but here’s some collections you might like to bag: Generation Hope Volume 1: Future Is a Four Letter Word written by Kieron Gillen (Phonogram), Batwoman Elegy TP Volume 1 by Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III, Baltimore: Plague Ships by Christopher Golden and Ben Stenbeck in hardcover, and Mister X: The Brides of Mister X also in hardcover, which collects Dean Motter’s return to Radiant City in the late 1980s. For a preview and proper list of that last one’s contents head to Dark Horse.

As for floppy comics, Space Warped #1 (of 2) by Herva Bourhis and Rudy Spiessert is billed as being in the tradition of Robot Chicken: Star Wars and Spaceballs so it should be fun. Comixology has a preview. Andi Watson’s 15 Love #1 (of 3) illustrated by Tommy Ohtsuka is out and previewed here, and if you think it sounds familiar it probably does: the series was announced eight long years ago. There’s a preview of Samurai’s Blood #1 (of 6) by Owen Wiseman, Nam Kim, Matthew Dalton, and Jessica Kholinne here, and will be of interest to people who like samurais and blood and vengeance and stuff.

Screamland #1 is a comic set in a world where movie monsters are real and mostly unemployed. That’s, uh, except for the ones cast in some monster porn film, of course. Preview here.

In the Marvel camp there’s Ghost Rider #0.1 by Rob Williams (Dark Wolverine) and Matthew Clark, offering new readers a chance to jump on the back of that particular motorbike (preview), and Iron Age Alpha #1, also by Williams, is previewed here. There’s also Ka-Zar #1 (of 5) by Paul Jenkins (Inhumans) and Pascal Alixe which sees the Savage Land under seige – preview – and Supreme Power #1 (of 4) previewed here.

Mystery Men #1 (of 5) is a comic in which you should not expect to see an appearance from The Shoveller or even Captain Amazing but you can expect comic shop employees the world over to beg Marvel to just do a brainstorm session or something and come up with new names for things. Written by David Liss and illustrated by Patrick Zircher, it’s about what dark conspiracies drive five heroes to put on masks and save the world. From the preview it looks kind of pulpy.

As for Fear Itself, you can cross Fear Itself: Fearsome Four #1 (of 4) off your list (preview) along with Fear Itself: Deadpool #1 (of 3) too (preview) .

Vertigo launches a spin-off series in American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest #1 (of 5) by Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy (Joe the Barbarian). It’s set during WWII in a Nazi-occupied Romania where some vampire hunters have gone behind enemy lines. Preview.

There’s a couple of Green Lantern Movie Prequel one-shots which fill newbies in on key characters so they won’t have to elbow whoever’s next to them in the film and whisper, Who’s that guy? Kilowog and Tomar-Re are first off the block, by Peter J. Tomasi/Joe Bennett and Marc Guggenheim/Cliff Richards, respectively.

Four Flashpoint titles this week ensure the F shelf will be mostly red and yellow:

Flashpoint Citizen Cold #1 (of 3) written and illustrated by Skott Kolins.
Flashpoint Deathstroke: Curse of the Ravager #1 (of 3) by Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Bennett.
Flashpoint Emperor Aquaman #1 (of 3) by Tony Bedard and Ardian Syaf
And Flashpoint: Frankenstein – Creatures of the Unknown #1 (of 3) by Jeff Lemire of Sweet Tooth fame, with art by Ibraim Roberson.

If you’re losing your place (and why wouldn’t you be) here’s a Flashpoint checklist again. Stick it in your pocket.

Finally, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle but you should do. It’s excellent. As a special bonus Big Hairy Alan Moore turned up for a short history lesson in this episode here, which you’d best watch now because it’ll disappear from the Internet in about a week or so.

-- Hayley

In Store 02/06/11 - 08/06/11

2011-06-07T15:52:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Archie Double Digest #219
2000 AD #1737
15 Love #1 (Of 3) (Andi Watson)
American Vampire: Survival Of The Fittest #1 (Of 5)
Annihilators #4 (Of 4)
Ant-Man And Wasp TP Small World
New Avengers #13
New Avengers Nannies And Nazis One-Shot
Baltimore Plague Ships HC
Batman And Robin #24
Batman Arkham City #2 (Of 5)
Batwoman TP Vol 1 Elegy(G. Rucka/J.H. Williams III)
Bird King HC (Shaun Tan)
Birds Of Prey #13
Black Panther Man Without Fear #519
Blue Estate #3 (Valley/Cypress)
Booster Gold #45 (Flashpoint)
Breed III #2 (Jim Starlin)
Caligula #2 (Of 6) (Dave Lapham)
Captain America
- By Dan Jurgens TP Vol 1
- Fighting Avenger TP
- No Escape TP
Celluloid HC (Dave McKean)
Congress Of The Animals HC(Jim Woodring)
Crysis #1 (Of 6) (Peter Bergting)
Dark Tower Gunslinger Little Sisters Of Eluria HC
DC Comics Presents Impulse #1
Doc Savage #15
Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files Fool Moon #2
Echo #30 (Terry Moore)
Empowered Special #2: 10 Questions For The Maidman
Famous Monsters Of Filmland #256
Farscape #20
Fear Itself Fearsome Four #1 (Of 4)
Flashpoint
- Citizen Cold #1 (Of 3)
- Deathstroke: Curse Of Ravager #1 (Of 3)
- Emperor Aquaman #1 (Of 3)
- Frankenstein: Creatures Of Unknown #1 (Of 3)
Flesh & Bone (Nobrow)
Ghost Rider #0 Point One
Glamourpuss #19 (Dave Sim)
Green Lantern Movie Prequels
- Kilowog One-Shot
- Tomar-Re One-Shot
Green Wake #3 (Of 5)
Hulk-Sized Mini-Hulks #1
Incredible Hulks #630
Iron Age Alpha #1
Isle Of 100,000 Graves HC (Jason)
Journey Into Mystery #624 (Gillen)
Ka-Zar #1 (Of 5)
Knights Of The Dinner Table #174
Li'l Abner HC Vol 3
London Walks SC (Badaude)
Lucky Luke Vol 29
Disney’s Mickey Mouse HC Vol 1 Race To Death Valley
Mister X HC: Brides Of Mister X (Motter/Milligan/D’Israeli)
Moriarty #2
Morning Glories #10
Mystery Men #1 (Of 5)
New Ghost SC (Rob Hunter/Nobrow)
Nick Cardy Artist At War HC Signed Edition
Anders Nilsen books:
- The Game
- Monologuist Paper Blog
Pearl HC (N. Richardson)
Preacher HC Vol 4 (Garth Ennis)
Pride & Predjudice (Ian Edginton)
PunisherMax #14 (Aaron/Dillon)
Red Robin #24
Samurai's Blood #1 (Of 6)
Savage Dragon #171
Scalped #49 (Jason Aaron)
Screamland Ongoing #1
Soulfire Vol 3 #1
Space Warped #1 (Of 2)
Spawn #208
Amazing Spider-Man/Ghost Rider Motorstorm One-Shot
Fear Itself Spider-Man #2 (Of 3)
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #159
Spongebob Comics #3
Stan Lee's Starborn #7
Stand No Man's Land #5 (Of 5)
Superman Chronicles TP Vol 9
Supreme Power #1 (Of 4)
Sweet Tooth TP Vol 3 (Jeff Lemire)
Thor TP Gods On Earth New Ptg
Titans #36
Twilight Experiment TP
Two Sentences SC (B. Richards/T. Meditzky)
Unwritten #26 (M. Carey/P. Gross)
Vampirella #6
Walking Dead Weekly #23
Warlord Of Mars #7
Deadpool #38
Deadpool Team-Up TP Vol 2
Fear Itself Deadpool #1 (Of 3)
Generation Hope TP: Future's A Four Letter Word (K. Gillen)
New X-Men By Grant Morrison TP Vol 2
Wolverine #10
X-Men Legacy #250
Yoko Tsuno Vol 6

MANGA

Black Jack TP Vol 14 (Tezuka)
Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex GN
Ouran High School Host Club GN Vol 16
Pokemon Adventures
- Platinum GN Vol 2
- TP Vol 13
Vampire Knight TP Vol 12

Due To Arrive 01/06/11

2011-05-31T17:32:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

15 Love #1 (Of 3)
All New Batman The Brave And The Bold #8
Amazing Spider-Man Ghost Rider Motorstorm One-Shot
American Vampire Survival Ot Fittest #1 (Of 5)
Anita Blake Circus Of Damned Ingenue #4(Of 5)
Annihilators #4 (Of 4)
Ant-Man And Wasp TP Small World
Avatar Last Airbender TP Vol 1 Lost Adventures
Baltimore Plague Ships HC Vol 1
Batman And Robin #24
Batman Arkham City #2 (Of 5)
Batwoman TP Vol 1 Elegy
Birds Of Prey #13
Black Panther Man Without Fear #519
Blue Estate #3
Booster Gold #45
Breed III #2
Captain America By Dan Jurgens TP Vol 1
Captain America Fighting Avenger TP
Captain America No Escape TP
Creepy Comics TP Vol 1
Danger Girl Campbell Sketchbook HC
Dark Tower Gunslinger Little Sisters Of Eluria Prem HC
DC Comics Presents Impulse #1
Deadpool #38
Deadpool Team-Up TP Vol 2 Special Relationship
Doc Savage #15
Empowered Special #2 10 Questions For Maidman
Fear Itself Deadpool #1 (Of 3)
Fear Itself Fearsome Four #1 (Of 4)
Fear Itself Spider-Man #2 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Citizen Cold #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Deathstroke The Curse Of Ravager #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Emperor Aquaman #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Frankenstein Creatures Of Unknown #1 (Of 3)
Generation Hope TP Futures A Four Letter Word
Ghost Rider #0 Point One
Golly TP Vol 1 Catching Hell
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Kilowog One-Shot
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Tomar-Re One-Shot
Green Wake #3 (Of 5)
Incredible Hulks #630
Iron Age Alpha #1
Journey Into Mystery #624
Ka-Zar #1 (Of 5)
Li'l Abner HC Vol 3
Li'l Depressed Boy TP Vol 1 She Is Staggering
Magnus Robot Fighter #6
Mister X HC Brides Of Mister X & Other Stories
Moriarty #2
Morning Glories #10
Mystery Men #1 (Of 5)
New Avengers #13
New X-Men By Grant Morrison TP Vol 2
Preacher HC Book 4
PunisherMax #14
Red Robin #24
Samurais Blood #1 (Of 6)
Savage Dragon #171
Scalped #49
Screamland Ongoing #1
Something Monstrous GN
Spawn #208
Stand No Man's Land #5 (Of 5)
Star Wars Old Republic #1 (Of 5)
Superman #712
Superman Chronicles TP Vol 9
Supreme Power #1 (Of 4)
Sweet Tooth TP Vol 3 Animal Armies
Titans #36
Transformers Classics TP Vol 1
Twilight Experiment TP
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #159
Unwritten #26
Walking Dead Weekly #23
Wolverine #10
X-Men Alpha Flight Prem HC
X-Men Legacy #250
X-Men Second Coming TP

The Gosh! Authority 31/05/11

2011-05-31T16:10:00.014+01:00

First up, IMPORTANT BORING STUFF: [Blah blah Bank Holiday Monday blah blah delay] This week's comics are arriving on Wednesday ie. the same day we put them on the shelf. They could arrive late in the afternoon, or early in the morning, my point being: nobody actually knows but the truck driver. If you're able to wait until Thursday to pop your cheery face through the door that would probably be a better idea.

Onward!

Given that the International Alternative Press Festival was held over the weekend just around the corner from this very shop, it make sense that the best stuff on the shelf is of the hand-delivered, self-published variety (mostly dropped in by the artists themselves on the way home from said festival). Becky Cloonan’s Wolves arrived in a FedEx box of course, but that’s no reason to discount it:

“Anyone who has been following my blog for a while might remember that last year I published this short story in an anthology me and some friends published in Japan for a convention in Tokyo - it was originally in Japanese; this version will be in English, and will have a few added pages,” Cloonan said on her blog a while back when she was still looking for a printer. Inside Pulse has a review and tells you what it’s all about. It’s a limited, screen-printed and signed edition of only 1000 copies so if you fancy one you’d best hurry in.

The second issue of The Comix Reader is piled high on the Gosh! counter, full of one-pagers by those you’ll have seen in the previous issue (Lord Hurk, Ellen Lindner et al) as well as new additions to the line-up including our very own ridiculously talented Mr Barnaby Richards. If you missed the first issue here’s Richard Cowdry, the brains behind the whole operation, telling you what the point of it all is:

Hey Comix Reader dudes!
Put some previews on The Internet or I will continue to use year-old flyers!
Love, Hayley

“A few years ago I went to an exhibition of 60's Underground Comix at the ICA. Even though they were presented under glass display cases, they radiated the power and energy of artists who were free to do as they pleased. There was also some modern cartoon art on display, and comparing the two, I had to ask : Where did all the fun go? The Comix Reader is in part an attempt to recapture some of the free spirit of the underground press.”

Meat Hill #2 is the second instalment of the story set in a distant retro-future London, “a heady mix of superheroes, monsters, jazz bands and greasy spoons,” by the aforementioned Gosh! Favourite Lord Hurk, who also dropped in the second issue of Static Revolter. That’s “revolter” with a “t” which I have been calling Static Revolver for probably about a year – I can only blush and apologise. It’s by Hurk and Gosh! alumni Kevin Ward and it looks even better than the last one. Here’s a teaser picture of some screenprinted covers drying on the rack (and a colour off being completed but it’s the best I’ve got for now).

Ian Edginton and Ian Culbard add another Sherlock Holmes classic to their line of graphic novels, The Valley of Fear. It’s the fourth and final book in the series which Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing is such a fan of:

“…These four volumes are among the most exciting treatments of the Holmes novels that I've ever seen -- Culbard's pulpy, golden-age illustration style complements Edginton's sharp eye for pacing to great effect… I've loved Sherlock Holmes all my life, and I've read the original novels a dozen times or more, but these adaptations still brought new life and energy to the familiar texts.”

Paul Hornschemeier (The Three Paradoxes) has been serialising a story in Mome for years and this week sees it collected in softcover. Life With Mr. Dangerous is about a girl who spends too much time watching a cartoon and starts to think the main character is talking to her through the television. In an interview with Newcity Lit he said he “wanted to write a story about that strange time between your early twenties and whatever adulthood is supposed to be. When you’ve embraced reality by getting a job, renting an apartment, getting a cat or a dog or a car or a fern — but you don’t really know who you are yet.” Here’s another preview in the form of snapshots taken at the printer’s before the book was assembled into a book. But in this one you get the added bonus of a jetlagged author smiling next to it.

Also collected is Citizen Rex by Mario and Gilbert Hernandez (Love & Rockets) which was a six-issue miniseries set fifty years in the future where an anti-robot movement is happening. “I just like the whole idea of robots, always have. To me, they’re free of the constraints of race, religion and societal mores that hamstring humans, and of course they piss people off,” said Mario in an interview with Comicbook Resources. It runs alongside some preview pages if you need ‘em.

Howard Cruse (Wendel) sees his Stuck Rubber Baby reprinted in honour of its 15th anniversary. It’s about gay and race relations in the 1960s American South, and is partly autobiographical. It comes with a new introduction by Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) and Newsarama have a review. If you’ve never seen it before head to Cruse’s website to see the teaser pamphlet he drew way back before the book was printed for the very first time.

Cullen Bunn (The Sixth Gun), Shawn Lee and Matt Kindt (Super Spy, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man) have teamed up for something they admit is totally ludicrous – The Tooth – a 200-page graphic novel whose main character has no face or eyes and is essentially just a yellow fang on legs. “[It’s] Swamp Thing-meets-Clash of the Titans-meets all the awesome comics your mom threw away when you went to college kind of a book," said Bunn at CbR, where they have a preview too. There are monsters, dragons, vicious demons, sorcerers, vengeful spirits and from the sounds of it they all take a thorough beating from The Tooth.

Constructive Abandonment is a hardcover collection of small surreal paintings accompanied by minimal text by two founding members of The Royal Art Lodge – an influential Canadian collective that parted company about three years ago – Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. “Beyond often being extremely funny, there is frequently something poignant in these works that speaks succinctly to culture and human experience more generally; I am totally amazed at how these two are able to say so much with such an economy of means,” says the Drawn & Quarterly blog. Preview here.

From Fantagraphics you can have Eye of the Majestic Creature which is a collection of semi-autobiographical and fantasy-based comics by Lesley Stein. “Larrybear is a naïve woman on the verge of Whatever, a cute Candide floundering about in an increasingly complicated world,” writes The Comics Journal in their review. PDF preview available here.

There’s another Richard Stark Parker book on the shelves – that’s the prose variety rather than the Darwyn Cooke adaptations. Backflash is the eighteenth volume of a hefty twenty-four, and they all come highly recommended from us lot behind the counter.

Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth sees the light of day again in the form of a deluxe hardcover. The Planetary crowd cross paths with Batman – that is every version of Batman that has ever existed in the character’s history: Bob Kane’s original, Adam West’s ‘60s camp extravaganza, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and all the others in between. No reviews of this new edition as yet but Pop Matters wrote a good one back in 2003 when the comic was originally published. This hardcover differs from previous editions in that it now boasts Ellis’ script for the story at the back of the book.

As for new comics, here are some of the things you can slap on your standing order:

Hellboy: The Fury #1 (of 3) by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo which Mignola says “is kind of this giant, apocalyptic wrap up to this middle chapter of Hellboy's life.” He talks about the whole crazy story arc in an interview over at Comicbook Resources, and there’s a preview of Fegredo’s typically excellent artwork here.

Reed Gunther #1 is an all ages comic by two brothers (Shane and Chris Houghton) which was existing as a self-published series until Image picked it up not so long ago. Reed Gunther’s a goofy cowboy who – along with his bear, Sterling – rides through the Old West fighting monsters and catching runaway trains. Comicvine has an interview with the pair (who also run How To Make Comics classes for kids over in the US, aw) and Comics Alliance have a preview.

Jonathan Hickman (FF) embarks on the second chunk of his popular series with S.H.I.E.L.D. Volume II #1 illustrated by Dunstin Weaver (X-Men). The League of Comic Geeks has a preview.

Grim Ghost #2 is a new supernatural series by screenwriter Stephen Susco (The Grudge) and Tony Isabella (Black Lightning), illustrated by Kelley Jones. We missed the boat on this one, first issue-wise, but we’re trying to get some more in. Broken Frontier have a review already, and say it’s “highly recommended candy for your brain.”

Static Shock Special is a one-shot tribute to the late comic creator and TV animation legend Dwayne McDuffie, who was instrumental in the production of animations like Justice League and Ben 10 (he died earlier this year following complications after heart surgery). It’s 32 pages of stuff by Felicia Henderson, Denys Cowan, Prentis Rollings and loads of others. Henderson talks to CbR about the project.

50 Girls 50 #1 (of 4) by Frank Cho and Doug Murray with artist Axel Medellin. There’s a big interview at CbR with all of them, but Cho summarises its content thusly: “We've got dinosaurs, we've got primitive aliens and giant bugs and women getting their clothes torn off. Issue #3 is all about dinosaurs. Doug wrote a great story about a race of dinosaurs that were descendants of these hyper-intelligent reptiles. So, you have the women who are evolved from apes versus the reptile people who evolve from dinosaurs. Issue #4 has more aliens in a haunted ship type of story.” I think that covers everything but you can have a preview just in case.

All the Flashpoint stuff is kicking off so if you’ve lost your checklist here it is again. You can cross these ones off this week:

Flashpoint: Batman – Knight of Vengeance #1 (of 3) by the 100 Bullets crowd – Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso with covers by Dave Johnson. “I think this Batman is a little bit more of a bad-ass than we've seen before,” Azzarello told Newsarama, “And that includes when I've written Batman, even though I've written some bad-ass Batman stories. This Batman is older, and he's much more angry. He's not the brilliant detective. He's still a brilliant tactician. I think he's even called that in Flashpoint. But he's much more of a pragmatic individual. His motivations come from a different place, and how he acts on them. It's not what you'd expect from Batman.” Preview here.

Flashpoint: Secret Seven #1 (of 3) by Peter Milligan and George Perez. “I don't know if I'm Vertigo-izing the Secret Seven, but it doesn't feel like a straight up superhero team book, whatever the hell that is. There is some weirdness and strangeness in there, as you'd expect from a book featuring Shade, The Changing Man. It's pretty dark and psychological, which I suppose suggests there are elements of Vertigo in it.” More of that interview here and a preview too.

And Flashpoint: Abin Sur The Green Lantern #1 (of 3) by Adam Schlagman and Felipe Massafera about which I can tell you nothing but where they’ve stashed the preview.

Lastly, in the world of the redesigned Wonder Woman you can get Wonder Woman HC Volume 1: Odyssey, which collects the first seven issues of J. Michael Straczynski’s run (or six issues plus the short in #600 if you’re being pedantic). It’ll be on the shelf next to this week’s Wonder Woman #611.

That’s it for comics. If you’re looking elsewhere for entertainment let me point you towards Stratford. Children’s authors Neal Layton, Ed Vere and Gosh! Favourite Sarah McIntyre (Vern & Lettuce) have created a 3D Monsterville which I’m not even going to both explaining because it won’t do it justice. Go look at these pictures.

Or (or “and”) you can go to Brighton and see Steve Aylett’s documentary on pulp science fiction author and philosopher Jeff Lint (The Caterer). According to Wikipedia, “He was the first person to steal Michael Moorcock's 'Multiverse' idea and the first to point out to Jack Vance how unfortunate the title Servants of the Wankh really was.” The movie stars Alan Moore, Stewart Lee, Steve Aylett, Josie Long, Jeff Vandermeer, D Harlan Wilson, Robin Ince, Mitzi Szereto, Bill Ectric, Andrew O'Neill, Vessel (of A+ band David Devant & His Spirit Wife fame, aka Mr Solo), Leila Johnston, 7-Inch Stitch and more, and is screening in Brighton on June 26. More on the movie at its website, and you can secure your seat in the West Hill Community Hall here. The man wrote an (as yet unpublished) novel called The Man Who Gave Birth To His Arse. How could you not want to see this film?

-- Hayley

In Store 26/05/11 - 01/06/11

2011-05-31T16:08:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Betty & Veronica Double Digest #191
2000 AD #1736
30 Days Of Night Night Again #2 (Of 4)
50 Girls 50 #1 (Of 4) (Frank Cho)
Adventure Comics #527
Al Capp's Complete Shmoo Newspaper Strips HC Vol 2
Alan Moore’s A Small Killing TP New Printing (Oscar Zarate)
Aliens Vs Predator Three World War TP
Avengers Academy #14 Point One
Backflash PB (Richard Stark)
Batman Beyond #6
Boys #55 (Garth Ennis)
BPRD Dead Remembered #3 (Of 3)
Breed TP Vol 1 Book Of Genesis
Buffy Season 8 TP Vol 8
Captain Britain HC Vol 1 Birth Of Legend (Chris Claremont)
Citizen Rex HC (G & M Hernandez)
Constructive Abandonment HC
Comix Reader #2 (B. Richards et al)
Criminal Last Of Innocent #1 (Of 4)
Dark Tower Gunslinger Battle Of Tull #1 (Of 5)
Darkness #91
DC Comics Presents: Superman Infestation (Joe Kelly)
DC Universe Online Legends #9
Death Of Zorro #4
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep #2
Doctor Who Insider #3
Dracula Company Of Monsters #10
Dungeons And Dragons #7
Eye Of The Majestic Creature GN
Fathom Vol 4 #0
Fear Itself #3 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Deep #1 (Of 4)
Flash Gordon:
- Invasion Of The Red Sword #2
- Mercy Wars #0
Flashpoint #2 (Johns/Andy Kubert)
Flashpoint: Abin Sur The Green Lantern #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint: Batman Knight Of Vengeance #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint: Secret Seven #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint: The World of Flashpoint #1
Godzilla Kingdom Of Monsters #3
Green Hornet Year One #10
Green Lantern Brightest Day HC
Grim Ghost #2 (Kelley Jones)
Halcyon #5 (Of 5)
Hellboy The Fury #1 (Of 3)
Herc #4
Heroes For Hire #8
House Of Mystery #38
Hulk #34
Intrepids #4
Iron Man War Of Iron Men TP
Irredeemable #26
iZombie #14 (Roberson/Allred)
Jonah Hex #68
Jurassic Park TP Devils In The Desert (John Byrne)
Kevin Smith Kato #10
Kill Shakespeare #11 (Of 12)
Life With Mister Dangerous GN(Paul Hornschemier)
Marvel Previews June 2011
Marvel Zombie Christmas Carol #1 (Of 5)
Meat Hill #2 (Lord Hurk)
Moon Knight #2 (Bendis/Maleev)
Osborn TP Evil Incarcerated
Ozma Of Oz #7 (Of 8)
Peanuts: Happiness Is A Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown HC
Planetary/Batman Deluxe HC(W. Ellis/J. Cassaday)
Previews #273 June 2011
Queen Sonja #17
Red Spike #2 (Of 5) (Mark Texiera)
Reed Gunther #1
Secret Six #34 (Gail Simone)
Sherlock Holmes: Valley Of Fear SC (I. Edginton/I. Culbard)
SHIELD #1 (Jonathan Hickman)
Shinku #1
Solomon Kane Red Shadows #3 (Of 4)
Amazing Spider-Man #663
Static Revolter #2 (Hurk/K. Ward)
Static Shock Special One-Shot
Stuck Rubber Baby SC New Edition
Suicide Forest TP
Superboy #8
Superman New Krypton TP Vol 4
Sweet Tooth #22 (Jeff Lemire)
Tarzan Jesse Marsh Years HC Vol 9
Thor For Asgard TP
Thunderbolts #158
Tintin Young Readers Edition GN Secret Of The Unicorn
Tooth HC (Matt Kindt Et Al)
Turf #5 (J. Ross/T. L. Edwards)
Walking Dead Survivors Guide #3 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #22
Weird Worlds #6 (Of 6)
Who Is Jake Ellis? #4
Witchfinder: Lost & Gone Forever #5 (Of 5)
Wolves SC Ltd Ed (Becky Cloonan)
Wonder Woman #611
Wonder Woman HC Vol 1 Odyssey
Astonishing X-Men #39
Deadpool Classic TP Vol 5
Wolverine Hercules Myths Monsters & Mutants #4 (Of 4)
Uncanny X-Force #11
X-23 #11
X-Factor #220
X-Men #12
X-Men Great Power #1
X-Men To Serve And Protect TP

MANGA

Biomega GN Vol 6 (Of 6)
Naruto 3-In-1 Ed Vol 1

Due To Arrive 01/06/11

2011-05-24T17:12:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

30 Days Of Night Night Again #2 (Of 4)
50 Girls 50 #1 (Of 4)
Adventure Comics #527
Aliens Vs Predator Three World War PB
Amazing Spider-Man #663
Astonishing X-Men #39
Avengers Academy #14 Point One
Batman Beyond #6
BPRD Dead Remembered #3 (Of 3)
Broken Trinity TP Vol 2 Pandora's Box
Captain Britain HC Vol 1 Birth Of Legend
Citizen Rex HC
Criminal Last Of Innocent #1 (Of 4)
Dark Tower Gunslinger Battle Of Tull #1 (Of 5)
Darkness #91
DC Comics Presents Superman Infestation #1
DC Universe Online Legends #9
Deadpool Classic TP Vol 5
Fear Itself #3 (Of 7) Fear
Fear Itself Deep #1 (Of 4) Fear
Flashpoint #2
Flashpoint Abin Sur The Green Lantern #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Batman Knight Of Vengeance #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint Secret Seven #1 (Of 3)
Flashpoint The World Of Flashpoint #1 (Of 3)
Green Wake #3 (Of 5)
Halcyon #5 (Of 5)
Hellboy The Fury #1 (Of 3)
Herc #4 Fear
Heroes For Hire #8
House Of Mystery #38
Hulk #34
Intrepids #4
Iron Man War Of Iron Men TP
iZombie #14
Jonah Hex #68
Jurassic Park TP Devils In The Desert
Marvel Zombie Christmas Carol #1 (Of 5)
Moon Knight #2
Osborn TP Evil Incarcerated
Ozma Of Oz #7 (Of 8)
Planetary Batman Deluxe HC
Red Spike #2 (Of 5)
Reed Gunther #1
Secret Six #34
SHIELD #1
Solomon Kane Red Shadows #3 (Of 4)
Static Shock Special #1
Stuck Rubber Baby SC New Edition
Suicide Forest TP
Superboy #8
Superman New Krypton TP Vol 4
Supreme Power #1 (Of 4)
Sweet Tooth #22
That Hellbound Train #1 (Of 3)
Thor TP Thunderstrike
Thunderbolts #158 Fear
Turf #5
Uncanny X-Force #11
Walking Dead Survivors Guide #3 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #22
Weird Worlds #6 (Of 6)
Who Is Jake Ellis #4
Witchfinder Lost & Gone Forever #5 (Of 5)
Wolverine Hercules Myths Monsters And Mutants #4 (Of 4)
Wonder Woman #611
Wonder Woman HC Vol 1 Odyssey
X-23 #11
X-Factor #220
X-Men #12
X-Men Great Power #1
X-Men To Serve And Protect TP

The Gosh! Authority 24/05/11

2011-05-24T16:07:00.034+01:00

Everyone grabbed a copy of Paying For It last week before I got a chance to nab one for myself, so if you (like me) are waiting on news of a restock: this is it. Come get ‘em.

Joining it on the new shelves is Vertigo’s Strange Adventures #1, a science fiction anthology featuring all new stuff by Peter Milligan (Hellblazer), Scott Snyder (American Vampire) and Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth), plus the very first chapter of Spaceman (a new series by 100 Bullets creators Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso), all topped off with a cover by Paul Pope (100%, Heavy Liquid).

Comics Alliance have a full contents page for those who like to open their presents early, but it’s all quiet on the preview front.

Back in 1999/2000 Peter Bagge (Hate) and Gilbert Hernandez (Love & Rockets) teamed up for Yeah! – a nine-issue all-ages series about an intergalactically famous girl group who were totally unknown on their home planet Earth.

“My daughter by then, in 1999, was eight, nine years old, and she was a girly girl and hated to way my comics looked and was like, “Do a comic for girls.” So it was very much me writing something that would entertain her,” said Bagge, of his Comics Code of Authority-approved (!) book. “I managed to convince Gilbert Hernandez to draw it, because I knew that he would capture that sort of Dan DeCarlo 60s or 70s Archie look. Since I’m ripping off Josie and the Pussycats, it may as well look like it.” Fantagraphics have a preview.

If you like Bagge chances are you’re a fan of Johnny Ryan too. This week’s Take a Joke collects all the best bits from his one-man laffs anthology Angry Youth Comix as well as a bunch of stuff yoinked from the pages of Vice magazine. There’s all manner of potty-mouthed things you’d expect from Johnny Ryan. Preview at Fantagraphics.

Last week Kurt Busiek was all about Dave Stevens and The Rocketeer but this week it’s all Jack Kirby. Kirby: Genesis #0 is the prelude to a new series he’s writing, illustrated by Alex Ross in their first collaboration since 1994. They’ve trawled through years and years worth of Kirby’s unused ideas and forgotten designs which they’re expanding upon to make a whole new series in itself. There’s a big long interview with them at Comicbook Resources and a preview here.

“I think something that's important to say about Jack Kirby that we can't say about anybody else over this last 100 years of creating comics and comic strips is that there isn't this wellspring of an unending sea of ideas for every artist,” said Ross. “At least not all the ones I've admired. Certainly, some people have come along and created all kinds of characters, but to have this many offshoots and things that were done independently that could be mined for creative potential...when you look at some of Kirby's designs and see the intricacy of thought and detail he'd put into a throwaway drawing, you realize this was a mind that was exploding with concepts. That's a very unique thing for a very unique person, and it makes it very special for us to be doing this. We couldn't just do this with Artist X, Y or Z.”

The Comics Journal are slowly loading old pre-Internet Comics Journal issues onto their new website and most recently made this available: an interview with Kirby by Gary Groth from 1990.

“I was a movie person. I think it was one of the reasons I drew comics. They galvanized me. When Superman came out it galvanized the entire industry. It’s just part of the American scene. Superman is going to live forever. They’ll be reading Superman in the next century when you and I are gone. I felt in that respect I was doing the same thing. I wanted to be known. I wasn’t going to sell a comic that was going to die quickly.”

Craig Yoe always delivers some of the most handsome books on the shelves, and this new one should be no different. Krazy Kat & The Art of George Herriman HC is his tribute to the genius comics creator featuring rare art, memorabilia, and new essays by the likes of Jay Cantor, Douglas Wolk, Harry Katz, Richard Thompson, Dee Cox (Herriman's granddaughter), Craig McCracken, Bill Watterson, along with reprinted classic ones from Gilbert Seldes and e. e. cummings.

Lewis Trondheim’s Approximate Continuum Comics were some of the first autobiographical works to come out of France. This volume from Fantagraphics (previewed here) collects the first three chapters from The Nimrod (which were originally released in English as regular American floppies) as well as a bunch of previously untranslated stuff, plus a section at the back in which the real life characters pick fault with Trondheim’s depictions of themselves. David B. has got something to say, as does Trondheim’s Mum. How often does that happen? The Comics Journal have a review of it. While you’re in the mood for some Trondheim you might like to pick up Dungeon TP Monstres Volume 4: Night of the Ladykiller, also featuring work by Joann Sfar.

The Accidental Salad looks like an Ignatz book only it isn’t – it’s part of the wave of new stuff we got from Blank Slate Books last week. The UK publisher has hatched a plan to produce large format comics showcasing previously unpublished artists and Joe Decie’s The Accidental Salad is the first off the block. “[It’s] the cream of my current work, including a nice chunk of new and unseen strips,” Decie told Dave O’Connell (Tozo) in this interview. Head to his blog to see what he’s all about: ink washed stories of the everyday with a twist of the absurd.
Also from Blank Slate are two books by German comic artist Mawil, the first time any of his colour stuff has appeared in English: The Band and Home and Away. In the former Mawil relives his schoolboy fantasy of being in a rock band, while the latter has nothing to do with a terrible Australia soap opera. It’s actually about growing up in East Berlin after the wall came down and fighting videogame addiction. Joe Matt (Spent) thinks it’s brilliant.

French graphic novelist Peggy Adam’s Luchadoras has the same sort of look to it as Persepolis. Set on the Mexican border, it’s about a woman attempting to escape an abusive gang-member fiancé, a corrupt society and a world of senseless atrocity. Basically, it’s about all sorts of things you can’t cram into a one-sentence synopsis eloquently or remotely well. It was chosen for the 2007 Sélection Officielle at the Angouléme International Comics Festival, and Broken Frontier have a review. They reckon you should read it once then read it all again.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale SC by Belle Yang is also about fleeing an abusive boyfriend, though in this story she shacks up with her Old World Chinese parents. Much like Maus, it’s about her relationship with her father and learning how he and her ancestors survived in China in during World War II. Yang talks about it in this interview and CbR really like it.

On the subject of “grim and foreign” how’s this one: Prison Stories by Igor Hofbauer, a Croation underground illustrator and poster artist. “Prison Stories is a rolling narrative of seven interlocking stories exploring imprisoned characters. The book is frankly terrifying. Not in a ‘goblins are going to eat my skull’ way, but a ‘humanity has deserted all bonds of allegiance’ way,” writes Last Hours, before going on to compare the mood of it to Charles Burns’ Black Hole.

Clonk is something that almost snuck in under the radar entirely. There are nearly no reviews of it, almost as if the thing doesn’t exist. Why? I don’t know. It looks marvellous in a Jason kind of way, or maybe even Goodbye Chunky Rice. It’s like a creepy kids book that starts with a suicidal hanging, so maybe that’s why. The Innsmouth Free Press has a rave review and here are two preview pages hidden in a corner of the publisher’s website: One. Two.

If you’re after something actually cute with no underlying weirdness Jeffrey Brown has just the ticket: the unbelievably twee postcard set The Cutest Sneeze in the World. Someone is already enthusiastically posting them all over the world. It’s about cats sneezing, cats getting out of bags, cats expanding, and cats looking at things, but if it’s any better than Kim Jong-il looking at things I’ll eat my hat.

Peter Hogan and Chris Sprouse’s six-issue miniseries Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom is now in paperback, and if you missed it the first go round you should read this interview with Hogan at CbR, where he talks about getting one of the best gigs in comics.

Gutwrencher was a four-issue story by Steve Niles and Keith Giffen that first appeared in 2006. “Gutwrencher really is the most straight forward horror thing I've ever done because it's really a nod to the horror movies of the '80s – the slasher films, the Prom Nights, the Friday The 13th's and things like that. It's about a high school reunion and the kid who thought he was abused in high school by all these people who comes back for a little revenge. I'll leave it at that,” said Niles, way back when. It’s out in trade paperback tomorrow, so you can grab that and their more recent Doc Macabre in hardcover to add to your grisly reading pile.

Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston (of The Coffin fame) see their series about dreams and levels of reality – Deep Sleeper – collected in hardcover for the first time ever. No new reviews so you can have this old one for now.

Also in hardcover is Peter Milligan’s 5 Ronin, which he talks about with CbR, with each of the five issues illustrated by a different artist: Tomm Coker, Dalibor Talajic, Laurence Campbell, Goran Parlov, and Leandro Fernandez. Next to it on the X-shelf you’ll find Mystique By Brian K. Vaughan: The Ultimate Collection TPB collecting issues #1 to #13 of the blue lady. Mark Millar and Chris Bachalo’s Ultimate War HC has arrived too, and if that’s not enough Millar for you there’s always the new issue of CLiNT.

The Tattered Man is a one-shot from the Jonah Hex team – Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti – about a spirit of vengeance whose existence has something to do with the WWII concentration camps. “I have always believed in giving people a second chance (except ex-girlfriends) and the theme of redemption and making hard choices have always interested me. It’s my human nature to believe there is some good in even the worst person… and this story takes an interesting idea/concept and runs with it. That said, there is a lot of simply horrible people in this book that die in horrific ways… but we make sure, at least, that they have what’s coming to them.” More of that interview at MTV Geek.

DC Comics Presents Green Lantern: Willworld by J.M. DeMatteis and Seth Fisher reprints stories from the early days of Hal Jordan as Green Lantern. DeMatteis described it as “Green Lantern meets Little Nemo in Quantum Wonderland. A playful, surreal, quantum physics fairytale.” It has been out of print for ages so bag a copy while you still can. Also, Seth Fisher’s an excellent artist who didn’t end up doing a whole lot – five years after receiving an Eisner nomination for this Green Lantern comic he died at the age of 33 after falling off a roof in Japan.

Lastly, here’s a couple of things from the wilds of the Internet that you might like:

A gallery of Bill Sienkiewicz covers that somebody sent me after I whinged that cover artists always draw the same grimace on every superhero face. If only there were more Siekiewiczes.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones has died. The Comics Journal posts an obituary and some pictures of lovingly rendered naked ladies. “I am a romantic and a painter and I love women…The female form just reflects light so simply and beautifully,” he once said.

That’s about it. I’ve just been told that next week people with proper jobs get another Bank Holiday Monday (I don’t, I’ll be here). The comics will be doing that thing where they arrive on the same day we’re allowed to sell them, so in all probability they won’t be available to buy until Wednesday afternoon. If you can save your visit until the Thursday it’ll be less chaotic and there will definitely be comics. You know the drill!

-- Hayley

In Store 19/05/11 - 25/05/11

2011-05-24T15:51:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

2000 AD #1735
Judge Dredd Megazine #311
5 Ronin HC (Milligan/Campbell )
Accidental Salad SC (Joe Decie)
Alter Ego #101
American Vampire #15 & HC Vol 2
Approximate Continuum Comics GN (Lewis Trondheim)
Secret Avengers #13
Band SC (Mawil)
Batman Brave And The Bold Emerald Knight TP
Detective Comics #877(S. Snyder)
Butcher Baker Righteous Maker #3
Captain America #618
Captain America Official Index To Marvel Universe TP
Ultimate Comics Captain America HC
Carbon Grey #3
Charlaine Harris Grave Sight GN Vol 1
CLiNT #8 (M. Millar/J. Ross Et Al)
Clonk GN Vol 1
Conan Road Of Kings #5 (Of 6)
Crossed 3D TP Vol 1 (David Lapham)
Cutest Sneeze In The World Postcard Set (Jeffrey Brown)
Daomu #4
Marvel Masterworks Daredevil TP Vol 2
Deep Sleeper HC (P. Hester/M. Huddleston)
Doc Macabre HC (Niles/Wrightson)
Dungeon TP Monstres Vol 4 Night Of The Ladykiller(J. Sfar/L. Trondheim)
DV8 Gods And Monsters TP (Wood)
Even The Giants GN (J. Jacobs)
FF #4 (Jonathan Hickman)
Forget Sorrow An Ancestral Tale SC
Futurama Comics #55
Gotham City Sirens #23
Green Arrow #12
DC Comics Presents: Green Lantern Willworld (J.M. DeMatteis/Seth Fisher)
Green Lantern #66 (War of GLs)
Green Lantern Corps #60 (War GLs)
Green Lantern Corps Revolt Of Alpha Lanterns HC
Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #10 (War of Green Lanterns)
Gutwrencher TP (Niles/Giffen)
Hellraiser #2
Home And Away GN (Mawil)
House Of Mystery TP Vol 6 Safe As Houses
I Never Liked You SC New Ptg
Incorruptible #18
Incredible Hulks #629
Infamous #6 (Of 6)
Influencing Machine HC
Iron Man 2.0 #5 Fear
Justice League International TP Vol 6
Justice Society Of America #51
Kato Origins #9 The Hellfire Club
King Conan Scarlet Citadel #4
Kirby Genesis #0 (Busiek/A. Ross)
Krazy Kat & The Art Of George Herriman HC (Craig Yoe)
Lengths #1 Weird Hours
Luchadoras GN
Magnus Robot Fighter #4 (Of 4)
Marvels Project: Birth Of Super Heroes TP (Ed Brubaker)
Mighty Samson #3
Mission #4
Namor First Mutant #10
Onslaught Unleashed #4 (Of 4)
Pixar Presents Cars #1
Power Man And Iron Fist #5 (Of 5)
Prison Stories SC (I. Hofbauer)
Punisher In Blood TP (R. Remender)
Robert E Howard's Savage Sword #2
Ruse #3 (Of 4)
Secret Warriors #27
Simpsons Summer Shindig #5
Slaughterman's Creed One-Shot
Smurfs GN Vol 6 Smurfs & Howlibird
Amazing Spider-Man #662
Astonishing Spider-Man/Wolverine #6 (Of 6)
Spider-Girl #7
Stan Lee's The Traveler #7
Star Wars Darth Vader & Lost Command #5
Strange Adventures #1
Strange Case Of Mr Hyde #2 (Of 4)
Suicide Girls #2
Action Comics #901
Super Dinosaur #2
Take A Joke TP (Johnny Ryan)
Tattered Man One-Shot(J. Palmiotti/J. Gray)
Mighty Thor #2
Tom Strong & Robots Of Doom TP (P. Hogan/C. Sprouse)
Transformers 3 Dark Moon Movie Adaptation TP
True Blood Tainted Love #4
Ultimate War Prem HC
Uncanny X-Men #537 (K. Gillen)
Unknown Soldier TP Vol 4 Beautiful World
Venom #3
Walking Dead #85 (R. Kirkman)
Walking Dead Weekly #21
Chaos War X-Men TP
Daken Dark Wolverine #9.1
Deadpool #37
Emma Frost Ultimate Collection TP
Mystique By Brian K Vaughan Ultimate Collection TPB
Wolverine #9
X-Men Earth's Mutant Heroes #1
X-Men Legacy #249
X-Men Spotlight
Xombi #3
Yeah GN (P. Bagge/G. Hernandez)

MANGA

Gente TP Vol 3 (Of 3)
Gundam 00 Season 2 GN Vol 3
Mega Man Gigamix TP Vol 1
Saturn Apartments TP Vol 3

Due To Arrive 25/05/11

2011-05-17T16:24:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

5 Ronin HC
Action Comics #901
Amazing Spider-Man #662
American Vampire #15
American Vampire HC Vol 2
Art Of Amanda Conner HC
Astonishing Spider-Man Wolverine #6 (Of 6)
Barks Bear Book HC
Batman Brave And The Bold Emerald Knight TP
BPRD TP Vol 3 Plague Of Frogs New Ptg
Breed Vol 1 Book Of Genesis TP
Broken Trinity TP Vol 2 Pandora's Box
Butcher Baker Righteous Maker #3
Captain America #618
Captain America Official Index To Marvel Universe TP
Carbon Grey #3
Chaos War X-Men TP
Conan Road Of Kings #5 (Of 6)
Daken Dark Wolverine #9 Point One
Daomu #4
Darkness #91
Darkness Origins TP Vol 3
DC Comics Presents Green Lantern Willworld Deadpool #37
Detective Comics #877
Dungeons And Dragons #7
DV8 Gods And Monsters TP
Emma Frost Ultimate Collection TP
FF #4
Godzilla Kingdom Of Monsters #3
Gotham City Sirens #23
Green Arrow #12
Green Lantern #66
Green Lantern Corps #60
Green Lantern Corps Revolt Of Alpha Lanterns HC
Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #10
Halcyon #5 (Of 5)
House Of Mystery TP Vol 6 Safe As Houses
Incredible Hulks #629
Infamous #6 (Of 6)
Iron Man 2.0 #5 Fear Itself
Justice League International TP Vol 6
Justice Society Of America #51
King Conan Scarlet Citadel #4
Li'l Abner HC Vol 3
Magnus Robot Fighter #4 (Of 4)
Marvels Project Birth Of Super Heroes TP
Memoir #4 (Of 6)
Mighty Samson #3
Mighty Thor #2
Mission #4
Marvel Masterworks Daredevil TP Vol 2
Mystique By Brian K Vaughan Collection TP
Namor First Mutant #10
Onslaught Unleashed #4 (Of 4)
Power Man And Iron Fist #5 (Of 5)
Punisher In Blood TP
Robert E Howard's Savage Sword #2
Runaways TP Vol 4 True Believers Digest New Ptg
Ruse #3 (Of 4)
Secret Avengers #13 Fear Itself
Secret Warriors #27
Spider-Girl #7
Spider-Man #14
Star Wars Darth Vader & Lost Command #5
Star Wars Legacy War #6 (Of 6)
Strange Adventures #1
Strange Case Of Mr Hyde #2 (Of 4)
Super Dinosaur #2
Tattered Man One-Shot
Thunderstrike TP Youth In Revolt
Tom Strong And The Robots Of Doom TP
Transformers 3 Dark Moon Movie Adaptation TP
Transformers Prime TP Vol 2
True Blood Tainted Love #4
Turf #5
Ultimate Comics Captain America Prem HC
Ultimate War Prem HC
Uncanny X-Men #537
Unknown Soldier TP Vol 4 Beautiful World
Venom #3
Walking Dead #85
Walking Dead Weekly #21
Wolverine #9
Wonder Woman #611
X-Men Earth's Mutant Heroes #1
X-Men Legacy #249
X-Men Spotlight
Xombi #3

The Gosh! Authority 17/05/11

2011-05-17T14:51:00.028+01:00

Chester Brown’s Paying For It has arrived and I’ve been instructed not to say anything rude on the Gosh! Blog. Let’s see how long that lasts.

It’s an autobiographical book about prostitution and being a john from the guy who did I Never Liked You. I can’t remember the last time a book arrived with such anticipation heaped before it (probably it’s because Chester Brown is excellent and the last time we saw a book from him was five long years ago – Louis Riel, an A+ piece of work). There are interviews all over the place but the most extensive one comes courtesy of The Comics Journal. Brown talks about how Dave Sim’s famously misogynistic rant section in Cerebus #186 had an effect on how he viewed romantic relationships:

“Up until [Cerebus #186] I just kind of accepted [that] everyone’s supposed to have a girlfriend and that’s the natural order. If you don’t have a girlfriend, you’re a loser. That’s what men do, they either have girlfriends or they marry—well, as long as you’re heterosexual. So, reading Cerebus #186, even though I didn’t agree with all the misogynistic views—I didn’t agree that women are inferior, all that stuff—still, here was a guy who was looking at male-female relationships in a different way. It kind of showed me, you don’t have to think like everyone else thinks about these things. Part of it was that I respected Dave a whole lot, and I knew him, and I thought he was very intelligent. That issue of Cerebus was a bombshell in a lot of ways. Like a lot of people at the time, I wasn’t sure, “Is he kidding? Is this a joke? Is he serious?” But it got me re-evaluating the whole male-female dynamic, and thinking about it in a different way, even if my conclusions are different from Dave’s.”

“Marriage is such a ridiculous, outdated institution that it almost doesn’t seem worth the energy to point out how stupid it is,” says Brown in another interview in the Montreal Gazette.

Jeet Heer, a friend of Brown’s (“Chester's sex life has long been a staple of amused and amazed conversation in my social circle”) writes a guest column at Canada’s Globe and Mail. “Ultimately,” he says, “sex work should be considered a trade, like auto repair or journalism. (Some people will never accept it; then again, some people will always hate the media, or mistrust their mechanics.)”

It’s causing a stir on the internet and people are arguing for and against it (prostitution and the book). Either way, I’m looking forward to reading it. Here are a couple of reviews at our favourite comic book acronyms, TCJ and FPI.

The biggest comic this week has got to be the Rocketeer Adventures #1 (of 4) – an all-new anthology series featuring Rocketeer stories by some of the best guys in the business: Alex Ross, John Cassaday, Mike Allred, Kurt Busiek, Michael Kaluta, Mike Mignola and Jim Silke (and that’s just the first issue!).

Comicbook Resources have a huge feature on it (preview pages too) in which they talk to everyone involved in this week’s issue. A portion of the profits go straight to the researchers currently trying to figure out a cure for the type of leukemia Dave Stevens died from back in 2008. A good cause and all that, but from the looks of it you won’t be needing that extra incentive.

Chico & Rita arrived some time last week so chances are you’ve already nabbed a copy. It’s the graphic novel version of the animated film (a Waltz With Bashir type deal) illustrated by the great Mariscal (legendary Spanish cartoonist who appeared in Raw back in 1980) and written by Oscar-winning director Fernando Trueba.

Inspired by the true story of Cuban band leader Bebo Valdes, it’s about a young piano player and his romantic entanglement with Rita, a singer. “1948 was the first year of the fusion between jazz and Cuban music: Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo,” said Trueba. “We set it in 1948 [because] we love all the Chevrolets and old advertisements,” added Mariscal, “Everywhere in the US and Europe people were dancing to cha cha and mambo. There was a big explosion of Cuban music.”

It’s another SelfMadeHero production so the quality is top-notch and they’ve even given us a bunch of signed and bookplated copies. Come in and grab one before they all go.

Ralph Steadman’s gone and done another book of splattery dog pictures. "To do another book about dogs in the wake of my three other books about dogs is, I am aware, a trifle excessive," he said. The Independent are into it – read their review here – and if you want to woof at some preview hounds point your nose at this.

Big heavy coffee table books from Gingko Press are all over the new release shelf this week making everything else look small and insignificant. In the unlikely event your gaze misses them, here’s what they’ve sent us:

Discrepancies HC by Alex Gross gives you pop surrealism aplenty. It includes most of the pieces from his most recent exhibition, as well as the entire show before that and various other bits from the sands of time. He talks to Hi-Fructose about it and they’ve got a fair whack of previews for you too.

More pop surrealism in Joe Sorren’s Painting/Sculpture: 2004 – 2010, published in conjunction with an exhibition of his in California. Head to Hi-Fructose again for an interview/preview.

EMEK: The Thinking Man’s Poster Artist HC collects a load of posters from the LA artist who helped revive the popularity of good old fashioned rock art. They’re a bit ‘60s psychedelia, a bit punk, and they’re done for the likes of NIN, Nick Cave, and Bright Eyes. Pictures at Gingko and the LA Weekly has an interview.

Monster Revolt! The Art of Dirty Donny HC gives you more rock and lowbrow art from the guy most famous for his work with Metallica (who provide the commentary in this book). Pictures at Gingko.

Not a big heavy hardcover at all but an artbook nonetheless is Zero: Jm Ken Nimura Illustration TP, a collection of colourful whimsy from the Eisner-nominated artist on I Kill Giants. Preview at Comic Buzz and if you’re interested in the details of the guy’s technique there’s a video interview over at The Comic Archive.

Joe Kubert’s Dong Xoai, Vietnam TP is in, thus completing the Kubert trifecta I mentioned last week.

“What I expect people to see, and the way I tried to draw it, are those events the way that I imagined them, having read the material that [retired colonel] Bill gave me. I tried to do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like a comic book or a comic strip but perhaps more like a combat reporter - that is, somebody who was there while the events were happening. And that’s why I did it in pencil and a lot of it may seem unfinished because I wanted that feeling of immediacy and the illustrations that I’ve done convey that to the reader so they themselves would feel that they are looking at the events happening while they’re happening.” More at Comicbook Resources.

Liar’s Kiss HC is the debut graphic novel by Eric Skillman, a man whose name you probably don’t know but whose work you’ll definitely have seen (he designed the cover of Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants, for starters). “Without giving too much away—it is a whodunit after all—the book is about a private detective, Nick Archer, who spends his nights with the woman he's supposed to be surveilling on behalf of her jealous husband,” he tells MTV Geek. “But when the husband turns up murdered, his cheating wife is the prime suspect and it's up to Nick to clear her name… and even in those two sentences I've already lied to you at least once. Sorry, it's just that kind of book.” With classic crime noir influences worn on his sleeve, you’ll probably be up for this if you’re a fan of Brubaker. Preview at Top Shelf, and a review at TCJ.

Yummy SC is a sort of true story – a graphic novel about the life and death of Robert ‘Yummy’ Sandifer, an 11-year-old gang member killed by his own gang, as seen through the eyes of a fictional classmate. “Back in 1994 I was a filmmaker teaching workshops to kids in the inner-city schools of Los Angeles. When the Yummy story broke, a lot of discussions started popping up among the kids. Some felt Yummy was a straight-up thug who got what he deserved. Others felt he was a victim too. At the time, there was a gang war going on in the area and there had been several memorials for students who'd been killed. Many of the kids had siblings who were in gangs or had been affected by gangs. It was a loaded topic.” Author G. Neri and illustrator Randy DuBurke talk about it here.

Having now met Robbie Morrison at our recent Free Comic Book Day signing, you should read some 2000AD stuff he did almost ten years ago. Collected for the very first time, The Bendatti Vendetta is a bloody gangland story set in contemporary Europe. Fully painted John Burns art throughout.

Chris Hastings’ The Adventures of Dr McNinja TP Volume 1 is a comic from The Internet.“In a world where a doctor can also be a ninja, you can expect some things. Little boys with large moustaches, giant lumberjacks, raptor riding banditos, Dracula's moon base... If you like action mixed with comedy and doctors mixed with ninjas, Dr. McNinja is a comic you'll most likely enjoy.” And why not? Anything can happen on The Internet, except for whatever happens in the story that’s exclusively print-only. They’ve put together a list of 10 Most Awesome McNinja Moments so you can do some preliminary detective work to see if you like it.

In hardcover you can have Powers Volume 1: Who Killed Retro Girl? which is the fully reformatted, redesigned, re-everything’d original Eisner Award-winning series by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. You can also get the controversial 2003 five-issue miniseries by Mark Millar and Terry Dodson, Trouble. It was a (failed) attempt to reach female readers with romance stories, and the book caused a stir for the two reasons listed over at CbR’s Robot6. Dodson provides the illustrated cover on this one, so casual browsers won’t be creeped out by the original photo versions.

Shadoweyes: Volume 2: Shadoweyes in Love continues the offbeat teen superhero story by Ross Campbell who’s cast aside the plump goth girls of Wet Moon for a bit. Preview at Ghetto Manga.

DC Comics Presents: Batman Dark City by Peter Milligan (Hellblazer) will be of interest to anyone reading Grant Morrison’s Bat-related titles, because he’s picked up on the Demon Barbathos plot point that began in this three-issue run by Milligan back in the early ‘90s. “I was interested – and still am – in the relationship between Gotham City and Batman. Interested in how Gotham is a character in itself, as important and Batman, The Joker or, indeed, The Riddler. Because of the varied nature of Gotham City I suppose it’s a story than can be told in a number of different ways,” said Milligan, talking about the (then uncollected) series in this interview from last year.

New series Batman: Gates of Gotham #1 (of 5) by Scott Snyder (American Vampire), Kyle Higgins, and Trevor McCarthy seems to be all about the same sort of thing: “I think when people refer to Gotham as a character, what they're reacting to is the mood it creates, the shadow that the city casts. In our story, we're really exploring the make-up of the city, and trying to take that concept of Gotham as a character to another level.” More at Newsarama.

Drums #1 (of 4) is a new one from El Torres, the writer of the recent miniseries Suicide Forest. Preview at MTV Geek.

Alpha Flight #0 Point One provides a good jumping on point for new readers courtesy of Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente, with Ben Oliver illustrating the Canadian superheroes. Van Lente said some stuff about it in USA Today (preview there too). Pick up Booster Gold #44 for the return of Dan Jurgens and a Flashpoint prelude (preview). And if you’ve been following James Asmus’ annuals crossover story Escape From The Negative Zone (in Uncanny X-Men Annual #3 and Steve Rogers: Super Solider Annual #1) you’ll be needing Namor First Mutant Annual #1 for the third and final chapter (preview).

Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker (Invincible) indulge in their Science Dog side-project again with Science Dog Special #2. “I think Science Dog is something Cory and I always wanted to do – even when we were doing Invincible; so it's been fun to come back to it every 25 issues. After doing it in Invincible #25, #50 and #75 we didn't want to wait until #100 to wrap up the story. So basically what we've done with Science Dog Special #2 is run the 12 pages from Invincible #75 that continued from the other two collected in Science Dog Special #1 and then go ahead and do a wrap-up conclusion to the entire story – and it ends up being pretty much a full-size issue. The story gets pretty epic by the end – at that point we're 50+ plus pages into it.” More at Newsarama.

And finally, a bunch of notable X-books. There’s X-Men Giant Size #1 in which Christopher Yost, Paco Medina and Dalibor Talijic begin a story they’ll finish up in X-Men #12 next month (preview). Astonishing X-Men #38 continues with the parallel continuity thing (“The X-Men split into two teams, each on seemingly separate missions told by rotating creative teams that collide with major consequences for the X-Men!” writes The Comic Book Nerd), previewed here. Deadpool: Wade Wilson’s War is collected in trade, and if you missed the series by Duane Swierczynski and Jason Pearson you can preview the first issue at CbR. Dave Lapham and Kyle Baker’s popular run on DeadpoolMAX continues this week with #8, and you can get the first six issues of the series in hardcover too. “Will it be sophomoric? Yes. Will it be fun? Yes. Will it be smart? Define smart.” Preview of this week’s issue here.

Before I sign off, here’s a six-page comic written by Paul Slade and illustrated by Hans Rickheit of the webcomic Ectopiary.

Insects are weird.

-- Hayley

In Store 12/05/11 - 18/05/11

2011-05-17T14:48:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Archie & Friends #155
B & V Friends Double Digest #214
Jugheads Double Digest #170
2000 AD #1734
Bendatti Vendetta TP (R. Morrison)
Adventures Of Dr McNinja TP Vol 1
Alpha Flight #0 Point One
Avengers #13 (Fear Itself/Bachalo)
Avengers Academy #14
New Avengers 100 Project SC
Ultimate Avengers TP Volume 3 Blade Vs The Avengers
Ultimate Avengers Vs New Ultimates #4
Batgirl The Flood TP
Batman #710
Batman And Robin #23
Batman Gates Of Gotham #1 (Of 5) (Scott Snyder)
DC Comics Presents Batman Dark City (Peter Milligan)
Book Of Dogs HC (Ralph Steadman)
Booster Gold #44 Flashpoint
Captain America First Vengeance #2 (Of 4)
Chaos War Incredible Hulks TP
Chico & Rita HC (Mariscal)
Cinema Retro #20
Courtney Crumrin Tales #2
Dark Shadows Complete Series HC Vol 2
Darkness Four Horsemen #4 (Of 4)
DC Universe Online Legends #8
Death Of Dracula TP
Deus Ex #4 (Of 6)
Discrepancies HC (A. Gross)
DMZ #65 (B. Wood)
Dong Xoai Vietnam TP (Joe Kubert)
Drums #1 (Of 4) (El Torres)
Electric Ant TP
Emek: The Thinking Man’s Poster Artist HC
Fables #105
Fighting American TP (Simon/Kirby)
Flash Omnibus By Geoff Johns HC Vol 1
Hawkeye: Blind Spot #4 (Of 4)
Hellblazer #279
Hellblazer City Of Demons TP
Herc #3 Fear Itself
Heroes For Hire #7
Hulk #33
Illustration Magazine #33
Invincible Iron Man #504 Fear Itself
Joe Sorren: Painting/Sculpture HC
Justice League Of America #57
Juxtapoz #125 June 2011
Knights Of The Dinner Table Black Hands 2011 One-Shot
Legion Of Super Heroes #13
Liar's Kiss HC
Li'l Depressed Boy #4
Modesty Blaise TP Vol 19 Double Agent
Monster Revolt! Art Of Dirty Donny HC
Namor First Mutant Annual #1
Outsiders #39
Paying For It HC (Chester Brown)
Power Girl #24
Powers Prem HC Vol 1 Who Killed Retro Girl?
Red Sonja: Revenge Of The Gods #3 (Of 5)
Rocketeer Adventures #1 (Of 4) (M. Allred/K. Busiek Et Al)
Science Dog Special #2 (Kirkman)
Shadoweyes GN Vol 2 Shadoweyes In Love (Ross Campbell)
Sherlock Holmes Year One #4
Sigil #3 (Of 4)
Silver Surfer #4 (Of 5)
Simpsons Comics #178
Skaar King Of Savage Land #3 (Of 5)
Amazing Spider-Man #661
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #158 & TP Volume 2
Spirit #14
Stan Lee Soldier Zero #8 & TP Vol 1
Star Wars Jedi Dark Side #1
Super Dinosaur Origin Special One-Shot
Super Hero Squad Squad For All Seasons TP
Superboy & The Legion Of Super Heroes: The Early Years SC
Supergirl #64
Superman Batman #84
Tank Girl Bad Wind Rising #4 (Of 4)
Teen Titans #95
Thor World Eaters Prem HC
Thunder Agents #7
Thunderbolts #157
Tintin Young Readers Ed GN Red Rackham
Transformers Foundation TP
Transformers Rising Storm TP
Trouble By Mark Millar Prem HC
Ultimate Comics Doomsday HC
Uncanny X-Force #10
Vampirella Scarlet Legion #1
Walking Dead Weekly #20
Witchblade #144
Astonishing X-Men #38 (J. Bobillo)
Deadpool Max Prem HC Nutjob (D. Lapham/K. Baker)
DeadpoolMax #8
Deadpool Wade Wilson's War TP
Generation Hope #7 (K. Gillen)
X-23 #10
X-Factor #219
X-Men Age Of Apocalypse Prelude TP
X-Men Curse Of The Mutants TP
X-Men Giant-Size #1
X-Men Prelude To Schism #2 (Of 4)
Young Justice #4
Yummy SC (Randy DuBurke)
Zatanna #13
Zero: Jm Ken Niimura Illustration TP
Zombies Vs Robots Undercity #2 (Of 4)

MANGA

Death Note Black Ed TP Vol 3
Gantz TP Vol 17
Hikaru No Go TP Vol 23
I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow TP Vol 3
Laon GN Vol 5

Due To Arrive 15/05/11

2011-05-10T10:50:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

Adventures Of Dr McNinja TP Vol 1 Night Powers
Alpha Flight #0 Point One
Amazing Spider-Man #661
Angel Yearbook One-Shot
Astonishing X-Men #38
Avengers #13 Fear
Avengers Academy #14
Batgirl The Flood TP
Batman #710
Batman And Robin #23
Batman Gates Of Gotham #1 (Of 5)
Booster Gold #44 Flashpoint
Bride Of The Water God TP Vol 8
Captain America First Vengeance #2 (Of 4)
Carbon Grey #3
Chaos War Incredible Hulks TP
Darkness Four Horsemen #4 (Of 4)
Darkness Origins TP Vol 3
DC Comics Presents Batman Dark City #1
DC Universe Online Legends #8
Deadpool Max Prem HC Nutjob
Deadpool Team-Up HC Vol 3 BFFs
Deadpool Wade Wilson's War TP
Deadpoolmax #8
Death Of Dracula TP
Deep Sleeper HC
Deus Ex #4 (Of 6)
DMZ #65
Doc Macabre HC
Dong Xoai Vietnam TP
Drums #1 (Of 4)
Electric Ant TP
Essential X-Men TP Vol 8 New Ed
Fables #105
Flash Omnibus By Geoff Johns HC Vol 1
Generation Hope #7
Ghost Talkers Daydream TP Vol 6
Gutwrencher TP
Hawkeye: Blind Spot #4 (Of 4)
Hellblazer #279
Hellblazer City Of Demons TP
Herc #3 Fear
Heroes For Hire #7
Hulk #33
Image Firsts Jack Staff #1
Image Firsts Magdalena #1
Image Firsts Orc Stain #1
Invincible Iron Man #504 Fear
JSA All Stars Glory Days TP
Justice League Of America #57
Kill Shakespeare #11 (Of 12)
Last Mortal #1 (Of 4)
Legion Of Super Heroes #13
Li'l Depressed Boy #4
Mighty Crusaders TP
Marvel Masterworks Mighty Thor HC Vol 10
Namor First Mutant Annual #1
Outsiders #39
Power Girl #24
Powers Prem HC Vol 1 Who Killed Retro Girl
Science Dog Special #2
Sigil #3 (Of 4)
Silver Surfer #4 (Of 5)
Skaar King Of Savage Land #3 (Of 5)
Snake Eyes Ongoing #1
Spirit #14
Star Wars Blood Ties TP Vol 1 Tale Of Jango & Boba Fett
Star Wars Jedi Dark Side #1
Star Wars Old Republic TP Vol 2
Super Dinosaur #2
Super Dinosaur Origin Special #1
Super Hero Squad Squad For All Seasons TP
Superboy Legion Of Super Heroes The Early Years TP
Supergirl #64
Superman Batman #84
Tattered Man One-Shot
Teen Titans #95
Thor World Eaters Prem HC
Thunder Agents #7
Thunderbolts #157
Tiny Titans #40
Transformers 3 Movie Prequel Foundation #4 (Of 4)
Transformers Ongoing #19
Trouble By Mark Millar Prem HC
Turf #5
Ultimate Avengers Vs New Ultimates #4 (Of 6)
Ultimate Comics Doomsday HC
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #158
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man TP Vol 2 Chameleons
Uncanny X-Force #10
Walking Dead Weekly #20
Witchblade #144
Wolverine Enemy Of State MGC 20 #1
X-23 #10
X-Factor #219
X-Men Age Of Apocalypse Prelude TP
X-Men Giant-Size #1
X-Men Prelude To Schism #2 (Of 4)
Young Justice #4
Zatanna #13

The Gosh! Authority 10/05/11

2011-05-10T10:49:00.000+01:00

Everything’s back to normal now. You can saunter in on Wednesday safe in the knowledge that everything is going according to plan. That is unless we all get beamed up in the night, or the world ends, or stuff just goes properly wonky. It might, but then it always might.

Ten minutes after I posted last week’s blog, this thing went up on The Comics Journal: The Day I Almost Killed Kurt Busiek, or rather: What Happened During My Week Away When Andrew Had To Write The Gosh! Blog. It’s a report on the Barcelona comics convention I went to. Sort of.

Farm 54 (originally Ferme 54) by Galit and Gilad Selikt arrived a few days ago. It’s a hardcover collection of three semi-autobiographical stories from three key moments in one person’s life: Noga, a Jewish girl born in the early 1970s who grew up in rural Israel. The FPI Blog posts a very good review (preview pages here) from someone who originally wanted to do the translation. “It might be one of the most important graphic novels to hit the British stores this year,” he says. Go read his review to see why. He also reckons it’s good companion piece to Joe Sacco’s war reportage.

Riffing on a similar theme here: Yossel – April 19, 1943 is one of two classic reprints from Joe Kubert this week, a man famed for his war stories (Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace). It’s about a 15-year-old aspiring artist in the Warsaw Ghetto, and also an alternative reality – this could have been Kubert himself had his family not emigrated to America back in the twenties. It’s part of Kubert’s paperback trio from DC Comics this May – the other being Jew Gangster, with Dong Xaoi to follow a little later.

Jew Gangster is set in Depression-era New York and indulges in pretty much every gangster cliché you can think of (in a good way). Says the man himself: “Yossel, Jew Gangster and Dong Xoai should not be listed as ‘comic books,’ because that would be a misnomer. As a friend stated in a recent discussion we were having about today’s narrative art and graphic novels, “There are no boundaries anymore, only the horizon.”’ I don’t know, I rather like just calling them all “comics” because it annoys The Guardian.

Jason Shiga (Meanwhile) gives you Empire State: A Love Story (Or Not), about a stereotypical geek who follows a girl to New York City because he likes her, and arranges to meet her at the top of the Empire State Building because it’s a Sleepless in Seattle in-joke. In fact, according to this interview with Shiga, the book pretty much picks up where Sleepless in Seattle left off.
“It’s part coming-of-age story, part love story, part comedy, part geeky reflections on the world. What it isn’t is your traditional rom-com filled with hilarious hi-jinks that ends up with the guy and the girl overcoming outlandish obstacles to discover that they’ve been in love all this time after all,” says Wired.

Seduction of the Innocent HC is not the book you might think it is, if you’re thinking it’s the one written by Class-A killjoy Frederic Wertham, M.D. This is instead a collection of pin-ups by indie creators featuring pretty ladies reading comics. It’s a new edition of a previous one (obviously), boasting 20 more pages of girls on beds strewn with copies of Bone, Cerebus, or Dave Cooper’s Weasel.

Talent includes Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Dylan Horrocks, Danny Hellman, Sam Henderson, Peter Kuper, Johnny Ryan, and Richard Sala. If you like those dudes, girls, or comics, this might be up your alley. Scroll down this page for some preview pin-ups.

Garden is a newly translated manga from Yuichi Yokoyama through the illustrious PictureBox (that same publishing house we get all sorts of brilliantly strange things from). A group of friends break into a hidden garden to find that it’s not the Eden they had expected, but “a landscape of machines, geometric forms and nonorganic objects.” You can see some preview bits over at the publisher’s website. If you’ve never read anything by Yokoyama go get yourself a cup of tea and work your way through this piece over at The High Hat. Now imagine the fury if this guy misplaced his ruler.

Deadman TP Volume 1 finally collects the stories that introduced Boston Brand to readers in the late ‘60s. Created by Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino, Brand was a circus trapeze artist shot dead on the high-wire by an unknown marksman in the first issue. He returns when (made up) Hindu goddess Rama Kushna tells him to go find his murderer. Sans a body of his own, the ghostly Deadman gets to commandeer whoever he likes, and I seem to remember the ballerina being a particularly good choice for sprightliness. Anyway, worth a read (I like it), especially if you’re following all the Blackest Night/ Brightest Day goings on. It collects Strange Adventures #205 - #213 so you’ll get some classic Neal Adams stuff too.

Also in trade paperback is Origins of Marvel Comics TP which gives you the Cliff’s Notes versions of everyone’s backstory, as written by the likes of Fred Van Lente, Jeff Parker, Jim McCann, Chris Yost, Mike Carey and Peter David, and illustrated by John Romita, Jr., Leinil Francis Yu, Alan Davis, Greg Land, Mark Brooks, Nick Bradshaw, Jill Thompson and more. Plus there’s over 200 pages of character files (heroes and villains alike) as compiled by Steve Rogers himself in the aftermath of Siege.

On the (imaginary) new comics spinner-rack you can find 30 Days of Night: Night, Again #1 (of 4), the beginnings of a new miniseries by horror writer Joe Lansdale (who has done more novels than I’ve done Percy Pigs) and Sam Keith (The Maxx, Lobo). “My approach was more akin to the old movies House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. I brought different problems into the story beyond the vampires. We’ll see how it works. I think it’s going to be good. Sam Kieth’s art is awesome,” said Lansdale. No previews. Wait and see.

Jim Starlin dusts off Breed for another outing in Breed III #1 (of 7). The character’s the result of demonic rape, raised on Earth by regular humans. "We're leading up to him confronting his father. That's natural, that's what everybody's waiting for," Starlin said to Comicbook Resources. Preview there too.

Geoff Johns kicks off Flashpoint #1 this Wednesday, with Andy Kubert on drawing duties. Johns told Newsarama that it’s his most accessible series to date – there’s nothing you’ll need to have read as a primer beforehand, so just dive in. Mostly Johns has been saying "the first rule about Flashpoint is, don't talk about what happens after Flashpoint,” but he did let this slip: “There are a lot of new characters in here. This isn't just one of those stories were you take the DC Universe, shake it up, and say, "This is what happened to so-and-so." There are a lot of new characters in here as well. So you, as the reader, are in this universe with Flash, meeting all these characters for the very first time. Some of them are brand new. Some of them are characters that you maybe aren't familiar with, who are in a different place. But it's very much a journey where Barry's in the dark as much as the reader.”

Here’s your Flashpoint checklist to cut out and stick on your bedroom wall. For classic Flash stories be sure to pick up DC Comics Presents: The Flash #1, which reprints stuff by John Broome, Robert Kanigher, Infantino again, and Joe Giella. They’re all things that have so far managed to dodge trade paperback collections.

Richard Corben (Hellboy: The Crooked Man) teams up with Mike Mignola again for a new one-shot, Hellboy: Being Human. Hellboy teams up with Roger to crash a dinner party hosted by a witch and her zombie servant. Over at Comicbook Resources Mignola talks about everything in store for the big red guy.

And lastly, Moriarty #1 is a new one from Image by Daniel Corey and Anthony Diecidue, which is basically a Sherlock Holmes comic in a Sherlock Holmes-less world. “Would Moriarty revel in victory, spend the rest of his life smoking cigars and sleeping on stacks of money?” Corey wondered. “Probably not. I think he’d fall on hard times, and it would take one heck of an event – say, a World War – to jolt him back to life.” Bleeding Cool have a preview.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. See you Wednesday.

-- Hayley

In Store 05/05/11 - 11/05/11

2011-05-10T10:44:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Archie & Friends Double Digest #5
Archie Archives HC Vol 1
2000 AD #1733
30 Days Of Night Night Again #1 (Of 4)
Atomic Robo Deadly Art Of Science #5 (Of 5)
Avengers We Are The Avengers TP
New Avengers #12
Back Issue #48
Batgirl #21
Batman And Robin Deluxe HC Vol 3 Batman Must Die (Morrison)
Batman Arkham City #1 (Of 5)
Batman Incorporated #6 (Morrison)
Batman Streets Of Gotham TP Vol 1 Hush Money
Birds Of Prey #12 & HC Vol 1 Endrun
Black Panther Man Without Fear #518
Breed III #1 (Jim Starlin)
Captain America And Korvac Saga TP
Captain America Omnibus HC Vol 1
Chew #27
Chronicles Of King Conan TP Vol 2
Cinderella Fables Are Forever #4 (Of 6)
Crossed Psychopath #2 (Of 6)
Danger Girl TP Vol 1 Destination Dang
Daredevil Reborn #4 (Of 4)
DC Comics Presents The Flash #1
Deadman TP Vol 1
Death Of Zorro #3
Devil's Concubine GN
Doc Savage #14
Dr Who Magazine #434
Draw #20
Dungeons & Dragons Dark Sun #4 (Of 5)
Dynamo 5 TP Vol 5 Sins Of The Father
Elephantmen #31
Elias The Cursed GN
Emily The Strange TP Vol 3
Emma #3 (Of 5)
Empire State: A Love Story (Or Not) GN (J. Shiga)
Fallen Angel Return Of The Son #4 (Of 4)
Fantastic Four MGC #570
Farm 54 HC
Farscape #19
Fear Itself Youth In Revolt #1 (Of 6)
FF #3 (J. Hickman)
Flash #12 FP
Flashpoint #1 (G. Johns)
Formic Wars Burning Earth #5 (Of 7)
Goon Vol 1 Nothin' But Misery 2nd Ed
Heavy Metal July 2011 #140
Hellboy Being Human One-Shot (M. Mignola/R. Corben)
Image Firsts Astounding Wolf-Man #1
Incredible Hulks #628
Infamous #5 (Of 6)
Irredeemable TP Vol 6
Jew Gangster TP (Joe Kubert)
Journey Into Mystery #623 (K. Gillen)
Little Lulu TP Vol 27 Treasure Map
Little Man TP New Ptg (C. Brown)
Lone Ranger #25
Magdalena Ongoing #6
Magus #4 (Of 5)
Marvel Adventures Thor/Spider-Man Digest SC
Mice Templar Vol 3 #4
Moriarty #1
Next Men #6 (J. Byrne)
Northlanders #40 (B. Wood)
Origins Of Marvel Comics TP
PunisherMax #13
PunisherMax Prem HC Bullseye
Queen Sonja #16
R.E.B.E.L.S. #28
Red Robin #23
Robert Jordan Wheel Of Time Eye Of The World #10
Runaways TP Vol 3 Good Die Young Digest
Seduction Of The Innocent HC (J. Brown/I. Brunetti/
D. Horrocks/S. Henderson R. Sala, J. Ryan Et Al)
Spawn #207
Amazing Spider-Man #660
Spider-Man Extremist TP
Spider-Man Hobgoblin Lives TP
Stan Lee's Starborn #6
Stand No Man's Land #4 (Of 5)
Starcraft TP
Super Heroes #14
Superboy The Boy Of Steel TP
Superman #711
Thor Lord Of Asgard TP New Ptg
Titans #35
Undying Love #2
Unwritten #25
Walking Dead Weekly #19
Warlord Of Mars Dejah Thoris #3
Witchblade Redemption TP Vol 2
Wolfskin Hundredth Dream #6 (Of 6)
Astonishing X-Men #37
Cable And Deadpool MGC #1
Daken Dark Wolverine #9
New Mutants #25
New X-Men TP Vol 1 (G. Morrison)
X-Men #11
X-Men Legacy #248
Yossel TP (Joe Kubert)
Young Marvelman Classic HC Vol 1

MANGA

Garden GN
Oh My Goddess Rtl TP Vol 38
Panda Man Vs Chiwanda TP
Twin Spica GN Vol 7

Due To Arrive 11/05/11

2011-05-04T12:52:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

Amazing Spider-Man #660
Astonishing X-Men #37
Batgirl #21
Batman And Robin #23
Batman Arkham City #1 (Of 5)
Batman Incorporated #6
Birds Of Prey #12
Black Panther Man Without Fear #518
Breed Col Vol 01 Book Of Genesis TP
Breed III #1
Carbon Grey #3
Cinderella Fables Are Forever #4 (Of 6)
Daken Dark Wolverine #9
Daredevil Reborn #4 (Of 4)
DC Comics Presents The Flash #1
Doc Savage #14
Dynamo 5 TP Vol 05 Sins Of The Father
Fear Itself Youth In Revolt #1 (Of 6) Fear
FF #3
Flash #12 (Flashpoint)
Flash #12 Var Ed (Flashpoint)
Flashpoint #1
Green Lantern #66 (War Of GL)
Green Lantern Movie Prequel Kilowog #1
Incredible Hulks #628
Infamous #5 (Of 6)
Infinite Vacation #1 (Of 5) Var Cvr 3rd Ptg
Journey Into Mystery #623 Fear
Lil Depressed Boy #4
Moriarty #1
New Avengers #12
New Mutants #25
Nonplayer #1 (Of 6) Var Cvr 2nd Ptg
Northlanders #40
Powers #8
PunisherMax #13
Rebels #28
Red Robin #23
Stand No Mans Land #4 (Of 5)
Superman #711
Thunder Agents #7
Titans #35
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #153 –156 2nd Ptg Var DOSM
Undying Love #2
Unwritten #25
Walking Dead Weekly #19
X-Men #11
X-Men Legacy #248

The Gosh! Authority 04/05/11

2011-05-04T11:45:00.022+01:00

Remember the delayed chaos of last week? It’s happening again. Thanks to the Bank Holiday/sadist distributors, we will be receiving this week’s delivery on the same day it goes on the shelf instead of having the 24-hour buffer-zone we’re so fond of. It might arrive late this afternoon, so if you can put off your own personal New Comics Day until the retro-style Thursday I highly recommend you do. Not only will you be helping to stall my inevitable breakdown, you will be more likely to leave the shop with a bunch of comics in your hand. Perhaps it will include some of these:

Alexandro Jodorowsky’s Screaming Planet is “a living piece of metal adrift in the cosmos, howling in its infinite sorrow” having been driven mad by its inhabitants. The book’s not actually a chunk of screaming metal, but a collection of recent short stories from Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal written by Jodorowsky and illustrated by such excellent people as J.H. Williams III (Batwoman), Ladronn (The Spirit), and Adi Granov (Iron Man: Extremis), with new introductions to each piece. I can’t find a single preview of the thing so instead you can have this video interview with Jodorowsky, because you only need the flimsiest reason to link to such things.

Classic Hellraiser comics are collected in Hellraiser Masterpieces TP Volume 1, meaning you’ve (I’ve) got yet another reason for terminal insomnia. Originally published by Epic in the early ‘90s, the series featured a list of top-notch creators. Obviously they’ve not collected the whole lot in one go, but you can see the contents page in this preview at Comicbook Resources. There’s Wordsworth by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Writer’s Lament by Dwayne McDuffie and Kevin O’Neill, and Dead Things Rot by Mike Mignola, to name only a handful.

Peter Bagge’s Bat Boy comic strips which ran in the (now defunct and always entirely bogus) American tabloid Weekly World News are now collected in hardcover thanks to IDW. All 100 strips are printed close to the original art size and you can see a couple of typically mental examples here.

Vertigo Crime’s The Executor by Jon Evans and Andrea Mutti is now in paperback, meaning there’s a more affordable way to bag what The Comics Journal considers to be one of the best of the Vertigo Crime bunch. It’s about a retired pro athlete who returns to his hometown when he’s named the executor of his (now mysteriously dead) high-school sweetheart’s will. “Part of it is the noir tradition; I was very consciously working in that vein, a la Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. Plus I think it’s more realistic, given the setting. In a really toxic environment, even basically good people will often wind up doing bad things – I genuinely believe that, and wanted to put it in a story,” said Evans in this interview. I kind of like this review. It’s not so much a review of the book as it is someone’s sob story about never having had a high school sweetheart on account of being a massive nerd. I never had a high school sweetheart either, and here I am writing a comic shop blog post about comics. How did I get here? What happened?

Gladstone’s School For World Conquerers SC is a new graphic novel by Mark Andrew Smith, most famously known as being the editor of Image Comics’ Popgun anthology. It’s about a top-secret academy for the spawn of super villains to learn the trade. “Gladstone’s School has the best staff and turns villainy into a science,” says Smith in an interview with First Comics News. Loads of preview pages there and some more here, too. Art comes courtesy of Armand Villavert & Carlos Carrasco and if there’s a more colourful thing on the shelf this week I’m yet to be blinded by it.

Huntington, West Virginia “On The Fly” is the somewhat annoyingly punctuated title of a nevertheless noteworthy collection of stuff by the late, great Harvey Pekar.

It’s comprised of five short pieces that mostly relate to a trip he made to West Virginia to speak at a book festival, at a time after the hype for the American Splendor film had died down and his speaking fee had dropped considerably. It’s about the people he met on the way, and the (sometimes totally insane) stuff they told him (like the limo driver who once received – as a gift from Leslie Nielsen – a “fart machine”, whatever that may be). Summer McClinton’s on art duties.

So here’s a cheery statistic for you: Around the world, one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds. The number of attempts is thought to be up to 20 times greater. John Porcellino has teamed up with two writers (Paul Peterson and Jason Gilmore) to illustrate a book called The Next Day, compiling four real-life stories from survivors of near-fatal suicide attempts. Someone’s animated Porcellino’s artwork for the book trailer. There’s an interview with the producer of The Next Day documentary, Alex Jansen, here.

On a more cheery death-related note, Jill Thompson’s Little Endless Storybook gets a brand new printing. Good to see it back on the shelves.

Robert Fawcett, contemporary of Norman Rockwell, was a commercial artist famous for his story illustrations and full-page ads in The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and the like. Among his peers he was known as “the illustrator’s illustrator” and that’s just was the guys in charge of this excellent hardcover artbook have decided to call it. Robert Fawcett: The Illustrator’s Illustrator collects hundreds of colour illustrations and black and white drawings (many of which have been largely unavailable for ages) all shot from the originals salted away by private collectors, so the quality of the reprint is far superior than their original magazine appearances. Frankly gobsmacking preview images here.

With the movie looming ever nearer you’re going to be seeing a lot of Green Lantern stuff over the coming weeks. Today’s Green Lantern Super Spectacular is a wodge of “greatest hits” reprints in a new magazine format. Among them, there’s Flight by Geoff Johns and Gosh! Favourite Darwyn Cooke, as well as the 1986 Green Lantern story by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill that prompted the following words to come out of Moore’s mouth during a recent interview:

“It’s the paucity of imagination. I was noticing that DC seems to have based one of its latest crossovers [Blackest Night] in Green Lantern based on a couple of eight-page stories that I did 25 or 30 years ago. I would have thought that would seem kind of desperate and humiliating. When I have said in interviews that it doesn’t look like the American comic book industry has had an idea of its own in the past 20 or 30 years, I was just being mean. I didn’t expect the companies concerned to more or less say, “Yeah, he’s right. Let’s see if we can find another one of his stories from 30 years ago to turn into some spectacular saga.” It’s tragic. The comics that I read as a kid that inspired me were full of ideas. They didn’t need some upstart from England to come over there and tell them how to do comics. They’d got plenty of ideas of their own. But these days, I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night.”

(Popculture defends the current writing team here)

He’s referring to the story in this collection, Tygers, so if you’ve never read it before you should stick it on your pull list, pronto.

DC Comics Presents Son of Superman #1 is worth picking up for some classic Elsewords stuff from Howard Chaykin and David Tischman, with art by J.H. Williams III. A Superman story in which Superman has been missing for fifteen years.

More reprints (this time from the Marvel camp) in the Spidey Sunday Spectacular by Stan Lee and Marcos Martin, a collection of their two-pager Spidey Sunday strips from Amazing Spider-Man.

Image Firsts: Phonogram #1 reprints exactly what you think it reprints. It’s written by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie (obviously), and if you’ve not seen McKelvie’s recent work on the cover (and back cover and innards) for Art Brut’s upcoming album I recommend a visit to his workblog.

As for new stuff, Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev (the team behind Scarlet and Daredevil) launch their highly anticipated Moon Knight #1. "I like the idea of a character being so off kilter that it makes him impossible to defeat as far as the villains are concerned because they have no idea where he's coming from," said Bendis, referring to Moon Knight’s crazy personality disorder. Preview at CbR.

Deadpool Annual #1 continues the story from last month’s Spider-Man Annual (preview here) and the Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1 is worth a mention because it’s just so ginormous (preview here).

That’s it, comics-wise, so here’s the bit of the blog post where I remind you about stuff and show you a thing I found in the wilds of The Internet. Dan Abnett, Al Ewing, Robbie Morrison are signing in our basement on Free Comic Book Day which is THIS SATURDAY. It’s not like we’ll have a roll-call or anything, but if you don’t come we’ll be quietly disappointed in you. There’ll be stacks of free comics from DC, Marvel, 2000AD and all the other big dudes, plus some small press giveaways from local people we like. If you’re in Edinburgh, there is a free Drop In And Draw event that looks like fun:

...Giving you the opportunity to hang out and draw with amateurs and professionals alike. Gain insight from our resident Manga expert Fumio Obata, our webcomic whiz Tom Hunt, or our non-fiction specialist Edward Ross. Play comics creation games like Panel Scrabble and ComicJam, create your own Comics Remix, or just spend an afternoon drawing whatever you like!

Details here!

What are you up to tonight? If the answer is “Staying in, eating beans on toast” I commend you because that is a brilliant way to spend an evening. HOWEVER, here is another potentially more exciting option: Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic Live as part of the London Word Festival.

With stand-up from Stewart Lee & Robin Ince, artists Steve Aylett, Savage Pencil, Melinda Gebbie and Kevin O’Neill panel-up to talk about their comic work, while music comes from hyperactive racketeers The Retro Spankees. With an exhibition of artwork from the magazine, and conducted by editor-in-chief Alan Moore.

All details here. Grab a ticket and head along. Say hello to the big hairy one on my behalf.

Lastly, a thing from The Internet. Cartoonist loveletters are the best loveletters – just look at these ones by Charles Schulz.

As you follow the letters around the room, they start off in an excited crush. Then they become sadder, as he writes more and more about missing Claudius and the letters suggest that he seems to be seeing her less and less. Toward the end, there’s a sad series of drawings of Charlie Brown on six different pieces of construction paper. Each page is a one panel joke using the background color in the punchline. All of the jokes come at the expense of poor Charlie Brown, who is trying as hard as he can to win a smile from the girl he likes.

-- Hayley

In Store 28/04/11 - 04/05/11

2011-05-04T11:43:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Archie Double Digest #218
Archie & Friends: Night At The Comic Shop TP
2000 AD #1732
Adventure Comics #526
Screaming Planet HC(Jodorowsky/J.H. Williams III)
Angel Illyria Haunted TP
Annihilators #3 (Of 4)
Artifacts #7 (Of 13)
Avengers Academy #13
Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1
Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes TP
Axe Cop Bad Guy Earth #3 (Of 3)
Bat Boy: Weekly World News Strips HC (Peter Bagge)
Batman Beyond #5
Batman Long Shadows TP
Blue Estate #2 (Rober Valley, Toby Cypress & Nathan Fox)
Boys #54 (Garth Ennis)
BPRD Dead Remembered #2 (Of 3)
Brightest Day HC Vol 2
Captain America Allies & Enemies TP
Captain America (F. Van Lente)First Vengeance #1 (Of 4)
Captain America Hail Hydra #5 (Of 5)
Captain America Spotlight One-Shot
Conan TP Vol 10 Iron Shadows In The Moon
Crypt Of Horror #11
Cyclops HC (Matz/L. Jacamon)
DC Universe Online Legends #7
DMZ TP Vol 10 (B. Wood) Collective Punishment
Do Androids Dream... Of Electric Sheep? #22
Doom Patrol #22
Dr Who Insider #2
Dungeons & Dragons Dark Sun #5 (Of 5)
Edge Of Doom #5 (Of 5)
Executor TP Vertigo Crime
Fear Itself #2 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Home Front #2 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Spider-Man #1 (Of 3)
Gladstones School For World Conquerors SC
Green Lantern Super Spectacular #1
Green Wake #2 (Of 5)
Hellraiser Masterpieces TP Vol 1(C. Barker/N. Gaiman/K. O’Neill/M. Mignola Et Al)
Herc #2
Heroes For Hire #6
House Of Mystery #37
Huntington West Virginia On The Fly GN (H. Pekar)
I Will Bite You! And Other Stories GN (J. Lambert)
Image Firsts Phonogram #1
Intrepids #3
Invaders Now TP
Irredeemable #25
iZombie #13 (C. Roberson/Allred)
Jennifer Blood #3 (Garth Ennis)
Jinx HC Essential Collection (Brian Michael Bendis)
Jonah Hex #67 (Jordi Bernet)
Jonah Hex No Way Back TP
JSA All Stars #18
Little Endless Storybook HC New Ptg
Marvel Zombies Supreme #4 (Of 5)
Melange: The Art Of Dean Yeagle Updated HC
Moomin Complete Lars Jansson
Comic Strip HC Vol 6
Moon Knight #1 (Bendis/Maleev)
Mouse Guard Black Axe #2 (Of 6)
Neonomicon #1-4 Bag Set
New Ultimates Thor Reborn TP
Next Day GN (J. Porcellino Et Al)
Ozma Of Oz #6 (Of 8)
Proof Endangered #5
Red Sonja #56
Red Spike #1 (Of 5)
Robert Fawcett: The Illustrator’s Illustrator HC
Secret Six #33
Secret Six The Reptile Brain TP
Solomon Kane Red Shadows #2 (Of 4)
Spidey Sunday Spectacular #1
Stuff Of Legend TP Vol 2 The Jungle
DC Comics Presents
Son Of Superman #1
Superboy #7
Sweet Tooth #21 (Jeff Lemire)
Taskmaster TP Unthinkable (J. Palo)
Astonishing Thor #4 (Of 5)
Thor Wolves Of North TP
Tiny Titans TP Vol 5 Field Trippin
Tron TP Original Movie Adaptation
Uncanny X-Force #9
Usagi Yojimbo #137
Vampirella #5
Walking Dead Survivors Guide #2 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #18
Weird Worlds #5 (Of 6)
Witchfinder Lost & Gone Forever #4 (Of 5)
Deadpool Annual #1 (J. Layman)
Wolverine Best There Is #6

MANGA
7 Billion Needles GN Vol 4
Bakuman TP Vol 4
Gunslinger Girl Omnibus TP Vol 2
Kekkaishi 3-In-1 Ed Vol 1
Lychee Light Club GN Vol 1
Maximum Ride TP Vol 4
Tegami Bachi GN Vol 5

Due To Arrive 04/05/11

2011-04-26T17:01:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

Adventure Comics #526
Angel Illyria Haunted TP
Annihilators #3 (Of 4)
Astonishing Captain America #1 (Of 5)
Astonishing Thor #4 (Of 5)
Avengers Academy #13
Avengers Academy Giant-Size #1
Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes TP
Axe Cop Bad Guy Earth #3 (Of 3)
Bat Boy Weekly World News Strips HC (Bagge)
Batman Beyond #5
Batman Long Shadows TP
Blue Estate #2
BPRD Dead Remembered #2 (Of 3)
Brightest Day HC Vol 2
Captain America Allies And Enemies TP
Captain America First Vengeance #1 (Of 4)
Captain America Hail Hydra #5 (Of 5)
Captain America Spotlight
Conan TP Vol 10 Iron Shadows In The Moon
DC Comics Presents Son Of Superman #1
DC Universe Online Legends #7
Deadpool Annual #1
DMZ TP Vol 10 Collective Punishment
Doom Patrol #22
Dungeons & Dragons Dark Sun #5 (Of 5)
Edge Of Doom #5 (Of 5)
Executor TP
Fear Itself #2 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Home Front #2 (Of 7)
Fear Itself Spider-Man #1 (Of 3)
Gladstones School For World Conquerors #1
Green Lantern Super Spectacular #1
Green Wake #2 (Of 5)
Herc #2
Heroes For Hire #6
House Of Mystery #37
Image Firsts Phonogram #1
Intrepids #3
iZombie #13
Jinx HC Essential Collection
Jonah Hex #67
Jonah Hex No Way Back TP
JSA All Stars #18
Little Endless Storybook HC New Ptg
Marvel Zombies Supreme #4 (Of 5)
Mice Templar Vol 3 #4
Moon Knight #1
Ozma Of Oz #6 (Of 8)
Proof Endangered #5
Red Spike #1 (Of 5)
Secret Six #33
Secret Six The Reptile Brain TP
Solomon Kane Red Shadows #2 (Of 4)
Spider-Man Power Comes Responsibility #2
Spidey Sunday Spectacular #1
Superboy #7
Sweet Tooth #21
Taskmaster TP Unthinkable
Thor For Asgard HC
Thor Wolves Of North TP
Tiny Titans TP Vol 5 Field Trippin
Transformers Heart Of Darkness #3
Tron TP Original Movie Adaptation
Turf #5
Uncanny X-Force #9
Walking Dead Survivors Guide #2 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #18
Weird Worlds #5 (Of 6)
Witchfinder Lost & Gone Forever #4 (Of 5)
Wolverine Best There Is #6
Wolverine Hercules Myths Monsters And Mutants #3 (Of 4)
X-Men Prelude To Schism #1 (Of 4)

The Gosh! Authority 26/04/11

2011-04-26T15:57:00.019+01:00

Hello, I’m back. While I was in Spain I learned that Edward Gorey’s The Wuggly Ump is translated to El Wuggly Ump, and yesterday the Internet told me that REM’s Michael Stipe has a tattoo on his arm of Ignatz Mouse throwing a brick at Krazy Kat. I have travelled far, gained worldly knowledge.

I wouldn’t even know Krazy & Ignatz existed (and neither would Stipe) were it not for the work of Bill Blackbeard, who could have been an excellent pirate with a name like that but chose to be a comic strip historian instead. He died last month at the age of 84. Tributes are popping up all over the place but there’s a brilliantly written appreciation by Jeet Heer over at The Comics Journal which you should read immediately. A chunk:

If I had to sum up the achievement of the late Bill Blackbeard in one sentence, I would say that he was the man who gave comics its memory. Cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King were immensely popular in their heyday but they worked in a notoriously fleeting medium, the newspaper page, and once their work stopped being published they were relegated to the dusty corner of the cultural consciousness reserved for trivia questions (“Who created Gasoline Alley?”). Largely thanks to Blackbeard’s unparalleled work as a collector and archivist, McCay, King, and countless other cartoonists from the early 20th century aren’t just answers to trivia questions, but rather are living forces in the comics world, with their major works in print and vibrantly influential on the best young cartoonists of the day.

The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA) crypt in 1995
Photographed by R.C. Harvey.
Pinched from here.

It’s a great piece, and so is this one by R.C. Harvey. If you’re a fan of stuff by Winsor McCay, Nell Brinkley, Frank King, Milton Caniff, Harold Gray, Chester Gould, E.C. Segar, Alex Raymond, Roy Crane, Jack Kent, Tove Jansson, or Charles Schulz you should doff your cap to the man who saved them from the bin.

A quick note on this week’s delivery: it’s still theoretically on schedule but is being buffeted in the wavy wake of Easter and the royal wedding. You won’t find us wearing Kate and William masks or straining to get a glimpse of a wedding dress or whatever: we’ll be here, don’t fret. However, the one-day buffer-zone we usually get between receiving the comics and actually putting them on the shelves has been taken from us, so we probably won’t have them for you until Wednesday afternoon. So! If you’re planning on coming in on Wednesday at all I recommend phoning ahead to see if they’ve arrived, or better yet: keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. We’ll let you know as soon as they get here.

And when they do, you can bag a copy of Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth. It’s the first volume in a three-book set from The Library of American Comics/IDW that will be “the definitive statement on the restless genius and timeless legacy of Alex Toth.” Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell had free reign to sift through Toth’s archives so the books will undoubtedly be full of stuff you’ve never seen before. This first volume covers his early work for DC in the ‘40s, his stuff at Standard, Zorro in the ‘50s, and all of the Jon Fury pages he produced while in the army. You can expect original art and photographs from family, friends and fans, plus rare pages and a previously unprinted-and-forgotten-about story from the ‘50s. Mullaney and Canwell talk to Dan Nadel (Art Out Of Time) over at The Comics Journal. Sample pages!

Love From The Shadows is Gilbert Hernandez’s third original hardcover graphic novel (after Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers) about Love & Rockets’ Fritz as a Z-movie actress. “Erotic, harrowing, graphically violent, and astonishingly grim, Love from the Shadows sees Hernandez plunging ever further into his own heart of darkness,” writes one reviewer over at TCJ, adding “Christ, what a f*cking book.” Here’s a PDF preview from Fantagraphics. A warning to those in offices or absent-mindedly explaining The Internet to elderly relatives: rude bits abound.

Obsolete is the latest from London’s own NoBrow Press by Danish artist Mikkel Sommer, who previously appeared in A Graphic Cosmogony. It’s about two neglected, weary soldiers taking solace in nihilistic hedonism. Head over to NoBrow for preview pictures and then check out Sommer’s blog and website. This guy is 23 years old. Let’s all pack it in and go down the pub and cry.

Pete Bagge’s Hate Annual is on fairly regular scheduling now, by which I mean I think it’s roughly a year since we saw the last one. Top marks, Mr Bagge. Hate Annual #9 includes the first full-length Buddy story in a decade and you can see some preview bits over at Fantagraphics.

David Hine and Shaky Kane’s six-part miniseries Bulletproof Coffin is collected in trade paperback. Here’s the Newsarama interview and preview pages I linked to when issue #1 was preparing to land, but between then and now a short documentary about Shaky Kane has appeared on Bleeding Cool. What’s Bulletproof Coffin about? “It’s about dead superheroes, stone-age girls in chamois leather bikinis, eyeball-headed psychics, bulletproof coffins with spiked tires, spirit walkers, secret attic rooms full of comic book collections, and resurrected GI’s,” of course.

In trade paperback you can have Sensational She-Hulk By John Byrne, collecting his early ‘90s eight-issue run plus Marvel Comics Presents #18. As a sort-of-related-aside, I found this accidentally: someone’s scanned choice pages from Sensational She-Hulk #50 in which she breaks the fourth wall and tries to find a creative team she likes to take over after John Byrne’s (comic book) death.

Jonah Hex: Tall Tales is also out in trade, collecting #55 – 60 of the series featuring usual suspects Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, with art by Vicente Alcazar, Phil Winslade, Jordi Bernet, Giancarlo Caracuzzo, Brian Stelfreeze and a cover by Gosh! Favourite Darwyn Cooke.

If you’re a fan of Cooke’s Parker graphic novel adaptations you might want to read the original prose novels. We’ve got loads of them on the shelf already but two more turned up this week – Comeback and Butcher’s Moon. They’re getting thicker as they go along so you’d best get stuck in now.

If we had a spinner-rack, these new releases would be flapping in the wind on Wednesday:

Thor: Asgard’s Avenger is a one-shot of character profiles which will probably be of interest to anyone just hopping on board after seeing the film. Also, Mighty Thor #1 by Matt Fraction and Olivier Coipel is the latest ongoing series in the slew of movie-hype releases. It’s especially geared towards anyone who’s never read Thor before, and kicks off with a storyline called The World Eaters in which Galactus has his eye on Asgard. Preview here, and here’s an extensive explanation of just what the hell Marvel are doing re: Thor and his many, many comics by Comics Alliance, gawblessem.

Strange Case Of Mr. Hyde #1 (of 4) by newcomer Cole Haddon and M.S. Corley somehow combines the story of Jack the Ripper with that of Dr. Jekyll. “I suppose it started with a childhood love of Victorian horror fiction, which itself was probably inspired by an earlier love for Universal monster movies,” said Haddon in his interview with Bloody Disgusting. “You know, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Invisible Man, and so on. I think I discovered Shelly, Stoker, Wells, and, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson right around the same time I discovered Hammer horror movies, too. In other words, I grew up finding a classic style of monster and horror much more appealing than the slasher flicks other kids were obsessing over in the 80s. I wanted to pay homage to that childhood love affair, what all these books and movies had done to shape my life.” Preview at Comicbook Resources.

Horror-wise you can also pick up a copy of Tomb of Dracula Presents: Throne Of Blood, a one-shot by Victor Gischler (X-Men) and Goran Parlov (Marvel Universe Vs. The Punisher) which sort of ties into Fear Itself. Preview at CbR.

And lastly, the recently de-bearded Paul Cornell is joined by Richard Donner, David Goyer, Damon Lindelof and more for 100 pages of Action Comics #900. The Source has the scoop.

Don’t forget to put highlighter and glitterpen all over May 7 in your diaries: it’s Free Comic Book Day and we’ve got three 2000AD guys (Dan Abnett! Al Ewing! Robbie Morrison!) signing in our basement. Also, if any small press people would like to load us up with some stuff to give away on the day, drop us an email at info@goshlondon.com.

-- Hayley

In Store 21/04/11 - 27/04/11

2011-04-26T15:54:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Betty & Veronica Double Digest #190
Life With Archie Married Life #9
2000 AD #1731
Judge Dredd Megazine #310
Slaine: Lord Of Misrule TP
American Vampire #14
Angel #44
Anita Blake Circus Of Damned Ingenue #3 (Of 5)
Avengers #12 Point One (Bendis)
Secret Avengers #12 & 12.1
Batman Incorporated #5 (Morrison)
Detective Comics #876
Brightest Day #24
Bulletproof Coffin TP (D. Hine/S. Kane)
Captain America #617
Cavewoman Snow #1
Conan Road Of Kings #4 (Of 6)
Danger Girl Army Of Darkness #1
DC Comics Presents Night Force One-Shot
Doctor Solar Man Of The Atom TP Vol 1 & #6
Doctor Who Special #28
Doomwar TP
Dracula: Company Of Monsters TP Vol 2 & #9
FF #2 (Jonathan Hickman)
Marvel Masterworks Fantastic Four TP Vol 6
Flash #11 (Flashpoint)
Flash Rebirth TP
Fleagles: Classic EC Artists SC
Genius, Isolated: The Life & Art Of Alex Toth HC
Godzilla Kingdom Of Monsters #2
Green Arrow #11 (Brightest Day)
Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #9
Hate Annual #9 (Peter Bagge)
Incorruptible #17
Incredible Hulks #627
Infamous #4 (Of 6)
Invincible TP Vol 14 Viltrumite War
Jonah Hex Tall Tales TP
Justice League Generation Lost #24
Justice Society Of America #50
Juxtapoz #124 May 2011
Kato Origins #8 The Hellfire Club
King Conan Scarlet Citadel #3
Knights Of The Dinner Table #173
Little Lulu’s Pal Tubby Vol 3 SC
Locke & Key: Keys To The Kingdom #6 (Of 6)
Love From The Shadows HC(Gilbert Hernandez)
Mad Magazine #509
Marineman #5
Marvel Previews May 2011 Extras
Mighty Samson Archives HC Vol 3
Mighty Thor #1 (Fraction/Coipel)
Mission #3
Morning Glories #9 (Nick Spencer)
Namor First Mutant #9
New York Five #4 (Of 4) (B. Wood)
Nexus Archives HC Vol 12
Obsolete SC NoBrow Press
Osborn #5 (Of 5)
Richard Stark’s Parker (Prose)
- Comeback
- Butcher’s Moon
Power Man And Iron Fist #4 (Of 5)
Previews #272 May 2011
Punisher TP Franken-Castle
RASL #10 (Jeff Smith)
Remake Special GN Vol 2
Runaways TP Vol 2 Teenage Wasteland Digest New Printing
Ruse #2 (Of 4)
Sandman TP Vol 5 A Game Of You (New Ed)
Scalped #48 (Jason Aaron)
Sensational She-Hulk By John Byrne TP
Spider-Girl #6
Amazing Spider-Man #659
Stan Lee's The Traveler #6
Star Wars Darth Vader & Lost Command #4
Strange Case Of Mr Hyde #1 (Of 4)
Action Comics #900 (P. Cornell)
Thor: Asgard's Avenger One-Shot
Thor Official Index To Marvel Universe TP
Thunderstrike #5 (Of 5)
Tomb Of Dracula Presents Throne Of Blood One-Shot
True Blood Tainted Love #3
Turok Son Of Stone #2
Turok Son Of Stone Archives HC Vol 8
Vampirella Archives HC Vol 3
Vanguard Frazetta Classics SC Vol 2
Velocity #4 (Of 4)
Venom #2
Walking Dead #84 (R. Kirkman)
Walking Dead Weekly #17
Warlord Of Mars #6
Wonder Woman #610
Age Of X Universe #2 (Of 2)
Astonishing Spider-Man/Wolverine: Another Fine Mess One-Shot
Deadpool #36
New Mutants #24 (Age of X - Carey)
Uncanny X-Men #536
X-23 #9
X-Men #10
X-Men God Loves Man Kills TP New Ptg
X-Men Vs Avengers And Fantastic Four TP
Xombi #2 (Frazer Irving)
Y The Last Man Dlx Edition HC Vol 5

MANGA

House Of Five Leaves TP Vol 3
March Story TP Vol 2

Due To Arrive 27/04/11

2011-04-19T15:15:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.
Action Comics #900
Adv Of Dr McNinja TP Vol 01 Night Powers
Age Of X Universe #2 (Of 2)
Amazing Spider-Man #659 Big
American Vampire #14
Anita Blake Circus Of Damned Ingenue #3 (Of 5)
Artifacts #7 (Of 13)
Astonishing Spider-Man Wolverine Another Fine Mess #1
Avengers #12 Point One
Batman Incorporated #5
Betty & Veronica Double Digest #190
Brightest Day #24
Bulletproof Coffin TP
Captain America #617
Conan Road Of Kings #4 (Of 6)
DC Comics Presents Night Force #1
Deadpool #36
Detective Comics #876
Doctor Solar Man Of Atom #6
Doomwar TP
Echoes #5 (Of 5)
Fallen Angel Return Of The Son #4 (Of 4)
FF #2
Flash #11 (Flashpoint)
Flash Rebirth TP
Genius Isolated Life & Art Of Alex Toth HC
Godzilla Kingdom Of Monsters #2
Green Arrow #11 (Brightest Day)
Green Lantern Emerald Warriors #9 (War Of GL)
Haunt #15
Incredible Hulks #627
Infamous #4 (Of 6)
Invincible TP Vol 14 Viltrumite War
Jericho Season 3 #6 (Of 6)
Jonah Hex Tall Tales TP
Justice League Generation Lost #24 (BD)
Justice Society Of America #50
King Conan Scarlet Citadel #3
Life With Archie Married Life #9 May June 2011
Love From The Shadows HC
Marineman #5
Mighty Thor #1
Miss Fury HC
Mission #3
MMW Fantastic Four TP Vol 06
Morning Glories #9
Namor First Mutant #9
New Mutants #24 AgeX
New York Five #4 (Of 4)
Oh My Goddess Rtl TP Vol 38
Osborn #5 (Of 5) Big
Power Man And Iron Fist #4 (Of 5)
Punisher TP Franken-Castle
Rocketeer Adventures #1 (Of 4)
Runaways TP Vol 02 Teenage Wasteland Digest New Ptg
Ruse #2 (Of 4)
Sandman TP Vol 05 A Game Of You New Ed
Scalped #48
Secret Avengers #12
Secret Avengers #12 Point One
Sensational She-Hulk By John Byrne TP Vol 01
Spider-Girl #6 Big
Spider-Man #13
Star Wars Darth Vader & Lost Command #4 (Of 5)
Strange Case Of Mr Hyde #1 (Of 4)
Suicide Girls #2 (Of 4)
Thor Asgards Avenger #1
Thor Official Index To Marvel Universe GN TP
Thunderstrike #5 (Of 5)
Tomb Of Dracula Presents Throne Of Blood #1
Transformers Prime TP Vol 02
Turf #5
Uncanny X-Men #536
Velocity #4 (Of 4)
Venom #2
Walking Dead #84
Walking Dead Weekly #17
Wonder Woman #610
X-23 #9
X-Men #10
X-Men God Loves Man Kills TP New Ptg
X-Men Vs Avengers And Fantastic Four TP
Xombi #2
Y The Last Man Deluxe Edition HC Vol 05

The Gosh! Authority 19/04/11

2011-04-19T14:35:00.007+01:00

Haluuqtuq Goshovites!

Hayley Campbell’s away on her Club 18-35’s tour to Spain this week, no doubt reliving her favourite Benidorm moments. To console yourselves until her return, why don’t you go and check out her recent Comics Journal reviews of Kiki and Pinocchio? In the meantime you’re stuck with me, so it'll be link-lite and maintain a certain air of panicky, deadline-looming desperation. Let’s do this, plaster torn from hairy leg-style!

First up, did someone say “Free Comic Book Day Signing Featuring 2000AD Stalwarts Dan Abnett, Al Ewing and Robbie Morrison”? Well, if you are that person, have I got some news for you! Y’see, we just happen to have a Free Comic Book Day signing, featuring 2000AD stalwarts Dan Abnett, Al Ewing and Robbie Morrison! How’s that for service? If you’re not immediately jumping off on that link, here’s the short version: those three talented gents will be jetting in from their respective Caribbean island getaways to sign for YOU. Saturday 7th May, 1pm – 2.30pm right here in the Gosh basement, and we’ll even have a pile of FREE comics for you.

Late last year a book came out to universal acclaim as one of the most important new works by an emergent creator in the last decade. Comparisons were made to Dave McKean and David Mazzucelli, among other luminaries, and the internet went nuts shortly before its release. That book was Duncan the Wonder Dog, by Adam Hines, the first in an incredibly ambitious planned series of nine graphic novels. And I don’t have the slightest idea of how good it was, because it sold out in, like, two seconds flat. Seriously, we only received one copy of our full order. So it’s with no small amount of happiness I’m able to announce the arrival of the second printing of Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One! Will this tale of sentient animals taking militant action against their human tormentors live up to the hype? I sure hope so, but either way it certainly looks nice. Massive 28-page preview here.

We love us some Jill Thompson. It’s that winning combination of being a ridiculously talented writer/artist along with being a thoroughly lovely human being. And we know you love you some Sandman. Not for nothing do those books continue to fly off the shelves year after year, edition after edition. So we’ll all be thrilled this week to get our hands on Delerium’s Party, a hardcover storybook keeping to the same format at Thompson’s previous Little Endless Storybook HC. This time around the ever-popular Li’l Endless are having a party, as Delerium tries to cheer up her sister Despair. Each member of the Endless brings along a gift in order to perk the living embodiment of hoplessness up, but is it a lost cause? It’s all-ages existential fun!

Enjoying Butcher Baker? Well Joe Casey isn’t resting on his controversial laurels this week, turning out the first oversized, hardcover volume of Marijuanaman. Created in collaboration with musician Ziggy Marley and artist Jim Mahfood, Casey promises “MARIJUANAMAN is not going to be what people except it to be.” Given his track record, I don’t doubt that at all. Casey is great at turning expectations on their head, and is – I think at least – one of the most underrated comics writers working today. There’s an interview with Casey & Mahfood over on Newsarama and Marley himself joins them over in the mass media outlets.

Pioneering comics journalist Joe Sacco gets a remastering this week. Safe Area Gorazde, his harrowing account of life under siege in the Muslim enclave of Gorazde during the Bosnian conflict, has been expanded with all manner of supplementary material. In similar fashion to the Special Edition of Palestine from a few years back, Safe Area Gorazde: The Special Edition HC features material such as an essay on the book’s origins by Sacco, reference photos (and panel comparisons), and follow up on some of the people featured in the book and more. If you only know Sacco from Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde is a must-read. I still think it’s his best work to date (though Footnotes in Gaza comes close). There’s a nifty video flick-through here. Seriously, Fantagraphics, whose ever idea it was to start doing those videos deserves some kind of bonus.

Drawn & Quarterly releases are always worth noting, especially when they’re debuting new talent. In this case it’s Zach Worton’s The Klondike, an historical tale of the Klondike goldrush of the late 19th Century which helped to shape Canada’s Great North. As one would always hope of such histories, it features colourful characters with names like “Soapy Smith” and “Skookum Jim Mason”, as well as the essential cast of plucky entrepreneurs, shady opportunists, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Not to mention glossary notes on how to pan for gold. Looking forward to it!

Dark Horse Presents was the first title published by Dark Horse back in 1986. It ran in print for nearly 15 years, and had an amazing line-up of talent pass through it’s covers. As well as debuting titles like Next Men, Concrete and an obscure little thing called Sin City, it also featured a who’s who of comic talent. Mike Mignola, Frank Quitely, Pat McKeown, Dave Cooper, Dan Brereton, Arthur Adams, Eddie Campbell, Moebius, Paul Pope, Bill Wray, Mike Allred, Roger Langridge, Matt Wagner, Geoff Darrow and so many more. Resurrected in 2007 as an online-only title (with occasional TP collections), this week sees the triumphant return of the regular ongoing title with an all new first issue. And what an issue: 80 pages of comics from the likes of Richard Corben, Howard Chaykin and Neal Adams, a brand new Concrete story from Paul Chadwick, a new full-colour Finder story from Carla Speed McNeill, Michael Gilbert's Mr Monster, a Harlan Ellison prose piece AND…inhale…a special sneak preview of Frank Miller’s upcoming 300 prequel, Xerxes. Not bad, eh? And all wrapped in your choice of cover by Frank Miller or Paul Chadwick. Dark Horse give the low-down here.

Astounding Wolf-Man co-creators Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard launch their new all-ages title Super Dinosaur this week, a title Kirkman describes as “a Pixar movie on paper”. As you would expect, it’s about a kid who is a boy genius and his best friend, a genetically altered Tyrannosaurus Rex, and their battles with the evil Dr Max Maximus. Kirkman has a bit to say about it all here.

Big, fold-out newspaper-style anthology Pood returns this week with it’s third issue. It’s 16 pages of comics gold, including the one and only Jim Rugg of Afrodisiac fame. And if you like what you see, well we’ve still got a few copies of #2 lurking about as well. Check out the video preview!

Marvel golden boy Jonathan Hickman is doing great things in that neck of the woods, creating comics that feel pleasantly distinctive from those of his contemporaries. Furthermore they’re all linking together by way of his groundbreaking S.H.I.E.L.D. series, which is laying down the foundations for a secret history to the Marvel universe. Now you can catch up on the series that featured Galileo taking on Galactus in this week’s S.H.I.E.L.D.: Architects of Forever HC, collecting issues 1-6 plus extra material from the #1 Director’s Cut. If you’re reading Secret Warriors, or FF, then you should definitely be checking this out.

Couple more nice collections out this week: Winterworld, the Chuck Dixon / Jorge Zaffino science fiction story originally published by Eclipse in the 90’s, gets a softcover release. Dixon talks a little about it, from when the hardcover was released, here, and there’s some lovely preview pages too. DC continue to repackage the classic Garth Ennis series Hitman with the release Ace of Killers, the 4th volume in the series. Dynamite are bringing out a collection of Bullet to the Head, the crime thriller by Matz and Gosh Favourite Colin Wilson. And lastly, lest we ever take it for granted, the newest Astro City collection is out: the Astro City Shining Stars HC brings together all of the interludes and one-shots that peppered the recent Dark Age epic.

Your Future Tyrannical Overlords

Did someone say EASTER WEEKEND, ROYAL WEDDING and MAY DAY? Chances are they didn’t say it around here, because we’ll be working through all of them as normal. But you lucky folks who are getting two four-day weekends on the trot might be wondering “Hey Andrew, are there going to be disruptions to new comics day over this historical period?” Well, my leisure-time friends, the answer is no…and yes. Y’see, it seems that new comics day will remain Wednesday for the 27th April and the 4th May, so no problems there. BUT, we will not be receiving the delivery until those respective days (as opposed to the usual one day lead-time we get to process everything), meaning that we may not have comics out on the shelf first thing in the AM. If you’re intending to come by in the morning on either of those days, I strongly suggest you give us a call first, or watch our Twitter or Facebook feed, where we’ll announce it as soon as things arrive. Capice?

And that’s about that! Hayley will be back with you next week, her pockets full of tapas and bottles of Estrella Damm (and hopefully some Spanish sweets). And don’t forget: Free Comic Book Day 2000AD Signing, Saturday 7th May, 1pm – 2.30pm. Get your arse down here, meet some great British writers, and get a bunch of free comics!

Tavvauvutit folks!

In Store 14/04/11 - 20/04/11

2011-04-19T14:31:00.001+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

2000 AD #1730
Archie Seven Decades Of Americas Favorite Teenager
Man From Riverdale TP
World Of Archie Double Digest #6
Astro City Shining Stars HC (Busiek)
Avengers #12 (Bendis)
Avengers Academy #12
Batman #709 (Crossover)
Black Dynamite Slave Island GN
Bullet To The Head TP (Colin Wilson)
Captain America Vs Red Skull TP
Complete Crumb Comics TP (New Ptg) Vols 13 & 15
Dark Horse Presents #1
DC Comics Presents Ninja Boy #1
DC Universe Online Legends #6
Delirium’s Party: A Little Endless Storybook HC (Jill Thompson)
Deus Ex #3 (Of 6) (Robbie Morrison)
DMZ #64 (Brian Wood)
Duncan The Wonder Dog TP Vol 01 (Of 9)
Dungeons & Dragons Classics TP Vol 01
Dungeons & Dragons Dark Sun #4 (Of 5)
Dungeons And Dragons #6
Fables #104
Fear Itself Sins Past #1 Fear
Guy Ritchie Gamekeeper GN
Gotham City Sirens #22 (Batman)
Green Hornet #15
Green Hornet Strikes #7 (Of 10)
Green Lantern #65 (War Of GL)
Green Lantern Corps #59 (War Of GL)
Hellblazer #278 (Peter Milligan)
Hi Fructose Magazine Quarterly #19
Hitman TP Vol 04 Ace Of Killers New Ptg (Garth Ennis)
Hulk #32
Invincible #79
Invincible Iron Man #503 Fear
Iron Man 2.0 #4
Justice League Of America #56
Kill Shakespeare #10 (Of 12)
Klondike GN
Last Phantom #6
Legion Of Super Heroes #12
Madman Atomica HC (Mike Allred)
Marijuanaman HC (Joe Casey)
Marvel Backlist Reading Chronology #1
Mass Effect Evolution #4 (Of 4)
Pood #3
Power Girl #23
Red Hulk TP Scorched Earth
Red Sonja Break The Skin One Shot
Ryder On The Storm #3 (Of 3)
Safe Area Gorazde HC Special Ed
SHIELD HC Architects Of Forever
Sigil #2 (Of 4)
Silent Hill Past Life TP
Silver Surfer #3 (Of 5)
Simpsons Comics #177
Sixth Gun #11
Skaar King Of Savage Land #2 (Of 5)
Stan Lee Soldier Zero #7
Marvel Adventures Spider-Man TP Sensational Digest
Spectacular Spider-Man #1000
Spider-Man New York Stories TP
Spirit #13
Suicide Girls #1 (Of 4)
Super Dinosaur #1 (R. Kirkman)
Supergirl #63
Superman Batman #83
Superman Batman Worship TP
Teen Titans #94
Essential Thor TP Vol 05
Thor Warriors Three Unleashed Prem HC
Thunderbolts #156
Thunderbolts Classic TP Vol 01
Transmetropolitan TP Vol 09 The Cure New Ptg
Trickster Native American Tales A Graphic Collection
Ultimate Comics Avengers TP Crime And Punishment
Uncanny X-Force #8
Walking Dead Weekly #16
Winterworld TP (Jeorge Zaffino)
DeadpoolMax #7 (Kyle Baker)
Generation Hope #6 (K. Gillen)
Wolverine #8
Wolverine & Jubilee #4 (Of 4)
X-Factor #218
Young Justice #3
Zatanna #12

MANGA
Akira Kodansha Ed GN Vol 06
Naoki Urasawa 20th Century Boys GN Vol 14
Silent Mobius Complete Ed GN Vol 04

2000AD Signing for Free Comic Book Day!

2011-04-17T17:44:00.006+01:00

DAN ABNETT!

AL EWING!

ROBBIE MORRISON!

What do these three dashing fellows have in common, besides being some of the most talented writers working in British comics today? Why, they’re all coming to sign here at Gosh Comics on Free Comic Book Day!

Yep, in association with the cuddly tykes of 2000AD, all three of these esteemed gentlemen will be taking their places in our stylish basement at 39 Great Russell St, WC1B 3NZ on Saturday 7th May from 1pm – 2.30pm. Come down and say hi, and get some writing advice from three gentlemen who have been instrumental in the restoration of the UK’s venerable science fiction magazine to its former creative glories.

DAN ABNETT! Along with creating numerous memorable 2000AD series such as Atavar, Kingdom and of course Sinister Dexter, Dan’s also responsible for a slew of Warhammer-related comics and novels (we’re talking best-selling fan-favourites here). Not to mention, of course, masterminding (along with frequent collaborator Andy Lanning) Marvel’s cosmic titles starting back at the excellent Annihilation and now continuing with new series Annihilators. Oh, and of course a series of original science fiction novels coming out from Angry Robot. Come see him, before I hog all of his time grilling him on how I can actually develop some kind of writing work ethic.

AL EWING! One of the newest generation of 2000AD writers, and certainly one of the best at capturing the mad, anything-goes energy of the magazine’s early days. With creations such as Damnation Station and the wonderfully demented Zombo, Al has quickly established himself as a fan favourite. He’s now one of the regular writers on Judge Dredd, has a stint on Garth Ennis’s Jennifer Blood coming soon and somehow also finds the time to write novels for the Abaddon Books line.

ROBBIE MORRISON! For nearly two decades now Robbie has been one of the most consistently reliable writers in the 2000AD stable. From the ground-breaking Shimura (featuring some of the earliest professional work of Frank Quitely), through the mind-bending Shakara, to perennial favourite Nikolai Dante, he’s created a slew of memorable characters that stand alongside those that have always defined the Galaxy’s Greatest Mag. On top of that, of course, are his stints working on titles for Marvel & DC, including the recent Deus Ex tie-in, and did we mention he's worked as an advisor on comics for the Scottish Arts Council?

So, if you think you can stand that much thrill-power in one room, then come on down! Saturday 7th May, 1pm – 2.30pm. Gosh Comics, 39 Great Russell St, WC1B 3NZ.

Oh, and did I mention FREE COMIC BOOK DAY? As if you needed any more incentive to come down, we’ll have free comics for you! As a part of the annual celebration of our beloved medium, we’ll be carrying a range of the free titles offered by publishers this year, including books from Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Top Shelf, and many more, including of course our friends at 2000AD!

Free comics. Lovely talented comics writers. Our usual range of the best comic book goodness money can buy. What more reason do you need? Get that sucker in the diary and I’ll see you all there!

Due To Arrive 20/04/11

2011-04-12T12:39:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

68 #1 (Of 4)
Angel #44
Astro City Shining Stars HC
Avengers #12
Avengers Academy #12
Batman #709
Captain America Vs Red Skull TP
Dark Horse Presents #1
Darkness #91
DC Presents Legion Super Heroes Damned #1
DC Comics Presents Night Force #1
DC Comics Presents Ninja Boy #1
DC Universe Online Legends #6
DeadpoolMAX #7
Deus Ex #3 (Of 6)
DMZ #64
Dungeons & Dragons Classics TP Vol 1
Dungeons And Dragons #6
DV8 Gods And Monsters TP
Essential Thor TP Vol 5
Fables #104
Fear Itself Sins Past #1 Fear
Firebreather Vs Dragon Prince One-Shot
Generation Hope #6
Genius Isolated Life & Art Of Alex Toth HC
Gotham City Sirens #22
Green Lantern #65
Green Lantern Corps #59
Halo Fall Of Reach Covenant #1 (Of 4)
Haunt #15
Hellblazer #278
Hitman TP Vol 4 Ace Of Killers New Ptg
Hulk #32
Invincible #79
Invincible Iron Man #503 Fear
Iron Man 2.0 #4
Justice League Of America #56
Kill Shakespeare #10 (Of 12)
Legion Of Super Heroes #12
Magdalena (Ongoing) #6
Marijuanaman HC
Marvel Adventures Spider-Man TP Sensational
Mass Effect Evolution #4 (Of 4)
Mice Templar Vol 3 #4
Morning Glories #9
Power Girl #23
Proof Endangered #5
Red Hulk TP Scorched Earth
Scarlet #5
Shield HC Architects Of Forever
Sigil #2 (Of 4)
Silver Surfer #3 (Of 5)
Skaar King Of Savage Land #2 (Of 5)
Spectacular Spider-Man #1000
Spider-Man New York Stories TP
Spider-Man One Moment In Time TP
Spirit #13
Super Dinosaur #1
Supergirl #63
Superman Batman #83
Superman Batman Worship TP
Teen Titans #94
Thunderbolts #156
Thunderbolts Classic TP Vol 1
Tiny Titans #39
Transmetropolitan TP Vol 9 The Cure New Ed
True Blood Tainted Love #3
Turok Son Of Stone #2
Ultimate Avengers TP Crime And Punishment
Uncanny X-Force #8
Velocity #4 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #16
Witchblade #144
Wolverine #8
Wolverine & Jubilee #4 (Of 4)
X-Factor #218
X-Men First Class TP Class Portraits
Young Justice #3
Zatanna #12

The Gosh! Authority 12/04/11

2011-04-12T11:54:00.017+01:00

It’s a smallish one this week but hopefully that means you’ll get to the end of the blog without nodding off. As a special bonus it even includes a thing I was supposed to blog last week but totally forgot so you can help me out by pretending you’re in the past.

First up there’s Hellboy: Buster Oakley Gets His Wish, a one-shot illustrated by the very excellent Kevin Nowlan, who not only pencils and inks it but gets to do his own lettering and colouring too: “As a kid I always liked the issue where my favourite artist would take an issue and ink it himself. It always seemed to be the ones that stood out. And in a rare instance or two a guy might do his own colour guides. Barry Smith did that with his last issue of Conan, The Song of Red Sonja. Neal Adams did it with his last issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow. The Swamp Thing stories that Bernie Wrightson coloured really stand out in that series.” You can read the rest of that interview over at Newsarama where he also gives you tips on how to draw cows to exaggerate their “cowness”. Preview at Dark Horse.

The anthology of prose short stories edited by Neil Gaiman finally arrives on our shelves almost a whole year after America got it. Simply called Stories, it features a cracking cover by Gosh! Favourite Tom Gauld and innards by the likes of Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Joanne Harris, Michael Marshall Smith, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Mosley, Richard Adams, Jodi Picoult, Michael Swanwick, Peter Straub, Lawrence Block, Jeffrey Ford, Chuck Palahniuk, Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O'Nan, Gene Wolfe, Carolyn Parkhurst, Kat Howard, Jonathan Carroll, Jeffrey Deaver, Tim Powers, Al Sarrantonio, Kurt Andersen, Michael Moorcock, Elizabeth Hand, and Joe Hill. Gaiman contributes his story The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains which is the thing he read aloud at the Sydney Opera House last year, accompanied by a Fourplay soundtrack and Eddie Campbell illustrations. Here’s a review of Stories, and here’s another one in the LA Times.

(Speaking of Tom Gauld, his new graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly looms nigh. Well, sort of. Next year. It’s called Goliath. It looks amazing -- see above.)

The Rime of the Modern Mariner by is a retelling of the Coleridge poem by Guardian cartoonist Nick Hayes. “It was when I discovered a picture of an albatross, belly swelled to busting, full of plastic bottle caps that it had mistaken for shrimp, rotted and interlaced with plastic bags tight around its bones, that the penny dropped: albatross; Coleridge; burdens of guilt. It was time for a modern mariner,” says Hayes in his “director’s commentary” over at the FPI Blog. It’s a gorgeously bound and coloured hardcover – in short, a typically excellent production by Jonathan Cape, UK home of Dan Clowes’ books – and if you’d like to see some pages they’re dotted in amongst his FPI Blog appearance. There’s a review of it over at the Guardian too. Biased or not, who cares – it looks lovely.

Pro-tip: putting a whale in your book is a sure-fire way of getting a mention on the Gosh! Blog

Darkie’s Mob HC is a collection of the strip by John Wagner (2000AD) and Mike Western that originally ran in the UK comic Battle in the mid-seventies. It’s pretty violent and dark – Captain Joe Darkie is crucified at one point, at another there are soldiers dying dysentery. “It was one of the things that made the story readable. No plastic soldiers like Captain Hurricane, this was an attempt to portray the reality of war and the strong emotions and sometimes desperate condition of the men who fought it,” said Wagner in this old interview.

Vertigo Crime’s Area 10 TP is worth a look, partly because it’s written by Christos Gage and illustrated by the excellent Chris Samnee, but mostly because it’s the only book in the shop to include the word “trepanation” in its blurb. Set in New York, it’s about a series of killings by someone who keeps the head every time – a killer the police have called Henry the Eighth. In an interview with USA Today, Gage talks about the perils of Googling a word like “trepanation” and I think it probably trumps my earlier experience regarding “infestation”. "I don't know that it's ever been big enough to be called 'popular.' It was done in the early 70s, and there are still people to this day who do it. Drilling into your own head is by itself going to keep out casual users. It's not like smoking weed – there's a little bit more of an investment in it.” Don’t do that to your head. And, uh, seeing as I’m somewhat ridiculous/cannot help it/have already done it: don’t look up “trepanation” on the Internet.

In trade-paperback you can get Sense and Sensibility, Nancy Butler and Sonny Liew’s follow up to Marvel’s Pride & Prejudice which spent an age on the New York Times Graphic Novel Best-Seller list. Here’s a review from someone who liked it very much, and if you never caught a preview: here you go.

Howard Cruse’s Wendel is now seeing print in a collected edition, decades after its first appearance. When it first appeared it was considered a unique, revolutionary piece of work – it being the first gay comic in mainstream media. It’s not so revolutionary now, of course, as Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) explains in her introduction: “You’ll find virtually no discussion of gay marriage in the pages of Wendel. The issue that has now become practically synonymous with LGBT civil rights was not high on the homosexual agenda in the eighties. Yet Wendel and Ollie’s loving, committed relationship is a paragon of stability. They parent a young boy, negotiate with Ollie’s ex-wife, have loving exchanges with Wendel’s parents, and come out to co-workers. They don’t live in a parallel universe like Chelsea or Castro, they’re ‘the gays next door,’ integrated for the most part seamlessly into the broader community.” More over at Publisher’s Weekly.

More reprints in DC Comics Presents Batman: Arkham, collecting a bunch of creepy stuff you won’t have seen since it first appeared by the likes of Dennis O’Neil, Alan Grant, Paul Grist, Curt Swan and more.

New stuff! Kieron Gillen (Phonogram) writes this week’s Journey into Mystery #622 which is a renaming of Thor. Incidentally, Thor: Whosoever Wields The Shield One-Shot collects old, old issues Journey into Mystery: #83, #84 and #88 with remastered colouring, plus a brand-spanking new framing sequence by Christos Gage and Marco Torricelli. Gillen’s story ties into the whole Fear Itself thing so if you’re following that – pick this up! “We're not just looking at the Asgardian part of the Marvel Universe. We've got all these magical beings and pantheons of gods existing in one universe. So what's the political structure surrounding that? How do these different people get along? Mostly it's a strained peace, but occasionally it's not. I, Claudius is one of my big influences. Another is The Thick of It, which was a brilliant British political TV show that set up the movie In the Loop. Obviously we're nowhere near as sweary as that. That gives you and idea, though, and I think that structure and those ideas make these mythological figures more real in that way.” More of that interview here, and a preview of Doug Braithwaite’s artwork too.

This week there are no less than three crossovers that need to be brought to your attention – Steve Rogers: Super Soldier Annual #1 is the second chapter of James Asmus’ Escape From The Negative Zone (which started in the Uncanny X-Men Annual #3 last month, and continues in Namor: The First Mutant Annual #1 next month). Previewed here.

Red Robin #22 is the first bit of a 3-part crossover called Judgement on Gotham, which continues in Gotham City Sirens and Batman later this month. Writer Fabian Nicieza says to Newsarama, “Even though it's part of the larger Judgment on Gotham storyline, it's a great self-contained issue that I think shows Tim [Drake] at his best, facing countless obstacles and managing to figure out how to overcome all of them, until the final obstacle he can't overcome to win the day is the stumbling block called: the truth.” Preview at Gotham Knights.

Daken Dark Wolverine #8 is the second part (of four) in the Daken/X-23 crossover by Daniel Way and Marjorie Liu. Liu talks to CbR about it in an interview I probably should have linked to when Part 1 came out. Speaking of X-books, Rick Remender and Jerome Opena’s Uncanny X-Force: Apocalypse Solution is out in hardcover this week, collecting the first four issues of the series along with some stuff from Wolverine: Road to Hell.

If you’re a fan of Elephantmen, you might want to pick up this week’s Elephantmen: Cover Stories #1 which is, as you’ve probably guessed, a collection of Elephantmen covers. Preview here. And if you’re following the Walking Dead but losing track of who’s doing what, Robert Kirkman’s got it covered in the Walking Dead Survival Guide #1 (of 4) which gives you a character run-down on everyone who’s been (and gone).

Last week I said that Skaar: Kind of Savage Land #1 (of 5) was out but it transpires I was being somewhat previous. Apologies. It’s out this week and it’s by Rob Williams and Brian Ching. See the son of Hulk fight against dinosaurs, giant robots and an evil mastermind, too! Preview.

And finally, Jonathan Hickman’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Infinity One-Shot promises to make foundations shake, crumble and fall. Here’s a preview and make sure you check out the issue number. Nice work, nerds.

Another thing I failed to do last week was tell you that Jason Atomic’s Hail To The King! exhibition, (aka H2TK!, his celebration of all things Jack Kirby) was opening, because then you could have gone along to the launch party. My most massive apologies for anyone who stayed home in their pajamas and ate fish fingers instead. Anyway, it’s on now at Bethnal Green’s Resistance Gallery (265 Poyser Street, E29 RF) and you should go and maybe even buy some of his excellent artwork. You can find some teaser images at Atomic’s blog.

So, that was the last Gosh! Blog from me for a couple of weeks. Now I’m off to Barcelona for a (busman’s) holiday. In the meantime you can read this review of Kiki de Montparnasse that I wrote for The Comics Journal, and Andrew will keep you suitably entertained in my absence too.

Adios.

-- Hayley

In Store 7/04/11 - 13/04/11

2011-04-12T11:50:00.000+01:00

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

Jughead Crowning Achievement TP
Jugheads Double Digest #169
B & V Friends Double Digest #213
2000 AD #1729
Adventure Comics #525
Area 10 TP (C. Gage/C. Samnee)
Marvel Masterworks Avengers TP Vol 3
New Avengers #11
Batgirl #20
Batman And Robin #22
DC Comics Presents Batman: Arkham (A Grant/P Grist Et Al)
Birds Of Prey #11
Black Panther Man Without Fear #517
Blake & Mortimer Vol 10
Booster Gold #43
Booster Gold Past Imperfect TP
Bring The Thunder #4
Broken Trinity Pandoras Box #6 (Of 6)
Butcher Baker Righteous Maker #2(J. Casey/M. Huddleston)
Captain America Fighting Avenger One-Shot
Steve Rogers Super Soldier Annual #1
Carbon Grey #2
Carnage #4 (Of 5)
Casanova Gula #4 (Of 4)(M. Fraction/F. Moon)
Chaos War Avengers TP
The Chap #56
Cinderella: Fables Are Forever #3 (Of 6) (Chris Roberson)
Clint #7 (M. Millar/J. Ross Et Al)
Complete Wendel SC
Dark Tower Gunslinger Little Sisters Eluria #5 (Of 5)
Darkie's Mob HC (John Wagner)
Death Of Zorro #2
Doc Savage #13
Doctor Who Magazine #433
Elephantmen Cover Stories #1
Ex Machina Deluxe HC Vol 5
Fear Itself Spotlight Fear One-Shot
Flash #10
Flash Gordon Comic Book Archives HC Vol 3
Fraggle Rock Vol 2 #3 (Of 3)
Hellboy: Buster Oakley Gets His Wish One-Shot (K. Nowlan)
Gotham City Sirens TP Vol 1 Union
Gothic Fall HC
Halo Fall Of Reach HC Boot Camp
Hawkeye: Blind Spot #3 (Of 4)
Incredible Change-Bots Vol 2 GN(Jeffrey Brown)
Incredible Hulks #626
Infamous #3 (Of 6)
Infestation #2 (Of 2)
Infinite Vacation #2 (N. Spencer/C. Ward)
Iron Man 2.0 #3
Jack Kirby Collector #56
Journey Into Mystery #622 (Gillen)
Justice League Generation Lost #23
Kevin Smith Kato #9
Li'l Depressed Boy #3
Lucky Luke Vol 28
Stephen King's N TP
Neptune GN
Next Men #5 (John Byrne)
Northlanders #39 (Brian Wood)
Onslaught Unleashed #3 (Of 4)
Outsiders #38
Ozma Of Oz #5 (Of 8)
PunisherMax #12
Raise The Dead II #4
R.E.B.E.L.S. #27
Red Robin #22 (Batman Crossover)
Red Sonja: Revenge Of The Gods #2 (Of 5)
Rime Of The Modern Mariner HC
Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time Eye Of The World #9
Salt Water Taffy GN Vol 4
Secret Warriors #26
Secret Warriors TP Vol 4 Last Ride Of The Howling Commandos
Sense And Sensibility TP (S. Liew)
S.H.I.E.L.D. Infinity One-Shot(Jonathan Hickman)
Skaar: King Of Savage Land #1 (Of 5)
Spawn #206
Amazing Spider-Man #658
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #15
Spike #7 (Of 8)
Spirit TP Vol 1 Angel Smerti (D. Hine)
Spongebob Comics #2
Stan Lee Starborn #5
Stories Edited By Neil Gaiman SC(J. Hill/C. Palahniuk/M. Moorcock/T. Gauld Et Al)
Superboy #6
Superman #710
Superman Codename Patriot TP
Thor Whosoever Wields This Hammer One-Shot (J. Kirby)
Thunder Agents #6
Transformers Ongoing #18
Ultimate Avengers Vs New Ultimates #3
Walking Dead Survivors Guide #1 (Of 4)
Walking Dead Weekly #15
Warlord Of Mars Dejah Thoris #2
Wolverine Best There Is Contagion One-Shot
Xenozoic Complete Collection TP New Ptg
Daken Dark Wolverine #8
Deadpool #35
Uncanny X-Force #7
Uncanny X-Force Prem HC
Uncanny X-Men #535 (K. Gillen)
X-Men Legacy #247

MANGA
Cross Game TP Vol 3
Dot Hack Link GN Vol 3 (Of 3)
Ultimo GN Vol 4
Yakitate Japan TP Vol 26 (Of 26)
Itsuwaribito GN Vol 2
Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths GN