Comic Book Resources

This contest is totes awesome

R. Sikoryak's Strand bag

Get it? I said "totes" and it's a tote bag contest! Oh, I slay myself.

Ahem. Anyway, The Strand Bookstore has teamed up with Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, Toon Books and the School of Visual Arts to offer the Strand Tote Bag Design Contest. All this month, until March 31, aspiring artists are encouraged to send in their design for famed New York book shop's next "artist tote bag.  Judges for the contest include  previous bag designers Art Spiegelman, Adrian Tomine, R. Sikoryak, Françoise Mouly and Steven Heller.

The prizes are pretty impressive. The grand prize winner not only gets to see their art printed on the store's bag, but also gets: an afternoon with Mouly; D&Q's complete set of books from 2009; $450 worth of recent Fantagraphics books; a complete set of Toon Books; and more.

Second prize nets you a class at SVA, a collection of signed D&Q books; more comics from TB and Fanta, and a $100 coffee gift card. Third prize is the same, but less so.

I don't know about you, but I'm tempted to enter by just drawing a couple of stick figures.

Rules and details for the contest can be found at that fifth link. A look at past Strand tote bags can be found here.

Heading James Sturm off at the 'Market'

It's probably too early to say what the best books of 2010 will be, but I feel safe in saying that James Sturm's Market Day will easily make it on the short list of works to be considered. The graphic novel, published by Drawn and Quarterly, is about a Jewish rug maker, who heads off to the local market full of hope and elan, only to experience a devastating setback to his career. It's a smart, moving work that I think will turn a lot of heads when it comes out in March.

In the meantime though, I took the opportunity to talk with Sturm about the book and it's development — as well as life at the Center for Cartoon Studies, a school he co-founded — over at the main CBR site:

Market Day

You say that this was originally intended to be a children's book. Where did the inspiration for "Market Day" come from?

Drawn and Quarterly, my publisher, actually played an important role in the book itself. There was a point when they hooked up with a national distributor - they were distributed by Chronicle Books at one point.

I don't think that worked out as well as their current partner [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], but when they first hooked up, they felt this would open up a lot more markets, and after the deal happened [publisher] Chris [Oliveros] sent an email to his stable of artists at D&Q saying "One of the things I'm considering is doing a children's book line. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them."

So, in my sketchbook, I conceived a story about a rug weaver. In that version of the story, the focus wasn't so much on the main character but more about how important one individual's commitment and support can be for somebody. In "Market Day," when the Finkler character disappears, it sets off this bad chain of events for Mendleman. In my mind I thought of Chris as the Finkler character and how important my own relationship with D&Q was for my own artistic development. The actual book plays out differently - but I did want to get that across and a sense of camraderie between artists who share a an aesthetic and committment to a certain type of work.

How to cook the Moomin way

Just one more reason to wish you lived in the U.K. The independent publisher Self Made Hero will be releasing a Moomin-themed cookbook this July.

Moomin, Vol. 3

"They're traditional Finnish recipes – it's an introduction to Finnish cuisine," said editor Emma Hayley at independent publisher SelfMadeHero. "There's drinks, salads, desserts, breakfast at the end of a Nordic summer night – it's great fun, with dialogue and Moominisms interspersed throughout the recipes." Other recipes will include the Snufkin's picnic pot, the Lighthouse Keeper's fish pie and potato au gratin for hungry Moomins.

The cookbook has already been published in Finnish, Swedish and French, where it is doing well, Hayley said. Jansson's writings have recently undergone a revival in the UK, with her adult novels The Summer Book, The Winter Book, Fair Play and The True Deceiver all reissued in the last 10 years.

Jansson is beloved throughout Europe (and other places as well) for her Moomin series of books, comics and other printed matter, about an unflappable, gentle hippo-shaped family that frequently find themselves engaged in some rather bizarre adventures. Drawn and Quarterly has been publishing Jansson's Moomin comic strips in some rather handsome hardbacks, and the fifth volume is due to come out later this year.

But, hey, if have trouble trying to import the book, you can always just gaze longingly at this Moomin gingerbread house. (via)

Clowes' 'Wilson' to premiere at TCAF

Clowes' TCAF poster

The Toronto Comics Arts Festival announced a big feather in its convention cap last Friday when they revealed that Dan Clowes will be headlining this year's show. Even more impressive, Drawn and Quarterly will be debuting his new graphic novel, Wilson, easily one of the most anticipated comics of 2010, at the show. Clowes has also done a groovy poster for the show, which you can see above.

TCAF will unveil their official Web site, with, no doubt, more news about the show, on Tuesday. (via Tom Spurgeon, who announced that he will be attending the con with his mom, which is cool in a completely different way)

What Are You Reading?

Humbug

Like a train eager to meet its next destination, What Are You Reading chugs along into the new year without ever once looking back. Our guest this week is the ridiculously prolific cartoonist, critic and blogger Shaenon Garrity (who can also be found here). In addition to her latest comic Skin Horse, you can read her regular reviews at The Comics Journal and she has a regular column over at Comixology.

But if you want to know what Shaenon's reading this week, you'll have to click on the link below.

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The 30 Most Important Comics of the Decade, part 1

The past ten years have been significant -- indeed some might say phenomenally good -- for the comics industry and the medium as a whole. While our economy collapsed, the Earth got hotter, and general chaos and disaster reigned, comics finally started to crawl out of its red-headed stepchild status. People started acknowledging comics as a legitimate form of art. Librarians and teachers started showing an interest in comics, arguing that it could help generate an interest in reading among children. And lots and lots of really great books came out in a variety of genres and styles. Comics, it could be argued, finally came of age.

When thinking about how to look at the past ten years of comics -- and also celebrate our one-year anniversary -- we wanted to do something different. Rather than try to list just our favorites or grade them on some aesthetic, subjective scale, we thought we'd look at the comics that mattered, the ones that, for better or for worse, changed the industry, changed how people thought about comics, and changed the way comics were read and bought. Here then, is our list of what we feel to be the 30 most important (or if you prefer, influential) comics of the decade. These aren't necessarily the best comics of the past ten years -- in fact you may find a few clunkers -- but rather the comics that, for one reason or another, changed things.

Here's how we put this thing together: I came up with a basic list that I then threw to the rest of the Robot 6 crowd, who proceeded to suggest other titles and question some of mine. Once we had hashed it out and came up with a final list, we divvied up who would talk about what book. The ranking was pretty much done solely by me, so if you're upset that comic A got ranked lower than comic B, I'm the guy to yell at.

Because our list got so long, we decided to break this into two parts. The first 15 are after the jump. The second part will appear tomorrow around the same time. Be sure to let at us know about whatever books we omitted in the comments section. And enjoy! Here's to another decade of great comics.

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Thin wallets, fat bookshelves: Drawn & Quarterly's spring catalog

From "Wilson," by Daniel Clowes

Having roamed through Fantagraphics' 2010 plans last week, it's time to take a look at Drawn and Quarterly's plans for the coming year, via the Farrar, Straus and Giroux spring catalog. Keep in mind this only covers books and graphic novels, and doesn't list any pamphlets. So I have no idea when the next issue of Big Questions will be out, for example.

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What Are You Reading?

Key Moments from the History of Comics

Having had Thought Ballonists' Craig Fischer over as our WAYR guest the other week, it seemed more than appropriate to invite his blogging colleague, scholar, educator, critic, author and all-around nice guy Charles Hatfield.

Find out what Mr. Hatfield is reading and see some embarrassingly complimentary birthday greetings about yours truly by clicking on the link below. And don't forget to tell us your own reading picks in the comments section.

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Oooh, another sale, eh?

Lynda Barry's What It Is

This Strange Brew-derived Canadian linguistic stereotype is brought to you by Drawn & Quarterly, the altcomix anchor of the Great White North, which is offering 30% off all purchases of three or more comics from its web store.

If you're a fan of Adrian Tomine, Lynda Barry, Seth, Chester Brown, John Stanley, Tove Jansson, Kevin Huizenga, Gabrielle Bell and so on, D&Q's Holiday Sale is the perfect excuse to stock up. And if you order by Monday you can still get your books in time for Christmas via the United States Postal Service's super-cheap media mail shipping rates.

What are you waiting for?

Straight for the art | Seth's new Nancy design

Nancy and Oona Goosepimple, by Seth

Man, that's a knockout, huh? Feast your eyes on George Sprott author (and all-around Dapper Dan) Seth's design for Nancy, Vol. 2, the forthcoming installment of Drawn & Quarterly's gorgeous John Stanley Library.

The image hails from this post by D&Q's Rebecca Rosen, which you really ought to read if the cult of Nancy has been a bit inscrutable to you like it has been to me. Just for example, the above image is a Seth drawing ... which graces a book containing the adventures of a character created by, and best known through the work of, Ernie Bushmiller ... but D&Q's Nancy books collect John Stanley's run on the character from her comic books, as opposed to Bushmiller's newspaper strips ... but those books were actually drawn by Dan Gormley, working off Stanley's storyboard-format scripts. Phew! And then there's the role that Mark Newgarden's abstractified tribute to Bushmiller's Nancy, "Love's Savage Fury," played in the character's popularity with cartoonists...and ditto Newgarden and Paul Karasik's landmark essay "How to Read Nancy" ... ah, let Rebecca explain it to you, and why it all matters.

Robot reviews: Another kids' comics round-up

Nancy Vol. 1

Nancy Vol. One
by John Stanley
Drawn and Quarterly, 128 pages, $24.95.

When faced with the challenge of adapting Ernie Bushmiller's classic comic strip to longer comic book format, John Stanley's response was simple and economical: Turn her into Little Lulu.

That's the only conclusion I can come to after reading this collection of stories in D&Q's ongoing "John Stanley Library" project. Nancy is pretty much Lulu with frizzier hair, Sluggo is a thinner and slightly more benign Tubby. There's even a snotty rich kid and bratty little boy similar to Wilbur and Alvin. Stanley even repeats one of his Tubby stories involving a burglar almost note for note.

That doesn't make Nancy a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. Mediocre Stanley is still miles above most people's best work. The best stories here though are the ones involving Oona Goosepimple, an odd, Wednesday Addams-type girl who supernatural antics cause no end of anxiety for poor Nancy. It's those stories where Stanley -- freed of the Bushmiller formula -- really gets inventive and inspired. If the ratio of Oona stories increases as the volumes do, then I'll keep buying these books as long as D&Q are able to get them out.

Reviews of Moomin, Amulet and more can be found after the jump ...

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Robot reviews: Another manga round-up

Ooku Vol. 1

Ooku: The Inner Chambers
by Fumi Yoshinaga
Viz, $12.99.

As story hooks go, Ooku's got a great one: A strange plague during the Edo period of Japan kills off more than three-quarters of the country's male population. As a result, the culture and gender relations end up going all topsy-turvy, and succeeding generations find the women ruling the roost and men being protected and prized for their ability to produce offspring. This is especially in the Shogun's harem, or Inner Chambers, where the story takes place.

It helps that the story is by Fumi Yoshinaga, who, in books like Antique Bakery and Gerald and Jacques, has proven herself to be more interested in gender relations and identity issues than mere yaoi squickiness (although she certainly likes that too. Certainly the fact that Ooku won the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize in its home country has led to a certain amount of anticipation among some manga fans.

Unfortunately, while Yoshinaga remains an excellent and expressive artist, the series stumbles out of the gate. One of the main problems is the translator's decision (no doubt motivated by an attempt to approximate a certain Japanese dialect) to have everyone speak in a formal, Renaissance Faire-like manner, with lots of "thees" and "thous" and "didsts." It has the unintended effect of coming off as forced, and distancing the reader from the characters and the story.

Beyond that though, Yoshinaga doesn't really seem to do much with her idea, at least so far. She seems more interested in conveying the various back room politics and romances that take place in the inner chambers than giving thought as to what such a huge change in the population would do to a culture. Would the fashion still be identical to what it was in the real world, with men shaving their heads and women wearing long gowns? Wouldn't that change somewhat drastically? Would a female shogun really keep a male harem and if so, would it be so identical in structure to what the real Edo shoguns had? This may sound like nit-picking, but makes the story seem more than a bit facile, as though she just swapped everyone's sex and that alone would be interesting enough. It may well be that I'm not giving Yoshinaga enough credit and that she's actually considered these issues and will explore them in more depth in future volumes. But so far, I'm not encouraged.

Reviews of Red Snow, Pelu and more after the jump ...

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Straight for the art | Melvin Monster covers

Melvin Monster

Frustrated that Drawn and Quarterly's John Stanley Library of books doesn't include the covers to the original comic books? D&Q feels your pain (sort of) and has posted the covers to the stories from the forthcoming, second Melvin Monster book on their blog.

And if that's not enough to satisfy you, they've also got a swell Nancy story.

Your video link of the day: Seth gets interviewed

The nattily dressed cartoonist talks about Doug Wright and his own book, George Sprott in this interview for Q TV. Is it just me or should Steve Buscemi play Seth in the great alt-comix biopic?

What Are You Reading?

Talking Lines

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading, where we can't stop talking about the comics (and other things) we love. I'm pleased as punch to write that our guest this week is R. Sikoryak, whose wonderful book, Masterpiece Comics, is out right now from Drawn and Quarterly.

Click on the link below to find out what Mr. Sikoryak and the rest of the Robot 6 crew are reading this week. And don't forget to let us know what comics or books you're currently enjoying in the comments section.

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