NBM Publishing
Thin wallets, fat bookshelves: NBM’s early 2010 line-up
Dungeon Twilight Vol. 3
During the next month or two, we’ll be looking at various indie and small press publishers’ plans for the coming year. Today we’re taking a quick look at NBM. Based on material found on the company’s Web site, as well as some catalog pages they sent me, I’ve managed to come up with a quick rundown of their line-up for the first six months of the year. FYI: The dates are based off of the Web site, and not the catalog, which are off by a few months due to trade shipping dates (translation: comic stores get it first).
What Are You Reading?
Criminal: The Sinners #2
Here at What Are You Reading, we don’t let a little thing like a holiday weekend keep us from our comics, no sir. Nor do we stop blogging about them.
Our guest this week is David Brothers, who can be found saying interesting things about comics at 4th Letter. Want to find out what he’s reading this week? Me too!
Robot reviews: hodge-podge time
Cold Heat 7/8
by Ben Jones and Frank Santoro
PictureBox Inc., 48 pages, $20.
This may be my favorite issue in the series so far, and I’m not sure I can easily articulate why. It’s hard at times for me to talk about this series without coming up with empty, awkward phrases and stumbling cliches. There’s something about hitting the time travel/memory wipe/reset plot button that appeals to me though, as protagonist Castle finds herself back at home and romancing a overly eager British music critic, though little has actually changed and dangerous aliens and evildoers are still lurking about.
Hitting that button must appeal greatly to Jones and Santoro as well, as they seem to be firing on all cylinders here. There’s an ever so slight shift in tone that brings plot and dialogue a little farther up center than it had been before, though little of the series’ sublime weirdness has been abandoned. Santoro offers some of his best compositions yet here; there’s more than a few pages here that are quite striking. I like how he tries to think of the page as an entire unit and not a collection of separate tiny panels that tell a story. Too few contemporary cartoonists, indie or otherwise, follow that example. I also like how he uses overlapping lines to suggest a character’s inner emotional state or provide different perspectives of the same scene. Meanwhile, Jones continues to show off his gift for hilarious, idiosyncratic dialogue. Twenty dollars may seem like a high price point (it’s due to a limited print run) but you know what they say about no good comic being too expensive? It’s true here.
Reviews of Dungeon and more after the jump.
Thin wallets, fat bookshelves: A publishing news round-up
Little Nothings Vol. 3
• NBM announced over the weekend they will release a third volume in Lewis Trondheim’s autobiographical Little Nothings series. You can read samples of the work on the company’s blog.
• The University Press of Mississippi will be publishing My Life With Charlie Brown in April. It’s a collection of essays, lectures and articles by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. If April seems to far away for you, this book is coming out next month.
• Fantagraphics unveils the covers for their next Krazy and Ignatz book (designed by Chris Ware), as well as the second volume of Prison Pit.
• Van Jensen gives readers the scoop on the upcoming book tour for Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer and announces plans for a sequel in winter of next year.
• Speaking of SLG, they will be releasing an omnibus collection of Gene Yang’s early work, entitled Animal Crackers, in January.
• The Kingdom of New York is a new book featuring essays and articles from the New York Observer magazine. It also sports a spiffy cover and interior art by Drew Friedman. And apparently Fantagraphics will be releasing a collection of Friedman’s celebrity portraits in summer of 2010.
• I don’t know if we caught this on the blog yet, but apparently Chuck Dixon and Gary Kwapisz are forming a publishing company devoted to historical comics.
• Dash Shaw, who has redesigned his Web site, apparently completely reworked his 2006 book the Mother’s Mouth, cutting out pages and changing colors. The alternations are only for the French and Spanish editions, however, which seems a shame.
APE ’09 | Exhibit A, NBM, SLG and more
The Alternative Press Expo, or APE, is coming up this weekend at The Concourse in San Francisco. The show runs from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Special guests include Jamaica Dyer, Phoebe Gloeckner, Dean Haspiel, Batton Lash, Lark Pien, Dash Shaw and Jeff Smith. I’ll be there covering the show, while Matt Maxwell will have a table to sell copies of Strangeways.
And over the next couple days, I’ll be posting what various companies and creators have planned for the show. If you’d like to be included, drop me the details on where you’ll be, what you’ll be selling and all that good stuff.
Exhibit A Press | Jackie Estrada dropped us a note about what Exhibit A Press (table 312) will have at the show, where special guest Batton Lash will be celebrating 30 years of Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre.
“He’ll be signing the limited-edition Supernatural Law Tales from the Vault Anniversary Special as well as comics and trades,” she writes. “We’ll also have Batton’s ‘monster cameos,’ one-of-a-kind hand-painted miniatures of everyone’s favorite monsters. Plus: new Graphitti Designs Supernatural Law T-shirt!”
More info at www.exhibitapress.com/pages/index.php
SLG Publishing | Jennifer de Guzman sent over an update on SLG’s plans for the show. “Jamaica Dyer will be a special guest, so we will have plenty of copies of her new book Weird Fishes,” she writes. “Jamaica will also be on the panel Personal Stories on Saturday at 5 p.m. with Dean Haspiel, Phoebe Glockner, and Dash Shaw. I’ll be moderating her spotlight panel on Sunday at 12 p.m.”
Things Undone
NBM | Ted Rall and Shane White will be at APE; Rall will have a few copies of The Year of Loving Dangerously, while White will sign copies of the recent release Things Undone (which is sitting on my dresser in my “to read” pile; I should read it before this weekend).
Top Shelf | Brett Warnock posts on his blog that Nate Powell, Grant Reynolds and Jeremy Tinder will be at their booth, along with himself and Leigh Walton. And as always, he’ll be at the Isotope party Saturday night.
Creators | Scott Morse will be on hand doing commissions and selling the last few remaining copies he has of The Ancient Book of Sex and Science.
Manga | Deb Aoki rounds up what various manga publishers are doing at the show.
Crime and Communism: An interview with Rick Geary
Famous Players
Rick Geary has been regarded as an “underrated” cartoonist for so long now that it’s almost a cliché at this point to label him as such. But in the many years he’s been making comics, he’s produced an impressive body of work that seems to escape a lot of folks notice. His stellar Victorian Murder series, now bumped up a few decades to encompass the 20th century, alone show such a high and consistent degree of quality that most cartoonists would give their eye teeth to have on their resume.
Having made his name with true crime, he’s recently attempted to tackle the biography genre, producing two books for Hill and Wang’s graphic line, one on J. Edgar Hoover, and most recently, one on Leon Trotsky.
I talked to him recently from his home in Kansas City, Missouri, about his new Trotsky bio as well as the latest book for NBM in his Murder series, Famous Players, about the mysterious and currently unsolved slaying of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor. Here’s what he had to say:
Robot reviews: The Big Kahn
The Big Kahn
The Big Kahn
Written by Neil Kleid, art by Nicolas Cinquegrani
NBM, 176 pages, $13.95.
Here’s the thing. I have a friend who fell in love several years ago with a wonderful, intelligent woman. His parents, however, refused to recognize their relationship and threatened to disown him if he married her. Why? Because she didn’t practice the same religion they did. Eventually they thankfully relented and embraced his now-wife, but it resulted in several years of ugly tension and discomfort for everyone involved, to put it mildly.
I have another friend who has two sisters who were both disowned by their father because, you guessed it, they married outside of the church. In the one case the sister married a Mormon. In the other, she just abandoned the church altogether. My friend has told me several times that her dad’s decision all but rendered her family asunder and caused scars that are still linger these many decades later.
So when one of the main characters in The Big Kahn, an up-and-coming young rabbi, has this huge guilt complex because in a moment of weakness he slept with a gentile girl, I’m not really feeling his pain. In fact, I want to punch him in the nose.
What Are You Reading?
Brave and the Bold #27
Sunday’s here and that means it’s time once more for What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is the incredibly talented cartoonist Rick Geary. Geary has two books out this fall, his latest entry in his ongoing XXth Century Murder series, Famous Players, and a biography of Leon Trotsky that should be coming out from Hill and Wang any day now.
Look for an interview with Mr. Geary appearing on this blog in the coming weeks. For now though, let’s just see what he’s currently reading …
Robot Reviews: Those wacky Asian countries and their crazy comical books
X-men: Misfits
X-Men Misfits Vol. 1
Story by Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman. Art by Anzu
Del Rey, 192 pages, $12.99.
Grafting the X-Men onto a shojo manga template isn’t a half-bad idea, considering the soap opera antics of the series back in its heyday (and indeed, even today). The problem lies in that Telgemeier and Roman have grafted too much of the template onto this comic, so that none of the characters have any room to move beyond their narrowly defined roles. It’s way too slavish to shojo cliches — Anzu apparently never met a chibi she didn’t like. There’s some amusement in seeing Angel gussied-up Bishonen style or Beast looking like Totoro’s second cousin, once removed, to be sure. But its adherence to shallow formula is just as bad as the dull exposition and fight scenes that make up most modern X-Men comics. Too bad. I was really hoping for something that blended the best aspects of both Western and Eastern comics, not something that swapped out one set of cliches for another.
Send Us Your Shelf Porn!
Welcome once again to Send Us Your Shelf Porn. Our guest this week is Marc Mason, newly established PR guru for NBM and proprieter of the Comics Waiting Room Web site.
Remember, you too can be a featured Shelf Porn guest. All you need do is take some photos of your burgeoning comics collection and send them to me at cmautnerATcomcastDOTnet. Feel free to include as much or as little info about yourself and your collection as you like.
And now here’s Marc …
Robot Reviews: From Wonderland With Love and Why I Killed Peter
From Wonderland With Love
From Wonderland With Love: Danish Comics in the Third Millennium
Edited by Steffen P. Maarup
Fantagraphics Books, 176 pages, $29.99.
Why I Killed Peter
by Alfred and Olivier Ka
NBM, 112 pages, $18.95.
Sexual abuse, particularly pedophilia, is a tough subject to handle in any medium, let alone comics. It requires a delicate touch, a sympathy for the victim and the supporting cast (though not necessarily the perpetrator), an understanding of all the conflicting emotions involved and a willingness to go for broke — to express the sheer horror of being violated both mentally and physically at such a young age in as honest and unflinching a manner as possible.
Two recent (or relatively recent at any rate) comics attempt to broach the unbroachable, but in wildly different ways. That both are successful has less to do with the grave severity of the subject matter than the particular talent involved and the unique perspectives they bring to their stories.
Everyone’s A Critic: A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction
• Pop Matters has an interesting essay comparing Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series with the similarly themed Italian comic Dylan Dog.
As characters, they could be satanic siblings, or infernal in-laws: Hellboy, the Hades-born offspring of a witch and a demon; and Dylan Dog, in love with an undead woman who was likely his mother, and battling his nemesis, the devil, who could be his father. Despite their fantastic and often horrific circumstances, at heart each character is a working-class hero, just trying to get the job done.
• Sean Collins grapples with All-Star Batman and Robin: “The thing really is (to quote Grant Morrison’s Mad Hatter) very much cleverer than its rep as a goddamn-Batman meme generator would indicate.”
• Curt Purcell continues his ongoing look at the Blackest Night series and superhero decadence in general.
• Matthew Brady enjoyed Lamar Abrams’ Remake: “It’s pretty ridiculous stuff, but always funny.”
• Greg McElhatton declares Neil Kleid’s The Big Kahn “easily Kleid’s best work to date as a writer.”
• Brian Hibbs was shocked — shocked I tell you — to discover that Archie #600 was a fun read: “I mean, I’m certainly a “Betty Man”, and that makes a lot more sense to me than Veronica, but Mike Uslan’s script here is remarkably crisp, as well as filled with real drama and pathos.”
• Katherine Dacey on Ooku: The Inner Chamber: “For all its dramatic and socio-political ambitions, volume one isn’t nearly as daring or weird or pointed as it might have been. If anything, it reminds me of a BBC miniseries: it’s tasteful, meticulously researched, and a little too high-minded to be truly compelling.”
• Kinukitty reads the yaoi manga Black Sun and says “I can’t even think about this title without kind of flapping my hands and sputtering a bit.”
• Rob Clough reads and reviews more minicomics, something we all should do more of.
• The Daily Cross Hatch on Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit: “True enjoyment of this volumes ultimately seems to fall on a willingness to embrace the complementary sensibilities of ‘aw, fucking gross’ and ‘oh, fucking sweet,’ ”
• KC Carlson reviews Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martel, a book I was completely unaware of until now.
• Finally, Tim O’Neil has some thoughts on what makes The Thing so awesome.
NBM teams with Panelfly for iPhone comics
Panlefly
NBM Publishing announced via press release yesterday a partnership with Panelfly to publish several of their graphic novels for the iPhone.
I’m not real familiar with Panelfly, but it appears to be an iPhone application that allows you to download comics within it (rather than each comic being a separate iPhone application). The application costs $1.99 to download, with single-issue comics costing 99 cents and graphic novels ranging in price from $3 to $10, (at least in terms of the titles listed on their iTunes page). Per the press release, NBM’s graphic novels will cost between $6.95 and $9.95.
“It’s clear this is the future where readers increasingly have a choice as to how they want to read their comics,” said NBM publisher Terry Nantier, “and we consider ourselves purveyors of graphic novels, not pushers of print publications. Any way you want a quality, engrossing novel-length comic, we’ll make that available, whether print or electronic.”
NBM graphic novels that will be added to Panelfly’s catalog include Brownsville, Flower and Fade, Unholy Kinship, Lindbergh Child and North Country. Panlefly also carries several SLG titles, like Rex Libris, Chumble Spuzz and Zombies Calling, as well as titles from Picturebox and Sterling Publishing.
What are you reading?
The Complete Peanuts: 1973-74
Welcome once again to What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is the esteemed critic and blogger Robert Clough. Rob is probably best known for his contributions to the seemingly now inert Sequart.com, though you can find most of his recent reviews on his blog, High-Low.
To see what Rob and the rest of us are reading, just click on the link below …
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Superman #1
Legal | A blog comment by publisher Denis Kitchen has led to another victory for the heirs of Jerry Siegel in their lengthy legal battle with Warner Bros. and DC Comics over the rights to Superman. A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Siegels co-own the rights to Action Comics #4, pages 3-6 of Superman #1, and the first two weeks worth of Superman comic strips. The same judge decided in March that the Siegels own half of Action Comics #1 and, therefore, half the rights to Superman. [Blog@Newsarama]
Publishing | Tokyopop has announced it will serialize several of its original series online for free. Titles include Psy-Comm, Undertown, Kat & Mouse, Pantheon High and Gyakushu. [press release]
Publishing | Marc Mason, editor of Comics Waiting Room, has been hired to handle public relations for NBM Publishing. [NBM Publishing]