The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist

It’s time once again for our monthly trip through Previews looking for cool, new comics. As usual, we’re focusing on graphic novels, collected volumes and first issues so that we don’t have to come up with a new way to say, “Batwoman is still awesome!” every month. And we’ll continue letting Tom and Carla do the heavy lifting in regards to DC and Marvel’s solicitations.

One cool change this month and for the foreseeable future: I’m joined by Graeme McMillan who’ll also be pointing out his favorites.

Finally, please feel free to play along in the comments. Tell us what we missed that you’re looking forward to or – if you’re a comics creator – mention your own stuff.

Abrams Comicarts

The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist – I admit, I tend to run hot and cold on Clowes’ output, but I’m a sucker for coffee-table career retrospectives, so the idea of taking 224 pages to look back at his career to date (with, of course, the traditional little-seen artwork and commentary) seems like a must-look at the very least. [Graeme]

Abstract Studios

Rachel Rising, Volume 1: The Shadow of Death – Terry Moore’s latest series gets its first collection and I love the premise of a woman’s waking up in a shallow grave with no memory of how she got there and needing to figure out who tried to kill to her. [Michael]

Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom

Arcana

Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom – I don’t know enough about Lovecraft, but man I love me some undersea kingdoms. [Michael]

Archaia

Cow Boy – As much as I don’t want to stick writer Nate Cosby in an all-ages box, I’m eager to read his and Chris Eliopoulos’ story of a kid bounty hunter trying to bring in his family of outlaws. [Michael]

If nothing else, Nate Cosby’s Twitter feed made me curious about checking out his western collaboration with Eliopoulos, but finding out that Roger Langridge and Colleen Coover were also contributing pushed me over the edge. [Graeme]

I’m Not A Plastic Bag – Color me skeptical but hopeful about Rachel Hope Allison’s ecological debut, even if that title makes me a little nervous. [Graeme]

Archie

Archie #631 – Picks up on that story where Archie and Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats hook up. Look, Archie’s going nowhere with either Betty or Veronica, so I’m rooting for the furry. [Michael]

Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 #1 – At first, finding out that this comic was actually by Tony Blake and Alex Saviuk without Lee was a letdown; until I found out that the comic is actually about Stan Lee, which pushes it into the “This will either be horrendous or bizarrely enjoyable” category. [Graeme]

I’m not sure that I’ve ever unreservedly enjoyed a comic that Stan Lee wrote, much less just came up with the idea for, but I love his persona and putting him in the comic with some superheroes is so crazy it just might work. [Michael]

Crossed: Badlands #1

Avatar Press

Crossed: Badlands #1 and 2 – I’m definitely not a horror fan, but the idea of Garth Ennis’ writing an ongoing biweekly series feels like it’s as good a lure to get me to pick this up as anything else. (I think the plan is to have creators alternate on arcs, with Si Spurrier and David Lapham as part of the alternate writers on the book. That’s a pretty impressive line-up.) [Graeme]

Boom!

Exile on the Planet of the Apes #1 – I’m all for another Planet of the Apes comic from Boom!. [Michael]

More Apes by Corinna Bechko and Gabriel Hardman (art by Marc Laming)? This can only be a good thing. [Graeme]

Supurbia #1 – I feel like we’ve seen a few of these “what if superheroes and reality shows were mashed together?” series, but here’s the first of four issues of another one written by former Marvel staffer Grace Randolph. [Graeme]

Kitchen Sink Press: The First 25 Years – Remember what I said about being a sucker for coffee table retrospectives above? That goes double for this one, which has the added benefits of being both cheap (only $15!) and having contributions from Alan Moore and other creators from Denis Kitchen’s vast address book. [Graeme]

Dark Horse

BPRD: Hell on Earth – The Pickens County Horror #1 – I’m all for new BPRD comics, but it’s getting more and more difficult to keep track of everything. Still, I’ll buy a Scott Allie Mignolaverse story any day. [Michael]

Abe Sapien, Volume 2: The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories

Abe Sapien, Volume 2: The Devil Does Not Jest and Other Stories - Abe’s my favorite BPRD character, so I feel like this the way I do the previous item: grateful, but also a little saturated. [Michael]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Volume 1 – The first ten issues – or two trades, if that’s how your brain works – of the Joss Whedon-led series get an oversized hardcover edition. [Graeme]

Channel Zero – Brian Wood’s breakthrough book comes back into print with this collection of the original series, the Becky Cloonan-illustrated follow-up and material from the awesome Public Domain design book. Jonathan Hickman fans, you should really pick this up. [Graeme]

Manara Erotica, Vol. 1: Click! and Other Stories – Yes, it’s comic porn. But unlike Lost Girls, this is actually sexy comic porn. [Graeme]

Ragemoor #1 – If they hadn’t got me with Richard Corben, they certainly would have with “living castle nurtured on pagan blood.” [Michael]

Avatar: The Last Airbender, Volume 2 – The Promise, Part 2 – Yikes, what a title. I’m still missing Avatar: The Last Airbender though, so this is welcome. [Michael]

Empowered, Volume 7 – Why haven’t I started reading this critical darling yet? I do not know. [Michael]

DC

Batman: Death by Design - Chip Kidd’s writing a Batman book and it’s a real-live, honest-to-goodness superhero adventure. What’s more awesome is that the concept of design plays a large role in the story in the form of a massive reconstruction project in Gotham City. [Michael]

Saucer Country #1

Saucer Country #1 – Paul Cornell + Ryan Kelly + saucer aliens = SOLD. [Michael]

Fairest #1 – Bill Willingham launches a new series about the women of Fables and makes me even less interested in everyone else’s modern updates of fairy tales. [Michael]

New Deadwardians #1 – The solicit opens, “Another vampire/zombie comic? Really, Vertigo?” My sentiments exactly and yet, this one’s illustrated by INJ Culbard whose work I’ve loved on the Sherlock Holmes adaptations he’s done with Ian Edginton. [Michael]

Dominique Laveau: Voodoo Child #1 – It would be redundant to mention that the cover to this is both “striking” and “by Rafael Grampá,” so I’ll just mention the concept, which is also eye-catching. It’s the story of a grad student who also happens to be heir to the Voodoo Queenship of the most haunted city in America, and someone is killing off the royal family. Vertigo was created for stuff like this. [Michael]

Dynamite

Bionic Woman #1 – I had the deepest crush on Jaime Sommers as an 11-year-old. My current crush on Paul Tobin’s writing is slightly less deep, but still significant enough to make me want to read this. [Michael]

I’ve been following Dynamite’s Bionic Man series and surprising myself by digging the hell out’ve it; seeing that this spin-off is being written by the insanely-underrated Paul Tobin was all I needed to convince me to read this. [Graeme]

George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel, Vol. 1 – For the fantasy fan (or HBO subscriber) in your life, here’s the first quarter of Dynamite’s adaptation of the not-so-cult-anymore novel. [Graeme]

Vampirella: The Red Room #1

Vampirella: The Red Room #1: On the one hand, it’s “monster vs. human cage matches.” On the other, it’s written by Dan Brereton, so it’s probably going to be good fun… [Graeme]

Fantagraphics

Angelman – I’ve not read much by Austrian cartoonist Nicolas Mahler, but I think I’m won over just by the idea of his new book, which satirizes not just superheroes, but the business behind them. [Graeme]

Interiorae – Lovely, lovely art by Gabriella Giandelli in this collection of his Ignatz series. (It’s also in full-color, unlike the original serialization, which is another win.) [Graeme]

I don’t know why it’s taken this long for Fantagraphics to collect the comics that got their cool Ignatz format a few years ago, but I’ll shut up and be grateful. I greatly enjoyed Giandelli’s creepy tale of an apartment building, its residents, the large rabbit who roams its halls, and the creature the rabbit seems to serve. What’s also exciting though is that this means Richard Sala’s Delphine will get a collection too. [Michael]

Humanoids

Monsieur Jean: The Singles Theory – So, so excited for this new book by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian, making its English language debut in this edition. [Graeme]

IDW

Berkeley Breathed’s Outland: The Complete Collection Sunday Comics, 1989-1995 – The star of this collection of Breathed’s Bloom County follow-up isn’t the title strip, but the reprints of his early, college-era work that’ll accompany them. [Graeme]

Funny Stuff

Funny Stuff By Frank Frazetta – It makes me a bad nerd to admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen Frazetta’s legendary early comics work, so I’m pretty excited for this oversized hardcover collection, especially to see just how much he… homaged other, more famous strips. [Graeme]

Rocketeer Adventures 2 #1 – Featuring work by Stan Sakai, Bill Sienkiewicz, Marc Guggenheim, Peter David, and Sandy Plunkett. Plus covers and pin-ups by Dave Stevens, Darwyn Cooke, and Art Adams. [Michael]

The first series of anthology tributes to Dave Stevens and his retro creation worked so much more than I’d expected, so I’m definitely up for a second go-’round. [Graeme]

Smoke And Mirrors #1: Mike Costa’s been winning me over every month with his Cobra series, so I’m looking forward to this creator-owned book he’s co-writing about a stage magician who gets trapped in a world where magic has taken the place of science. [Graeme]

Star Trek, Volume 1 – Dear all fellow Trekkies/Trekkers/whatever you want to call yourselves: If you liked the original TV show and also the JJ Abrams movie reboot, you owe it to yourself to check out this monthly series, so grab this collection of the first issues and dig in. [Graeme]

Will Eisner’s The Spirit: Artist’s Edition – Of all the IDW “Artists Edition” books to date, this is the one that just feels like a must-have. Eisner’s Spirit pages as they appeared on his drafting table? I cannot wait to see these. [Graeme]

IDW probably explained the “Artist’s Edition” concept before and I just wasn’t paying attention, but I am now and I finally get why it’s cool to have COLOR scans of original-size black-and-white art so you can see blue pencils, art corrections, editorial notes, and stuff like that. Especially for someone as legendary as Will Eisner.  [Michael]

Saga

Image

Saga #1 – New Brian K. Vaughan. Does anything else need to be said? Oh, alright: FIona Staples on art. Seriously, you guys. [Graeme]

I’d buy a Fiona Staple fantasy epic anyway. That Brian K Vaughan is writing it makes me sigh like a Belieber. [Michael]

Hell Yeah #1: There’s something weirdly fitting about reading a series about the generation who’s grown up with super-heroes that’s created by someone like Joe Keatinge, who’s been around in comics for a long time, and Andre Szymanowicz’ art looks good as well… [Graeme]

The Manhattan Projects #1 – Jonathan Hickman returns to indie roots with the true story behind the atomic bomb. Turns out, Oppenheimer created this rocket ship, but forgot to shield it against cosmic rays… [Graeme]

Mad scientists! By Jonathan Hickman! [Michael]

’68, Volume 1: Better Run Through the Jungle – Mark Kidwell, Nat Jones, and Jay Fotos’ Vietnam War/zombie series is collected. [Michael]

The Walking Dead: Cutting Room Floor – I’m very, very curious about this collection of Robert Kirkman’s handwritten notes about the creation of his hit series. It sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? But it could very well be awesome… [Graeme]

Marvel

Avengers Academy #27 – Guest-starring the Runaways, ya’ll! And Bruiser’s totally punching Mettle cross-eyed on the cover. [Michael]

Savage Beauty

Moonstone

Savage Beauty Limited Edition Hardcover – I’m really curious to see how Mike Bullock’s contemporary, political jungle-girl story turns out. [Michael]

Oni

The Coldest City - If Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy taught me anything, it’s that I’m really not done with Cold War spy stories just yet. This one’s set in Berlin, which is even cooler. [Michael]

I’ve already read this one in galley format, and it is really, really good for those who like the spy stuff (Queen and Country fans, it’s written by Antony Johnston, so you know that it’s great; the art by Sam Hart follows Steve Yeowell’s lead from his early Zenith days, and for those who know my love for that series, there are few higher compliments I can offer). [Graeme]

The Secret History of DB Cooper #1 – Beyond “colorful weirdness and conspiracy-laden Americana,” I have no idea what to expect from Brian Churilla’s new series, and that just makes me look forward to it all the more. [Graeme]

I can’t wait to find out once and for all if Mr James is Doobie Keebler. [Michael]

Atomic Robo: Real Science Adventures

Red 5

Atomic Robo: Real Science Adventures #1 – Eep! An Atomic Robo anthology! Great news for a series whose back-up stories have always been just as entertaining as its lead feature. [Michael]

Atomic Robo returns with an all-new ongoing series?!? Surely this means that Christmas is either not over, or coming early or… well, you know what I mean. Good stuff. [Graeme]

Top Shelf

Blue – I’ve never heard of Pat Grant, the creator of this OGN, but Craig Thompson calls him “the Australian Mark Twain,” which is good enough for me. [Graeme]

Zenescope

The Jungle Book #1: Zenescope get around to “updating” the classic and well-loved story, which is more than likely going to mean adding more cleavage than you would’ve thought appropriate. Welcome to the year 20BOOB, everyone. [Graeme]

Are You My Mother?

With 2012 still fresh and new, it seems like as good a time as any to look at various publishing companies’ plans for the year ahead and pick out what looks good, or at least interesting. Because the year looks to be filled with so many delights, I decided to double down and offer not just six but 12 comics I’m really looking forward to reading. Obviously this list is reflective of my own, indie-slanted interests, so feel free in the comments section to tell me what a dope I am for forgetting about Book X by Artist Y.

1. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin). With a planned initial print run of 100,000 copies, there’s little doubt that Houghton Mifflin is expecting big things from Bechdel’s follow-up to her hugely acclaimed graphic novel Fun Home. Whereas that book dealt mainly with Bechdel’s relationship with her dad, this one focuses on her mom (in case you didn’t grab that from the title). A touchy subject, to be sure, but Bechdel’s proven she can handle such difficult, personal material with considerable aplomb.

Mastering Comics

2. Mastering Comics by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (First Second). Abel and Madden’s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures was one of the best “how-to” guides comics has ever seen. I’m anxious to see what they’ll do for an encore.

3. Sammy the Mouse Vol. 2 by Zak Sally (La Mano). Volume One of Sally’s surreal, anthropomorphic saga just came out, collecting the first three issues of the Ignatz series. As good news as this is, what I’m excited about is Sally’s plans to have Volume 2, featuring all-new material, out by the end of the year. Sammy was one of the best books in the Ignatz line, and I’m eager to see the story continue.

4. Best of Enemies: A History of the Middle East Relations, Part One by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B (Abrams). Funny the things you find out when you start strolling through a company’s online catalog. Did you know that Abrams is kickstarting another graphic novel imprint this year? With a heavy focus on Eurocomics? I sure as hell didn’t. One of the more notable releases is an English edition of the award-winning Kiki de Montparnasse. What I’m really curious about, however, is this historical project by the always interesting David B. and friend on the history of the Middle East.

5. Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown (Drawn and Quarterly). How long has it been since a collected version of Ed has been available? It’s been a long time. Long enough for me to note that it’s one of the few books by Brown that I haven’t read (other than pieces here and there — it’s shameful, I know). This is definitely going to be one of the big reprint projects of the year.

6. The Strange Tale of Paranorma Island by Suehiro Maruo (Last Gasp). This was initially promised to come out last year but apparently got delayed. Let’s hope we’re able to see a release in 2012. Maruo’s work is rarely for the squeamish or easily offended, but his comics have a haunting, lush quality that makes them worth checking out.

7. Barnaby Vol. 1 by Crockett Johnson (Fantagraphics). Here’s the other big reprint project of the year. Johnson’s wonderful, vastly underrated comic strip about a little boy and his underperforming fairy godfather is finally, finally being collected. Can’t wait.

8. Rohan at the Louvre by Hirohiko Araki (NBM). OK, so NBM has been publishing these graphic novels about the Louvre museum in Paris, and for the most part they’ve all been pretty good. This one, however, looks really interesting as it’s by the creator of the manga series Jo Jo’s Bizarre Adventures and stars one of the characters from that series. Chris Butcher talks a bit about it and offers up a preview over at his site.

9. Skippy Vol. 1 by Percy Crosby (IDW). OK, this is the other other big reprint project of the year. Even more than Barnaby, Skippy has largely been forgotten by a lot of comic readers, even though it heavily influenced works like Peanuts. But it’s a thoroughly charming, thoughtful strip that I expect will find a new appreciation with the release of this book.

The Lovely, Horrible Stuff

10. The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell (Top Shelf). A new book from Eddie Campbell is always cause for celebration. This one deals with money and mankind’s general relationship toward it, with lots of personal anecdotes provided by the author, no doubt.

11. Lose #4 by Michael DeForge (Koyama Press). Oh, yeah, boy, more DeForge. What’s not to like?

12. Spirit World by Jack Kirby (DC). I didn’t even know this work existed until DC announced the collection earlier this year — that’s how poor a Kirby scholar I am. Still, it’s nice to see DC make a concerted effort to get as much of the King’s work out there as possible and I’m excited to see what this collection — mainly collecting horror/supernatural-style magazine stories if I’m correct — holds.

American Barbarian

Back in 2010, when Thomas Scioli started bolstering his online presence and entered the realm of webcomics with American Barbarian, I was curious to see how things would play out (as may or may not have been obvious in my June 2010 interview of him). I’ll be honest and admit that now, more than a year later (and with far more of the project online to read), American Barbarian far exceeds what I expected. As much as I have always enjoyed and respected his Kirby-influenced approach to visual storytelling, after reading this double post Apocalyptic tale, I am far more impressed with Scioli’s funky ear for dialogue. It’s like reading a 1970s comic written by a minimalist version of David Mamet. Doubting my quirky endorsement of the work? Then realize AdHouse is collecting the webcomic for a 256-page/6 ” x 9 ” /hardcover release early this year. If you don’t trust my tastes, then you should definitely trust AdHouse publisher Chris Pitzer. To mark the upcoming release, Scioli and I did another of our quick email interviews. Before diving into the interview, let me take a second to agree with JK Parkin’s sentiment in this post, back in June, that DC Comics should have considered Scioli for one of the New 52 titles that it launched back in September. So I was surprised to learn (as you can read in this interview) that DC did not contact Scioli when assembling the creative team for the new OMAC title. As I edited this interview I realized it was hard to find my favorite part of our discussion, but it may be the revelation that the look for Two-Tank Omen came to Scioli in a dream. A close second was learning a bit about his next webcomic, Final Frontier. Feel free to chime in with your favorite part of this interview and/or Scioli’s work in the comments section, please.

Tim O’Shea: As an independent creator, the job of marketing your work falls to you. Do you think over the years, you have gotten more comfortable marketing yourself? On a related note, how did you decide upon doing this one minute trailer for American Barbarian?

Thomas Scioli: Even the largest comics publishers don’t seem to have a budget for promotion, so I’d say any creator, independent or mainstream, can benefit from doing their own promotion. It’s something that I’ve never been comfortable with, but do out of necessity. I think I have gotten better about it, because in the beginning, it would give me crippling anxiety, now it’s just mild trepidation. The idea for doing a trailer came from having seen other people do it. AdHouse’s own Afrodisiac trailer and [Top Shelf's] Infinite Kung-Fu [trailer] are two that made an impression on me when they made the rounds. It got me excited about those two works, so I wanted to do the same. I’d been dabbling with animation, back when I started AmBarb so it was a natural outgrowth of that, too. Once you start doing a webcomic it isn’t long before you realize, hey, why not just do a cartoon?

O’Shea: Did AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer contact you regarding the possibility of an American Barbarian book, or was it the other way around?

Scioli: It happened pretty organically. Comics is a small world, independent comics is even smaller. We’d been hanging out on the convention circuit. Chris had expressed an interest in American Barbarian from pretty early on, but there’s a wide gap between interest as, “that’s something I’d like to read” and “that’s something I’d like to publish.” When I got closer to finishing the book, I knew I had to start pitching it to publishers soon. I was dreading the thought. Chris had bought an American Barbarian pinup I did for the program book and art auction at HeroesCon 2010. At HeroesCon 2011, our tables were adjacent. One of the most common things people ask me at conventions is “When are they going to reprint the first Godland hardcover?” Since it’s been out of print for many years and goes for ridiculous prices online. The idea occurred to me, “Hey, Joe and I own this, so just because Image doesn’t want to reprint it doesn’t mean some other publisher might.” I half jokingly turned to Chris and said, “Do you want to publish a reprint of the first Godland hardcover?” Chris said no, but that he’d like to publish American Barbarian. It was as simple as that. I was ready to say yes right then and there, but I decided to wait until I got home and think about it first. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I had a long list of reasons why AdHouse would be the best possible publisher for it. And I like Chris so much, that the idea of working with him made it easy to say yes.

O’Shea: To you, what are some of the larger benefits to teaming with AdHouse?

Scioli: Before AmBarb, my audience was largely the wednesday comics store audience, viewing my work mainly from a Kirby nostalgia direction. When I started going all-in on webcomics, I noticed a totally new audience discovering my work for the first time. I think being with AdHouse gives it a different context where the full range of things I’m bringing to the table can be highlighted.

I feel like Chris Pitzer is strong in areas that I struggle with. He’s got a great understanding of book design, which is really important for a project like this that is going from an online context to book form. He’s focused on making the book an interesting object in and of itself. Since this is a work that I created entirely on my own, it wasn’t commissioned by a publisher, the main thing you need is a publisher who understands presentation. I know American Barbarian will get the attention it needs and not get lost in the shuffle. AdHouse’s line seemed to me to be carefully curated. Each release really counts. It’s gotten to a point where each new AdHouse book is kind of an event, you know? The Josh Cotter books, then Afrodisiac, then Duncan the Wonder Dog, Pope Hats, Forming. I feel like AdHouse has had this great track record of quality, where I’m benefitting from that goodwill, that American Barbarian is the next AdHouse book and that that means something. I think it’s a great way to have your work presented.

O’Shea: In the webcomic’s first chapter for several panels before his arrival you inject small panels teasing the impending arrival of Two-Tank Omen in a manner that reminded me of Walt Simonson’s teases for Surtur. Did that serve as an inspiration for you?

Scioli: I’m a fan of Thor, so it might be in there somewhere. It’s probably closer to the buildup to the introduction of Galactus, since the buildup and intro happen within the same chapter. Ditko tended to do more of the Surtur-style multi-issue buildup to a villain’s intro than Kirby did. Didn’t they mention Dormammu for months before he actually showed up in Dr. Strange? Spiderman always seemed like it had lots of silhouetted mystery villains hanging around making plans for ages before they’d actually make a move.

Specifically what I was thinking of, and I think it will be more apparent in the print version, is that I had an idea in one of my notebooks to have a subplot going on in a small panel at the bottom of each page, and to have that bottom panel slowly get larger and larger until it engulfs the entire page. I eventually found a use for that idea here, in the buildup to Two-Tank’s arrival.

O’Shea: Is it me or did you enjoy writing the dialogue for American Barbarian’s brothers and father? I cracked up when you had his dad telling the king: “you’re going to have to eat some shit.”

Scioli: Yes I did. I had to make that choice for this comic, how do people talk? I’d been doing the high and mighty fantasy speech in 8-Opus. I wanted to take a break from it and see if I could get away with some more direct, less polished speech. While I’m drawing, I’ll write temporary dialogue in the margins as a placeholder for when I can fill in something more polished. I’ve talked to some other artists who also do this, too. I thought it might be interesting to have them speak in that “first draft” dialogue. “Eat shit, Submariner!” rather than “Taste the full cosmic fury of mine awesome hammer Mjolnir!”

O’Shea: When Rick is carving revenge into his fingers you went to a completely different art style in two panels (pages 10 and 11) of Chapter 2, in fact at least with 11 it looks like it is a photo of actual hands. What lead you to try those panels that way?

Scioli: I don’t know. It was something that just came up in the course of doing it. I hadn’t planned to do it that way, until I sat down to draw it. I knew I wanted to reserve the right to draw any page any way I wanted to. That’s part of the freedom of webcomics. I knew fumetti, watercolor and collage were tools that I hadn’t used before in a comic, so this seemed like a good place to do it. In a lot of ways that’s the emotional focal point of the whole story, so if you’re going to do it somewhere, that’s the place for it.

O’Shea: Am I right in assuming you love designing zany-looking characters. Who do you consider among the American Barbarian cast to be the most outlandish looking character?

Scioli: You’re right, that’s my favorite part of the job. The most outlandish has got to be Two-Tank Omen. That was one that came to me in a dream, so I don’t feel like I “designed” it as much as some of the other characters. Gali-Leo is pretty weird and he was one that was very carefully constructed.

O’Shea: At what point in the story planning did you realize: “I want to have Rick driving a Honda in the opening to chapter 3!”?

Scioli: I wanted him to roll down the hill in some kind of vehicle. At first I was kind of picturing something like in the Simpsons driving game where you utterly destroy your car and drive around in a frame with no tires.

Eventually I decided I wanted this to be another point to include some photo-collage. That’s actually my car.

O’Shea: How is plotting and pacing for a webcomic different than your approach in your past projects?

Scioli: Here’s a big difference, which worked out really well: there’s no set length for the chapters. Each chapter is as long or short as it needs to be. I had 14-page chapters, 40-page chapters. Originally I had concieved of this as a 10-part monthly mini-series comic book. That means that I would’ve had to cram the 40-page chapter into 20-some pages or pad out the 14-page chapter. It lets the work breathe and find its own pace.

I also like how you can release it a page at a time. In a monthly comic, the only page that lingers is the last page. You have to wait a while for that next chunk of story, so that’s where the cliffhangers go. With a webcomic, every page is a cliffhanger. As a creator, you hate the fact that something you labored over can be read so quickly. The people who followed the comic as each page was posted read it in a timeframe that was a lot closer to the timeframe I created it in.

O’Shea: Am I right in thinking you love to use thought balloons for comedic effect (I am thinking in particular of the line “I thought that douche was her boyfriend” from Chapter 5).

Scioli: I’m a big believer in the thought balloon. It lends itself to humor of course, since it’s viewed as a quaint relic, but I think you can use it for serious effect, too.

O’Shea: The webcomic is currently at chapter 10. How many chapters will be covered in February’s release?

Scioli: There will be 10 chapters total, but chapter 10 is pretty long. That’s the whole story. After the story finishes, ambarb.com will host my next webcomic: Final Frontier.

O’Shea: Care to divulge some more details about Final Frontier?

Scioli: It’s the most straight-up superheroey thing I’ve ever done. There’s a whole universe of characters doing all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s tangentially related to American Barbarian.

O’Shea: Are there any extras that the American Barbarian book is going to offer?

Scioli: There are extra drawings and sketches scattered through the book as chapter breaks or design elements. There’s an awesome map of American Barbarian’s world on the endpapers. There’s no backmatter. The book is pretty much all story. The story ended up being a lot bigger than I thought it would be. That last chapter just kept going and going.

O’Shea: In a recent Twitter exchange with Kurt Busiek, you noted that there is a lack of plot (much less subplot) in some comics. How did that come to be, in your opinion?

Scioli: I disavow anything I post on Twitter. Anything I say on there is usually only how I feel at the moment I tweet it, and I usually disagree with it immediately.

I think that because Kirby-style action comics story-telling is my baseline, which is very plot-heavy, everything else tends to seem to my eyes, leasurely and anemic by comparison. But I probably tend towards an over-reliance on plot mechanics and need to learn to more fully utilize the other components of storytelling.

O’Shea: It’s a simple opinion at its core, but I still have to ask (based on this tweet) what is it about the writing process that is so enjoyable for you?

Scioli: That’s where it feels like you’re really playing with toys and having fun, when you’re in those early stages of figuring out the shape of it. The day-in-day-out drawing of a comic has its own set of rewards, but things happen so much more slowly, it’s not as enjoyable. I think it’s also because my early work was so much more focussed on the drawing. Writing was something I did to facilitate the things I wanted to draw, where now I’ve accumulated enough experience that I actually have feel like I have things to say, and a way of expressing them.

O’Shea: Please tell me that DC contacted you when they decided to include OMAC as part of the new 52?

Scioli: They did not. DC is the one big four company I’ve never done anything with. OMAC is a lot closer to what I’d like to see from mainstream superhero comics, a focus on visual bravura and clearly-choreographed action. It’s got that joy in the drawing process that I’d just mentioned. I’d been enjoying Giffen’s recent penciling work leading up to it. It’s beautiful. It’s my favorite of the new 52, and tellingly enough it’s by far the worst-selling. I know better than anybody what a tough sell the fake Kirby thing can be.

Judge Bao and the Jade Phoenix

It’s time once again for our monthly trip through Previews looking for cool, new comics. As usual, we’re focusing on graphic novels, collected volumes and first issues so that I don’t have to come up with a new way to say, “ Wonder Woman is still awesome!” every month. And I’ll continue letting Tom and Carla do the heavy lifting in regards to DC and Marvel’s solicitations.

Also, please feel free to play along in the comments. Tell me what I missed that you’re looking forward to or – if you’re a comics creator – mention your own stuff.

Archaia

Judge Bao and the Jade Phoenix - A detective story set in ancient China. Plus: cool name.

Avatar

Dicks #1 – Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s humor makes my top hat explode and my monocle fly off my face, but I remember this being pretty popular back in the day and I imagine that it’s new presentation in color and leading into a new storyline could make it popular again.

Bongo

Ralph Wiggum Comics #1 – This, on the other hand, is exactly my kind of funny. Kind of like 30 Days of Night, I’m astonished no one’s thought of it before. Too bad it’s just a one-shot, but hearing that Sergio Aragones is one of the contributors makes me want to poke myself with my Viking helmet to see if I’m dreaming.

Terror on the Planet of the Apes #1

Boom!

Terror on the Planet of the Apes #1 – Boom continues its domination of the Planet of the Apes by reprinting classic stories from Marvel’s time with the concept. Between Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Boom’s other PotA comics, I’ve been itching to read these stories.

Adventure Time #1 – As much a welcome no-brainer as Ralph Wiggums Comics. Oh, man. Now I want a crossover!

Dark Horse

Conan the Barbarian #1 – Not only does this have Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan; it also features one of my favorite Conan characters, Bêlit the pirate queen.

BPRD Hell on Earth: The Long Death #1 – The Mignola-verse is managing to come out with some kind of first issue or collected volume just about every month now. That’s amazing. In this mini-series, the team returns to the spooky woods from New World.

Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi #1 – If this had come out fifteen years ago when I was still voraciously devouring all the Star Wars EU history I could get my hands on, I would’ve been dancing like a Twi’lek slave girl over finally getting the story of how the Jedi came to be. It’s one of the few events in Star Wars history that haven’t yet been explored.

Dark Horse Presents #9 – Featuring Tarzan, Lobster Johnson, and the world’s largest pirate ship. Not in the same story, unfortunately, but still pretty cool.

DC Universe Presents #6

DC

DC Universe Presents #6 – The Challengers of the Unknown take over the title with a beautiful, fantastic cover by Ryan Sook.

Legends of the Dark Knight: Jim Aparo - This isn’t even out yet and I’m already impatient for Volume 2.

Northlanders, Volume 6: Thor’s Daughter - I’ve been looking forward to finally trying out Northlanders with this volume. Telling the story of the Siege of Paris through the eyes of a Viking woman is a great hook.

Dynamite

Warriors of Mars #1 – Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories couldn’t be more different in tone from Edwin Lester Arnold’s goofy Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, but the similarities in concepts (Southern soldiers transported to Mars where they fall in love with princesses) has had fans and writers making connections between them for decades, including Alan Moore in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Now Dynamite’s taking a turn with Carter’s princess (or her people, anyway) kidnapping Gullivar’s.

First Second

Friends With Boys - I’m all for three things: First Second publications, Faith Erin Hicks comics, and stories about people learning to communicate with people unlike themselves. No, wait: four things. Ghost stories.

The Big Town

Fantagraphics

The Big Town - Charles Schulz’ son wrote this novel (the last in his jazz-age trilogy) about the end of the Roaring Twenties and “the role of business, crime, morality, and love in our lives.” It’s not comics, but it sounds ambitious and transporting.

Humanoids

Celestial Bibendum – New York is now on the Seine and there’s a lonely seal named Diego living in it. That’s weird enough that I’d like to know more.

IDW

Road Rage #1 – You might think that the short story “Trucks” was Stephen King’s ultimate homage to the Richard Matheson novella Duel. After all, “Trucks” was collected in Night Shift and King himself directed the movie adaptation of it, Maximum Overdrive featuring Emilio Estevez, AC/DC, and a giant Green Goblin mask. What you might not know is that King also collaborated with his son Joe Hill on a biker-gang novella called Throttle that’s more directly inspired by Duel (which you probably remember was also adapted to film as Stephen Spielberg’s first feature-length project). IDW is now adapting both Duel and Throttle to comics with this four-issue mini-series.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Volume 1: Change is Constant – The first issues of the new, ongoing series are collected.

Jack Avarice is the Courier - I love the way IDW released this mini-series: weekly over the course of a single month, then the entire collection the month after that. I’d love to know how it sold for them, but for me as a consumer, that’s a perfect system.

Thief of Thieves

Image

Thief of Thieves #1 – Some new guys named Robert Kirkman and Nick Spencer team up to write one of those crime comics the kids love these days.

Glory #23 – Rob Liefeld’s Extreme relaunch continues to impress me with the talent it’s choosing. In this case, Joe Keatinge (Popgun) and Ross Campbell (Shadoweyes) offer a very different take on the Wonder Woman archetype.

King City - Brandon Graham’s masterwork is finally collected.

Marvel

Winter Soldier #1 – The closest thing we’re going to get to a Black Widow comic right now.

Ka-Zar by Mark Waid and Andy Kubert, Volume 2 - Ka-Zar vs. Thanos. ‘Nuff said.

Metropolitan

Journalism - A collection of short comics by cartoonist/war-reporter Joe Sacco.

Moonstone

The Lone Ranger: Vendetta - The concealed cowpoke and Tonto investigate a serial killer with possible connections to the Ranger’s dead nemesis, Butch Cavendish.

Rohan at the Louvre (French edition)

NBM

Rohan at the Louvre - A newly famous mangaka meddles with a cursed painting deep in the bowels of the famous museum. This will not end well.

Oni

Sixth Gun, Volume 3 – Trade-waiters have reason to whoop it up now that the next installment of the awesome Weird Western is on its way.

Courtney Crumrin, Volume 1: The Night Things Special Edition – The comic that put Ted Naifeh on so many radars gets color and a hardcover.

SLG

Malleus Maleficarum: A Guide to Catching Witches - Everyone’s favorite Inquisitorial treatise on How to Hunt and Torture Pagans, the Homeless, and Other People You Don’t Like is adapted to comics.

Top Shelf

Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland – One of the last projects Pekar worked on before his death is also – according to Alan Moore’s intro – “one of [his] very greatest works.”

That’s it for me. What are you looking forward to?

Also, if you did check out our Black Friday list, some of these are repeats from it, as several places have deals that have been running all weekend and go through Monday. I’ve put the new stuff up top, after the deal that starts at midnight …

Dark Horse Comics has another digital deal set up for Cyber Monday: the first 500 customers through Dark Horse Digital will get a 50 percent discount. There’s a $20 minimum, and the deal runs for 24 hours beginning at midnight Pacific Time on Nov. 28; you’ll also need a coupon code: dhcyber. You can find more details here.

And if you buy $100 worth of stuff from Things from Another World on Monday, they’ll give you $10 worth of digital Dark Horse Comics.

Ben Towle is offering 25 percent off everything in his web store.

Fantagraphics has marked down everything in their web store by 30 percent.

Marvel is offering 30 percent off a Digital Comics Unlimited subscription today.

Top Shelf Productions, meanwhile, is offering 30 percent off everything in their online store. You’ll also need a code for this one: CYBERTSP.

The online store for Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint is holding a 25 percent off everything sale for Cyber Monday.

Viper Comics has a huge 70 percent off sale going at their online store. Head over there and pick up Robot 6 favorite Ryan Cody’s Villains collection, “Thick as Thieves.”

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund are selling personalized graphic novels from several creators, including Neil Gaiman, Jason Aaron, Brian Wood, Brian Azzarello, Jeff Smith, Dan Clowes, Evan Dorkin and many more. Also, as part of the CBLDF’s Spirit of Giving holiday gift drive, donations you make on Cyber Monday will be acknowledged by The Will & Ann Eisner Family Foundation, who will make a contribution of $1 for every donation and gift order placed on the CBLDF’s website. In addition, they will contribute $5 for each new, renewing or gift membership made from now until Dec. 31 — so give the gift of free speech to someone on your list this year.

If you’re looking for cheap graphic novels, look no further than, um, CheapGraphicNovels.com. They’ve got a whole bunch of Absolute and Omnibus editions for 50 percent off.

This isn’t really a Cyber Monday thing, but I thought it was cool — Ben Templesmith is selling a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that came with a blank cover. And he’s provided his own custom cover. You can bid on it on eBay.

Khepri Comics, which has had big discounts on select items over the last few days, is putting EVERYTHING on sale for Cyber Monday. And again, buy some comics, help the cheetahs. You’ll need this coupon code: CHEETAH40MON.

Midtown Comics has comics, graphic novels and statues on sale through Monday night.

Jeff Smith’s Boneville site is holding a signature sale through mid-December, where every book ordered will be signed by Smith.

Mimoco has all their designer flash drives for 25 percent off, which include drives based on Batman, Green Lantern, Star Wars and more.

Threadless is holding a $10 T-shirt sale through Monday, so you can get those cool robot shirts by Ethan Nicolle, Becky Cloonan, JR Goldberg and Jhonen Vasquez for cheap.

MattyCollector has a ton of action figures on sale, including some of their past San Diego Comic Con exclusives and several Justice League Unlimited packs.

Top Shelf goes digital

Both Top Shelf and comiXology sent out press releases this morning announcing that they’ve launched two new apps for the Apple iOS, one for general readers and one aimed at kids.

The Top Shelf Productions iOS App will include comics and graphic novels like From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Essex County by Jeff Lemire and Infinite Kung Fu by Kagan McLeod. The Top Shelf Kids Club iOS App will feature books like Owly by Andy Runton and Johnny Boo by James Kochalka, among others. Purchases on these apps will sync across the Comics by comiXology platform — iOS, Android and the Web.

To help promote the launch, Top Shelf and comiXology are offering five graphic novels at reduced prices for the next week:

$1.99 for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1910 by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill
$1.99 for Owly book 1 by Andy Runton
$0.99 for Johnny Boo book 1 by James Kochalka
$1.99 for Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown
$2.99 for The Surrogates by Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele

Additionally, Wednesday will see the comiXology debut of the newly remastered Top Shelf edition of Lost Dogs, the Xeric-award-winning first graphic novel by Jeff Lemire. The graphic novel returns to print next year.

Top Shelf emphasized that in addition to comiXology, their books are also available through other digital providers, like Graphicly, Comics+ by iVerse, Apple iBooks and Google Books. More titles will continue to roll out on every platform in the days to come, including the Nook and Kindle Fire devices, as well as the Diamond Digital program which partners with comic shops. New “buy digital” buttons now appear throughout their website, offering easy access to digital editions in every available format.

All this week at Robot 6 we’re interviewing some of the many contributors to First Second’s new anthology, Nursery Rhyme Comics. Today, Michael May talks to cartoonist Aaron Renier.

Aaron Renier first came to comics fans’ attention with his childlike, but suspenseful Spiral-Bound, a Top Shelf graphic novel that earned him the Eisner for Talent Deserving Wider Recognition in 2006. Last year, he gained some of that recognition with his adventurous and spooky The Unsinkable Walker Bean from First Second. This year finds him still with First Second illustrating one of the more obscure (to me, anyway; Lewis Carroll fans will undoubtedly recognize it) nursery rhymes in their collection.

Michael May: For those who aren’t familiar with “The Lion and Unicorn,” can you explain the history behind it?

Aaron Renier: Sure. The history behind it is that in the early 17th Century, England and Scotland became unified and they needed a new coat of arms. So they took one of the two lions from the English coat of arms and one of the two unicorns from the Scottish coat of arms. One lion and one unicorn to symbolize the unity for the new British coat of arms. But when I read the poem I saw it as something much stranger, and colorful. So I tried to ignore that knowledge.

May: Did you get to pick the poem or was it assigned?

Renier: I picked it. I did because I had no interest in merely illustrating a nursery rhyme I was already familiar with. Almost all of the fun of being an illustrator is being able to add your own two cents. If I had done something I grew up with I’d have felt pretty bad derailing the meaning and visuals too much. It was something new to me and that left me able to imagine it as something fresh. If you read the poem literally, it’s immediately strange. Why give [the animals] bread? Why give them cake? It has a happy bit of nonsense I loved. It was also a very nice challenge to make a poem most people would be unfamiliar with into something relevant and new and special.

May: What hook did you find that made it fun to adapt?

Renier: The hook for me was that I was allowed to make the lion and the unicorn the steed of two evil men. It was impossible for me to villainize two animals. I love animals, and animals are animals. Imagine villainizing a unicorn or a lion. It’s impossible. Such fantastic creatures. It’s men who would care to battle over something as silly as a crown.

May: Do the riders represent anyone in particular?

Renier: The riders represent the hearts of people that would fight for the power of a crown. They are greed and corruption! Careless, cold-hearted hunger for the crown! It’s really a pity they have such beautiful beasts of burden. I feel bad for the lion and the unicorn.

May: Did you have to do any research for the story?

Renier: I did one image search online for the poem and discovered an alarming amount of images with the two animals “putting up their dukes” and often with boxing gloves on. I remember closing that search window thinking how boring that interpretation was. I never read the poem and saw them standing in the middle of town punching each other, and I realized then that I needed to quickly sketch it out as I saw it. So that’s how it came to be. As I said, I looked up the poems origin, but the poem’s background didn’t seem important to me. I didn’t want to turn a wonderful bit of nonsense into a history lesson. The poem needed to take new form, and become relevant to me.

May: Though the poem has the animals being “drummed out of town,” you depict them as being led out; almost tricked. Is that an intentional bit of subversion on your part?

Renier: I hope it comes across that way. Yes, I think the world is run by people who want power for the sake of being powerful, not caring if they ruin a few fruit markets along the way. The good thing is they get drummed out of town (animals love cake and bread!) and the crown can be used for something useful. The children at the end can use that piece of metal for make believe and a good ol’ game of “kick the crown” if they want. The future of that town is with the children. I pictured the men eventually sitting on a distant hill in some long forgotten valley, hungry and trying to get the baked goods away from the animals. Ha!

Thanks so much to Aaron for answering my questions.

TOMORROW: Brigid Alverson talks to anthology editor Chris Duffy.

As we noted last year, Ed Piskor has been reworking his comic Wizzywig, the story of a phone hacker and his escalating career of techno-pranks. He wrapped it up this week, and the comic is complete on his site, so now is a good time to grab a cup of coffee and read the whole thing. Piskor has a nice, clean style, and he has completely redrawn this comic from its earlier, three-volume incarnation, tightening it up considerably along the way and updating it to include references to Wikileaks. There’s a print edition in the works from Top Shelf, due out next year, and that should be worth saving your pennies for.

Any Empire

The effects of various forms of militarism on young boys, and the lives that can result, accounts for much of Powell’s focus, as two of the three principal characters grew up with real soldiers in their families, and the boys devote much of their imaginative lives to war fantasies inspired by G.I. Joe comics and toys and Hollywood movies like Platoon.

A third character, a young girl, is similarly affected by her fantasy life, although she plays at girl detective thanks to Nancy Drew novels, rather than dealing with the anxieties the boys suffer trying to live up to their society’s narrow notion of manliness.

All three share a school and exposure to a weird neighborhood mystery—turtles are being found badly wounded, their shells smashed intentionally—but they drift into radically different directions as they reach adulthood and, eventually, they reunite.

It’s pretty heartbreaking stuff, but it’s never hard to read, as Powell infuses the narrative with occasionally quite startling fantasy sequences that seem to ebb and flow from the lives of the characters; initially these sequences seem summoned by them in order to deal with boredom or escape stressful situations, but  later they seemingly have a life of their own, coming unbidden.

Big Questions (Drawn and Quarterly) The first thing one notices about Anders Nielsen’s career-spanning work is how apt the first half of the title is—it’s big. The hardcover deluxe edition is 660 pages long, almost three inches thick and weighs in at five pounds.

The second thing one notices is how quickly it changes its tone and style from short, crudely-drawn gag strips to an elegantly, airily drawn epic narrative that wrestles with some of the biggest issues any story can ever wrestle with…as experienced by a group of finches and the many animals and few humans in their neighborhood.

There’s a blurb from Paul Constant of The Stranger about the book, saying “Imagine if Peanuts suddenly turned into Lord of the Rings and you have a vague idea of the tone.”

Vague is right; that example certainly gets at the way a couple of funny comic strips about birds eating seeds transforms into a sprawling mythology, with birds breaking into different religious factions, going to war with one another, offering the finch version of Plato’s shadows on the wall theory of reality and even visiting the bird underworld, but the example unfortunately carries with it the connotations of the works cited.

And it’s difficult to define Big Questions by reference to other works, because there aren’t any other works like it. Certainly there are plenty of ones that involve discussing big, human issues in the context of the animal kingdom, stripping them of the specifics and making them more universal and timeless in the process, but not in a comic book—certainly not a comic book of this size, scope, scale and ambition.

Nilsen’s Big Questions is like Nilsen’s Big Questions, and nothing else.

The large cast of finches are all simply drawn—somewhere between John Porcellino and James Kochalka on the complexity-of-design spectrum—usually appearing in medium shot as bird shapes with beaks and dot eyes (In close-up, they get more detailed). Their simplicity and indistinguishability makes their sometimes grandiose names seem ironic (Ulysses, Theodorus, Eusippius and Algernon are some of the fancier names, although there are more common sounding oness like Betty, Curtis and Leroy), as well as add a layer of humor to their personality and social conflicts.

While their lives are defined by their interactions with one another, their predators and the search for food, some of which they get from an elderly woman who cares for a young man with serious developmental issues (He’s referred to as “The Idiot”), the appearance of a unexploded bomb dropped by an airplane (Or is it an egg, laid by a giant bird?) introduces a new, all-consuming conflict in their lives, as does the inevitable result of a bomb, the later crash of an airplane and the introduction of its human pilot.

The results are amazing. It’s action-packed (who knew finch fights could be so suspenseful?) and it’s funny (I laughed out loud at page 489) by turns, but more than anything it’s meditative and elegiac. It’s…it’s…um…

Huh.

It’s Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions. You should probably read it.

Daybreak (Drawn and Quarterly) When you hear someone say they’re sick of reading comics of a particular genre or on a particular subject, chances are what they really mean is they’re sick of reading comics from that genre or on that subject that aren’t very good.

For example, I know I’ve told myself I’m sick of reading zombie comics a few dozen times over the course of the last decade (and I’m sure I’ve publicly declared as much to anyone who would listen at least half as many times), and yet every once in a while I’ll come across a really amazing zombie comic that makes me eat those words.

Brian Ralph’s Daybreak is just such a comic.

Ralph, an alternative cartoonist who came out of the Fort Thunder collective, has a highly cartoony, illustrative style with a greater focus on story and emotion rather than representation. And this collection of the previously serialized Daybreak is a handsome little hardcover from Drawn and Quarterly, a publisher not especially known for jockeying with IDW and Dark Horse for the horror comics publishing crown.

But that’s exactly what Daybreak is, a very atypical version of your typical zombiepocalypse premise.

Aside from the difference in presentation and style than, say, Walking Dead or Marvel Zombies or one of those Ashley Wood comics, Ralph’s comic is told in second-person, with the reader being the main character.

It opens with a one-armed man in tattered clothes standing atop a pile of rubble, looking at the reader and, in the next panel, saying, “It’ll be dark soon. Better come with me.”

Keeping a rigid, six-panel grid structure, which focuses a consistent of point-of-view similar to what you might see in a film shot with a single, hand-held camera in a single take, the one-armed man leads the main character (the reader) through the piles of rubble that passes for the world, from hide-out to hide-out and battle to battle, meeting several other characters along the way.

Ralph’s zombies, which, in good zombie movie tradition, are never referred to as zombies, rarely if ever appear on panel, usually depicted in the distance as emaciated, lurching silhouettes, which certainly adds to the horror of the climax, when the reader finally has to deal with one face to face, and the book’s equivocal conclusion.

Daybreak is perhaps most unusual, however, in its ability to pass through the eye of the needle that is the space between the extreme edge of art comics and the extreme edge of pop genre comics. That, and Ralph’s ability to so masterfully tell an immersive, gripping story in such a difficult structure.

Okie Dokie Donuts: Open For Business (Top Shelf) This slim, 48-page graphic novel from writer/artist Chris Eliopoulos and Top Shelf is the first in a planned series about the titular doughnut shop, “a little place in town that you should know…a hot donut service that’s sure to grow,” as the big-headed, tiny-bodied, elastic-limbed characters sing in their musical introduction of the shop and its, um, zaftig proprietor, the appropriately named Big Mama.

Everything seems to be going great at her doughnut shop—everyone’s singing about her products, after all—until a salesman with a very untrustworthy-looking moustache overheard Big Mama mention that she could use a little more help around the shop (“Hark! Did I just hear a restaurateur in trouble?!” he cries, storming in).

His solution is Mr. Baker, a giant robot that is, “The latest in high-tech oven machinery!”

Mama is leery of trusting a soulless machine to produce her doughnuts, as her secret ingredient is love, but she’s persuaded to at least try him out. And as in any story in which a machine is called in to replace a human being, it naturally runs amuck.

But don’t worry, this book is part of Top Shelf’s growing kids line, so the robot doesn’t go on a killing spree or anything too terrible. It simply causes some kitchen chaos and makes some pretty gross doughnuts, but it all ends happily enough.

Well, “all-ages” is probably a better demarcation of the intended age group than “kids,” as anyone who enjoys cool comics art should find plenty to love in here. Eliopoulos’ panels are jam-packed with busy little-details, most of the movement augmented by sweat drops, action lines, clouds of breath and steam, stars and hearts to further clutter them, making each panel into a sort of baroque of cartoon elements.

Design-wise, Eliopoulos’ characters are all wildly exaggerated, but in a remarkably consistent way, so that their arms may stretch like taffy in movement, but they slide right back into place for the next panel. The character’s are flexible, but solid; they’re cartoons, but they’re real cartoons.

Each page is packed with panels and action, and the art is all colored in a limited, doughnut-shop palette of browns, whites, oranges and pinks. Like the snack in the title, the book is small, but sweet and satisfying.

It’s an annual tradition to look forward to: The alternative comics publisher Top Shelf has unveiled its “Massive $3 Sale,” in which they’re pricing down their catalog to near-ridiculous levels — in many cases $3, and in many more cases just one lousy American dollar. For very little money, you can rack up a big chunk of one of the best comics publishers’ best comics.

What would I get? At the $3 level, Kolbeinn Karlsson’s The Troll King — a surreal collection of intertwined short stories that for once lives up to the overused, rarely true label “fairy tales for grown-ups” — is basically a must-buy. I’d also be sure to pick up Andy Hartzell’s Fox Bunny Funny, an unpredictable and impeccably cartooned funny-animal allegory about conformity and self-discovery. Lilli Carré’s remarkably assured debut collection of satirical short stories, Tales of Woodsman Pete, is another no-brainer. If you’re interested in rounding out your Alan Moore collection with some of his more off-the-beaten-path efforts, you can get all eight issues of his underground-culture zine Dodgem Logic, his prose novel Voice of the Fire, and his poetry/photography collaboration with José Villarubia The Mirror of Love for three bucks a pop. And you can pick up all three issues of Jeffrey Brown’s one-man action anthology series Sulk — Bighead & Friends, a return to his genuinely funny superhero parody characters; Deadly Awesome, an 84-page mixed martial arts fight comic; and The Kind of Strength That Comes from Madness, a grab bag of sci-fi/fantasy/action/adventure spoofs — for a buck apiece, which is a steal.

Beyond the deepest discounts, you’ll rarely find the publisher’s heavy (literally–these books are big) hitters priced as low as they are now: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, Campbell’s Alec: The Year’s Have Pants omnibus, and Jeff Lemire’s complete Essex County are all $20, while Craig Thompson’s Blankets is just $22.50.

And hey, if you’re totally new to all of these books, so much the better. Maybe DC’s New 52 initiative has you in an “I’ll try anything for $3 a book” mood? If so, put a few bucks aside and get some full-fledged graphic novels for that price or lower. You’ll be glad you did.

The Homeland Directive

As an Atlanta native, in terms of pro sports teams, I root for the Braves and Falcons every season. In a similar vein, when something from Top Shelf (partially based out of the Atlanta metro area) is published, much less by a talented Atlanta-based writer like Robert Venditti, I aim to support that project, but only if that support is warranted. I am happy to say that Venditti and artist Mike Huddleston’s The Homeland Directive has more than earned my full and enthusiastic support. Don’t trust my gut? Consider what The Middle Ground columnist Graeme McMillan’s wrote about the 152-page graphic novel: “‎It’s unlikely you’ll find a book that looks as good as The Homeland Directive this year.” The book, released last month, is best framed by the publisher: “As a leading researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Laura Regan is one of the world’s foremost authorities on viral and bacteriological study. Having dedicated her career to halting the spread of infectious disease, she has always considered herself one of the good guys. But when her research partner is murdered and Laura is blamed for the crime, she finds herself at the heart of a vast and deadly conspiracy. Aided by three rogue federal agents who believe the government is behind the frame-up, Laura must evade law enforcement, mercenaries, and a team of cyber-detectives who know more about her life than she does—all while trying to expose a sinister plot that will impact the lives of every American.” My thanks to Venditti for his time and be sure to visit the Top Shelf website for a six-page preview of the book.

Tim O’Shea: Was there any one factor (influencing your decision more than others) as to why you tapped artist Huddleston for the project?

Robert Venditti: I wrote the book having no idea who the artist was going to be or, for that matter, if it was even going to get published. When I turned in the script to Chris and Brett at Top Shelf, Mike Huddleston was one of the first names they mentioned. I’d never met Mike before, but I was a fan of his work on The Coffin, so I was immediately onboard with the idea. He’s an amazing talent, and he proved himself to be a consummate professional as well. It was an absolute joy to work with him.

O’Shea: The color schemes and tones in this book are distinctive in many ways. Was that an approach that you and Huddleston agreed upon–or how was the color selection process determined?

Venditti: That was all Mike. He told me before he got started that he wanted to be experimental with the art and coloring, but I really had no idea what that meant. Even if he’d tried to explain his vision to me, I don’t think I would’ve understood, since I don’t have much of a background in art. But I want the artists I collaborate with to feel like they have the room to bring their own creativity to the project, so I told Mike to do what he thought would work on the page. As the first pages were coming in, my reaction was that they were completely unlike anything I’d ever seen, and in a completely positive way. He really went above and beyond.

O’Shea: You definitely gain inspiration from living in Atlanta, given the role the CDC plays in the book. Was it pretty early in the process that you realized you wanted to build a story involving the CDC?

Venditti: I knew from the outset that the story was going to involve a mystery illness that was spreading throughout the American population. With a story like that, you’re going to want the Centers for Disease Control involved, so even if I wasn’t an Atlanta resident, I still would’ve made Laura a doctor at the CDC. But living here made it easier for me to get the exact name of the highway exit that leads to the Atlanta airport!

O’Shea: In refining the plot of the book, did you consider toning down the political commentary for fear it would compromise the thriller aspect of the story?

Venditti: At no time did I want to be seen as taking a specific position one way or the other in the debate between personal privacy and public safety. Too often in our entertainment, it’s obvious what the storyteller thinks, and, to me, it feels like I’m being beat over the head with the writer’s message. With my writing, I hope that I can present an unbiased argument to the reader, and then let them come to their own conclusions. To act as though I know all the answers would be disingenuous, because ultimately many of these questions don’t have an answer.

O’Shea: How much research did you pursue for the accuracy of the story?

Venditti: For The Surrogates—a science fiction story set fifty years in the future—I tended to make things up as I went along. With The Homeland Directive, however, I wanted to ground the story in the real world, so I studied books about epidemiology and how various government agencies respond to viral and bacteriological crises. It’s a fascinating topic, but also quite terrifying. The doctors and specialists who are the vanguard of our defense in these scenarios often don’t know beforehand how dangerous the threat is. They’re made from far sterner stuff than me.

O’Shea: Few writers can say they had their graphic novel adapted for film. Any interest in garnering interest from Hollywood with this new book, or are you less interested on this go-round?

Venditti: I wrote all of The Homeland Directive before The Surrogates was even optioned, so having it adapted to film was never my primary goal. I just wanted to make a good comic. Having said that, I enjoyed my experience with the Surrogates adaptation tremendously, so if Hollywood were to come knocking on my door again, I’d be happy to let them in.

O’Shea: Were you surprised when this School Library Journal review of The Homeland Directive noted that while it is an adult graphic novel, it could also appeal to teen readers?

Venditti: To me, the content seems skewed toward an older audience, not necessarily because of excessive violence or adult content, but because it deals with some pretty heavy issues. To have a publication like School Library Journal endorse the book is a huge compliment and, yes, a bit of a surprise. But maybe it shouldn’t be. My mom had me reading Stephen King in middle school, and I seem to have turned out okay.

O’Shea: Do you think the loss of privacy (due to security concerns) will ever be stemmed and we might go back the other way, or is there no going back?

Venditti: I think that for the tide to turn, we would have to lessen our dependence on technology, and I just don’t see that happening. At least not voluntarily. One of the themes of The Homeland Directive is the extent to which Americans are complicit in their own surveillance. And we’re a fickle nation, too. We demand that government protect us from the terrorist threat, but if government tries to do so in a manner that we view as intrusive, then we rebel against it. In many ways we put government in a no-win situation. I’m not assessing blame or suggesting that there’s an obvious solution. Like I said, maybe these questions can’t be answered.

O’Shea: As a writer who sees the blessing and curse of technology as you do, when a new technology enters the market do you quickly see the potential pitfalls that come with the new gadget’s advantages?

Venditti: I wouldn’t say that I foresee the pitfalls, but I can be a little leery, depending on the technology. With things like smart phones and the iPad, I’m an early adopter—the convenience they offer is too tempting. On the other hand, watching IBM’s Watson crush the competition on Jeopardy! . . . that was kind of unnerving.

Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.

Spontaneous #1

Graeme McMillan

If I had $15 this week, the first thing I’d grab would be a complete nostalgia-buy: DC Retroactive: Justice League of America – The 70s #1 (DC, $4.99), because I am a complete and utter sucker for JLA stories, and grew up reading old back issues of the title I found at used bookstores. This would be worth it for the reprint at the back alone, never mind the new story by Cary Bates that looks like it’s playing around with the multiverse one more time. To accompany that, I’d also pick up the first two issues of Joe Harris and Brett Weldele’s Spontaneous (both $3.99), because – even though I missed the Free Comic Book Day release of the debut – I’m a fan of Harris’ Ghost Projekt and Weldele’s work on The Surrogates, and curious to see just where a book about spontaneous human combustion can actually go.

If I had $30 this week, I’d add Kirby: Genesis #2 (Dynamite, $3.99) and Captain America & Bucky #620 (Marvel, $2.99) to my pile, each one taking on Kirby characters in their own way – I really loved the first two issues of Kirby: Genesis, and Chris Samnee’s art alone makes Cap/Bucky a must-read. I’d also get another Dynamite book, the first issue of Terminator/Robocop: Kill Human ($3.99), because I’m hoping that Brit writer Rob Williams brings the 2000AD feel that the cyborg cop vs. killer robot high concept really deserves. Finally, I admit that I’m unable to resist Amazing Spider-Man #666 (Marvel, $3.99), just to see what Spider Island is like in person, as sad as I am that they didn’t go for the more obvious Spider-Manhattan pun for the title…

When it comes to splurging this week, I’m sticking with ol’ webhead: Essential Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, Vol. 5 (Marvel, $19.99) collects all manner of classic issues from my youth, including the original Sin-Eater saga, and resisting that just isn’t going to happen anytime soon, I’m afraid. Make mine late 1980s Marvel!

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #2 - 1969

Chris Mautner

If I had $15:

Wow. It’s a really strong week. There’s a new issue of Glamourpuss ($3.99) out, so that’s probably my first buy. There’s also a new Smurfs book, The Astro-Smurf ($5.99) out as well, but I think I’ll hold off on that for now and go instead with the second chapter of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century ($9.95), which I’ve been rather anxiously anticipating.

If I had $30:

I love learning about classic Eurocomics, so my next purchase would be one of two new books from Fantagraphics: either Gil Jordan: Murder by High Tide ($18.99) or Sibyl-Anne Vs. Ratticus ($16.99). I know nothing about either book or the creators (M. Tillieux and R. Macherot, respectively) and am eager to be schooled.

Splurge:

Oh my goodness, where to begin? There’s the new Alex Toth collection, Setting the Standard ($39.00), also from Fanta. There’s also a fourth volume of Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby ($49.99) out. There’s a interesting looking collaboration between Lou Reed and Mattotti on Poe’s The Raven ($22.99), Rick Geary has a new Murder volume out, this time on Sacco and Vanzetti ($15.99), George O’Connor’s latest retelling of classic Greek myths, Hera ($9.99) arrives, Grant Morrison’s examination of the cape and cowl genre, Supergods ($28.00) is out and Gary Spencer Millidge’s biography of Alan Moore ($45.00) is here. I’ll take it all please.

Olympians, Volume 3: Hera - The Goddess and Her Glory

Brigid Alverson

So many choices! If I had $15, the first $10.99 of it would go to vol. 8 of Twin Spica. This is a great series about a girl who aspires to be an astronaut, and while it definitely favors human drama over sci-fi, there’s a bit of both. That leaves me four bucks, so I can buy one comic. I see a lot of temptations, but there’s no way I’m missing The Sixth Gun #13 ($3.99) so that gets the nod.

It doesn’t get any easier at the $30 level. I’m tempted by the newest volume in George O’Connor’s beautifully drawn Olympians series Hera: The Goddess and her Glory ($9.99), but an odd little comic called Seeds ($10.99) is pulling me away with the promise of family drama in a detached indy style. OK, I’ll go with that, and then add Spontaneous #1 ($3.99) to the pile, because who can resist a comic about spontaneous human combustion?

My splurge is all over the place. I’ll take the second issue of Spontaneous, for starters, as Oni seems to be releasing them simultaneously. Toss in Ape’s latest Richie Rich comic as well. The serious splurge begins with Abrams’ Krazy Kat and the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration ($29.95). As much as I love old comics, I love oddball memorabilia even more, and Craig Yoe always finds some interesting ephemera to add to his collections of classic comic strips. I’ll take that Olympians book now, and add the second volume of Defiance ($16.99), also from First Second, because I think the first volume was my favorite of last spring’s books and that’s saying a lot when you’re talking about First Second. And finally, because even splurges have their limits, Atomic Robo: The Deadly Art of Science, the fifth collection of this series and one of my favorites. There. Done. Hold my calls, I’m reading comics.

Flashpoint: Project Superman #2

Chris Arrant

If I only had $15, it would be a tough week for me; I count 14 titles I’d easily spend my money on. Narrowing it down to $15, I’d spend the bulk of it on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III: Century #2 (Top Shelf, $9.95). If anyone’s deserved my money sight unseen it’s Alan Moore, and that goes double after reading the first issue of this series. Second up would be Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips’ Criminal: Last of the Innocent #2. This one seems to recapture some of the first series’ magic after going a bit wild in subsequent installments.

If I had $30, I’d double back and get Flashpoint: Project Superman #2 (DC, $2.99) if for nothing else than to see more of Gene Ha. After his debacle with IDW and Bill Willingham, I’m glad to see him back on shelves – although I kind of wish he’d been given a more prominent series at Marvel or DC. Next up would be a trio of Marvel titles: X-Men Schism #2 (Marvel, $3.99), Uncanny X-Force #12 (Marvel, $3.99) and Secret Warriors #28 (Marvel, $2.99).

If I had money to splurge, I’d give it up for the second Metal Hurlant Collection (Humanoids, $29.95). I have some of these stories in their
original magazine format, but this would fill out my collection and let me give away those singles to someone deserving.

Atomic Robo, Volume 5: The Deadly Art of Science

Michael May

If I had $15, I’d load up on floppies, as usual, starting with a couple of series I’m following faithfully. Xombi got recent praise from both Jeff Lemire and Grant Morrison, so don’t take just my word for how good it is. Issue #5 ($2.99) of course makes my pile. Also, I just finished watching the live-action Planet of the Apes TV show and loved it, but watching the cartoon series that followed it is a real buzz-kill. I need some good Planet of the Apes again and the fourth issue of Boom’s series ($3.99) is just the ticket. Rounding off the pile are Image’s undersea-treasure-hunt-gone-horribly-wrong story The Vault #1 ($3.50) and IDW’s Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters #5 ($3.99). I’m going to miss Phil Hester’s art on Godzilla, but am excited at the same time about Victor Santos’ (who takes over starting with this issue) work on it.

If I had $30, I’d trade-wait Godzilla and Planet of the Apes to save enough money for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III: Century #2 ($9.95) and Olympians, Volume 3: Hera – The Goddess and Her Glory ($9.99).

As some of the guys said above, it really is a busy week, so I’m also splurging like crazy on four different books. Like Brigid, I loved Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis’ Resistance, Volume 1 and can’t wait for this new installment, Defiance ($16.99). I’m also looking forward to Keith Champagne and Shawn Moll’s league of extraordinary cowboys in Death Valley ($17.99), Phil Hester and David Marquez’ follow-up to Days Missing with Volume 2: Kestus ($24.95), and of course Atomic Robo, Volume 5: Atomic Robo and the Deadly Art of Science ($19.95). It’s not even fair to call Atomic Robo a splurge item. Really more of a necessity.

Any Empire

Nate Powell wowed indie readers back in 2009 with the release of Swallow Me Whole, a haunting graphic novel about a teen-age brother and sister suffering from mental illness and attempting to hold themselves and their family together.

Now Powell has released his follow-up to Swallow, Any Empire. The book, available through Top Shelf, examines the way children are taught about war and violence and how even “acceptable” military violence can end up appearing on our city and town streets.

The book debuts in San Diego this week, and should be in stores next month. We talked to Powell about the book and its underlying themes, both political and social.

Let’s start by talking about the book’s origins. How did Any Empire first take shape?

Well, the book emerged as I was finishing up Swallow Me Whole, and I’d been pretty impacted by the books Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, On Killing by Dave Grossman, the movie Children of Men, and also a zine supplement in an LP by some friends Please Inform The Captain This Is A Hijack. I’d been very focused on the long history of the state’s prime directive of ensuring its own existence, even if that meant killing or imprisoning its own citizens, or provoking air raids to flatten its own cities for a “proper” moral justification for war (as was one of Churchill’s many shadier moments leading into WWII). We’ve all grown up accustomed to seeing smoldering wastelands on CNN, but I began imagining the rubble as buildings, transplanting foliage back onto the blight, and couldn’t stop imagining my own neighborhood as a wasteland indistinguishable from the ones I’m so used to seeing on the news.

That, coupled with the culture of fear and distrust in which we live, the explosion of populist authoritarian rhetoric and evangelical bullshit, got me started on the book. It was originally a shorter, more concrete, essay-like book whose approach was pretty influenced by Gabby Schulz/Ken Dahl’s books. Over time, it became more and more about living with a very specific privileged fantasy surrounding violence, particularly state violence, and how our own perspectives on that cultural glory-myth will continue to crumble as we’re forced to join the rest of the world in the next fifty years.

From 'Any Empire'

Certainly issues of fantasy violence versus real violence are explored in the book, especially with one character’s daydreams/games involving his action figures. Did you draw upon personal experience for those scenes at all? Is anything in the book autobiographical and if so to what extent?

The book is a work of fiction, but yes, I was definitely a G.I.Joe kid, and I grew up in the South in a military family. It’s unavoidable that Lee is essentially me as a kid, and a lot of his experiences are similar to things that were part of my life. I was (and still am) a pretty private individual, despite the fact that a lot of my life comes through on the page. As a boy, I played plenty with other kids, but it was an entirely different kind of play. Most of my imaginative play was intensely private, and the space carved out had a certain sacredness to it — it was essentially the same space I later discovered could exist when making up worlds in comics.

Like most of my books, characters often have a basis in real people, and a lot of situations are based on something that really did happen, but the who and the what are often entirely shuffled around.

As with Swallow Me Whole, the book also deals with issues of childhood, fantasy and the tricky segue into adulthood. Are these conscious themes you like to explore?

In each of these stories, these themes presented themselves as very natural elements of the story. With the completion of this book, though, I finally feel satisfied enough to be disinterested in exploring adolescence much further in books, at least for now. Spending a few years on a single story is also weird, because by the time you finish a book, you sometimes can’t wait to move past certain issues or themes that might’ve burned in your heart three years prior. Highly subjective experiences will always be a focus to me, but the fantastic elements in this book are largely in relation to our cultural delusions of invincibility, of exceptionalism, and of moral preeminence.

From 'Any Empire'

The book jumps around in time a bit, and moves from fantasy to reality and back again. Were you concerned about the reader’s disorientation at all? I got the feeling at times you wanted the reader to be a little unsure if a sequence was really happening or was in the character’s head.

My sequences and transition give that feeling a lot, and I think they just require taking the sequence of events at face value. There’s a little bit of revisionism in one of the character’s heads as an adult, and some weird Twilight Zone business that brings the present day reality back around to an earlier imagined scene, but the division between fantasy and reality is certainly more clear-cut than in Swallow Me Whole.

Generally, scenes from youth occur without panel borders, unless they’re total fantasy scenes. Adult fantasy scenes sometimes have a formal affectation too, but it’s honestly not very important to figure out what’s really happening and what’s not. The big scene that leads into the end is really happening on the streets of Wormwood, and is based on a highly questionable Marine exercise in an impoverished neighborhood of my hometown in 2002. For six weeks, the DOD performed live urban warfare training exercises as people were trying to get about their daily lives. Not a stretch of the imagination by any means– the state just truly doesn’t give a shit.

Apart from the books you initially mentioned, did you have any other specific comics or comic creators that you referenced while putting the book together? Especially as far as the look and design of the book goes?

I’d say that Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville and Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions series certainly made their mark on the page layout and narrative flow. Swallow Me Whole was kinda drawn in a vacuum and was really freeform in certain ways, so it was exciting to reel the layout back in, and define a little more carefully what was signified by certain aesthetic choices. That approach revealed more patterns and themes within the book than I was initially aware of, and discovering those unexpected echoes was exciting.

I noticed that you tend to eschew panel borders in most of your comics. Why?

Speaking for myself, when I look at a panel without borders, it seems I internally expand my “view” of the scene far beyond the edge of the panels, and seem to slow down my reading of the image. Whenever I’d do a page that’s just one floating panel in the middle of the page, it seemed to provide the sense of both a splash page and of the pause in the story’s beat given by all the negative space. The next step was to see how an entire page of these vignette panels would read, and there are times where it feels like each panel on the page is its own splash page.

From 'Any Empire'

There’s a bit of gender issues at play in the book as well, as the boys, especially Purdy, seem driven to be by a need to prove themselves as men and as boys engage in aggressive, “manly” games, whereas the main female character, Sarah seems, at least at first, to be the more emotional and sympathy-driven character. Are you consciously exploring these gender roles in the book and if so what are you attempting to address?

As much as the book’s plot is partially driven by play, the main theme here is violence in a variety of forms. And yes, gender definitely plays a role here, but I think that we unavoidably perceive gender as more of the divide here in the story than it really is. The major differences among the characters are in what constitutes their real-life experiences with violence, how they perceive their own relationship to a formidable world, the shape fantasies take in their lives, and to what end the fantasies serve.

Lee comes from a family privileged enough to know life without domestic violence, and his father seems to’ve had an okay time in his military experience, so as a Reagan-era American child, he is able to purely enjoy the cultural glory-myth of bloodshed. At the same time, he is very aware of rumblings of much larger changes in his near future, and works his way through that with a series of epic, romantic, and fatalistic fantasies. As inevitable as it seems to adults, it’s important to note that moving to a new house or town as a child does feel quite like a kind of violence, as privileged as that statement sounds.

Purdy is essentially always waiting for the bottom to fall out, especially in relationships with any other people. I’m pretty sure that he expects new friends and strangers to respond to his true self with disappointment and laughter, and really has no idea that there’s no trick to getting people to open up to you, to sharing time together. It’s all push-pull to him, one thing constantly in reaction to something else. He has essentially woven his own self-concept into a rickety fantasy of its own, so that he can present that fantasy to the world as his core self, but he’s just not that weird or twisted or gung-ho at his core– that’s what makes him so uncomfortable about the twin brothers and their little cult. They seem to personify the things he projects about himself, and they see through his front.

Sarah’s mom is a nurse, and I feel that she’s already gained a very different exposure to violence and mortality from that relationship. Her own interest in wild animals also means that she is becoming more exposed to the brutality and chaos inherent in the wild. Real violence, the violence of hawks and field mice, beatings and heart attacks, is plenty for her, and fantasy serves a different purpose– sleuthing mysteries are another means by which she can put pieces together and make some order out of a grim world.

Do you feel like things like GI Joe and other “boy-oriented” toys are designed to encourage boys to be aggressive and violent? Lee plays extensively with his action figures, but he doesn’t take the same path Purdy does.

I mean, sure they do to an extent, but that’s really a non-issue. I was neck-deep in G.I.Joe and Cold War cultural mythology, as were most boys I grew up with, and most of us turned out just fine. It’s far more damaging to grow up thinking a boy should be punished or corrected for wanting to wear a dress or play with dolls, or grow up thinking that you inherently can’t trust people who live in shoddier homes or who aren’t white. My focus on Reagan-era toys and imaginative play was just on the ways kids always find a way to process the complicated issues in their lives, even if it’s using the only vocabulary they’ve learned thus far, the vocabulary of power games and simple fantasies.

In reading your replies, I get the feeling this was a book borne out of anger, or at least frustration, at the state. Was making the book at all cathartic for you? Did you get any sense of satisfaction or release in making this comic (beyond the pure pleasure of making comics of course).

More than anything, I’d say that anxiety and dread were the motivating feelings. Our cultural climate has reached such levels of emotion-fueled, religion-soaked reactionary rhetoric that these extremes have worked to define themselves as a new moderation. It’s disheartening for all of us to be treading water in so much mutual distrust. Amidst all these crises and transitions, as usual there is absolutely no mainstream criticism of capitalism itself, or of the dirty, dirty ways it has made room for the worst in human nature.

As people continue to grow and change, it’s also so daunting to feel that people are truly expendable to those in power. A lot of effort and action sometimes feels like it can be no more than a gesture; this is the jam that Lee, Sarah, and Purdy get into towards the end. Even if nothing is fundamentally changed from our resistance, those gestures must be made. Another theme that was on my mind a lot was the legitimacy of “I don’t know” as an answer. It’s okay to step into the unknown, and it might be horrible, but a future full of unknowns is revealing itself to us all the time, and it’s no reason to shrink away from fighting for a divergent future.

The book was certainly satisfying to work through, but more than anything I fell deeper and deeper into the connections between characters, and the unspoken conflicts tearing at them from inside. My political lean on the story tempered itself considerably while working through its multiple drafts, and I feel it only became compelling once the narrative itself overtook the pissy rants that gave birth to it. Go catharsis!

This announcement raised all sorts of questions in our minds, and fortunately, Chris Ross, Top Shelf’s director of digital publishing, was here to explain it all to us. Read on for lots more info, including the answer to the burning question “Will we ever see Lost Girls on digital?” as well as whether they will do same-day print and digital releases.

Robot 6: Why did you choose to go with iVerse over the other distributors?

Chris Ross: Actually, our initial offering is with iVerse, but we’re planning on using many distributors over the next few months. They were the first to approach us, so they’re the first one out the gate.

Robot 6: Did you consider doing your own Top Shelf app? If so, why did you decide against it?

Chris: We have and we will. We’ll be creating two apps in 2011—a company branded app and a kid’s club app.

Robot 6: Have you considered other modes of digital such as Kindle, Nook, or direct download?

Chris: Right now, we offer two books, (Veeps and Voice of the Fire) through Amazon Kindle, Nook Store, Apple’s iBooks, and Google Editions. We also offer the first four Owly’s and some FCBD titles on the Kindle. One problem is the Kindle (the most popular ebook platform) isn’t designed to be a great platform for reading comics, so any solution is a shoehorned solution and there are more issues than fixes. It’s really unfortunate because Amazon has been an awesome company to work with, and we’re really looking forward to their solution to comic creation.

Apple is unique in that the implementation of ePub via iBooks can be altered, or at least their alteration/mod of the ePub specification (fixed-content ePub) is sort of the temporary lifesaver for comics. Right now, we plan to roll out Kid’s Club children’s books via iBooks within the next few weeks.

We’ll also be offering our books via Google Editions.

Our basic goal is to have every book we possibly can available through as many channels as possible. There might by technical limitations, or social limitations, or creator limitations, but that’s where we’re headed.

Robot 6: How much of your catalog is available digitally as of today?

Chris: 70+ new titles via iVerse, with two titles via our ebook partners.

Our plan is to have everything we are able to have available up and running by the end of summer. That includes backlist and Out of Print stuff that we still have rights to publish.

Robot 6: Do you plan on making it all available eventually? Are there books you would not release digitally?

Chris: We would love to make everything available, but we also want to make sure our authors are comfortable with a digital release, and that our content partners realize that we’re a publisher that publishes books ranging from Owly to Lost Girls, from Okie Dokie Doughnuts to Chester 5000, from Blankets to Lucille. The only books I foresee us not publishing digitally are books where the creator has asked for us to wait, or where we don’t have the digital rights (like if we licensed the print-only North American rights on a foreign edition).

Robot 6: Some of the books on the app are pretty new, such as Nate Powell’s Any Empire. Do you have any plans to release to digital the same day a book goes into print?

Chris: Yes we are. The plan forward is to do day-and-date releases of print and digital on all future titles.

Robot 6: How do you determine the prices of the books?

Chris: Usually we start with the list price of the physical book, and then remove distribution and physical book considerations, and we talk about what the lowest price we can see selling a book for, what are prices competitively for long-form graphic novels, and try to get to the lowest price we are comfortable with. This will be an evolving thing, of course, as the whole world of pricing structures is in flux. But the nice thing is that prices are easy to change in the digital world.

Robot 6: Apps like Comics+ bring in readers who are already reading comics, but Top Shelf books have a wider appeal—it’s easy to envision a lover of fiction who doesn’t think of herself as a comics reader picking up a Top Shelf book. Are you doing anything to promote the digital books to those readers?

Chris: Our first big push digitally, after we settle our catalog via iVerse and our other partners, will be our kid’s club, children’s book initiative. We have so many people come up to us at conventions saying that they love Owly, that they love Johnny Boo, and asking when they can get those books on their iPad for their kids. Right now, Apple has cornered the market for digital children’s books in that 1) they’re relatively inexpensive and 2) Because printing considerations aren’t taken into account, they can be experimental and flexible in terms of form. We’re also seeing a lot more parents reading to their children via an iPad or other touch devices.

Robot 6: You have kids’ comics like Owly, Korgi, and Johnny Boo alongside some fairly sophisticated adult comics. Do you have any plans to market your children’s books separately, perhaps in a comics for kids type app?

Chris Ross:Yes, we will have a KIDS CLUB app that will be specifically designed to only feature our all-ages material. And our Top Shelf app will be for mature audiences that’ll carry all our titles (mature reader, and the all-ages ones as well). So, this way all readers can have access to our books.

Robot 6: At the other end of the scale, will we ever see Lost Girls on digital?

Chris Ross:Absolutely. It may not initially be released via iTunes, but via other channels to get it to people who want it.

Robot 6: Do you have plans for any specials, bundles, or promotions in the near future?

Chris Ross: Right now, no, but we do con specials, yearly round-up specials, etc. We’ll probably do something like that again in the future through our digital initiative.

Kagan McLeod‘s Infinite Kung Fu collection arrives from Top Shelf at the San Diego Comic Con next week, and to promote it Top Shelf has tipped us off to this fun little trailer that Kagan and his brother Sean put together. Take a gander, and if you like it, you can read the first 250 pages of the book over on Top Shelf’s website.

Check out the debuts below.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3 Century #2

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III): Century #2 – 1969
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is back! Our merry metafictional marauders continue their bestselling adventures through the 20th century! In this volume, the League must battle dark cultists amid the sit-ins, sitars, and psychedelics of 1960s swinging London.

Any Empire

Any Empire
by Nate Powell
Nate Powell’s follow-up to the Eisner-Award-winning Swallow Me Whole examines war and violence, and their trickle-down effects on middle America. As a gang of small-town kids find themselves reunited in adulthood, their dark histories collide in a struggle for the future.

Infinite Kung Fu

Infinite Kung Fu
by Kagan McLeod
Funk, martial arts, and zombies combine in this epic saga! One reluctant monk must master all the styles of kung fu to save the world from a curse that has brought the dead back to walk the earth.

I’d been looking forward to Homeland since reading the solicit a few months ago; I’d really enjoyed the writer, Robert Venditti’s Surrogates comics, and the idea of him keeping going with the thriller genre outside of such a science fiction setting (Homeland is more mainstream thriller with political – and medical – overtones) was a particularly enticing one. What I didn’t expect, though, was that it would look so good. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve liked Huddleston’s work from what little I’d seen of it before, but if this book doesn’t get him nominated for all manner of awards, there really is no justice in the comic book award world (Feel free to continue reading when you’ve all finished laughing).

Huddleston’s work sings in this book, takes in the influences and styles and looks from all over the place like a magpie and ties them all together into something that, as Steve Jobs would say, just works. You can see Bill Sienkiewicz in places, Darwyn Cooke in others, and it’s all tied together with the more linear, familiar style I’m used to from earlier Huddleston works… but with a new (to me, at least) boldness in terms of color and texture (similar to Kristian Donaldson’s work from Supermarket with Brian Wood, if anyone besides me remembers that) and – and perhaps I’m reading into this just a little – what might be shout outs in terms of blur and tone to Venditti’s Surrogates partner, Brett Weldele, in places. Which is to say, it looks very good indeed.

It makes for an interesting read, because Huddleston switches color palettes, styles and even media so often that it should be far more distracting than it actually is. There’s a fine line between being a virtuoso and showing off, and Huddleston dances right up to the brink here, but never goes over – everything hangs together, with visual shifts references those in the story, and Venditti’s writing ends up being served showcased, instead of upstaged, by the art (I haven’t said too much about the writing, intentionally, but it’s strong, with a worryingly plausible hook that will, if you’re paranoid, stick with you for a long time afterwards).

Finishing the book, my first thought was actually that I can’t believe that DC didn’t try and grab Huddleston or Venditti for their big relaunch. It’s pointless, of course; they’re both better off doing this kind of work, their own creations and their own interests. But if you want to see genre work done exceptionally well, in contemporary settings for modern audiences, it’s unlikely you’ll find a book that looks as good as The Homeland Directive this year. Sometimes a little style goes a long, long way.

There are a lot of ways to run a blog promoting your publishing company. Dark Horse uses its blog primarily to remind readers of new product. DC breaks news about its comics and runs interviews with its creators. Top Shelf and First Second talk about their own product, but also make time to discuss books they’re enjoying from other publishers.

One of my favorite publisher’s blogs right now is Hermes Press‘ relatively new one. Since they publish a lot of reprints of classic. licensed material, they not only keep readers updated on their publishing schedule, but also link to news about what others are doing with those same licenses. For example, Hermes is reprinting old Dark Shadows comics, so they’re also following production on the Tim Burton Dark Shadows movie. They reprint Buck Rogers strips, so here’s some news about a Buck Rogers screening in New York. They reprint Roy Rogers, so here are some links to other bloggers who are talking about Roy. It’s a fun blog that doesn’t just promote product; it engages in the larger conversation about the things it’s interested in. Some of the other blogs are doing that too (First Second and Top Shelf in particular), but Hermes is going all out.

What makes a perfect publisher’s blog in your opinion?

Good-Bye Chunky Rice

Cartoonists rarely produce great work right out of the starting gate. It usually it takes lots of time and lots of effort for an artist to hone their style and storytelling abilities. Debut comics — even those made by the greats — rarely offer any indication of what type of treasures lie ahead. Even Chris Ware had to make Floyd Farland before he could produce Jimmy Corrigan.

Still, sometimes a cartoonist seems to spring out of the sea foam fully formed, producing a work that not only draws attention and great buzz, but also indicates exactly where they’re headed — what direction they plan to take as an artist and what you as a reader can expect from them.

Here then, are six debut comics that made people go “Who the heck is this guy? And why haven’t I heard of him before?” I’m sure I missed someone. I always do. Be a dear and let me know who I forgot in the comments section, won’t you?

Night Fisher

1. Goodbye Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson. True, Thompson had done a few mini-comics before Chunky was published, but those weren’t seen by many until years later. Chunky was really the book that introduced readers to Thompson. The reaction to the book was swift and laudatory. I remember people buzzing about the book at SPX that year, wondering who this guy was and how could he produce so moving and assured a work at so young an age. With only three major books to his name so far (four if you count this year’s forthcoming Habibi), he’s remained one of the more beloved and significant creators in the alt-comix landscape.

2. Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown. Rare is the cartoonist who gets a glowing cover blurb from Chris Ware on their very first comic. Brown, however, was lucky enough to do so with his debut book, a cringe-tastic tale of awkward, and ultimately doomed, young love. He’s shown quite a bit of diversity since then, especially in humor books like Incredible Change-Bots, but I don’t know that he’s produced anything as emotionally affecting as this particular title yet.

3. Yummy Fur by Chester Brown. Looking back, it seems hard to believe that Yummy Fur was Brown’s first comic, that he was that good right out of the gate with so few missteps, but it’s true. That very first issue, with the start of the Ed the Happy Clown serial, stories about toilet paper that killed people and oddities like Walrus Blubber Sandwich let readers know from the get-go that there was something unique and potentially unsettling about this particular comic. I remember reading that first issue in my local comic store at the time and being profoundly unnerved by it. So much so that it actually scared me off of Brown’s subsequent work for several years afterward. That’s gotta be a mark of some kind of quality, no?

Lose #1

4. Bone by Jeff Smith. You could ostensibly argue that Smith’s first professional comics work was Bone’s precursor, Thorn, a comic strip he drew for his college newspaper while enrolled at Ohio State University. You could make that argument, but I’m not going to. For all intents and purposes, that first issue of Bone was Smith’s debut into the world of comics, a debut which proceeded to change the landscape for all-ages and alternative comics for years to come. Smith had obviously spent a inordinate amount of time thinking about and developing the series beforehand, since  it’s so assured and fully formed from the first page. His craft and storytelling abilities are just as confident in that first issue as they are in the last.

5. Night Fisher by R Kikuo Johnson. As with Chunky Rice, there was quite a bit of hype and brouhaha over the publication of Johnson’s inaugural work. Publisher Gary Groth even compared its release to the arrival of the first issue of Love and Rockets, or words to that effect. It’s not that good, although this tale of disaffected adolescence and drug dealing in Hawaii is certainly compelling and suggests that Johnson is an artist capable of producing great work. Unfortunately, he has yet to follow up on that initial promise. But Night Fisher still marks him as an artist to watch out for.

6. Lose #1 by Michael DeForge. What planet is DeForge from that he is able to produce such stellar work with such seeming effortlessness? And how is he able to make comics so profoundly creepy? So far he’s produced three issues of Lose and a rather wide assortment of mini-comics and anthology contributions with next to no drop in quality. The confidence this guy exudes on the page, especially in that first issue, is rather shocking honestly. I say we can expect great things from him, but he’s already produced great things, starting with that very first issue of Lose.

Kagan McLeod began publishing single issues of his martial arts/horror extravaganza Infinite Kung Fu way back in 2000, but as he told JK Parkin in an interview last summer, he hasn’t given up on it. He’s been hard at work and all 464 pages of the epic are coming out from Top Shelf in July.

For anyone who read those single issues, this is great news. But what’s even better is that Top Shelf 2.0 has more than half the book posted right now for free. Whether you’re already a fan or yet to be converted, that’s a hell of a lot of awesome.