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New and Featured Products
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What It Is
Lynda Barry
MAY 2008
What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or remember. Bursting with full-color drawings, comics, and collages, autobiographical sections and gentle creative guidance, each page is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: "The ordinary is extraordinary." Lynda Barry explores the depths of the inner and outer realms of creation and imagination, where play can be serious, monsters have purpose, and not knowing is an answer unto itself.
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? These types of questions permeate the pages of What It Is, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Her insight and sincerity will tackle the most persistent of inhibitions, calling back every kid who quit drawing to again feel alive at the experiential level. Comprised of completely new material, this is her first Drawn & Quarterly book.
208 pages, hardcover
ISBN: 9781897299357
$24.95 US / $24.95 CDN
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Preview (PDF) |
Paul Goes Fishing
Michel Rabagliati
February 2008
This fourth instalment in Michel Rabagliati's semi-autobiographical series finds Paul settling comfortably into adult life, occasional twinges of anxiety aside. His graphic design business has taken off, his partner Lucie is pregnant, it's mid-July and time to leave behind the city to go fishing. Long lazy days stretch out while Paul's thoughts wander from the colorful characters at the fish-and-game camp to the lurking depths of childhood, a Holden Caulfield-esque adolescence, and the encounters that have shaped his sense of family thus far. But the golden glow soon lifts off his vacation, with the realization that the lake isn't as idyllic as it would seem, and neither is pregnancy.
Elegant composition and spare, condensed drawing crystallize emotion and atmosphere in this wistful and engaging account of everyday hopes and hardships, told with a keen and playful sense of iconic detail. Even the mundane holds beauty and meaning in this compassionate story of expectation, disappointment and wonder.
Praise for Michel Rabagliati:
"His stories are personally revealing but gentle, full of kind people with common problems... Rabagliati employs a light, curvy drawing style and episodic plotting that overtly recalls Hergé's Tintin adventures, or Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian's Monsieur Jean stories." --The Onion
ISBN: 9781897299289
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$16.95 US / $16.95 CDN
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Haunted
Philippe Dupuy
February 2008
A surprising, wry, and deeply moving reflection on despair and the way back out.
Ten years after finishing the original French edition of Maybe Later--the book in which the French superstar cartooning duo Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian worked separately for the first time--Dupuy set out on his own again with Haunted. Here, entirely independent, gone are the tightly constructed narratives and urbane, elegant graphics of his projects with Berberian. In their place, roughed-in drawings give an urgent, spontaneous feeling to a series of hallucinatory stories and dreamlike sequences that register the raw distress of solitude and self-doubt--the dark core of the material held in balance by Dupuy's acid humor and lyrical sensibility.
A jogging Dupuy runs around and sometimes through the stories of the misfit characters that haunt him: a self-amputating dog, a Left Bank artist in search of emptiness, an art-collecting duck, Lucha Libre wrestlers, and a group of single guys at the watering hole imagined as the anthropomorphic "Forest Friends." Heart pumping, gaze turned inward, the ground occasionally giving way beneath his feet, this alter ego concludes that sometimes you need to cross the line to figure out where it is.
The original French edition of Haunted was nominated for the 2006 award for Best Comic Book at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian were awarded the prestigious Angoulême Grand Prize in 2008.
ISBN: 9781897299265
$24.95 US / $24.95 CDN
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Shortcomings
Adrian Tomine
October 2007
"Tomine's genius is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the result is that life itself floods in. His mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer's in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro. Shortcomings, as near as he'd get to a grand statement, is as deceptively relaxed and perfect as a comic book gets." --Jonathan Lethem
"One of the most masterful cartoonists of his generation, 32-year-old Adrian Tomine's [Shortcomings] centers on Asian-American protagonist Ben Tanaka, a lonely, socially constricted man, longing to make a connection and spinning in the purgatory between youth and adulthood... equal parts poignant, hilarious, and sad." --The Village Voice
Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long–term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it's wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the subject of heated, spiralling debate, setting in motion a story that pits California against New York, devotion against desire, and trust against truth.
By confusing their personal problems with political ones, Ben and Miko are strangely alone together and oddly alike, even as they fly apart. Being human, all too human, they fail to see that what unites them is their shared hypocrisies, their double standards. This gray zone between the personal and the political is a minefield that Tomine navigates boldly and nimbly. The charged, volatile dialogues that result are unlike anything in Tomine's previous work or, for that matter, comics in general. But Shortcomings is no mere polemic. Any issues that are raised stand on equal footing with expertly-crafted plot turns, subtle characterization, and irreverent humor, all drawn in Tomine's heart-breakingly evocative style. What Tomine ultimately offers is more provocation than pronouncement--a brutal, funny, and insightful reflection of human shortcomings.
Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine's iconic comic book series Optic Nerve (issues #9-11) and was excerpted in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13.
Click here to enter the Shortcomings mini-site!
ISBN: 9781897299166
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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365 Days: A Diary by Julie Doucet
Julie Doucet
December 2007
"Julie Doucet is a conceptual artist trapped in a cartoonist's body... finding fresh ways to channel her creative eruptions onto paper." --The Village Voice
"Like many of her alt-comics contemporaries, Doucet eradicates any uppity delineation between art and comics." --Bust Magazine
Despite Julie Doucet's renunciation of her comics-centric lifestyle over five years ago, 365 Days is imbued with the iconic talent and studied aesthetic of her seminal comic book series Dirty Plotte, which catapulted her into being one of the world’s greatest cartoonists. This visual journal, starting in late 2002, is an idiosyncratic collision of her various creative interests, wherein personal narrative, collage and drawing begin to tell the story of her pursuits into printmaking and beyond, chronicling her maturation as a mid-career artist and her fluid extension into a broader arts community.
Now exhibiting internationally, Doucet blurs the boundaries between high art, illustration, craft and comics: where panel borders once divided pages, collage creeps in; events and doodles merge; recollection and narrative blend with the abstract. The surreal neurosis of her comics has subsided to reveal a more relaxed creativity that is unrestricted by form or definition and is as engaging as ever. 365 Days: A Diary By Julie Doucet was excerpted in McSweeney's #13.
ISBN: 9781897299159
$29.95 US / $29.95 CDN
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Preview (PDF) |
White Rapids
Pascal Blanchet
October 2007
Award-winning Quebecois cartoonist Pascal Blanchet's graphic novel is a compelling account of the rise and fall of the small northern town of White Rapids. In the first English translation of his work, Blanchet seamlessly blends fact and fiction as he weaves together the official history of the town and snapshots of the quotidian life of its residents. Founded in 1928 in an isolated region of Quebec forest, the town was conceived and constructed by the Shawinigan Water & Power Company to function as a fully-equipped, self-contained living community for workers at the nearby dam and their families. Intended as an incentive to lure workers to the remote and inaccessible region, White Rapids provided its residents with all the luxuries of middle-class modern life in a pastoral setting—until the town was abruptly shut down in 1971, when the company changed hands.
Blanchet's unique, streamlined, retro-inspired aesthetic draws on Art Deco and fifties Modernist design to vividly conjure up idyllic scenes of lazy summer days and crisp winter nights in White Rapids, transporting the reader back to a more innocent time.
ISBN: 9781897299241
$27.95 US / $27.95 CDN
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Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book Two
Tove Jansson
October 2007
"A lost treasure now rediscovered--one of the sweetest, strangest comics strips ever drawn or written. A surrealist masterpiece. Honest." --Neil Gaiman
"[Jansson's] work soars with lightness and speed, and her drawings only echo her writing: delicate but precise, observant yet suggestive... Jansson was exceptional, an exuberant explorer of emotional independence and interdependence, a liberating force." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
In the second volume of Tove Jansson's humorous yet melancholic Moomin comic strip, we get four new stories about jealousy, competition, childrearing, and self-reinvention. The Moomins try to hibernate in the fashion of their ancestors but insomnia places them smack dab into a winter carnival with the winter-sports loving Mr. Brisk. The fickle and eternally lovestruck Mymble and Snorkmaiden find themselves in competition over a thrilling new man. Moomin Mamma meets her new neighbor, the Fillyjonk, causing her to hire the depressed and secretive Misabel as her new maid. Mymble's mother arrives on the Moomin family’s doorstep with her 17 new children. Finally, A prophet arrives on the scene declaring that the happy Moomins are in fact not happy at all and need to get back to nature and be free. Moomin, of course, becomes more and more miserable the freer he gets.
Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children's authors of the twentieth century for her illustrated Moomin chapter books. The D+Q reprint series collects, for the first time in North America, Jansson's internationally syndicated Moomin comic strip that debuted in the London Evening News in 1954.
ISBN: 9781897299197
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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ACME Novelty Datebook: Volume Two, 1995-2002
Chris Ware
December 2007
Straggling behind the mild 2003 success of cartoonist Chris Ware's first facsimile collection of his miscellaneous sketches, notes, and adolescent fantasies arrives this second volume, updating weary readers with the last ten years of Ware's clichéd and outmoded insights.
Working directly in pen and ink, watercolor, and white-out whenever he makes a mistake, Ware has cannily edited out all legally sensitive and personally incriminating material from his private journals, carefully recomposing each page to simulate the appearance of an ordered mind and established aesthetic directive. All phone numbers, references to ex-girlfriends, "false starts," and embarrassing experiments with unfamiliar drawing media have been generously excised to present the reader with the most pleasant and colorful sketchbook reading experience available. Included are Ware's frustrated doodles for his book covers, angry personal assaults on friends, half-finished comic strips, lengthy and tiresome fulminations of personal disappointments both social and sexual, as well as his now-beloved drawings of the generally miserable inhabitants of the city of Chicago. All in all, a necessary volume for fans of fine art, water-based media, and personal diatribe. Hardcover, attractively designed, and easy to resell.
ISBN: 9781897299180
$39.95 US / $39.95 CDN
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ACME Novelty Library #18
Chris Ware
December 2007
In keeping with his athletic goal of issuing a volume of his occasionally lauded ACME series once every new autumn, volume 18 finds cartoonist Chris Ware abandoning the engaging serialization of his "Rusty Brown" and instead focusing upon his ongoing and more experimentally grim narrative, "Building Stories."
Collecting pages unseen except in obscure alternative weekly periodicals and sophisticated expensive coffee table magazines, The ACME Novelty Library #18 re-introduces the characters which New York Times readers found "dry" and "deeply depressing" when one chapter of the work (not included here) was presented in its pages during 2005 and 2006. Set in a Chicago apartment building more or less in the year 2000, the stories move from the straightforward to the mnemonically complex, invading character's memories and personal ambitions with a text point size likely unreadable to human beings over the age of 45. Reformatted to accommodate this different material, readers will be pleased by the volume's vertical shape and tasteful design, which, unlike Ware's earlier volumes, should discreetly blend into any stack or shelf of real books.
ISBN: 9781897299173
$17.95 US / $17.95 CDN
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ACME Novelty Library, No. 18.5
Chris Ware
This print portfolio, somewhat hedgingly entitled The ACME Novelty Library, No. 18.5, contains all four "Thanksgiving" covers drawn by cartoonist and cultural commentator F. C. Ware for the November 27th, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, as well as the additional fifth comic strip which heretofore only appeared in digital form, all carefully printed in full color at an oversized 15" x 20" size on heavy paper and folded in half for easy recycling. As if this wasn't dreary enough, included is a new supplementary folded comic strip, measuring 16" x 11," which is also folded in half. Presented as the "Lower East Side" version of the even more ridiculously priced signed "Upper East Side" portfolio (which is, however, not folded in half) the consumer is asked to carefully weigh whether purchase of this object is truly necessary, and to act accordingly.
ISBN: 9781897299340
$32.00 US / $32.00 CDN
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All We Ever Do Is Talk About Wood
Tom Horacek
March 2008
Tom Horacek's characters possess the hydrocephalic proportions of Playmobil people, but they've traded the colorful plastic environs of childhood for a bleaker, twisted landscape where insanity, loneliness and death are fodder for laughs. Heard from their pinhole mouths and seen in their beady eyes is fear, desperation, resignation, and pure misanthropy, all presented across a single-panel canvas. Join in the fun with this first collection of Horacek's bitingly bitter gag cartoons, All We Ever Do Is Talk About Wood.
ISBN: 9781897299487
$9.95 US / $9.95 CDN
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Berlin #15
Jason Lutes
MARCH 2008
The penultimate chapter to Berlin: City of Smoke, the second volume in Jason Lutes' trilogy about the decline of the Weimar Republic, finds its broad cast of characters searching for solid footing in a chaotic cityscape. The relationship between Pavel the scavenger and the orphaned Silvia Braun comes to a painful end, while tensions rise between the Cocoa Kids and their German manager. Meanwhile, Kurt and Marthe struggle to come to peace with their failed romance and the different ways they view changing world.
ISBN: 9781897299500
$3.95 US / $3.95 CDN
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Crickets #2
Sammy Harkham
February 2008
Crickets #2 features the highly anticipated second installment in Sammy Harkham's new ongoing serial Black Death as well as a number of shorter strips that showcase the acclaimed young artist's sharp wit and quirky sense of humour. Begun in the first issue, Black Death follows the adventures of a curiously indestructable man shot full of arrows and a mute Golem as they wander in the woods together, blundering through their encounters with its strange and isolated inhabitants. In the unrelated shorter strips, Harkham, publisher of the influential comics anthology Kramer's Ergot, takes advantage of the opportunity to exercise his considerable imagination on a wide range of topics, from his autobiographical adventures on a signing tour to the frustrated comic aspirations of the emperor Napoleon.
ISBN: 9781897299449
$4.95 US / $4.95 CDN
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Palooka-ville #19
Seth
March 2008
Seth's shoe-gazing protagonist Simon Matchcard haunts the upper stories of his family's failing business, caring for his mentally ailing mother and refining a "special brand of loneliness... something so long and so wide that it ceases to be defined as merely loneliness." His solitude and melancholia develop into hallucinations in which he inhabits a past constructed of his own memories and a desperate nostalgia for a time that never was, in which he imagines his mother as a vibrant young woman. Simon struggles to fabricate a fulfilling past for his mother to atone for being bullied by his overbearing brother into committing her to a rest home.
ISBN: 9781897299470
$4.95 US / $4.95 CDN
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Albert and the Others
Guy Delisle
February 2008
Limbs are swapped and pants are dropped in Albert and the Others, a collection of wordless strips that expose the pleasures, pitfalls and perversities of masculinity. In this companion volume to Aline and the Others (2006), Guy Delisle delves deep into the male psyche and emerges with twenty-six alphabetically arranged strips, named after the men who tumble through the pages. These elastic protagonists risk damnation and dismemberment in a series of improbable slapstick relationships with women, which veer from the titillating to the downright macabre.
ISBN: 9781897299272
$9.95 US / $9.95 CDN
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Preview (PDF) |
Joseph
Nicolas Robel
September 2007
Joseph is another fantastical tale from surrealist master Nicholas Robel. A little boy with enormous hands and an overactive imagination copes with indifferent parents, teasing schoolmates and troubling dreams. Returning to themes explored in Fallen Angel, his first book from D+Q’s Petits Livres series, Robel captures the wonders and traumas of childhood in a short narrative that is as emotionally sincere as it is cryptic. Obliterating the line between the physical and the imaginary, Robel exploits the dynamic potential of his signature simple yet highly evocative drawing style.
ISBN: 9781897299319
$9.95 US / $9.95 CDN
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Fire Away
Chris von Szombathy
January 2008
Chris Von Szombathy’s surreal illustrations explore the bold juxtaposition of color and use of iconic imagery characteristic of modern underground screenprinting as practiced by sub-cultural icons such as The Little Friends of Printmaking. Von Szombathy breaks new ground in the aesthetic by simultaneously emphasizing the repetition of shape and the subversion of expectations with jarring intersections of organic, inorganic and purely abstract elements. Swirling fractals of curves and angles erupt from and entangle his subjects, invading the void space of his backgrounds with injections and infections of form and light. Fire Away is Von Szombathy’s first published collection.
ISBN: 9781897299494
$12.95 US / $12.95 CDN
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Preview (PDF) |
Milk Teeth
Julie Morstad
December 2007
In this collection of illustrations, Vancouver artist Julie Morstad spins fairy tales infused with dreamlike innocence and a touch of the macabre. Morstad’s work has been shown in galleries, featured on the cover of Neko Case’s 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and developed into a line of patterned wallpapers with a distinctive nostalgic quality. Milk Teeth’s universe, populated by animals, flowers, peculiar objects and disembodied heads, has a sensibility reminiscent of Marcel Dzama’s surreal drawings, Jeffrey Eugenides’ haunting novel The Virgin Suicides, and Peter Weir’s classic film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
ISBN: 9781897299456
$12.95 US / $12.95 CDN
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Lucky, Volume 2 #2
Gabrielle Bell
June 2008
In this issue of Lucky Gabrielle travels with two fellow cartoonists up the West Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle, collecting little stories along the way in Oakland, Berkeley, Eureka and Portland. Back in New York, she and sidekick Tom discover the secrets of Roosevelt and Governor's Island. Later, they go deep sea fishing with comedienne friend Edith. Also included is a bonus story about Gabrielle at eleven years old, when she tried to run away from home and live alone at a summer camp during the off-season.
ISBN: 9781897299623
$3.95 US / $3.95 CDN
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Berlin #16
Jason Lutes
June 2008
Blood spatters the street, a life's work goes up in flames, and lovers take flight in the final chapter of Berlin: City of Smoke, the second volume of the epic trilogy. Against the backdrop of the 1930 Reichstag elections, in which the National Socialists gain unprecedented political power, those citizens who have not yet chosen sides are forced to walk the knife's edge of history as it cuts irreversibly through their lives. Nazi assaults Communist, black confronts white, and Kurt Severing struggles with the futility of using language itself to strike at the dark heart of human nature.
ISBN: 9781897299616
$3.95 US / $3.95 CDN
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Against Pain
Ron Regé, Jr.
JULY 2008
Against Pain is the first collection of multipage anthology pieces by Ron Regé, Jr. The storytelling side of his expressive work is featured in these comic strips gathered from McSweeney's, The New York Times, Kramers Ergot, NON, Rosetta, Arthur, The Comics Journal, and Drawn & Quarterly's anthology. Suicide bombers, art appreciation, and a Lynda Barry "cover" are brought together under the theme of suffering and how people cope with it. Against Pain also includes the alt-comics zine classic Boys: a 22-page collaborative comic--considered by many to be Regé’s finest work--illustrating the "lust life" of a friend in explicitly honest and hilarious detail.
"Ron Regé is one of a handful of cartoonists not only to reinvent comics to suit his own idiosyncratic impulses and inspirations, but also to imbue them with his own peculiar, ever-changing emotional energy. To me, he is unquestionably one of 'the greats.'" --Chris Ware
ISBN: 9781897299296
$24.95 US / $24.95 CDN
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Red Colored Elegy
Seiichi Hayashi
JULY 2008
Seiichi Hayashi produced Red Colored Elegy between 1970 and 1971, in the aftermath of a politically turbulent and culturally vibrant decade that promised but failed to deliver new possibilities. With a combination of sparse line work and visual codes borrowed from animation and film, the quiet melancholy lives of a young couple struggling to make ends meet are beautifully captured in this poetic masterpiece. Uninvolved with the political movements of the time, Ichiro and Sachiko hope for something better, but they're no revolutionaries; their spare time is spent drinking, smoking, daydreaming, and sleeping--together and at times with others. While Ichiro attempts to make a living from his comics, Sachiko's parents are eager to arrange a marriage for her, but Ichiro doesn't seem interested. Both in their relationship and at work, Ichiro and Sachiko are unable to say the things they need to say, and like any couple, at times say things to each other that they do not mean, ultimately communicating as much with their body language and what remains unsaid as with words.
Red Colored Elegy is informed as much by underground Japanese comics of the time as it is by the French Nouvelle Vague, and its cultural referents range from James Dean to Ken Takakura. Its influence in Japan was so large that Morio Agata, a prominent Japanese folk musician and singer songwriter, debuted with a love song written and named after it.
"I wanted to live like Sachiko and Ichiro; to have aspirations even while living stoically and humbly." --Morio Agata
ISBN: 9781897299401
$24.95 US / $24.95 CDN
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Good-Bye
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
JULY 2008
Good-Bye is the third in a series of collected short stories from Drawn & Quarterly by the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, whose previous work has been selected for several annual "top 10" lists, including those compiled by Amazon and Time.com. Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these stories expand the prolific artist's vocabulary for characters contextualized by themes of depravity and disorientation in twentieth-century Japan.
Some of the tales focus on the devastation the country felt directly as a result of World War II: a prostitute loses all hope when American GIs go home to their wives; a man devotes twenty years of his life to preserving the memory of those killed at Hiroshima, only to discover a horrible misconception at the heart of his tribute. Yet, while American influence does play a role in the disturbing and bizarre stories contained within this volume, it is hardly the overriding theme. A philanthropic foot fetishist, a rash-ridden retiree and a lonely public onanist are but a few of the characters etching out darkly nuanced lives in the midst of isolated despair and fleeting pleasure.
Praise for Yoshihiro Tatsumi:
"Prepare to be disturbed and blown away. The stuff is remarkable, amazing..." --Los Angeles Times
"Abandon the Old in Tokyo is a revealing time capsule and a strangely moving portrait of survival in a land where everything is changing." --Time
"Tatsumi's stories have an artistic expressiveness, philosophical coherence and dark, emotional weight that is undeniable." --The Daily Yomiuri (Japan)
"These stories...reveal an artist who was making comics that weren't just adult, but truly mature." --The Village Voice
ISBN: 9781897299371
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Preview (PDF) |
Gentleman Jim
Raymond Briggs
JULY 2008
Gentleman Jim is the story of Jim Bloggs, an imaginative toilet cleaner who, dissatisfied with his station in life, devotes his time to envisioning a world beyond it. His walls are lined with books like Out in the Silver West, The Boys Book of Pirates and Executive Opportunities, which provide fodder for his ruminations on career change. Encouraged by his wife, also eager to incorporate more adventure into her life, Jim sets out to bring these dreams to fruition by accumulating various accoutrements, only to discover that the life of an executive, an artist, or a cowboy is more complicated and costly than it appears.
Jim's childlike understanding of the world that surrounds him is enhanced by Raymond Briggs' subtle and inventive illustration. Fantasies are portrayed as organic clouds that move between and overlap outlined panels of his reality, and myopic Jim is drawn smaller and softer than the policemen and bureaucrats interested in impeding upon his search for adventure. As he begins to infringe more seriously on the law, the city workers and their speech boxes become increasingly angular, much like the rigid rules and regulations restricting his sincere quest. With this playful style, Briggs expertly transforms common feelings of inadequacy into an endearing and enjoyable experience that speaks across generations, concluding with an optimistic implication that even a misfortunate outcome can be better than no change at all.
ISBN: 9781897299364
$14.95 US / $14.95 CDN
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Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke
Jason Lutes
August 2008
The second volume of Jason Lutes's historical epic finds the people of Weimar Berlin searching for answers after the lethal May Day demonstration of 1929. Tension builds along with the dividing wall between communists and nationalists, Jews and gentiles, as the dawn of the Second World War draws closer. Meanwhile, the nightlife of Berlin heats up as many attempt to distract themselves from the political upheavals within the city. The American Jazz band Cocoa Kids arrives and quickly becomes a fixture. The lives of the characters within Lutes's epic weave together to create a seamless portrait of this transitory city. Marthe Muller follows lover Kurt Severing as he interviews participants in the May Day demonstration, but moonlights in the city’s lesbian nightlife. Severing acts as a window through which the political shifts within the city and its participants can be seen. As with Berlin Book One: City of Stones, Lutes creates a sense of anxiety, of the doom to come.
Paperback original, 200 pages.
ISBN: 9781897299531
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Preview (PDF) |
Aya of Yop City
Abouet & Oubrerie
SEPTEMBER 2008
The original D+Q volume of Aya debuted last year to much critical acclaim, receiving a Quill Award nomination, and praise for its accessibility and for the rare portrait of a warm and vibrant Africa it presented. This continuation of the dynamic story by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie returns to Africa's Ivory Coast in the late 1970s, where life in Yop City is as dramatic as ever. Oubrerie's artwork synchronizes perfectly to Abouet's funny and lighthearted writing, which together create a spirited atmosphere and scenarios that, however unique to the bygone setting, remain entirely contemporary in their effect.
The original cast of characters is back in full force, with a case of questionable paternity fanning the flames of activity in the community. The new mother Adjoua has her friends to help with the baby, perhaps employing Aya a bit too frequently, while a new romance leaves Bintou with little time for her friends, let alone their responsibilities. The young women aren't the only residents of Yopougon involved in the excitement, however; Aya's father is caught in the midst of his own trysts and his employer's declining Solibra beer sales, and Adjoua's brother finds his share of the city's nightlife.
ISBN: 9781897299418
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Jamilti and Other Stories
Rutu Modan
September 2008
Published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2007, Exit Wounds—a tale at once mystery and romance—introduced North American readers to the colorful and tightly woven narrative by Rutu Modan and was included in Time and Entertainment Weekly's "best of" lists.
Jamilti and Other Stories collects the cartoonist's short works that lead the reader through unexpected turns of plot and unusual character portraits. Some are darkly fantastical and unsettling, such as the unraveling of a serial-killer murder mystery, or her accounts of an infatuated plastic surgeon and his sanitarium, and a mother back from the dead with dubious healing powers. Others are more attuned to surprising discoveries that shape personal identity, as in the story of a tragic past that lies within a family’s theme hotel, or that of a struggling musician who hopes an upcoming gig will be his big break. In "Jamilti," Modan addresses political violence with a suicide bombing that shakes up a day in the lives of a young couple.
Hardcover, 120 pages.
ISBN: 9781897299548
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Drawn & Quarterly Showcase: Book Five
The D&Q Showcase Series
SEPTEMBER 2008
The Drawn & Quarterly Showcase is a new talent anthology and the only annual collection to have the focused visual acumen of D+Q editor-in-chief Chris Oliveros, who scours the globe for three cartoonists to spotlight and introduce to North American readers. More often than not, it is the first time the cartoonists have had the chance to work in full-color with twenty-five pages, and on such a wide-reaching visual platform. The series is hailed for its consistent quality and for the superior editorial vision of its short stories, volume after volume.
Book Five features Anneli Furmark (Sweden), Amanda Vähämäki (Finland), and T. Edward Bak (United States), with cover art by Vähämäki.
Praise for Book Four:
"At a time when there's a very healthy field of good anthologies being published, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase continues to stand out, here in its fourth volume presenting three stories that are each something special and deeply enjoyable...This here is another strong Showcase, spotlighting some truly notable creative talent."--Nashville City Paper
"Together these three short stories manage to flesh out another issue of a collection that, if not the best of its kind, may perhaps be the sturdiest currently being published."--The Comics Journal
ISBN: 9781897299302
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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The Burma Chronicles
Guy Delisle
September 2008
After developing his acclaimed style of firsthand reporting with his bestselling graphic novels Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China, Guy Delisle is back with The Burma Chronicles. In this country notorious for its use of concealment and isolation as social control—where scissor-wielding censors monitor the papers, the leader of the opposition has spent twelve of the past eighteen years under house arrest, insurgent-controlled regions are effectively cut off from the world, and rumor is the most reliable source of current information—he turns his gaze to the everyday for a sense of the big picture.
Delisle’s deft and recognizable renderings take note of almsgiving rituals, daylong power outages, and rampant heroin use in outlying regions, in this place where catastrophic mismanagement and iron-handed rule come up against profound resilience of spirit, expatriate life ambles along, and nongovernmental organizations struggle with the risk of co-option by the military junta. The Burma Chronicles is drawn with a minimal line, and interspersed with wordless vignettes and moments of Delisle’s distinctive slapstick humor.
Hardcover, 208 pages.
ISBN: 9781897299500
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book Three
Tove Jansson
September 2008
Moomin has been swiftly making its way into the hearts of North Americans ever since Drawn & Quarterly began collecting the strip in 2006. It debuted in the London Evening News in 1954 and has become the fastest-selling D+Q series to date. Fifty years ago, Jansson's observations of everyday life—whimsical but with biting undertones—easily caught the attention of an international audience and still resonate today.
This third volume returns to Moominvalley, where its beloved inhabitants get tangled up in five new stories. Moomin falls in love with a damsel in distress, an unseasonably warm spell turns the valley into a tropical rainforest, and a flying saucer crashes into Moominmamma’s garden. Moominpappa decides to live out his dream of occupying a lighthouse and writing a great seaside novel, only to discover that he hates the sea so close up and has no interest in writing about it, and a variety of curious clubs spring up in the valley. Moomin and Moominmamma do their level best to avoid the whole mess but, of course, get drawn into the muddle.
Hardcover, 104 pages.
"[Jansson’s] work soars with lightness and speed, and her drawings only echo her writing: delicate but precise, observant yet suggestive…Jansson was exceptional, an exuberant explorer of emotional independence and interdependence, a liberating force." —Los Angeles Times Book Review
ISBN: 9781897299555
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell
Gabrielle Bell
Gabrielle Bell splits her cartooning time between creating wry sketchbook autobiographical comics, such as those included in her 2006 graphic novel, Lucky, and working on more detailed fictional short stories. This collection represents her short comics work that has been published in various anthologies over the past five years, including Kramer's Ergot, Mome, and The D+Q Showcase Book Four. The surrealist title story, in which a young woman turns herself into a chair so as not to be too much of a bother to those around her, is being adapted into the short film, Interior Design, by director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep) as part of the forthcoming Tôkyô! trilogy set for fall 2008 release.
Hardcover, 112 pages.
ISBN: 9781897299579
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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Kuruma Tohrimasu
Gabrielle Bell
In collaboration with Michel Gondry!
September 2008
Conceived as a thank-you gift for the cast and crew of the film Interior Design (directed by Michel Gondry; co-written by Michel Gondry and Gabrielle Bell), this small art book is a collection of drawings and photographs made during the production of the film. Published as part of D+Q’s Petits Livres imprint, this limited print-run book is a perfect companion volume to Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell.
Paperback original, 64 pages.
ISBN: 9781897299593
$12.95 US / $12.95 CDN
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Skitzy: The Story of Floyd W. Skitafroid
Don Freeman
October 2008
Published in the centennial year of Don Freeman's birth, Skitzy follows a day in the life of a man literally divided between life as an office worker and as an artist. Without the use of dialogue, his fluid and economical illustrations create an engrossing and fully believable environment, seducing the reader into a familiar world where expressive, gestural drawings explore the possibility of striking a perfect balance between work and play.
Floyd W. Skitzafroid’s wife worries that he is culture-starved and overworked, but she is only half right. Shortly after he leaves the house, Floyd splits into two: one a carefree artist, and the other a grumpy worker with no time to spare. The contented Floyd quickly evades his morose counterpart in favor of a trip to his studio, sporting a broad grin throughout the day. But while this half paints and walks around pleasantly greeting those he meets, the other Floyd is confined to a desk, interacting only with paperwork, a looming boss and his own disrupting thoughts. When the two halves of Skitzafroid are reunited after the workday, an unexpected eye-opener gives Floyd the push he needs to find a solution that will allow him to enjoy his passions without compromising his financial freedom.
ISBN: 9781897299586
$19.95 US / $19.95 CDN
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ACME Novelty Library #19
Chris Ware
December 2008
The penultimate teen issue of the ACME Novelty Library appears this autumn with a new chapter from the electrifying experimental narrative "Rusty Brown," which examines the life, work and teaching techniques of one of its central real-life protagonists, W. K. Brown. A previously marginal figure in the world of speculative fiction, Brown's widely-anthologized first story "The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars" garnered him instant acclaim and the coveted White Dwarf Award for Best New Writer when it first appeared in the pages of Nebulous in the late 1950s, but his star was quickly eclipsed by the rise of such talents as Anton Jones, J. Sterling Imbroglio and others of the so-called "psychovisionary" movement. (Modern scholarship concedes, however, that they now owe a not inconsequential aesthetic debt to Brown.) New surprises and discoveries concerning the now-legendarily reclusive and increasingly influential writer mark this nineteenth number of the ACME Novelty Library, itself a regular award-winning periodical, lauded for its clear lettering and agreeable coloring, which, as any cultured reader knows, are cornerstones of any genuinely serious literary effort. Full color, seventy-eight pages, with hardbound covers, full indicia, and glue, the ACME Novelty Library offers its readers a satisfying, if not thrilling, rocket ride into the world of unkempt imagination and pulse-pounding excitement.
ISBN: 9781897299562
$17.95 US / $17.95 CDN
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