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What It Is
by Lynda Barry
from Drawn and Quarterly
“Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+” —Salon
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry’s compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. 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 to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry’s first Drawn & Quarterly book is a full-color collage that is not only a gentle guide to this process but an invigorating example of exactly what it is: “The ordinary is extraordinary.”
Good-Bye
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
from Drawn and Quarterly
“Prepare to be disturbed and blown away. The stuff is remarkable, amazing.”—Los Angeles Times
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.
Shortcomings
by Adrian Tomine
from Drawn and Quarterly
Amazon Significant Seven, November 2007: Adrian Tomine draws his mid-twenties slackers with an impeccable, exact line for every slumpy gesture and cultivated rumple. In Shortcomings, this ex-wunderkind tackles a book-length comic for the first time after three collections of stories, and his maturity shows not so much in the ages of his characters, who are still slackly wandering, dropping out of grad school or managing a movie theater, but in his calm and masterful handling of his story, in which vividly individual characters wander through the maze of imposed and self-generated stereotypes of Asian and American identities (the title is a wry allusion to one of the most enduring of those assumptions). Never has that old commonplace that the personal is the political seemed more paralyzing, and more true. --Tom Nissley
FROM THE PREEMINENT CARTOONIST OF HIS GENERATION, THE MOST ANTICIPATED GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2007
Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine’s first long-form graphic novel, is the story of Ben Tanaka, a confused, obsessive Japanese American male in his late twenties, and his cross-country search for contentment (or at least the perfect girl). Along the way, Tomine tackles modern culture, sexual mores, and racial politics with brutal honesty and lacerating, irreverent humor, while deftly bringing to life a cast of painfully real antihero characters. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Tomine has acquired a cultlike fan following and has earned status as one of the most widely acclaimed cartoonists of our time.
Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine’s iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13.
Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip - Book One
by Tove Jansson
from Drawn and Quarterly
Tove Jansson's Moomin stories are read and loved around the world, enjoying devoted attention in Japan, Europe and Jansson's native Scandinavia. Jansson's work is now seeing a further growth in popularity, with the Moomin chapter books republished in Britain and France, and new US editions released by FSG. The revival continues in North America with this new volume of comic strips from premium publishers Drawn & Quarterly.
Originally published in London's Evening News, Jansson drew and wrote these strips in English. Written in the same period (1954-1960) as the chapter books Moominsummer Madness and Moominland Midwinter, these strips will entertain children with their familiar characters, while adult readers will appreciate their gentle wit and often satirical stance.
This volume is the first in an anticipated five-volume set, and collects the four stories Brigands, Family Life, Moomin on the Riviera and Moomin's Desert Island.
The enchanting comic strip that introduced adult readers to the wonderful world of Moomin
Tove Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children’s authors of the twentieth century for her illustrated chapter books regarding the magical worlds of her creation, the Moomins. The Moomins saw life in many forms but debuted to its biggest audience ever on the pages of the world’s largest newspaper, the London Evening News, in 1954. The strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world with millions of readers in forty countries. Moomin Book One is the first volume of Drawn & Quarterly’s publishing plan to reprint the entire strip drawn by Jansson before she handed over the reins to her brother Lars in 1960. This is the first time the strip will be published in any form in North America and will deservedly place Jansson among the international cartooning greats of the last century.
The Moomins are a tight-knit family–hippo-shaped creatures with easygoing and adventurous outlooks. Jansson’s art is pared down and precise, yet able to compose beautiful portraits of ambling creatures in fields of flowers or on rock-strewn beaches that recall Jansson’s Nordic roots. The comic strip reached out to adults with its gentle and droll sense of humor. Whimsical but with biting undertones, Jansson’s observations of everyday life, including guests who overstay their welcome, modern art, movie stars, and high society, easily caught the attention of an international audience and still resonate today.
Exit Wounds
by Rutu Modan
from Drawn and Quarterly
Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, a young man,Koby Franco, receives an urgent phone call from a female soldier. Learning that his estranged father may have been a victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera, Koby reluctantly joins the soldier in searching for clues. His death would certainly explain his empty apartment and disconnected phone line. As Koby tries to unravel the mystery of his father’s death, he finds himself piecing together not only the last few months of his father’s life but his entire identity. With thin, precise lines and luscious watercolors, Rutu Modan creates a portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties.
Exit Wounds is the North American graphic-novel debut from one of Israel’s best-known cartoonists. Modan has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times and Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture. She is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation.
Exit Wounds is the North American graphic-novel debut from one of Israel’s best-known cartoonists. Modan has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times and Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture. She is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation.
The Push Man and Other Stories
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
from Drawn and Quarterly
A collection of short stories from the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics.
Legendary cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the grandfather of alternative manga for the adult reader. Predating the advent of the literary graphic novel movement in the United States by thirty years, Tatsumi created a library of literary comics that draws parallels with modern prose fiction and today's alternative comics.
Designed and edited by one of today's most popular cartoonists, Adrian Tomine, The Push Man and Other Stories is the debut volume in a groundbreaking new series that collects Tatsumi's short stories about Japanese urban life. Tatsumi's stories are simultaneously haunting, disturbing, and darkly humorous, commenting on the interplay between an overwhelming, bustling, crowded modern society and the troubled emotional and sexual life of the individual.
Legendary cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the grandfather of alternative manga for the adult reader. Predating the advent of the literary graphic novel movement in the United States by thirty years, Tatsumi created a library of literary comics that draws parallels with modern prose fiction and today's alternative comics.
Designed and edited by one of today's most popular cartoonists, Adrian Tomine, The Push Man and Other Stories is the debut volume in a groundbreaking new series that collects Tatsumi's short stories about Japanese urban life. Tatsumi's stories are simultaneously haunting, disturbing, and darkly humorous, commenting on the interplay between an overwhelming, bustling, crowded modern society and the troubled emotional and sexual life of the individual.
Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip - Book Two
by Tove Jansson
from Drawn and Quarterly
In the second volume of Tove Jansson’s humorous yet melancholic Moomin comic strip, we get four new stories about jealousy, competition, child rearing, 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. Moominmamma 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 seventeen 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.
Red Colored Elegy
by Seiichi Hayashi
from Drawn and Quarterly
A true cornerstone of the Japanese underground scene of the 1960s
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 great that Morio Agata, a prominent Japanese folk musician and singer/songwriter, debuted with a love song written and named after it.
Acme Novelty Library #18 (Acme Novelty Library)
by Chris Ware
from Drawn & Quarterly
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, ACME Novelty Library #18 reintroduces the characters that 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 characters’ memories and personal ambitions with a text point size likely unreadable to human beings over the age of forty-five. 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.
Acme Novelty Library #19
by Chris Ware
from Drawn and Quarterly
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.
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