NEW STUFF ARCHIVES
New for December 2021
The Shiatsung Project
by Brigitte Archambault
The Shiatsung Project is an intriguing debut graphic novel by Brigitte Archimbault, a francophone artist from Montreal. While this is her first graphic novel, she has been a working artist for sometime, starting out her career as a painter and sculptor, then branching out to make animated short films before at last taking the graphic novel plunge. Her animation experience clearly informs her work in The Shiatsung Project, which is cleanly delineated and filled with bold swathes of color for a clear and concise look that is a good formal match for the work's content. The Shiatsung Project presents readers with a frighteningly mundane portrait of a not too distant future in which the our society continues unabated and unimpeded along its current path of technological systems following the dictates of capitalism to isolate and control individuals, leading, "logically" and inevitably to this cul de sac. Intrigued? If so, check out the publisher's page on it, HERE – and make sure to keep scrolling for a substantial preview.
retail price - $20.00 copacetic price - $17.75
Bat Kid
by Inoue Kazuo & Ryan Holmberg
A project of Bubbles Press and a companion to the latest issue of Bubbles (#12), Bat Kid is the work that initiated what became a major manga genre: Baseball! Beautifully printed (in Canada) on newsprint, in black and white, with spot reds on select signatures – presumably as in the original – and with many full color illustrations peppered throughout Ryan Holmberg's critical essay (see below). In other words: nice! Bubbles sez: "Before Ichiro, before Star of the Giants, even before the Nippon Professional Baseball league, there was Inoue Kazuo’s Bat Kid (1947-49), celebrated as the first major baseball manga in Japan. Originally serialized in the legendary magazine Manga Shonen, Bat Kid played an essential role in the growth of postwar manga. Its popularity drew aspiring cartoonists to Manga Shonen’s famous amateur submissions section, many of whom would later go pro. It kept Manga Shonen in business long enough to host Tezuka Osamu’s first major magazine serial, Jungle Emperor. After Inoue died suddenly in 1949, the artist who oversaw the continuation of Bat Kid, Fukui Eiichi, later went on to revolutionize manga by creating the groundwork for sports manga and gekiga both. The condensed book edition of Bat Kid—on which this English edition is based—was crowned the top children’s manga by Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store in 1948. The many baseball manga that began appearing in the ‘50s, leading to an explosion of sports manga in the ‘60s, all drew inspiration from Inoue’s pioneering work. A rare opportunity to read early postwar manga in English, this edition of Bat Kid also contains a copiously illustrated sixty (!) page essay by historian and translator Ryan Holmberg explaining the significance of Bat Kid, artist Inoue Kazuo’s career, and the popularity of baseball in Japan before and after World War II. Whether you’re manga mad or baseball crazy, this unique volume will not disappoint. Pick up a copy today and experience for yourself the baseball manga that started it all!"
retail price - $14.95 copacetic price - $13.75
A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History of 309
by Aaron Cometbus & Scott Satterwhite
Documenting and celebrating 25 years (and more!) of the 309 Punkhouse in Pensacola, Florida in 152 pages, this softcover book was (thankfully) edited and coordinated by former Punkhouse residents Aaron Cometbus and Scott Satterwhite and (fittingly) published by The University Press of Florida. Here, in a series of thirteen interviews with former residents – including Aaron and Scott – readers are treated to a multipoint-persepctive on the lives that intersected with the Punkhouse. These interviews seek to examine and analyze not only how the tenants created and formed the (ever-evolving) 309 Punkhouse, but also how the Punkhouse then in turn nurtured their own personal growth and enabled their own subsequent personal evolutions in an ongoing, spatially and temporally unique dynamic; a nexus of people, place and time that we now know as Punkouse 309. Also includes a twelve page spread of black and white photographs!
retail price - $19.99 copacetic price - $17.75
These items and more may also be found at our eCommerce site, HERE.
New for November 2021
Tunnels
by Rutu Modan
The mysteries of the ancient past intersect with the complexities of the present day in this tour de force graphic novel from Israeli cartoonist and educator, Rutu Modan. Fact, fiction, myth, history, politics, religion, sexualities and rivalries both sibling and professional all mix it up in the 284 full color pages of Tunnels. This quite aptly titled work demonstrates how we are all moving through our own tunnels that extend before, through and after our own lives and that these tunnels run in parallel, over, under and across the tunnels of others in one vast network the entirety of which no single participant can hope to grasp. That the physical tunnels in which the action plays out here move under and across the border between Israel and the Palestinian Territories makes all that transpires that much more fraught. An engrossing and entertaining – not to mention educational – read. | Translated from the Hebrew by Ishai Mishory | Hardcover
retail price - $29.95 copacetic price - $26.75
The Waitingby Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Talk about a story that pulls at the heart-strings! While The Waiting is "fictional," it is loosely based on that of the author's own family history; focused particularly on that of her mother, who fled to what is now South Korea during the onset of the Korean War that divided the country. Told through a framing bracket of the daughter/author's relationship (á la Maus) the mother's story gradually unspools in page after page of well composed comics, affectingly employing bold brushwork. Starting with the mother's harsh yet still bucolic childhood under the Japanese occupation, which was filled with its own sorrows, the story takes an abrupt turn with the start of hostilities between the Soviet and Chinese-backed North and the US-backed South, and the mother is forced to flee, along with her own, newly formed family. While the story focuses on one extended family, it can easily be read as a stand-in for the experience – and tragedy – of Korea as a whole. Reader's familiar with Korea's twentieth century history will probably already have some idea of the rough outlines that this narrative will take, but we'll nevertheless refrain from giving them away here, so as to not take away any of the impact. | Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
retail price - $24.95 copacetic price - $21.75
This Is How I Disappearby Mirion Malle
Mirion Malle is a French cartoonist living in Montreal. This Is How I Disappear is her second book to be translated into English (by Aleshia Jensen and Bronwyn Haslam). Its portrait of 21st urban living – that includes overcoming depression, finding community and, finally, making connections – has won quite a few fans, including those among her cartooning peers; some of whom have gone on record with their praise: "I want to give this book to all the people I love! Mirion Malle's unique sensitivity and amazing poetic drawings are like a bandaid and a treat at the same time. This Is How I Disappear is my favorite comic of the year." – Penelope Bagieu | "A stunning portrayal. Malle gives us just enough to keep going – just enough to root for Clara as we stumble with her through anxiety, depression and a culture of shame. The journey is well worth it." – Sophie Yanow | "Malle's characters come thorugh so vibrantly on the page. I wish they could be my friends, too! Especially Clara, the heroine of the story. With strikingly accurate detail and a subtly political lens, the book examines issues like the obstacles to obtaining psychological support and the lasting impacts of abuse, without ever being didactic. Malle is a wonderful storyteller." – Julie Delporte
retail price - $24.95 copacetic price - $21.75
Afternoon at McBurger's
No One Elseby R. Kikuo Johnson
Here's a graphic novel filled with a highly empathic, pitch perfect portrait of a family going through a stressful moment of transition that serves both to reveal the development of each family member's respective character – along with the way in which each of their characters grew out of their relationships to each other – and then shape them in new ways. The entire work is rendered with a mood capturing exactitude very much (and quite successfully) in the mode of The Master (aka Jaime Hernandez) and is a real pleasure to read. Need a little more convincing? There's a mini-interview with R. Kikuo Johnson along with a nice preview in The New Yorker, HERE.
retail price - $16.99 copacetic price - $15.00
Avocado Ibuprofen
Pond Lifeby Hiller Goodspeed
Pond Life is a friendly, litttle (6" x 7"), debossed, casebound hardcover edition collecting 146 single-page reflections composed in words and pictures by the Vancouver-based artist, Hiller Goodspeed – plus a fun-filled appendix! Another beautiful edition from Perfectly Acceptable Press, who have this to say about the book: "Pond Life collects 146 new drawings by Hiller Goodspeed addressing today's most pressing issues: cardboard boxes, art, understanding, haircuts, time, space, Florida, and many others. Includes an appendix with book club discussion questions, alternative titles, and an index." If you aren't hep to Hiller, you can get a good idea of what's in store – and also potentially spend some enjoyable minutes – by visiting his Instagram, HERE.
retail price - $30.00 copacetic price - $26.75
Ginseng Roots #9
Sleep of History: Paintings and Books of David Sandlin Here is your best single opportunity to experience the full range of the uncategorizable works of David Sandlin. Schooled in art and painting at the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB) during the late 1970s, but harboring within a deep love of comics (especially those of Jack Kirby) and a burgeoning affair with Punk Rock, Sandlin quickly made his way to New York City upon graduation and became enmeshed in the early '80s art and music scene there; in the process coming to the attention of Art Spiegelmen and François Moulay (among others) and ending up in their groundbreaking comics anthology, Raw, while at the same time producing prints and paintings and getting shown by Gracie Mansion in SoHo. And, well, as they say, the rest is... (all here in Sleep of) History. Sleep of History is a 192 page, full color exhibition catalogue – from Sandlin's show at the Abrams-Engel Institute for Visual Arts at UAB that took place in the summer of 2017 – cum artist monograph. While his paintings – rightly – take center stage here, there is also quite a good look at his elaborate print/book work. If any book lives up to the hype of being a feast for the eyes, this one does! And for anyone reading this entirely unfamiliar with Sandlin's work, while we can categorically state that formulaic comparisons uniformly fail to do justice to artists, in order to point potentially interested customers' expectations in the general vicinity of Sandlin's work, we will state that it lies somewhere in the artistic territory bounded by Robert Williams and Mark Ryden on the one side and Art Spiegelman, Mark Alan Stamaty and Ben Katchor on the other (with a dash of the anarchy of Marc Bell thrown in). But, again, that comparison only should be considered as serving as guide posts pointing towards the work, and does not in anyway attempt to describe the actual crux of the work, which is deeply personal and rooted in Sandlin's personal history as someone born and raised in Northern Ireland, who was then transplanted in Alabama as a teenager. Sandlin's work shines a bright, sharp light on dark and ill-defined areas of the American Psyche, and anyone who pays attention will come away with insights offered nowhere else.
retail price - $25.00 copacetic price - $25.00
These items and more may also be found at our eCommerce site, HERE.
New for October 2021
Lure
by Lane Milburn
Hot off the press, it's Lane Milburn's long-in-the-works epic meta-science fiction masterwork! Packed with page after page of sumptuous, otherworldly vistas, Lure dives deep into the science fiction realm, stimulating the reader's visual cortex and carrying them out of the ordinary and into fantastic realms. The story that unfolds is, however, a somewhat different animal from what the art might lead one to expect. Without giving away any plot particulars, we can say that the story gradually emerges from its science fiction trappings and evolves into a cautionary tale about the fraught relationship between art and commerce; one in which the slope is very slippery, indeed. There is a clear allegorical dimension to Lure, one that is present from the outset, with the alien world that is the locale where the story largely unfolds sharing the name with the title of the work. There is also a meta-fictional probing that goes on throughout Lure, starting with the transparent substitution of the planet’s name by the work’s central thematic concern – the multi-leveled problematics of the lure of the "success" offered by global capitalism – and continuing throughout the work, in a series of simultaneous deconstructions of some of the basic underlying mechanics of science fiction: of how projecting current dilemmas from our present into a posited future make it easier to show things that might otherwise remain hidden in plain sight; how speaking of the normative and familiar in terms of the alien and the other further direct our perceptions and awarenesses through our imaginations in such ways to allow the unearthing of buried conflicts. Suffice it to say there’s plenty of food for thought here in the pages of Lure. Regardless of the implications of the story, this 192 page, full size, full color hardcover (that was five years in the making!) makes for an engaging read that also provides a true feast for the eyes. Page after page of stunning tableaus that mesh the natural and the technological provide the settings for an unfolding of events filled with memorable, fully realized and authentically interacting characters – the most central of which, it is worth noting, are women, including Lure's protagonist, Jo. Anyone who'd like to get a foretaste can scroll through a hefty review/preview at Screenrant, HERE (there's enough here that a spoiler warning might apply).
retail price - $29.99 copacetic price - $26.75
Visual Crime
by Jerry Moriarty
This giant-size (10" x 13") hardcover volume is the latest from the self proclaimed (and coiner of the term) paintoonist, Jerry Moriarty. This intriguing work is rendered in a combination of rich, fully saturated color oil paintings, bare-bones black & white pen and ink drawings – along with some that include watercolor highlights – combinations of text with black and white reproductions of drawings and paintings (à la newspaper stories) and more! You won't find another work like it! Moriarty came to the attention of the comics world with his signature series, Jack Survives, which was published in Art Spiegelman & Francois Mouly's Raw Magazine back in the 1980s, and he has been busy blurring the boundaries between cartooning and painting ever since. Here in the pages of Visual Crime, he brings his 83 years on this planet fully to bear on this insightful look at art's place in the world.
retail price - $24.95 copacetic price - $21.75
TOO TOUGH TO DIE: An Aging Punx Anthology
by J.T. Yost, Haleigh Buck, Hyena Hell, Emily Flake, Josh Bayer, Dan McCloskey, Aaron Renier, John Porcellino, Janelle Blarg, Carrie McNinch, Jesse Reklaw, Eva Muller, Ben Snakepit, et al
The title pretty much says it all here! Edited by Haleigh Buck and J.T. Yost, Too Tough to Die collects a massive 328 pages of comics about old punks still rocking out, one way or another, by Steven Arnold, Josh Bayer, Gregory Benton, Janelle Blarg, Kyle Bravo, Haleigh Buck, Sophie Crumb, Emily Flake, CN “Pinky Frankenstein”, J. Gonzalez-Blitz, Sam Grinberg, Hyena Hell, Danny Hellman, Joakima Hillyard, Jordan Jeffries, Gideon Kendall, Victor Kerlow, Jim Kettner, Ayti Krali, Karl Christian Krumpholz, Steve Lafler, Will Laren, Brother Malcolm, Lynne Margeaux, Daniel McCloskey, Carrie McNinch, Adam Meuse, Robb Mirsky, Eva Müller, Fred Noland, Andrea Pearson, Josh PM, John Porcellino, Haley Simone Potter, Liz Prince, Jesse Reklaw, Aaron Renier, Chris Shary, Ben Snakepit, James Spooner, Robert Henry Stevenson, Steve Thueson, Lance Ward, Adam Yeater & J.T. Yost; Plus script-only contributions from Mike Hunchback, Michael Kamison & Chris L. Terry . Whew!
retail price - $19.99 copacetic price - $17.77
Comfort Creatures
by Robert Henry Stevenson
Each of the incredibly detailed, eyeball searing drawings in this digest size, saddle-stapled, comic compendium feel like a hybrid of Basil Wolverton and Robert Williams. Some have further been mutated so as to be able to incorporate graphically bold text within their intricate design in such a way as to enhance the visual appeal and formal qualities. If only the effort that was put into the creation of the texts incorporated into the drawings was commensurate with that put into the drawings themselves... A few are up to par – including the "title track", which starts it all off, and hits the nail on the head – but most of the other texts required a bit more thought and polish to bring them up to the level of the drawings they are partnered with. We hope Stevenson continues down this road a bit, so maybe next time!
retail price - $6.00 copacetic price - $5.75
Demons: To Earth and Back
by Hyena Hell
If you're looking for a satisfying, fun, and potentially cathartic comic book read that reveals the contours of horror and romance snuggling up to each other (brought together by humor), look no further: Hyena Hell's follow up to her well received No Romance in Hell is a trick and a treat. Once again featuring Bug and Grog, Demons to Earth and Back provides another new twist on the "life in hell" theme. Running a whoppin' 56 pages – to its precursor's 24 – on heavy newsprint, it's also a lot of comic book for your hard earned dime. Bonus romance advice from Bug!
retail price - $6.66 copacetic price - $6.00
These items and more may also be found at our eCommerce site, HERE.
