#drawn & quarterly

[woshibai]

The English version of my book "20KM/H" is released today. You can purchase it through the following URL: http://drawnandquarterly.com/books/20-km-h/

This book includes 50 wordless comics that I drew between 2017 and 2020. It is published by Drawn & Quarterly. The craftsmanship of the book is superb, much thanks to everyone who contributed their work to this book!

#comic #comicbook #book #Drawn&Quarterly #Woshibai #我是白 #art #comics #artwork #cartoonist #illustration #illustrations #cartoon

[balu8]

Beautiful Darkness

by Fabien Vehlmann/ Marie Pommepuy and Kerascoët

 Drawn & Quarterly

#Drawn & Quarterly #beautiful darkness #kerascoet #Sébastien Cosset #Marie Pommepuy #Fabien Vehlmann #comic book #bande dessinée

[figcatlists]

Alternative comics and literary graphic novels chart

This chart is a selection from my list of 200 alternative, art, and experimental comic books, as well as graphic novels with a literary bent. I arranged the chart in reverse order of publication to highlight the more recent titles; I also excluded some of the obvious big-name classics to make it somewhat more interesting than your standard "comic books aren't just for kids starter pack".

#comics recs #comic recommendations #graphic novels #alt comics #alternative comics #fantagraphics books #drawn and quarterly #indie comics #independent comics #alt comix

[haveyoureadthiscomic-poll]

#it's a good life if you don't weaken #seth #drawn & quarterly #drawn and quarterly #graphic novel #graphic novels #poll

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kate Beaton's "Ducks"

It’s been more than a decade since I began thrilling to Kate Beaton’s spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/hark-a-vagrant-the-book/

Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. Her second Hark! collection, Step Aside, Pops, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant “straw feminists”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/step-aside-pops-a-new-hark-a-vagrant-collection-that-delights-and-dazzles/

Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published The Princess and the Pony, a picture book that I read to my own daughter — and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, Poesy the Monster-Slayer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/

Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. But that memoir, Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them.

Beaton’s memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation.

The story that follows is — naturally — wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with — and empathy for — the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

Early reviews of Ducks rightly praised it for this subtlety and ambivalence. This is a book that makes no easy characterizations, and while it has villains — a content warning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults — it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system.

This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world’s filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute.

But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told.

Beaton’s memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it’s also — and not incidentally — a narrative and artistic triumph.

In other words, Beaton’s not just telling an important story, she’s also telling a fantastically engrossing story — a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale.

Likewise, Beaton’s art is perfectly on point. Hark!’s secret weapon was always Beaton’s gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly perfect, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. If anything, Ducks does this even better. I think you could remix this book so that it’s just a series of facial expressions and you’d still convey all the major emotional beats of the story.

Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006):

https://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/

But also the increasingly autobiographical work of Lynda Barry, culminating in her 2008 One! Hundred! Demons!:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hundred-demons/

(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019’s Making Comics):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lynda-barrys-making-comics-is-one-of-the-best-most-practical-books-ever-written-about-creativity/

In 2014, we got Cece Bell’s wonderful El Deafo:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-deafo-moving-fresh-ya-comic-book-memoir-about-growing-up-deaf/

Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of Lucy Knisley, especially later volumes like 2020’s Stepping Stones:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enhanced-rock-weathering/#knisley

Along with Jen Wang’s 2019 Stargazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/stargazing-jen-wangs-semi-autobiographical-graphic-novel-for-young-readers-is-a-complex-tale-of-identity-talent-and-loyalty/

2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/

And don’t forget 2017’s dazzling My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and Ducks stands with the best of it.

[Image ID: The cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks.']

#pluralistic #kate beaton #hark a vagrant #tar sands #oil sands #big oil #carbon #climate emergency #memoir #books #graphic novels #alberta #fort mac #fort macmurray #misogyny #boomtowns #gift guide #drawn and quarterly #reviews

[ultrameganicolaokay]

Moomin Adventures: Book One by Tove Jansson and Lars Jansson. Cover by Tove and Lars Jansson. Out in July.

"Presented in an all new softcover format that collects the all ages comics of both Tove Jansson and Lars Jansson, the five-volume Moomin Adventures series will introduce the timeless comic strip to a new generation of readers of all ages. Moomin Adventures Book One kicks off with perhaps the most famous adventure of them all, Moomin on the Riviera, which was adapted into an animated feature and debuted at the London Film Festival. In Moomin's Desert Island, the entire Moomin family is stranded on a desert island-the very island their ancestors came from. The Moominvalley hijinx continued with a charming mix of strips from Finland's most famous writer/artist Tove Jansson, and her brother Lars Jansson who taught himself how to draw in order to take over the strip when it was in syndication."

#moomin adventures #moomin #the moomins #moomintroll #drawn and quarterly #tove jansson #lars jansson #softcover #paperback #graphic novel #collected edition #comics

[animenostalgia]

News - Drawn & Quarterly has announced they’ll be releasing Yokai: The Art of Shigeru Mizuki October 30, 2023! This 200 page hardcover artbook will feature color illustrations by Mizuki, as well as supplementary work by Mizuki translator and scholar Zack Davisson. Retail price will be $44.95 USD.

#news #yokai #shigeru mizuki #manga art #art book #links out #drawn & quarterly

[smashpages]

Out this week: Aya: Claws Come Out (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95): 

Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie’s first volume of Aya, released back in 2006, won the “First Comic” prize at Angouleme that year. Now, more than a decade after the last volume was released, the husband and wife duo return to the Ivory Coast for more stories featuring the college student and her friends.

See what else is arriving in comic shops this week!

#graphic novels #drawn and quarterly #aya #marguerite abouet #clement oubrerie #new comic book day #can't wait for comics #ncbd #new comics day #new comics #aya: claws come out

[redcoloredelegy]

Page 54; panel 2.

Published in English by Drawn and Quarterly. Image taken from my personal copy, 1st edition hardcover, 2008.

#redcoloredelegy #gekiga #manga #garo #seiichi hayashi #hayashi seiichi #drawn and quarterly #red colored elegy

[woshibai]

I'm thrilled that my wordless comic collection "20KM/H" will be published by Drawn & Quarterly on May 16! It contains 50 of my wordless comics. You can now pre-order it from the link here:

http://drawnandquarterly.com/books/20-km-h/

#comic #comicbook #cartoon #cartoonist #woshibai #drawn&quarterly #20km/h #art #artwork #artist #illustration #illustrations #illustrator

[balu8]

Drawn and Quarterly (2000) #3: The Pillow

by Franco Matticchio

Drawn and Quarterly

#drawn and quarterly #franco matticchio #comics #anthology #art #long post

[dynamobooks]

Julie Doucet: My New York Diary (1999)

#julie doucet #drawn and quarterly #comics #graphic novel #autobiographical #1990s #new york

[haveyoureadthiscomic-poll]

#moomin #mumintroll #tove jansson #drawn and quarterly #london evening news #newspaper comics #comic strip #comic strips #newspaper strip #poll

[randomcomicbookreading]

Underwater #3 (1995)

Underwater is one of the few unfinished Chester Brown's works, hence it has never been compiled in graphic novel format. The only phisical evidence for its existence is the original comic book series where it was periodically published by chapters.

Neither plot nor author's aims are easy to understand starting with chapter three. Underwater is deliberately surrealist, its dialogue is written in a bizarrely distorted version of English, and a single chapter is too few pages long to draw any kind of conclusion.

In fact, the Underwarter episode is so short because it only fills half of the book. The second half belongs to another legendary unfinished work by Brown, nothing less than the Christian Gospels comic adaptation!. Particularly, these 13 pages adapt the "fedding the multitude" miracle according Gospel of Matthew.

It's known that Brown's graphic translation of Jesus' life has a very special feature among others in any medium: The mood and look of Jesus changes depending on the particular gospel writer he is adapting. Clearly, the chosen depiction for Matthew's part is quite uncommon: semi-bald, older than usual, serious (almost angry) face... I am tremendously curious about the other alternative versions and the autor's reasons to choose those characterizations. I'll look for more chapters of Underwater and Yummy Fur on the Internet, hoping that Chester Brown take the decision to finish any of those works in order to see it reprinted .

Purchased at Gosh! (Soho, London) for  £3.50

#Underwater #Cherster Brown #Drawn and Quarterly #Gospels #Matthew #Gosh! #Jesus #Yummy Fur #random comic book review #comic book review

[ultrameganicolaokay]

Winnie-The-Pooh by Travis Dandro and A.A. Milne. Cover by Dandro. Out in April.

"The beloved children's classic appears as a graphic novel for the first time! Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize winner Travis Dandro takes a left turn from his detailed autobiography and returns with the charming tales of Winnie-the-Pooh. In 2015, the A. A. Milne childrens' classic, long since viewed as the benchmark for intelligent and whimsical storytelling, slipped into the public domain. Dandro expands the world of Hundred Acre Wood in all directions, creating stunning full-page tableaus where Pooh and everybody's favorite characters - Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, and of course, Christopher Robin - to romp, argue, fail, and love. Indebted to the unforgettable pen-and-ink drawings of E. H. Shephard, this addition to the canon of timeless literature for all ages encompasses all of Winnie-the-Pooh's original adventures, alongside a brand-new story from Dandro created exclusively for this volume."

#winnie-the-pooh #winnie the pooh #drawn and quarterly #travis dandro #a.a. milne #hardcover #graphic novel #comics

[dinosaurgiantpenny]

#comics #birds of maine #michael deforge #drawn and quarterly