We’ll be at Spring Con this weekend. We’ll have all our new stuff (including Michael DeForge’s Structures and Dash Shaw’s New Jobs!) and Peter Wartman will be on hand showing off previews of Over The Wall! Stop by!

TCAF here we come! We’ll be there at table 158! We’ll have all our books from Gabrielle Bell, James Romberger, Jon Lewis, Tom Kaczynski, Derek Van Gieson, Vincent Stall… AND we’ll have Dash Shaw’s new mini comic New Jobs AND the new Structures book by Michael DeForge! Come see us!

Post York was nominated in the Best Single Issue (One-Shot) category of the Eisner Awards! Congratulations to James Romberger and Crosby!!!

Derek Van Gieson‘s Eel Mansions got reviewed recently by Thirteen Minutes. In our humble opinion, they totally got it right:

This book is a little bat-shit crazy, in all the right ways of course.

[...]

Eel Mansions is a compelling mélange of Duran Duran references, occult government conspiracy, hipster lingo, and strong humor, like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s a wholly unique sound and aesthetic from Derek Van Gieson. What I think makes the title succeed so boldly is that it’s able to subvert archetypes, simple ones like the lantern-jawed high school jocks who turn to law enforcement or military service so people will give them the respect they could never genuinely earn on their own, or reclamation of the “hipster” designation, but also more complex ones. Even aloof arcane archetypes are made totally self-aware and grounded in reality instead of becoming lost in their own mythologies.

Read the entire review here.

Gabrielle Bell was interviewed by Dan Nadel over at The Comics Journal. It’s a fascinating conversation covering wide raging topics, from The Voyeurs to Kramer’s Ergot, to her thoughts on autobiographical comics, to… well so much more! Here’s a taste:

NADEL: So then what’s the process in assembling something like Voyeurs? Because it has a definite structure, and it covers a bunch of years. It doesn’t feel like a book of incidental pieces: it actually kind of felt like an arc. I mean, not only because relationships happen, come to an end —

BELL: I think it’s actually — maybe the reader imposes that arc.

NADEL: Really? That wasn’t intentional?

BELL: It was intentional, but I was only working with this big pile of stories.

NADEL: Right. But you must’ve left some out, and —

BELL: Yeah, but — also, there were stories that I left out that were relevant to the “so-called” arc that I left out because they weren’t that good … But I did, I definitely was trying to streamline it. I added a few pages in here and there. Like to begin and end Ron and my relationship, for example, so we didn’t just jump into it. And then also Michel [Gondry] and me. It’s kind of weird to have these two relationships in there, and they’re not really much to do with each other in the story. But mostly, I was just choosing the stories that were the best, or perhaps were reaching for something bigger, so in a way it was more like the natural — I mean, every story that we write, that one individual writes, is kind of the same story — they’re trying to get at the same thing, in a way. So, I think there are natural themes that come about, and that’s, in a way, the arc. As I was doing all the stories, I wasn’t thinking about it in the bigger sense — it was just each story I would try to do the thing as an independent unit. I wish I were more calculating though — if I could somehow make my life into a story.

NADEL: [Laughs.] But you do — I mean, the stuff with Michel in France is very story-ish. You know, you have set-ups, and comic beats, and there are gags in there, and there’s a story. You get there, and you leave, but in between there are these episodes.

BELL: I wish I could tell more of it. I wish I could — when I was working on the movie [Interior Design – a segment within Tokyo! (2008)] with him in Japan, I wish I could have told the story then. I wish I had kept the comics journals then, but we were working so much. We’d get up at 5, 6 in the morning, and then work until 2 in the morning, and there was no time to even jot anything down. But it was so much more interesting than — I feel like, in a way, I’m doing all the comics about the boring parts, because there’s nothing happening, so there’s time to do it.

Read the entire interview here. It’s a good one!

Come see James Romberger on his latest books 7 Miles a Second and Post York with a slide show and special musical performance by Crosby. NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium: Monday, February 25, 2013 (tonight!) at 7:00 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street in The Bark Room (off lobby).

James Romberger’s tale of foraging survivors in New York City after the polar ice caps have melted operates within a genre that’s very near and dear to my heart. Yeah, you can classify this story as post-apocalyptic.

[...]

Romberger introduces us to his engaging world in an impressive 16-page wordless sequence that really forces the reader to study the eerie silence of New York City. The only thing you can really hear in your mind’s ear is the quiet sputter of the small boat as it trolls the streets of submerged Manhattan, or the wake gently lapping up against the overgrowth now intertwined with rubble, the man-made and natural worlds once again trying to find a symbiotic arrangement that actually works.

[...]

Romberger fashions his protagonist after his son Crosby, explicitly concerned with the world we’ll be leaving our children. The very nature of that idea is a nice gateway to the type of tension that the book explores, considering the optimal balance of the natural world and the man-made world, of selfless altruism with that pragmatically selfish survival instinct I mentioned before. In short, if either of these dynamic relationships becomes imbalanced, bad things happen.

Read the entire review here.

The thirty-fourth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Monday, February 25, 2013 (tomorrow!) at 7:00 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street in The Bark Room (off lobby).

Scheduled presentation: James Romberger on his latest books 7 Miles a Second and Post York with a slide show and special musical performance by Crosby.