Tag: Books

Via email, word that Charles Kochman, whose Abrams ComicArts imprint has been putting out high quality books of comics and comics history for several years, has been promoted to editorial director of Abrams ComicArts....

Via email from Jeff Lemire, the exciting news that "ESSEX COUNTY BECOMES THE FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL TO BE NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN ESSENTIAL CANADIAN BOOKS OF THE DECADE!" The selection comes as part of Canada Reads, a yearly literacy campaign aimed at spotlighting the best in Canadian literature. Voting was open to the public, and comics types have supported a vote for ESSEX COUNTY as a vote for comics legitimacy, but it's certainly a deserved honor. Lemire's bleak, spare tales of rural Canadian life and coming of age are timeless and powerfully told.

Continuing on with the end of year announcements, PW's annual Best Books issues is out, and it includes 10 graphic novels, as follows:

Jason Little's second Bee book is coming soon from Dark Horse. Want!

Every Friday, The New York Times presents its "graphic books" best seller list. It's compiled from BookScan, Diamond, and, as far as we can tell, magic juju algorithms of some kind. It is, like all best seller lists, probably a little subjective and magical, but it certainly reflects a stable metric of what books are selling briskly that week. Given all that we've talked about this week in terms of superheroes and literary comics and manga and what not...let's see exactly what is selling THIS week in American comics, with my own commentary.

You'd think a graphic novel drawn by Ramona Fradon, Rick Veitch, Michael Netzer and Terry Beatty would have gotten some attention, and it has, but not in comics circles. The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, authors of the best-selling Goodnight, Bush. As you might guess, the topic at hand is an explanation (from one point of view) of why jobs are scarcer than a mint copy of CHEW #1. As a preview at Huffington Post shows, the story is a didactic allegory using superhero tropes to illustrate income disparity and the decoupling of profit from employment and...also how people turn into the Hulk from being exposed to too many Fox News rays.

Abrams ComicArts, an imprint of ABRAMS, returns to New York Comic Con to showcase the 2010 line up of high-quality comics related titles.

How many Dabel brothers are there? While Les and Ernst are familiar from their various imprints at publishers around town, there's also Pascal and David Dabel, and they have launched their own publishing house called Sea Lion Press, which is set to publish YA books by well-known authors including Paulo Coelho, Richelle Mead and Richard A. Knaak. They'll be at New York Comic-Con to promote a new series of comics based on Mead's bestselling Dark Swan series, starting with STORM BORN, the story of freelance shaman Eugenie Markham, who fights strange creatures from a place called the Otherworld. Mead is also the author of the bestselling Vampire Academy books, for those without access to a teen-age reader.

Somehow or other we just stumbled across this blog by Hungarian cartoonist Attila Futaki whose comics adaptation of the immensely popular Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book One: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan just came out. There are quite a few of these YA novel to graphic novel conversions going on, but Futaki's art is a lot nicer than it has to be. The final version is colored by José Villarrubia and looks even better.

By Torsten Adair --

The following is a selection of new comic strip titles due to be published this Fall 2010. This list is not comprehensive, as there are over 200 books about comic strips scheduled from September to December. These are just the titles which caught my eye. Although you are welcome to debate the definition of "comic strip" in the comments, for my purposes I'm including single-panel cartoons as well as books about comic strips in this list.

One of the great unfinished graphic novel projects, Craig Thompson's HABIBI, has been finished, he announced earlier this week. Thompson has been slaving away on this 600 page opus since BLANKETS was published to great acclaim in 2003. The subject matter is nothing less than Islam, and Thompson has promised to look at it the way he looked at Christianity in BLANKETS. That isn't going to be controversial at all.

The West Hollywood Book Fair takes place Sunday, September 26th, and as in past years will have an extensive Comics and Graphic Novels Pavilion and a full slate of programming, on topics including webcomics, YA and a spotlight on MOUSE GUARD's David Petersen, all of which you can see below: