Drawn & Quarterly

Okay... continuing on with Fall previews, we move to one of the Big Six pubishers. No, not comics, the mainstream Big Six, the ones which dominate American and English bookselling. Macmillan is part of of the Holtzbrinck Group, and includes such marques as Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, St. Martin's, Tor, Scientific American, and, of particular interest to comics fans, First Second Books.

If you can't make it out for these seminal events, you can still listen to these modern masters talk with WYNC's Leonard Lopate right here.

While we're sitting overlooking the greenery of the last week of summer there's already a tinge of fall in the air up here in Maine, and it will soon be time to stowaway the flip flops and dust off the leather jacket. And not to boast, but if you live in New York City, call is going to be freaking awesome. Here's an event list for their cartoonists courtesy of Drawn and Quarterly

The complete BIG QUESTIONS by Anders Nilsen is ure to be one of the books of the year, a 600+ page meditati

D&Q has revealed the cover to Hark! a Vagrant their Kate Beaton collection. Just the other day, The Beat and another industry observer were chatting about this and that and we observed that no one does a comics author tour like D&Q. The fantastic response to the Chester Brown tour being an example of that. Fantagraphics is the only company that even comes close.

A while back we predicted Chester Brown's I-was-a-john memoir, PAYING FOR IT, would be one of the most talked about graphic novels of the years. Surprise! We called it! The Star looks at the book in light of Brown's run for Parliament on the Libertarian ticket

Chester Brown's PAYING FOR IT is destined to be one of the most talked about graphic novels of the year -- we'd suspect it may be THE most talked about. It's a great work of comics that is nonetheless problematic for the views it espouses about human relationships and commerce. Just in case you aren't sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for the book to come out, PAYING FOR IT is a memoir by Chester Brown about his experiences employing prostitutes. Brown's previous works include such masterworks as I NEVER LIKED YOU, ED THE HAPPY CLOWN and the historical narrative LOUIS RIEL, which is considered an important political work in Brown's native Canada. As one of the pioneers of the most successful schools of autobiographical comics, Brown is a major figure of the art comix era.

Wow! Lots of great books coming out this month!

This is exciting: Drawn and Quarterly is making their WonderCon debut with guests Seth and Vanessa Davis, and the debut of Shigeru Mizuki's ONWARD TOWARDS OUR NOBLE DEATHS and Pascal Girard's REUNION:

As the PR points out, Chester Brown isn't a recluse but he doesn't leave his home city of Toronto too much, so catching him on the road this year in support of PAYING FOR IT is a must. More dates to be announced, but the current schedule calls for Toronto, Chicago, NYC, Montreal, Vancouver and Seattle.

Oji Suzuki is the latest in D&Q's gekiga projects, and Tom Devlin explains why:

Chester Brown's PAYING FOR IT is sure to be one of the most-discussed GNs of the year, and D&Q has just released the final cover. In case you missed the log line, it's an account of Brown's decade-long practice of hiring prostitutes and his arguments for the dignity and necessity of the profession -- in Canada certain forms of prostitution are legal, but that situation is changing for the worse, and Brown makes a pretty impassioned plea in the book to expand on the legalization of what really should be a business transaction between adults. We've read the whole thing, and while we're not quite on board with some of of it, he does make a good case for keeping things safe and legal. The book will have an intro by R. Crumb and blurbs from many famous folks, including Neil Gaiman, who writes: