Drawn & Quarterly

Publisher of the Year candidate Drawn & Quarterly has finally broken the seal on literary comics going digital with a two book deal with Kobo Vox which will see Chester Brown's LOUIS RIEL and PAYING FOR IT released. According to associate publisher Peggy Burns, the deal is non-exclusive, and next year will see more titles and platforms for D&Q. Literary comics publishers Fantagraphics and D&Q are along the last holdouts among publishers going digital -- partially due to their authors' ambivalence (or dislike) of the platform -- so even this tiny toe-dipping into the digital world represents a big step forward. In this case, Chester Brown actually encouraged the move -- and it doesn't hurt that Kobo is, like D&Q, a Canadian company.

A new Gilbert Hernandez GN is not astonishing news in and of itself -- the guy is one of the most prolific geniuses out there. However, that it will be overtly semi-autobiographical and that it will be published by D&Q makes it even more newsworthy, as revealed this morning at The Comics Reporter. MARBLE SEASON "follows a group of children and teenagers growing up in suburban southern California of the early 1960s, and tells the untold stories from the youth of an American comics legend. Pop culture references—TV shows, comic books, and music—saturate this evocative story, giving MARBLE SEASON the distinctive narrative depth and attention to detail fans have come to expect from the acclaimed cartoonist's work."
 
The book will be released this fall with a tour to follow.

Slate has a preview of the autobio material in the upcoming Lynda Barry collection Everything Vol. 1. More in link.

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: