Books

This year's edition is guest edited by Neil Gaiman, who tweeted this cover.

Jaime Hernandez and Jason Shiga are highlights of Abrams book offerings. including their new books on Archie, Jerry Robinson and a new grahipc novel by best selling author Audrey Niffenegger.

If we read this PR correctly, the CBG/Impact Books booth will be the center of all things "Ozzy" at the con -- with promotional Ozzy Osbourne fans. At least it wasn't a tote bag! They'll also have a display of how-to books, a new price guide, trivia and portfolio review.

We've mentioned book bloggers a few times lately, and contrasted their peaceful, herbivore ways with the violent, predatory jungle of comics blogging. Now here's a VERY direct comparison -- and also some interesting market research type stuff -- via the Graphic Novels Challenge. This is a blogging program in which book bloggers try to read a bunch of graphic novels in a given period -- one of a series of similar challenge for memoirs, history books or whatever. Most of the bloggers are not trained-from-birth comics experts and heir comments are illuminating. The list is also high on "litereary" and young adult comics -- not very much Marvel or DC. They also check books to read out of the library, so they are not "Wednesday" Crowd" much.

What's this? A new graphic novel illustrated by the amazing Nathan Fox and written by M.F. Wilson? Why yes! OR at least a collection of "Fluorescent Black,", their story that has been running in HEAVY METAL for the last three years. Fox writes "We are really proud of how it turned out and it features a TON of new content including guest pinups, additional narrative pages and more."

A preview of Flight 7 is up. This will be the last volume of the anthology of fantasy comics featuring many animators and illustrators. Editor Kazu Kibuishi had a bit more at his blog:

It's time for pissed off readers to put their money where their mouth is.

Anything billed as an Absolute All-Star has to be great, but Frank Quitely holds up his end with the cover for ABSOLUTE ALL-STAR SUPERMAN,...

The Vertigo blog annoucned their GN schedule for Jan-Apr 2011 yesterday -- including some books that were announced back in May but didn't get too much attention: RAT CATCHER by Andy Diggle and Victor Ibañez NOCHE ROJA by Writer: Simon Oliver and Jason Latour (above -- nice!)) Also, a new OGN, AARON AND AHMED by Jay Cantor and James Romberger. Nothing else new we spotted, although we're bummed that the third volume of the deluxe collected Preacher won't be out for another year. We had already cleared a place on the shelf for it!

Even as the previous item showed graphic novel sales down from last year, Sandy Bilus has posted a list of books to look forward...

This popped up somewhere in our RSS feed: The Unauthorized San Diego Comic-Con Survival Guideby Doug Kline from popculturegeek.com. This self published guide is a small pocket-sized book that sells for $7 plus shipping and includes info on surviving the ordeal of a lifetime, or at least the month. BUt if you ask us, you don't really need a book to figure out most of this stuff:

Artist GB Tran has just relaunched his website, and he has a preview of VIETNAMERICA, a comics memoir to be published by Villard next...