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Here’s the second part of February’s preview. There’s some unusual titles here (including a publisher of religious graphic novels), some which don’t seem to exist beyond a listing on Books In Print.
As usual, my boilerplate:
So, here’s what caught my eye. Please comment below, and please feel free to mention titles I may have marginalized or overlooked. My tastes are eclectic, but there’s stuff which doesn’t interest me, or doesn’t evoke much of a response. I respect everyone who manages to publish something, but with some 400 graphic novel titles a month, I have to be selective.
CAVEAT: As I discovered while doing the publisher posts, that some titles have been canceled or postponed. The titles below, the information is subject to change. Some may already be out and on sale, some may be vaporous. Covers and text are supplied by the publishers.
Oh, and the advisory: I am employed as a bookseller. Nothing I say here or anywhere else online has any connection to my employer. I know my employer can take umbrage at any association people may make between my private and professional activities, so I’m careful to let sleeping Xoloitzcuintli lie.
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Frank Reade
Anina Bennett; Paul Guinan
EAN: 9780810996618
$ 24.95
Before Jules Verne’s flying machines and H. G. Wells’s spaceships, there was Frank Reade, globe-trotting inventor and original steampunk hero. Frank Reade magazines were the world’s first science fiction periodicals, enthralling millions of readers with tales of fantastic inventions and adventures. Now many of the spectacular images from the vintage dime novel series are being reprinted for the first time in more than a century, along with excerpts from the action-packed stories. In Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, this lost legacy of Americana is interwoven with a biography of the “real” Reade family—inventors and explorers who traveled the world with their helicopter airships, submarines, and robots, and who encountered figures like Geronimo and Houdini. This epic saga is brought to life in the multimedia style of the authors’ previous volume, the critically acclaimed Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel. Frank Reade is part–science fiction, part–alternate history, and entirely exciting!
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One Model Nation [animatic available here]
Courtney Taylor-Taylor, Jim Rugg
EAN: 9780857687265
$ 24.95
From US rock band The Dandy Warhols’ frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor comes an original graphic novel illustrated by indie super star Jim Rugg.
A work of historical fiction set in Germany in 1977, it follows four young men who were to become the voice of their generation. This is the epic journey of art noise band One Model Nation, the final dark days of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the band’s mysterious disappearance only months later. Features a host of bonus extras: sketches, director’s commentary, deleted scenes and more.
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Birdseye Bristoe
Dan Zettwoch
EAN: 9781770460669
$ 19.95
It’s a story line we know all too well: “A mysterious stranger comes to town.” Only the town is not really a town and the stranger is a gigantic cell-phone tower. The town is Birdseye Bristoe—a portmanteau created from an interstate sign that points to two real towns—and it has only one real permanent resident, an old-timer known only as Uncle. A confirmed bachelor and World War II veteran, he owns most of the real estate in town. His teenaged great-niece and -nephew visit occasionally, though the town doesn’t have much to offer apart from an adult superstore, a gas station, and a tackle shop.
Uncle reluctantly agrees to lease his land to a conglomerate of telecommunications carriers, and sets the somewhat random condition that the tower be built with a huge crossbar set horizontally into the mast, making it also the world’s largest cross. Birdseye Bristoe begins with the destruction of the cell tower and works backward to unravel the story of its fall.
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Gloriana
Kevin Huizenga
EAN: 9781770460614
$ 19.95
In Gloriana, Kevin Huizenga exposes the mechanics that underpin everyday life. His protagonist, Glenn Ganges, has conversations about dish soap and library visits that are both faithful depictions of mundane interactions and existential dissections of the units that construct our lives. Huizenga has an understated, quiet approach to story writing that allows his characters (and his readers) the self-awareness to recognize the humor and tragedy of every moment.
Huizenga’s much-lauded work is finely detailed, and in its innovative use of form, it explores the boundaries of the comic medium, deconstructing and reconstructing panels to express temporality and lived experience more fully. Presented in this expanded edition, Gloriana employs familiar settings and thorough, sometimes scientific explanations to reach thoughtful conclusions.
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Faith Pack 2
Art Ayris
EAN: 9781613280522
$ 11.99
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Faith Pack 4
Art Ayris
EAN: 9781613280546
$ 11.99
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The Celestial Bibendum: Limited Edition Oversized Deluxe Hardcover With Slipcase
Nicolas de Crécy
EAN: 9781594650611
$ 69.95
From multiple Eisner nominated creator and European star Nicolas De Crecy (SALVATORE, GLACIAL PERIOD) comes a masterpiece of color and irony, recounting the absurd tale of one lonely seal pup by the name of Diego in the vast and corrupt metropolis of New York-on-the-Seine.
Presented in Humanoids Deluxe treatment: limited and numbered edition of only 550 copies.
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Big Deal, Volume 1
Katsura, Yuramei
EAN: 9781937796037
$ 5.49
Bank robbers, bordellos and a whole lot of bed-hopping, as British black comedy meets Yaoi in a head on collision.
Fergus Campbell is straight out of prison with only one thought in his mind, to pay back his former friend and partner in crime, Judas MacGregor for stitching him up and sending him there in the first place. What he least expects on his return to his old haunts, is to fall head over heels in love with Mikhail, the stunningly beautiful owner of the best little whorehouse in town.After one night of bliss with Mikhail, Fergus resolves to make the blond bombshell his own. But there is one thing that stands in the way between him and a relationship with the man of his dreams. He is already married the psychotic young alcoholic, Hugo. Although their marriage has been falling apart for years, the spoiled Hugo won’t let go of his meal ticket so easily. What follows can only be a wild ride of lust, mayhem and revenge!
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Curious Fruits and Vegetables: An Aleatoric Abecedary of Floral Fauna
Jim Coughenour, Nicholas Pavkovic
EAN: 9780983875727
EPUB $ 0.99
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Shifters: 1
Terry Wagner, Charles Michael, Cheryl Voskamp, Clarissa Wagner
EAN: 9780985152703
Item Status: On Demand
$ 5
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Worlds of Phazer
Mariano Nicieza
EAN: 9780985134501
$ 29.99
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Goliath [preview available]
Tom Gauld
9781770460652
$19.95
Goliath of Gath isn’t much of a fighter. Given half a choice, he’d pick admin work over patrolling in a heartbeat, to say nothing of his distaste for engaging in combat. Nonetheless, at the behest of the king, he finds himself issuing a twice-daily challenge to the Israelites: “Choose a man. Let him come to me that we may fight. If he be able to kill me, then we shall be your servants. But if I kill him, then you shall be our servants.”
From one of Britain’s most popular cartoonists, Goliath displays a sensitive wit, a bold line, and a traditional narrative reworked, remade, and revolutionized.
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Who’s publishing the new Gauld?
Drawn and Quarterly. Check out the link embedded in the title of GOLIATH.