Showcasing will be this year’s Eisner nominee The Quest For The Missing Girl by Jiro Taniguchi in which a mountaineer comes to Tokyo to search for his dead friend’s daughter. Come and cheer us on at the awards Friday night – or pass by Saturday morning with a hangover cure – whichever way the vote goes!
 
Our other banner title is a future release Years of the Elephant by Willy Linthout. This one is particularly close to my heart. Willy, totally unknown in North America, is an award winning comic artist in Belgium with over 130 titles in print and more than 10 million copies sold, mostly from a series about the zany adventures of a real-life stand up comic Urbanus. But this isn’t what we will be publishing – you know us better than that!
 
In 2004 Willy’s only child, a 21 year old son, Sam, committed suicide. Although fictionalised, this is the story of how Willy attempted to cope with the event and the rift it caused in his marriage.
 
Willy is scheduled to appear at SPX in September if you’re in the Bethesda area and will be signing copies there.
 
I will have a copy of the Ponent Mon Spanish edition for you to look at and touch plus some photocopies of Chapter One to take away so please remind me!
 
We have a new printer who we suspect will have done a stunning job of the first two titles entrusted to them. Because of the delay caused by losing our original printer, we are running a little behind our original schedule for 2009 and will only be able to bring a very small quantity in by airfreight for SDCC. These are:
 
A Distant Neighborhood vol. 1 by Jiro Taniguchi and
The Summit of the Gods vol. 1 by Yamemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi
 
These are two of the most amazing books I have worked on to date. Come and see why!