by BK Munn
Koyama have announced their Fall slate of books and it definitely looks like there are some gems in there. The big news is that Lose is making the leap to full-colour, but the maybe the best thing is that Julia Wertz’s Drinking At the Movies is being reprinted.
Because I’m a hopeless fanboy, one of the books I’m most curious about is Robin Nishio’s Wailed, purported to be a collection of photos documenting the comics “scene” and billed as “raw, gritty and illuminating” and reminiscent of “the pioneering work of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama” by the publisher. And if that weren’t pretentious enough, you should read the actual blurb below. Nishio is a graphic designer/director/illustrator with a foot in the comics world (he was in the Root Rot anthology that DeForge and Koyama co-edited, for example), and the work of his I’ve seen online is certainly strong and beautiful, so this should be interesting.
Here are the books, with some of the publisher’s descriptions below:
DRESSING
by Michael DeForge
$19.95
September 2015
“Like Very Casual, a collection of very odd odds and sods from the outré oeuvre of Michael DeForge.”
Sequential recently reviewed DeForge’s First Year Healthy, published by Drawn and Quarterly.
LOSE #7
by Michael DeForge
$10
September 2015
“Revel in a cartoonist at the height of their powers exploring the eccentricities of a woman who befriends her dad’s doppelgänger, and the realities of a flightless bird/boy hybrid.”
Lose #6 made Sequential’s Best of 2014 List.
BLACK RAT
by Cole Closser
$15.00
September 2015
“This aesthetically varied collection of nine graphic short stories is loosely linked by the recurring appearance of a black rat.”
Sequential reviewed Closser’s previous Koyama book, Little Tommy Lost: Book One here.
SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY
by Jane Mai
$12.00
November 2015
“Autobio with bite. This collection of diary comics features the ennui and wee of twenty-something Jane Mai whose emotions and art traverse the high and low. Moments of visual poetry and heartbreak are interspersed by bad body hair and bathroom disasters; much like life.”
DRINKING AT THE MOVIES
by Julia Wertz
$15.00
November 2015
“Julia Wertz is the anti-Bridget Jones; her diary comics are filled with life’s real and often really hilarious moments. Representing Julia Wertz’s critically acclaimed first graphic memoir in a new format, with brand new material from Wertz, and an introduction by Janeane Garofalo. But don’t worry; we haven’t replaced any of the wrenching and ribald, whiskey-soaked coming-of-age tale. This is Wertz at her best, which is sometimes her worst.”
Sequential reviewed Wertz’s previous book with Koyama, The Infinite Wait And Other Stories here.
WAILED
by Robin Nishio
$21.95
November 2015
“Page through the lives of contemporary cartooning’s enfants terribles. Wailed is an intimate chronicle of a group of friends who also happen to be the vanguard of alternative comics making. In stark black and white, the lives of these young artists are illuminated. Comics are often associated with the past, but this is a document of their future.”
CROSSWAYS
by Phil Woolam
$22.95
November 2015
“Crossways presents the ever-changing grids that make up the modern urban center, be they intersecting streets, crisscrossing wires or the ladder that climbs up the side of a building, as pure abstraction. For Woollam, landscape is liquid and the city is a medium as fluid as ink.
KIDS’ COMICS
JUNCTION
by Nathan Jurevicius
$19.95
November 2015
“Make a face when the wind changes and it will stick, but, in this myth, you might just love it. For generations the Face Changers have made the clay tokens that change the winds and faces of their kin. This month the youngest is tasked to take the ten thousand footsteps to the top of the mountain and engulf the town in the winds of change.”