By Will Wellington
Sequential Summer Intern Will Wellington here with the first weekly summer C-List of summer! A lot of this week’s list is drawn from the trusty ol’ FB because I’m a lazy butt who doesn’t know how to internet, but don’t let that turn you off. If you can, let it turn you on instead! Now, isn’t that better? Hopefully I’ll be able to draw on more diverse sources for my future C-Lists.
Item! Why is the summer so cold? Why am I sick? Why is everyone sick?! Even my super-talented friend Austen whom (who? whom?) I’ve been hoping to find some excuse to feature on one of these C-List things is sick! Oh ma gawd, this sucks so hard.
Beaton 1Item! The incredible Kate Beaton released her first children’s book this week with Scholastic / Arthur A. Levine. It’s called The Princess and the Pony and features a feisty young warrior-princess named Princess Pinecone alongside everyone’s favourite dopey equine. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but so far all the press is glowing. Also, hey, there are new Hark! A Vagrant strips up and Step Aside, Pops is due out in September. Everything’s coming up Beaton.
Item! All this week the New Yorker has been featuring excerpts from Drawn & Quarterly’s massive new retrospective omnibus (Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels): pieces by Debbie Drechsler, R. Sikoryak, Gilbert Hernandez, Michael Deforge, and Diane Obomsawin.
Deforge 1Item! Speaking of Michael Deforge: on Canada Day, Publisher’s Weekly shared a story called “Christmas Dinner” from his upcoming Koyama Press collection Dressing. Deforge also recently released two of his Patreon stories as a comic titled On Topics with Breakdown Press.
Item! Brad de Roo has been conducting stellar interviews with scribes of all stripes for the Bookshelf’s blog and last week he interviewed weirdo-comix impresario and All-Star Schnauzer Band aficionado Marc Bell re. the latter’s new D+Q title Stroppy. It’s a laugh and a half.
Item! Following this week’s Image Expo, a couple announcements regarding Canadian creators caught my eye: notably Bryan Lee O’Malley is going to be scripting a series called Snotgirl (it’s “funny and fucked up,” O’Malley says) and Richard Pace is working on a new miniseries called Expired with Jimmie Robinson.
Item! And while we’re on the subject of big announcements, let’s not forget that Jeff Lemire is writing the X-Men! (And that I got to interview him–unfortunately before that announcement.)
Item! And ALSO while we’re on the subject of big announcements made well before anyone can actually do anything in response to them, here’s Christopher Butcher of TCAF and the Beguiling on “the divorce of the hype and publicity cycle from the sales cycle, and the lack of a strong and trusted critical and curatorial voice coinciding with both“–and how that’s hurting the industry. Have you preordered Big Kids yet??? I HAVE!
Ngui 1Item! Marc Ngui recently posted a detailed walkthrough of parts of his 2007 comic “Memoirs from the Distant Future” on Project Hieroglyph. The comic aims to “create a fabulous vision of the future and have it grounded in some solid ideas and real experiences,” and does so by imagining how present aspects of the urban landscape might be transformed by future generations. Project Hieroglyph, which is “administered by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination,” hopes to use science fiction to “provide not just an idea for some specific technical innovation, but also to supply a coherent picture of that innovation being integrated into a society, into an economy, and into people’s lives.” Meanwhile, Ngui soldiers on with his project of illustrating all of A Thousand Plateaus, and I soldier on with my project of somehow getting all the crap I want to get rid of to Value Village without a car.
That’s all, folks!
Will Wellington lives and works in Guelph.