Drawn and Quarterly continues to do God’s Work be announcing even more John Stanley reprints:

We’ll be starting off with a three volume set of Stanley’s Melvin Monster. During the “monster” craze of the Sixties, Dell Comics launched this short-lived but hilarious and weird series about a good little monster boy and his disappointed family. While primarily know as a writer, Stanley actually wrote and drew all nine issues of this series. This series will be designed by longtime Stanley champion Seth.

Next up, a three-volume set of the Stanley “Teen” comics–Thirteen going on Eighteen, Around the Block with Dunc and Loo, and Kookie. These frantic comics about teenagers and beatniks remain compelling 40 years later largely because of the skill that Stanley brought to his pacing, joke-writing, and character development. Thirteen is again almost all Stanley written and drawn and is one of the great “lost” treasures of silver age comics. Dunc and Loo and Kookie feature other artists (notably Bill Williams) finishing Stanley’s layouts but still maintaining that manic quality that was a Stanley trademark. Again, Seth will lend his design talents to this set.

This is fantastic news. With Dark Horse’s Little Lulu project rounding up nearly 20 volumes of Stanley’s best known work, this should supplement it nicely and show future generations just what a genius Stanley was.

Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS comes out in a few short days, and the legendary cartooner will be touring all spring and summer, into the fall D&Q reports. Here are her current tour dates:

06/4 The Strand New York, NY
06/5 Free Library of Philadelphia Philadelphia, PA
06/6 NYU Cantor Center New York, NY
06/7-8 MoCCA Fest New York, NY
06/12 Hideout Chicago, IL
07/24-27 Comic-Con San Diego, CA

In more NPR comics news, they present Adrian Tomine’s ‘The Donger and Me’, an examination of the character from John Hughes lovably racist Sixteen Candles.

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§ ICv2 has a two-par interview with First Second’s Mark Siegel:

What were your big hits for the second half of 2007 through the holiday season?

Laika and Robot Dreams have had all sorts of interesting things happen for them (Laika is Nick Abadzis and Robot Dreams is Sara Varon). It’s a delightful thing to see happen. It’s kind of interesting that these are both sort of on the young side; Laika is getting shelved a lot in the teen sections but it’s not necessarily meant that way. And Robot Dreams definitely appears very young at first glance, but then many of the reviews caught on that it has strange, unexpected depth to it. Those have been really pleasant surprises. Both reviewed very well, and there’s a lot of interest. There were a lot of invitations for Nick Abadzis; he spoke at the Smithsonian, he’s been all over the place, and on the radio. That’s been a fun thing to see take off.

In part two, Siegel talks about projects for 200, including, a new book written by Gene Yang and drawn by Derek Kirk Kim called Second Lives; Genius by Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen; and The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, a non-fiction book about a photographer who goes to Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders.

§ The Daily Cross Hatch talks to Charles Berberian and Philippe Dupuy:

What was the catalyst for these solo projects?

CB: Phillippe had some difficult issues that he had to deal with, on a personal level. I couldn’t get involved with them. So it was a step further into what we did ten years ago, which came out as Maybe Later. In that book we drew our own pages, but this was a matter of going through hard times, and he was really into that difficult moment.

PD: There are just some subjects that you have to deal with alone. When a subject is good to work on together, we work together.

§ Anthem Magazine interviews Gary Panter:

Maybe some cartoonists make money from their cartooning. Cartooning does not supply any meaningful amount of my income. I have to do commercial art. I think of my self as a painter. If my wish came true, people would buy my paintings and then i could afford my hobbies: cartooning and playing guitar. As it is, I have always had to do commercial art to survive.

We’re a little bit recovered from the week’s dizzying array of New York-cenetered events. Wednesday was Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian at Housing Works, moderated by Matt Madden. You can read Madden’s report here. Also recap by Kiel Phegley. We arrived a little latish (but still well before 7:00) and the place was already PACKED. The woman from Worlds Without Borders said it was the biggest crowd they had had for ANY of their events and a producer from NPR was there talking to people–graphic novels are hot!

We already linked to Isaac Cates excellent write up. It was a charming and discursive evening — the focus was not on craft question but more Dupuy and Berberian’s feelings about their work and their working process. We snapped a few photos but weren’t very close to the action. Above you can see (l-r) Madden, Dupuy and Berberian, with the NPR guy in the foreground. Here’s one more.

The crowd was a who’s who of the comics scene. Nick Bertozzi had brought his class from SVA. We ran into our former intern, Cindy Arias, who is much missed, as the ongoing lack of an events calendar here proves. Baby Aldara Madden was on hand. We also saw David Mazzucchelli whose Asterios Polyp will surely be one of the most talked-about graphic novels of 2008. However, Mazzucchelli will not be the one doing the talking, as its been announced that he will be doing no press for the book. Other luminaries spotted: Bob Sikoryak, a bunch of folks from Act-i-vate and Studio Deep Six, PWCW’s Ada Price, Jessica Abel and lots lots lots more. There were even people we didn’t know, new or returning recruits to the Dupuy/Berberian army, hopefully.

THURSDAY, we were off to the Friar’s Club for a “bookwarming” for Drew Friedman’s More Old Jewish Comedians. . Brian Heater already has a fabulous write-up with great photos from the event.

The Friar’s Club, in case you don’t know, is a private club for comedians and old timey Catskill schtickmeisters. The Friars Club Roasts are show business legends, with everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. to Milton Berle to Roger Grimsby having been the targets over the years. Okay Roger Grimsby was a local New York newscaster not a comedian, but the Friars Club is as old New York as you can get, a monument to the days when business was conducted over a cigar and whiskey and not Facebook and Twitter.

Given our love of timeless comedy and Rat Pack-era glamour, we were thrilled to be invited to this shindig. As is our wont, we arrived a bit late, and festivities were already under way, just in time to hear Mickey Freeman finishing up the joke with the punchline “Just enough to win!” This was followed by the joke with the punchline “Doctor, am I getting stronger?” Freeman also mentioned someone who was “so eager to join the Friar’s Club that he had prostrate surgery.”

The Beat was majorly overcome to be in the same room with Jerry Stiller, Larry Storch and…JOE FRANKLIN. “JF!” as fans of the Uncle Floyd Show will recall. Others in attendance, ubiquitous Bob Sikoryak and wife choreographer Kriota Wilberg, Gilbert Gottfried, Len Cariou (The original Sweeney Todd), Kaz, the Royal Flush magazine crew, and Michael Kupperman. We chided Kupperman on the non-appearance of a new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle, but he explained he has been busy finishing up an animation project which we aren’t allowed to talk about but it sounds great. We also heard that the next issue of MAD magazine is going to be an ALL-MONKEY issue, so that will be of some interest to our regular readers.

Our camera was kiboshed for the night by low batteries, but we snapped one or two. We can also add that the pigs in blankets at the Friars Club were, for some reason, the best we ever tasted.

Stiller and Friedman

Charles Brownstein, Brian Heater and Nikki Cook converse beneath the Friar logo. Mark Newgarden in the BG.

Note: Friedman and Larry Gelbart will be appearing at Skylight Books in LA on March 29th.

FRIDAY NIGHT it was pouring rain, but we still managed to make it out to Brooklyn to Rocketship for the Leah Hayes party. We hadn’t been there since the still-ongoing remodeling; although the store is a bit narrower it has been redone in a very pleasing way, and the left over show-store slat walls are mostly gone, too. On hand, the usual gang including Brian Heater, Jah Furry, Dash Shaw, who is newly relocated back in New York and Julia Wertz, Above, Hayes poses in the well-stocked store. Our camera still not working, so no more pictures.

As a reminder, we’re always looking for pictures of comics related events. SEND US YOUR LINKS!

Fresh off their Gran Prix win at Angouleme, the legendary duo of Dupuy and Berberian come to America. Related: a preview of Dupuy’s Haunted at Vulture. Also, Matt Madden previews tonight’s event.
Words Without Borders and Housing Works Presents
Tales from the Global Village, Part 3:
Straight out of Angoulême
Dupuy & Berberian

Wednesday, March 5th
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street, Soho
7:00PM

Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian have been collaborating for twenty-five years, with their most successful comic series, “Monsieur Jean,” selling over 120,000 copies in France. The anthology of their work, Get a Life, won an Angoulême Alph-Art Award, one of the most coveted awards in the comic genre. Their work has appeared in The New Yorker and in drawn & quarterly and Dark Horse Presents. Phillipe Dupuy was born in Paris and Charles Berberian was born in Iraq. After having spent his childhood in Baghdad and later Beirut, Lebanon, Berberian settled as a teenager in Paris where both he and Dupuy continue to live and work. Drawn and Quarterly has translated and published much of their work, including most recently Philippe Dupuy’s Haunted.

Matt Madden, moderator (NYC, 1968) has been doing comics for over 10 years now. He is the author of Black Candy and Odds Off (Highwater Books.) In 1996 Madden began writing reviews for The Comics Journal and other publications, which he continues to do, if infrequently. He is a founding member of the American chapter of the formalist comics group, Oubapo. Madden lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Jessica Abel. He works in illustration and comics coloring and also teaches comics at the School of Visual Arts. He is currently working on several new projects, including a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style; and the new periodical series collecting new work, A Fine Mess, published by Alternative Comics

Thursday night, Adrian’s at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, sponsored by the Harvard Bookstore.

Last night, he addressed a SRO crowd at the Librairie Drawn and Quarterly. It was the first time I had seen Adrian’s slide show for Shortcomings. All I can say is, do not miss this slide show. I know, I know, I’m his publicist, but the slide show is charming, funny, reflective, and self-critical. It provides a stripped-down view into his process as an artist–from the way he constructs a page to how he tries to learn from his critics, peers, heroes and himself.

At The D&Q Librarie.

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Vanessa Davis talks to her mom at the D&Q website. Say, maybe these autobio comics ARE the best form of storytelling!

Of all the events of the coming year, nothing excites us more than the return of Lynda Barry. Surely on the shortlist of the best writers ever in the comics format, Barry has created a body of work unparalleled for its subtlety and perception of the doubts and triumphs of adolescence. An early adapter of the cross-platform cartoonist role, her novel The Good Times Are Killing Me, received rave reviews and was turned into an equally well-received play.

Barry, a classmate of Matt Groening, Charles Burns and Gary Panter at Evergreen College, has been fairly quiet during the current indie comics renaissance, but that should change this year when Drawn & Quarterly begins a major reintroduction of her work, starting with her first new book in years, What it Is, due in the fall. D&Q is also reprinting five volumes of her seminal Ernie Pook’s Comeek weekly strip. This week the D&Q blog spotlighted a new story called “Near Sighted Monkey”, above. Is it any wonder we’re excited?

Is there no end to the cartoonists invading the airwaves this week? Now Adrian Tomine will be appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air today.

D&Q’s Peggy Burns also reminds us that Tomine is going on a mini tour at the end of this month:

2/26 — D+Q Librairie, Montreal
2/28 — Brattle Theater, Harvard Bookstore
2/29 — RISD Auditorium, Providence, RI
3/5 — Politics & Prose, Washington DC.

More at the Shortcomings site.

Yesterday’s NY Times magazine cover by Adrian Tomine.

Link via the D&Q blog.

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More here.

Adrian Tomine has drawn his share of magazine covers in his day, but it appears that it’s his MUG that adorns the latest issue of LA City Beat. Within lies a profile as his SHOERTCOMINGS tour winds up:

“Even since I was a teenager doing these little mini-comics out of my parents’ house, I would get these totally divergent and sort of irreconcilable opinions of my work,” says graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. “It would be, like, ‘You’re great; you’ve got a lot of potential,’ or ‘Give up; you suck!’”

On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, the 33-year-old is sitting in a Los Feliz café down the street from Skylight Books, where later he’ll be signing copies of his new book, Shortcomings. Bespectacled and mild-mannered, the Sacramento-born artist-writer seems an unlikely candidate to incite such extreme reactions. The clean-lined, black-and-white cartoon vignettes in his long-running, critically lauded comic book Optic Nerve do occasionally depict grueling or even violent moments, but mostly they capture scenes of everyday life, usually in minute emotional detail.

Tomine winds up his book tour tonight at Cody’s in Berkeley.

We totally missed the announcement, but luckily Johanna caught it! In an historic example of détente, Fantagraphics, D&Q, Checker and IDW are teaming up! For Classic Comic Strips month, and an oversized promotional sampler:

This full-color 11″ x 17″ tabloid is a spectacular showcase of some of the finest comics art of the last century and a collector’s item in the making! Designed like an old-time classic newspaper comic strip supplement, Comic Strip Masterpieces will feature superb reproductions of some of the very finest Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, Dennis the Menace, Flash Gordon, Yellow Kid, and Popeye strips, including many stunning full-color Sunday pages! There will also be a “sequel” of sorts to the hugely popular Unseen Peanuts (an annotated spread of Peanuts strips from the upcoming ninth volume of Complete Peanuts that have never been reprinted since their original newspaper release almost 40 years ago), as well as biographical notes on the cartoonists, a checklist of classic comic strip reprints, and more. Reading Comic Strip Masterpieces will be like traveling back in time to an era when comic strips were actually good!

Rounding up a bunch of photos or cartooners spotted about the globe, conquering all in their path.

Via Jeff Newelt, photos from the Paul Pope Diesel Party in Hollywood celebrating the release of PULPHOPE
and debuting new original PP screenprints on sale at Diesel’s Melrose location:

Pope, James Jean and David Silverman, director of THE SIMPSONS MOVIE.
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Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan kicks off her Exit Wounds tour in Washington, DC at the JCC, 7:30 PM, 1529 16th Street, NW. She’ll be at SPX this weekend as well.

Wednesday, October 3rd @ 7PM
ADRIAN TOMINE - SHORTCOMINGS *Release Party
BookCourt- 163 Court Street Brooklyn

Details here.

PS: More Adrian Tomine interviewing at Gothamist:

Having lived and worked on both coasts now, what do you think is the biggest difference between being an artist in California versus New York?
The humidity. I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper…it’s a disaster. And these are issue that I never once faced in Berkeley.

I know you were probably hoping for a more profound answer, but aside from little things like the weather, my work process and atmosphere is pretty much unchanged. When I’m sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.

Details via the D&Q blog — apparently it is the kind of place where a golden afternoon light always shines, as earnest folk in mufflers roam amongst the stacks of fine books — our kind of place, in short.

The new Drawn & Quarterly store in Montreal had it’s unofficial opening over the weekend, and by all accounts it was a success. On the eve of the opening I picked up the store sign (variation pictured above). It was silkscreened on plywood by one of the newest D+Q cartoonists, Pascal Blanchet. The store will have it’s official launch party on October 19th (a co-launch with Blanchet’s new book, White Rapids). In the meantime, come by the store located at 211 Bernard West in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood and check back here soon for more details on the October 19th launch.

In advance of the release of SHORTCOMINGS this week (release party Wednesday in Brooklyn) Adrian Tomine has several new interviews online, including this one at New York magazine:

Why is Ben so unable to view himself as critically as he views other people?
Because he’s a human being? It’s interesting, though: From the reaction to this story, I have learned that my scale of what is acceptable might be a bit different from other people’s. It reminds me that there’s been a lot of great works by other artists that I really admire and I assume must be universally acclaimed. And then I do some research and find out, oh, it turns out a lot of people hated Stanley Kubrick’s movies.

And this in-depth one at The Believer:

Q:Do you mean fully formed as an artist?

AT: Yeah. Someone like Julie Doucet was as great with the first thing she published as with the last thing she published, and it was completely her own style with no clear antecedents. It would require one to be quite an asshole to tell her how she could improve or what she might need to focus on. With me, people saw me struggling with different ideas, different methods. So I got a lot of advice, some solicited, some not, and that continues today. But in terms of the really valuable advice, I learned a lot of concrete stuff by seeking it out. Once I felt comfortable enough around some of the people who had been heroes to me, like Jaime Hernandez, Dan Clowes, or Peter Bagge, and I had gotten over that intimidation, I would seize on these opportunities to ask, “In this issue, you did this thing, and how did you do that?” Without fail, every cartoonist that I asked advice from bent over backward to be helpful and encouraging. It took many forms: some of it was just an implicit acceptance, like being invited along to the dinner with all of the good cartoonists, or sitting down at a drafting table with an artist and him showing me how to draw backgrounds and perspectives.

Adrian Tomine’s SHORTCOMINGS is sure to be one of the hottest graphic novelsof the fall, and to help speed it along D&W has just launched a website including tour dates, which we have to reproduce as a jpg, but if you follow the above link you can get all relevant details.

D&Q sends out a personnel related press release and is thoughtful enough to include a Julie Doucet panel to illustrate it!

Effective immediately, Jamie Salomon has been hired as Controller, announced Chris Oliveros, Editor-In-Chief and Publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. Salomon has overseen D+Q’s finances for the past five years while employed at the chartered accounting firm Rabinovitch Luciano in Montreal. At D+Q, Salomon will direct all financial reporting and accounting operations.

“As D+Q has grown from a comic book company to a book company in the past decade, our financial reporting needs have increased. Jamie has been our most valuable behind-the-scenes player in this process,” said Oliveros. “Furthermore, his genuine appreciation and knowledge of the comic book medium makes him an integral part of the D+Q team in understanding why we do what we do.”

Salomon graduated from McGill University with a Bachelors of Commerce. He was the publisher and editor of Copacetic Comics & Crunchy Comics, a freelance tax accountant, and translation consultant.

Drawn & Quarterly, the critically acclaimed Montreal-based comic book publisher, attracts readers from around the world. The company’s cartoonists­Lynda Barry, Chester Brown, Guy Delisle, Tove Jansson, Joe Sacco, Seth, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware and others­are among the best in graphic novel literature. D+Q is distributed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States, Raincoast Books in Canada and PGUK in the United Kingdom.