Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features Swedish artist Max Andersson, whose work Charles Burns describes as "my kind of fun":

Pixy

Alka Seltzer and Angina Pectoris have all the luck — bad, that is. They've been ejected into the street because their apartment was put to sleep, Angina had to abort their child (the result of a malfunctioning Safe-Sex bodysuit) — how could it get worse? When a friendly stranger offers them his apartment, things seem to be looking up... but then Angina gets a call from the Netherworld. It's her aborted fetus: he's drunk and he's pissed off. So begins Pixy, which Neil Gaiman calls "the best comic I've read this year" — a 65-page journey into a nightmare world unlike any you've ever seen before. The rest of the book follows Alka's attempts to infiltrate the Kingdom of the Dead (where time runs backwards and is sold by the pint to time-addicts), in order to track down the malevolent Pixy and kill him for good. Shedding bodies and identities with some regularity (Pixy himself blows one to smithereens), Alka finds his own sense of reality eroding further and further during his sojourn down under — and it doesn't help at all when Pixy, now his best friend, accompanies him back up to the Land of the Living, where the gun-happy undead sprite wreaks unspeakable havoc. Pixy is the first major work by Swedish cartoonist Max Andersson, and it combines the freewheeling-yet-obsessive graphic and narrative weirdness of such contemporary North American cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Kaz and Charles Burns with a bizarre yet coherent story that mixes coal black humor, barbed satire, wild surrealism, and stark horror in a totally new way — a feast for the (preferably deranged) mind and the (preferably diseased) eye.

72-page black & white 9" x 12" softcover
regularly $11.95 • ON SALE $8.96
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Bosnian Flat Dog

The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. A grenade shell from a Sarajevo souvenir shop. A refrigerator with the frozen mummy of Tito... These serve as the starting point for a journey further and further down the collective unconscious of the Balkans, where the borders between dream and reality are erased and redrawn until they form a tale as exciting as it is fantastic, a tale which could be about our times and a war-torn Europe but just as well might be a deep dive into the psyches of its authors or a discussion about the essence of drawing. Bosnian Flat Dog is the result of a unique collaboration between two of Sweden's most internationally renowned cartoonists, Death and Candy and Pixy creator Max Andersson and Lars Sjunnesson. Each of them contributed to every single drawing to the extent that they no longer can tell themselves exactly who did what. This has lead to the emergence of an independent artistic entity which is neither of the two, but something else, at once familiar and unknown and perhaps a little bit scary.

112-page black & white 10" x 7.5" softcover
regularly $13.95 • ON SALE $10.46
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Hey Canada, happy Canada Day! Canadians (specifically, Ottawans) can spend America's big national holiday on Friday, July 4, at the opening of an exhibit of Dave Cooper's preliminary pencil sketches for his paintings of pillowy women (see Overbite and Underbelly) at Galerie La Petite Mort from 7-10 PM.

Blake Bell, author of STRANGE & STRANGER: THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO, will appear as a guest on the live Mr. Media podcast on BlogTalkRadio this week (Wednesday, July 2) at 1:00 p.m. EST. This was rescheduled from June due to a power outage that prevented the originally scheduled interview.

The Mr. Media podcast will be archived online, but those listening live may call in and talk to Blake and ask that long-awaited Ditko question you've never known the answer to. Call in at (646) 595-3135.

Go here for more info or to listen to the show once it airs.

For one reason or another, every once in a while one of our books will slip under the radar and go under-appreciated, or maybe it made an initial splash but has since faded from the general consciousness. For the month of July, 2008, we're highlighting some of these "hidden gems" from our back catalog and encouraging you to discover some great but obscure books by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off! Click here for the full selection. (Sale ends at 11:59 PM Pacific time, July 31, 2008.)

We'll also be spotlighting these books with a daily feature here on Flog, starting right here and right now! Leading off the top of the alphabet: Canadian artist Ho Che Anderson, best known for King, his acclaimed comics biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and also creator of these lesser-known gems:

Young Hoods in Love

In this collection of original, previously unpublished stories, Anderson looks to the streets of his own modern-day Black Toronto for this group of gritty urban tales of explosive human relationships. Meet Toronto's sexiest bank robbers in "Young Hoods in Love." Join Edith in her desperate search for her son's father in "Johnny Angel." Experience the gut-wrenching surprise ending of "The Twilight of Our Years." See the unforgettable meeting of "Molly and Madeleine." And in the volume's closer, watch Cookie balance three relationships and two careers in "Doe." Funny, profane, and authoritatively real, Young Hoods in Love thrusts Ho Che Anderson into the first rank of contemporary comics creators.

80-page black & white 7" x 11" softcover
regularly $9.95 • ON SALE $7.46
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Scream Queen

A woman driving alone through the desert picks up a younger woman whose car has broken down on the side of the road. Later at the younger woman's job, the two ladies chat, revealing bits and pieces of their lives. After this meeting, the older woman leaves for an appointment with a man. She arrives at his apartment where he's having sex with a woman. The woman confronts him. Turns out she's the living dead, come to bring the man to the other side. Scream Queen marks the first book by Anderson since his landmark graphic novel, King. Scream Queen represents a marked departure from King, being a much shorter work of genre fiction, but employing a similar graphic sensibility and mastery of form to chilling effect.

(Trivia note: pages from Scream Queen decorate the room of the depressed son in the film Little Miss Sunshine.)

56-page black & white 10" x 10" softcover
regularly $12.95 • ON SALE $9.71
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