• Bram Meehan puts this year's two major Bill Mauldin releases, our collection Willie & Joe: The WWII Years and Todd DePastino's biography A Life Up Front, in a shared #10 position on his "Top Ten Comics of 2008" (via TCR)
• There's a great illustration by Max in this New York Times article about the future of the publishing industry that we're all reading with great interest
The latest issue of the 2008 Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz Award-nominee features the first chapter (of three) of an all-new graphic novel by superstar Freak Brothers creator Gilbert Shelton! Thomas Ott (The Number), Josh Simmons (House), David Greenberger (Duplex Planet) and rising minicomics star Laura Park all make their MOME debuts. Bottomless Belly Button creator Dash Shaw delivers an all-new story, "Satellite CMYK", and creates this issue's covers. Also featured: Tim Hensley, Kurt Wolfgang, Nate Neal, Sara Edward-Corbett and Derek Van Gieson.
We just wrapped up the next MOME (Vol. 14), out next spring. This issue features quite a doozy: Lilli Carré's "The Carnival," a 32-page full-color graphic novella (featured on the cover above). It's an elegant follow-up to her new graphic novel, The Lagoon, and between both stories it's clear that Carré is a major talent to watch.
In the meantime, look for MOME Vol. 13 to hit stores next month.
Chicagoans! You've got 2 hours to hie ye'self down to Quimby's to see a reading by Anders Nilsen at 7 PM. Sez Anders on his blog, "I'll be showing a sort of preview of the forthcoming Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes (Monologues II-Fantagraphics Books, due out in February) as well as a video-ized version of the strip Event, which first appeared in Mome, back in 2005, and was originally conceived as a video, not a comic strip. Which explains why it doesn't really look like one. Joe Meno and Arthur Nersesian are also reading."
We've got a brand-new selection of downloadable wallpapers featuring recent and upcoming Fantagraphics titles. Just click on the size that matches your monitor resolution and the image will open in a new window; if you're on a PC, right-click the image and select "Set As Background"; if you're on a Mac, control+click and select "Set As Desktop Background." (We don't know what the procedure is for iPhones, but if you have one, you probably do, right?) And for our complete selection of wallpapers, click right here!
I don't know why, but watching a video review of a book you put together is infinitely more dread-inducing than a print review. But I guess we got off pretty easy with this week's Comic Book Haters video podcast. I'm not sure there's anything more entertaining than listening to three guys with thick Jersey accents trying to make sense of something they're not very familiar with. I'm actually quite grateful to the Haters for giving MOME a shot, because it's clearly not in their wheelhouse, per se, and it would have been easy for them to choose something else to review. But they didn't, and hey, they kind of liked it. Thanks, guys!
