Go read: NY Magazine previews ABANDONED CARS with an exclusive excerpt from the book. 

Subterranean Books has some great pics up from Tim Lane's art show and book release party last Friday night.  Here's one of the author with a life-size cut out that I want for my living room:

Really, weren't you sold on this one just from the kickass poster above?Hot damn.

Anyway, the show opens on Sept 26th, 7-9PM and goes through Nov. 9th. For more info, visit:

Subterranean Books
6275 Delmar Blvd
St Louis, MO 63130

Here's a review of Abandoned Cars from PRINT magazine:

Forget about Marvel's Secret Invasion or DC's Final Crisis. The real comic book event of the summer comes in the unassuming guise of a hardcover collection of illustrated short stories. Abandoned Cars (Fantagraphics) is the breathtaking debut book by St. Louis writer/illustrator Tim Lane. Lane drew on a number of inspirations-everything from "pre-Comics Code" comics like Will Eisner's The Spirit to Bruce Springsteen's concept album Nebraska to inform this collection of atmospheric tales about the human condition. "Over technique, over stylization, more important than anything else is emotional impact," he says. This isn't to say that the book lacks either technique or style, but that for all its visual dazzle, there's an emotional tug, sometimes sympathy, sometimes revulsion. Refreshingly, the book isn't slavishly devoted to genre or to its inherent comic book-ness (no tights or monsters). So why not just write a straight-up short story collection? "The stories I like to tell are conducive to comics," he says. The book signals the arrival of a major new voice on the American literary landscape, with or without the illustrations.  

Shame On Us Dept: Tom Spurgeon scoops us on pointing out the blog and  website of Abandoned Cars cartoonist Tim Lane.

Abandoned Cars
By Tim Lane

Abandoned Cars is Tim Lane’s first collection of graphic short stories, noir-ish narratives that are united by their exploration of the great American mythological drama by way of the desperate and haunted characters that populate its pages. Lane’s characters exist on the margins of society—alienated, floating in the void between hope and despair, confused but introspective. Some of them are experiencing the aftermath of an existential car crash—those surreal moments after a car accident, when time slows down and you’re trying to determine what just happened and how badly you’re hurt. Others have gone off the deep end, or were never anywhere but the deep end. Some are ridiculous, others dignified in their efforts to struggle to make sense of, and cope with, the absurdities, outrages, ghosts, and poisons in their lives.

The writing is straightforward, the stories mainstream but told in a pulpy idiom with an existential edge, often in the first person, reminiscent of David Goodis’s or Jim Thompson’s prose or of films like Pick-Up on South Street or Out of the Past. Visually, Lane’s drawing is in a realistic mode, reminiscent of Charles Burns, that heightens the tension in stories that veer between naturalism on the one hand and the comical, nightmarish, and hallucinatory on the other. Here, American culture is a thrift store and the characters are thrift store junkies living among the clutter. It’s an America depicted as a subdued and haunted Coney Island, made up of lost characters—boozing, brawling, haplessly shooting themselves in the face, and hopping freight trains in search of Elvis.

Abandoned Cars is an impressive debut of a major young American cartoonist.

168-page black & white 7" x 9.5" hardcover • $22.99
Add to Cart • Read More...

Our week of video and photo teasers of upcoming releases continues to continue with Abandoned Cars, the debut collection from the young and scarily talented Tim Lane (whom you can meet at Comic-Con!). Watch the video above, and take a closer look in our photo gallery. Finale on Monday!

Tim Lane has a blog, and is posting a new weekly strip on it. Not familiar with Tim Lane? You will be soon.