128-page color/b&w 7" x 9" softcover • $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-349-1
Ships in: June/July 2010 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
The acclaimed anthology of contemporary comics steams toward its landmark 20th issue. This issue leads off with the cover story, the first part of the satiric psychedelic epic "The White Rhinoceros," drawn by Josh Simmons and written by The Partridge in the Pear Tree. It is our privilege to welcome the great Gilbert Hernandez to the pages of Mome with a brand-new story starring his beloved character Roy! Also debuting this issue, exciting newcomer D.J. Bryant, with what may be the most hard-boiled story to appear in Mome yet. And making return appearances: Olivier Schrauwen, Tim Lane, Conor O'Keefe, and Robert Goodin with new stories, and T. Edward Bak with the continuation of his epic "Wild Man" serial.
Download an EXCLUSIVE 9-page PDF excerpt (1.6 MB) with a page from every artist in the issue, plus the Table of Contents.
• Aha! All those teasers from Frank Santoro have been leading up to this, "page 1 of a comic for Internazionale, an Italian independent weekly newsmagazine. Coming soon!"
• On the Jim Flora Art Blog: Electromechanical Design sales brochure; a children's book illustration detail; half of a 1950s business card illustration (above); and a link to the 1959 UPA animated adaptation of Flora's The Fabulous Firework Family produced by Gene Deitch
• Johnny Ryan's Lovecraftian creatures, coming soon to a Stinckers machine near you
• Review: "...[The Search for Smilin' Ed is] a massive comedic epic of demonic possession and ventriloquism — it’s an explosion of the kind of thing Deitch does best. ... I defy anyone to read this and keep pace with Deitch’s ideas — somewhere between hippie psychedelics and virtual reality futurism is where Deitch’s brain lies. His wacky cartoon art style reveals a complex universe that meditates on the nature of reality itself, and your personal place within it as filtered through the isolated impressions of your own brain." – John Seven, Reverse Direction
• Review: "Malkasian’s tale is like something out of a fairy tale Book of Revelations, with a strangely similar vibe to the final season of Lost. ... With Temperance, Malkasian has heightened the depth of her ideas and demanded more from her audience. It’s a religious parable, to be sure, but it doesn’t stop right there, instead going into the territory of the motivations of belief, including the roles of fear, wrongdoing and falsehoods." – John Seven, Reverse Direction
• Plug: "[Johnny] Ryan in Prison Pit proves to be a master of precise composition and pacing. Though there's nothing redeeming about any of the characters in Ryan's hellish world, I still want to follow them for the artist's drawing virtuosity. There isn't a misplaced line, or a poorly chosen composition in this book, and it leads to a visually compelling, well-paced piece of work." – Charles Brownstein, in an interview with The Comics Reporter
• Interview: At his blog Hardboiled Wonderland, author Jedidiah Ayres talks to Tim Lane about Abandoned Cars, about which Ayres says "A collection of graphic short stories linked by theme and style that modulate between a sharp, gritty focus and dream-sense stream of consciousness, it reads like the book Jack Kerouac may have written with oh, say Donald Ray Pollock, populated by characters outrageous and familiar, out of their minds and so far down to earth that they're actually beneath it. And that's not saying anything about the visuals. Tim's gorgeous illustrations are why I bought the damn thing. That he could write worth a crap was gravy. His style is batter-dipped Americana with a generous dose of film-noir aesthetics and if I knew anything about graphic artists, I'd blow your mind with some mash-up comparison, (please insert your own dream team here and then assume that he tops it)." A bit from Tim: "I'm also very interested in creating a hint of pre-comics code comic illustration style in my work — especially the crime/horror comics of the late 40's and early 50's — because, beyond the fact that I love that stuff, I think it represents something ideological that is still pertinent today and resonates with my own attitude toward life."
• Interview: Chris Reilly of TCJ.com's Guttergeek has a Q&A with Michael Kupperman. Reilly says "Kupperman weeds out all the NARCs at the party — meaning that if his work does not make you laugh, go back to Omega House and spank some pledges, you joyless freak. Seriously, this man is one of the all-time great comic book satirists (in that he’s so funny that he may be satirizing comedy). ... Through his lens the most mundane thing become seriously funny." Kupperman says "Why should you read Tales Designed to Thrizzle? To experience the liberating power of laughter. Of course, if you don’t find it funny then there’s really no reason to read it. If you have no sense of humor, stay away."
No-longer-daily clips & strips (we'll probably be posting these twice a week for the foreseeable future) — click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:
• Presspop's limited-edition poster featuring the artwork from the slipcase of their Japanese edition of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware — it's an all-new strip!
This item is available with two different cover designs. Please indicate your preference when ordering.
THE ACCLAIMED 2008 DEBUT, BACK IN PRINT IN A 2010 SOFTCOVER!
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.
2009 Ignatz Award Nominee: Outstanding Anthology or Collection
Download an EXCLUSIVE 16-page PDF excerpt containing the first two stories (2.2 MB).
Bonus: Download and print the "American Cut-Out Collectibles" (29.6 MB PDF) so you can assemble them at home without ruining your book!
![The Search for Smilin' Ed! [Pre-Order]](components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=0a1748876e865db13b15c61b312bdcb9.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout= "The Search for Smilin' Ed! [Pre-Order]")
![Abandoned Cars [Softcover Ed. - Pre-Order]](images/stories/books/bookcover_abcasc.gif "Abandoned Cars [Softcover Ed. - Pre-Order]")
