The long-running science fiction comics anthology Metal Hurlant is returning via publisher Humanoids, and there’s currently a Kickstarter campaign taking place for this new iteration. The new iteration of Metal Hurlant will be published quarterly, and Matt Fraction, James Stokoe, Brian Michael Bendis, and Simon Roy are among the writers and artists contributing to the new version.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from “A New Dawn,” by artist Jorg de Vos and writer Jake Thomas.
This is going up in the wake of the election, s0 — we’ll be quick with this introduction. Maybe you’d like to read something. Maybe it’s galavanizing, maybe it’s inspiring, maybe it’s escapist. Here are 10 books due out this month that might fit that bill.
At the start of the pandemic, Arundhati Roy, the author who introduced much of my country to the Booker Prize, declared that “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” After having lived four years inside this “next world” I wonder if we can say with certainty what kind of a portal 2020 was? Has whatever was supposed to have metamorphosed done so?
There’s a long and storied history of tales of American academics becoming unmoored far from home. J.M. Tyree’s The Haunted Screen is an impressive entry in this literary lineage: its protagonist is dealing with the erosion of his marriage and a the echoes of a past relationship, even as he muses on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. There’s also a possibly malevolent presence lurking in the woods and a sense that several characters know more than they’re letting on; it’s a concentrated dose of heady musings and travels into the uncanny. I spoke with Tyree about writing the book, the ways film can inform literature, and the nature of haunting.
Alex Ries’s illustrations encompass everything from prehistoric life to video game concept art and storyboards. The forthcoming book Other Worlds: The Art of Alex Ries includes an impressive overview of his work in all of its myriad dimensions. Here’s what Ries had to say about the creation of some literally otherworldly beings, along with a selection of images from the book, which is on Kickstarter now:
In our morning reading: thoughts on The Necks’ new album, nonfiction by Maris Kreizman, and more.
Nick Rees Gardner’s third book (So Marvelously Far, 2019 and Hurricane Trinity, 2023) is a linked story collection focusing on the fictional Westinghouse, Ohio. Right away, I was drawn to see Gardner’s world in connection with Sherwood Anderson’s linked stories in Winesburg, Ohio, and Gardner’s Delinquents didn’t disappoint. As the opening pages make clear, this Rust Belt collection is about a very different America than Anderson wrote about in Winesburg. They’re trapped; they’re often addicts; they’re seeking a means to escape Westinghouse; they’re looking to find love, meaning, connection, and some shred of satisfaction. Time passes or it doesn’t in Westinghouse, as the book points out. Too often, the characters struggle just to make it another day.
Poet Tracy Dimond’s debut collection Emotion Industry reads like an array of your funniest friend’s deepest divulgences, purged all at once in the corner booth of a bar–every word long-overdue. What comes out is the wryest examination of the outward through the inward–of pop culture through the lens of undiagnosed chronic illness, of feminine rage through a well-honed sense of humor. And vice versa. And vice versa again…