Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s this new comic book publisher, and they’re making a splashy debut with a new line of comics. There’s been a bit of that this year, but right now I’m here to talk about the new press DSTLRY and their recent anthology The Devil’s Cut, which features an impressive array of writers and artists, including the people behind several of my favorite comics of the last five years.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Erdogan: A Graphic Biography: The Rise of Turkey’s Modern Autocrat, a new book from writer Can Dündar and artist Anwar. (The translation is by L.L. Kreider.) Dündar, a journalist who Orhan Pamuk called “a very courageous journalist,” is currently living in Berlin, for reasons discussed in this article. Read on for a glimpse of this groundbreaking graphic biography.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954, a new graphic novel by Marcelino Truong, translated into English by David Homel. Publisher Arsenal Pulp Press described the book as “an expansive, gripping graphic novel set in Indochina in the year leading up to 1954, when the French-held garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell after a fifty-five-day battle, leading to the end of the first Indochina war opposing both French and Nationalist Vietnamese forces to Ho Chi Minh’s National-Communist underground state.”
For many writers and artists, spending time at conventions is a regular part of an annual routine. It’s not surprising, then, that some have opted to use genre and comic book conventions as the setting for stories, including one of Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club stories, Nick Mamatas’s novel I Am Providence, and Paul Cornell and Marika Cresta’s Con & On. Now, in the new series True Believers, writers Joshua Viola and Stephen Graham Jones teamed with artist Ben Matsuya for a tale of cosplay and horror set at the Colorado Festival of Horror.
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Derek M. Ballard’s graphic novel Cartoonshow, scheduled for release this week from Oni Press. You might know Ballard’s work from his contributions to Adventure Time or The Midnight Gospel; you might have also seen his comics at places like The Nib. In a wide-ranging interview with The Comics Journal in 2021, Ballard said that “a book with a spine, that’s something I’ve been trying to do for a long time.” In Cartoonshow, Ballard reckons with the experience of being a single father and a working artist, and the complexities that come with both.
Using comics to explore history is nothing new. Jason Lutes’s acclaimed Berlin explores several overlapping lives in Weimar-era Germany; Warren Ellis and Raoul Caceres’s Crécy is a bleakly comic take on a significant moment in English history; and Rutu Modan’s The Property examines national trauma and its effect on one family. History and biographical comics can be somber in their tone as in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, a hallucinatory take on Jack the Ripper and London in the late nineteenth century. They can also be, as the historical entries in Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant prove, irreverent, funny, and unpredictable.
The first thing that caught my eye after opening Jeremy Haun’s Haunthology was the list of blurbs. About half of them came from comics creators I admire (Declan Shalvey! James Tynion IV!), while the other half came from horror writers whose work I dig (Laird Barron! John Langan!). Throw in an introduction by Nathan Ballingrud and you have something tailor-made to pique my interest.
Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Ted Adams and Jorge Coelho’s graphic novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby. This project has been in the works since 2019, and is currently available via a Kickstarter campaign from Clover Press. As Coelho explained in a statement, the timing of the project was unexpectedly serendipitous: “A feeling of chaos, confusion and crumbling eras permeated both art and real life during the making of this book, resulting in my largest and most rewarding creative challenge so far.” Read on to see a new adaptation of a classic story.