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Fresh off their Gran Prix win at Angouleme, the legendary duo of Dupuy and Berberian come to America. Related: a preview of Dupuy’s Haunted at Vulture. Also, Matt Madden previews tonight’s event.
Words Without Borders and Housing Works Presents
Tales from the Global Village, Part 3:
Straight out of Angoulême
Dupuy & Berberian

Wednesday, March 5th
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street, Soho
7:00PM

Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian have been collaborating for twenty-five years, with their most successful comic series, “Monsieur Jean,” selling over 120,000 copies in France. The anthology of their work, Get a Life, won an Angoulême Alph-Art Award, one of the most coveted awards in the comic genre. Their work has appeared in The New Yorker and in drawn & quarterly and Dark Horse Presents. Phillipe Dupuy was born in Paris and Charles Berberian was born in Iraq. After having spent his childhood in Baghdad and later Beirut, Lebanon, Berberian settled as a teenager in Paris where both he and Dupuy continue to live and work. Drawn and Quarterly has translated and published much of their work, including most recently Philippe Dupuy’s Haunted.

Matt Madden, moderator (NYC, 1968) has been doing comics for over 10 years now. He is the author of Black Candy and Odds Off (Highwater Books.) In 1996 Madden began writing reviews for The Comics Journal and other publications, which he continues to do, if infrequently. He is a founding member of the American chapter of the formalist comics group, Oubapo. Madden lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Jessica Abel. He works in illustration and comics coloring and also teaches comics at the School of Visual Arts. He is currently working on several new projects, including a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style; and the new periodical series collecting new work, A Fine Mess, published by Alternative Comics

Thursday night, Adrian’s at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, sponsored by the Harvard Bookstore.

Last night, he addressed a SRO crowd at the Librairie Drawn and Quarterly. It was the first time I had seen Adrian’s slide show for Shortcomings. All I can say is, do not miss this slide show. I know, I know, I’m his publicist, but the slide show is charming, funny, reflective, and self-critical. It provides a stripped-down view into his process as an artist–from the way he constructs a page to how he tries to learn from his critics, peers, heroes and himself.

At The D&Q Librarie.

Vanessa Davis talks to her mom at the D&Q website. Say, maybe these autobio comics ARE the best form of storytelling!

Of all the events of the coming year, nothing excites us more than the return of Lynda Barry. Surely on the shortlist of the best writers ever in the comics format, Barry has created a body of work unparalleled for its subtlety and perception of the doubts and triumphs of adolescence. An early adapter of the cross-platform cartoonist role, her novel The Good Times Are Killing Me, received rave reviews and was turned into an equally well-received play.

Barry, a classmate of Matt Groening, Charles Burns and Gary Panter at Evergreen College, has been fairly quiet during the current indie comics renaissance, but that should change this year when Drawn & Quarterly begins a major reintroduction of her work, starting with her first new book in years, What it Is, due in the fall. D&Q is also reprinting five volumes of her seminal Ernie Pook’s Comeek weekly strip. This week the D&Q blog spotlighted a new story called “Near Sighted Monkey”, above. Is it any wonder we’re excited?

Is there no end to the cartoonists invading the airwaves this week? Now Adrian Tomine will be appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air today.

D&Q’s Peggy Burns also reminds us that Tomine is going on a mini tour at the end of this month:

2/26 — D+Q Librairie, Montreal
2/28 — Brattle Theater, Harvard Bookstore
2/29 — RISD Auditorium, Providence, RI
3/5 — Politics & Prose, Washington DC.

More at the Shortcomings site.

Yesterday’s NY Times magazine cover by Adrian Tomine.

Link via the D&Q blog.

More here.

Adrian Tomine has drawn his share of magazine covers in his day, but it appears that it’s his MUG that adorns the latest issue of LA City Beat. Within lies a profile as his SHOERTCOMINGS tour winds up:

“Even since I was a teenager doing these little mini-comics out of my parents’ house, I would get these totally divergent and sort of irreconcilable opinions of my work,” says graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. “It would be, like, ‘You’re great; you’ve got a lot of potential,’ or ‘Give up; you suck!’”

On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, the 33-year-old is sitting in a Los Feliz café down the street from Skylight Books, where later he’ll be signing copies of his new book, Shortcomings. Bespectacled and mild-mannered, the Sacramento-born artist-writer seems an unlikely candidate to incite such extreme reactions. The clean-lined, black-and-white cartoon vignettes in his long-running, critically lauded comic book Optic Nerve do occasionally depict grueling or even violent moments, but mostly they capture scenes of everyday life, usually in minute emotional detail.

We totally missed the announcement, but luckily Johanna caught it! In an historic example of détente, Fantagraphics, D&Q, Checker and IDW are teaming up! For Classic Comic Strips month, and an oversized promotional sampler:

This full-color 11″ x 17″ tabloid is a spectacular showcase of some of the finest comics art of the last century and a collector’s item in the making! Designed like an old-time classic newspaper comic strip supplement, Comic Strip Masterpieces will feature superb reproductions of some of the very finest Gasoline Alley, Dick Tracy, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, Dennis the Menace, Flash Gordon, Yellow Kid, and Popeye strips, including many stunning full-color Sunday pages! There will also be a “sequel” of sorts to the hugely popular Unseen Peanuts (an annotated spread of Peanuts strips from the upcoming ninth volume of Complete Peanuts that have never been reprinted since their original newspaper release almost 40 years ago), as well as biographical notes on the cartoonists, a checklist of classic comic strip reprints, and more. Reading Comic Strip Masterpieces will be like traveling back in time to an era when comic strips were actually good!

Rounding up a bunch of photos or cartooners spotted about the globe, conquering all in their path.

Via Jeff Newelt, photos from the Paul Pope Diesel Party in Hollywood celebrating the release of PULPHOPE
and debuting new original PP screenprints on sale at Diesel’s Melrose location:

Pope, James Jean and David Silverman, director of THE SIMPSONS MOVIE.

Silverman, Dark Horse’s Jeremy Atkins, Newelt, and Sam Humphries of MySpace.

Pope with Jonas Hjertberg, Director Creative Services, Diesel USA

Newelt with James Pascoe, who sports a beard that yells “40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness.”

Interior of the store showing Pope’s artwork.

Brad McKay of the Doug Wright Awards, and D&Q’s Chris Oliveros

At Stumptown, several local bands with cartooning cnnections rocked the house. Above, “Fox Hollow keyboardist Kaela Graham and cartoonist Jeremy Eaton (with Adam Grano looking away). Photo by Kevin Schlosser.” Many more photos from the show at Flog, which is where we also got that caption.

Also via Flog, Joe Sacco, Peter Bagge and the invisible world of Jim Woodring at Sacco’s 10/26 event at the Fantagraphics book store.

Via Dark Horse’s Diana Schutz, at the recent SPX, Vertigo’s Bob Schreck, Schutz and Dean Mullaney reuinite.

While at a convention in New Zealand, Amanda Conner makes new friends.

Drawn and Quarterly has posted their signing schedule for this weekend’s Small Press Expo:

FRIDAY

expo hours: 2:00 PM - 8:00 PM

2:00 PM - 4:00 PM Kevin Huizenga signing

4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Anders Nilsen signing

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Spotlight on Rutu Modan (auditorium)

6:15 PM - 8:00 PM Rutu Modan signing

SATURDAY

expo hours 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM

1:00 PM - 3:00 PM Anders Nilsen signing

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM Kevin Huizenga signing

3:30 PM - 4:30 PM “Reality-Based Comics” panel with Rutu Modan, Nick Abadzis and Nick Bertozzi (Brookside Conference Room)

4:45 PM - 6:45 PM Rutu Modan signing

9:00 PM Ignatz Awards, where D+Q cartoonists are nominated for, count them, 13 awards!!

Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan kicks off her Exit Wounds tour in Washington, DC at the JCC, 7:30 PM, 1529 16th Street, NW. She’ll be at SPX this weekend as well.

Wednesday, October 3rd @ 7PM
ADRIAN TOMINE - SHORTCOMINGS *Release Party
BookCourt- 163 Court Street Brooklyn

Details here.

PS: More Adrian Tomine interviewing at Gothamist:

Having lived and worked on both coasts now, what do you think is the biggest difference between being an artist in California versus New York?
The humidity. I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper…it’s a disaster. And these are issue that I never once faced in Berkeley.

I know you were probably hoping for a more profound answer, but aside from little things like the weather, my work process and atmosphere is pretty much unchanged. When I’m sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.

Details via the D&Q blog — apparently it is the kind of place where a golden afternoon light always shines, as earnest folk in mufflers roam amongst the stacks of fine books — our kind of place, in short.

The new Drawn & Quarterly store in Montreal had it’s unofficial opening over the weekend, and by all accounts it was a success. On the eve of the opening I picked up the store sign (variation pictured above). It was silkscreened on plywood by one of the newest D+Q cartoonists, Pascal Blanchet. The store will have it’s official launch party on October 19th (a co-launch with Blanchet’s new book, White Rapids). In the meantime, come by the store located at 211 Bernard West in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood and check back here soon for more details on the October 19th launch.

In advance of the release of SHORTCOMINGS this week (release party Wednesday in Brooklyn) Adrian Tomine has several new interviews online, including this one at New York magazine:

Why is Ben so unable to view himself as critically as he views other people?
Because he’s a human being? It’s interesting, though: From the reaction to this story, I have learned that my scale of what is acceptable might be a bit different from other people’s. It reminds me that there’s been a lot of great works by other artists that I really admire and I assume must be universally acclaimed. And then I do some research and find out, oh, it turns out a lot of people hated Stanley Kubrick’s movies.

And this in-depth one at The Believer:

Q:Do you mean fully formed as an artist?

AT: Yeah. Someone like Julie Doucet was as great with the first thing she published as with the last thing she published, and it was completely her own style with no clear antecedents. It would require one to be quite an asshole to tell her how she could improve or what she might need to focus on. With me, people saw me struggling with different ideas, different methods. So I got a lot of advice, some solicited, some not, and that continues today. But in terms of the really valuable advice, I learned a lot of concrete stuff by seeking it out. Once I felt comfortable enough around some of the people who had been heroes to me, like Jaime Hernandez, Dan Clowes, or Peter Bagge, and I had gotten over that intimidation, I would seize on these opportunities to ask, “In this issue, you did this thing, and how did you do that?” Without fail, every cartoonist that I asked advice from bent over backward to be helpful and encouraging. It took many forms: some of it was just an implicit acceptance, like being invited along to the dinner with all of the good cartoonists, or sitting down at a drafting table with an artist and him showing me how to draw backgrounds and perspectives.

Adrian Tomine’s SHORTCOMINGS is sure to be one of the hottest graphic novelsof the fall, and to help speed it along D&W has just launched a website including tour dates, which we have to reproduce as a jpg, but if you follow the above link you can get all relevant details.

D&Q sends out a personnel related press release and is thoughtful enough to include a Julie Doucet panel to illustrate it!

Effective immediately, Jamie Salomon has been hired as Controller, announced Chris Oliveros, Editor-In-Chief and Publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. Salomon has overseen D+Q’s finances for the past five years while employed at the chartered accounting firm Rabinovitch Luciano in Montreal. At D+Q, Salomon will direct all financial reporting and accounting operations.

“As D+Q has grown from a comic book company to a book company in the past decade, our financial reporting needs have increased. Jamie has been our most valuable behind-the-scenes player in this process,” said Oliveros. “Furthermore, his genuine appreciation and knowledge of the comic book medium makes him an integral part of the D+Q team in understanding why we do what we do.”

Salomon graduated from McGill University with a Bachelors of Commerce. He was the publisher and editor of Copacetic Comics & Crunchy Comics, a freelance tax accountant, and translation consultant.

Drawn & Quarterly, the critically acclaimed Montreal-based comic book publisher, attracts readers from around the world. The company’s cartoonists­Lynda Barry, Chester Brown, Guy Delisle, Tove Jansson, Joe Sacco, Seth, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware and others­are among the best in graphic novel literature. D+Q is distributed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States, Raincoast Books in Canada and PGUK in the United Kingdom.

Miriam Katin, Joe Matt, Guy Delisle (making his first U.S. appearance!), and James Sturm are D+Q’s guest artists at San Diego this year. They’ll be on various panels and signing at our booth #1529. The schedule is as follows: