This Weekend: The Daily Forlorn

Though I won't be able to attend APE in San Francisco this weekend, there will be a book of my drawings debuting there: The Daily Forlorn from Chance Press collects a handful of work from the daily drawing blog of the same name, hand-stiches it, and packages it together nicely with extra prints and fanciness. The normal edition is limited to 75, with an even limited-er edition in far smaller numbers.

Chance Press will be at table 341, so stop by and pick up one of the copies there while you're perusing all the wonders at APE.

Chance Press Limited Edition Book

In other news that I'm behind in posting: Chance Press, an independent producer of hand-bound books will be publishing a sort of sketchbook/behind the scenes/what-on-earth-am-I-doing prelude to the Fantagraphics relaunch of Forlorn Funnies in November. The book will be in a very limited edition, with a "deluxe" edition coming out as well, both some time around October. For more on the collection and other books from the fine people of Chance Press, visit their site.

Pre-order: All and Sundry

The collection All and Sundry – featuring pieces spread through myriad publications and projects over the past six years – is now available for pre-order from Fantagraphics.

And I'll be signing the book in a couple weeks at San Diego Comic-Con. When I have the signing schedule, I'll post that here.

All and Sundry Catalog Preview

A peek at the aforeposted All and Sundry collection (which will debut this summer at San Diego Comic-Con) is available in the down-loadable PDF of Fantagraphics Fall 2009 catalog. I've been diligently scanning dozens of sketchbooks over the past few weeks and will post a couple previews of the book sometime over the interim months: until then, there's this.

Make Mine A Sub-Life

One of my favorite cartoonists below the age of forty is John Pham. Ever since seeing his series Epoxy (which grew exponentially better as it went), I constantly wanted to read more and see what mutation his language would make next. So I've been anxiously anticipating the release of Sub-Life, his new series from Fantagraphics (a preview, xeroxed version of which I was fortunate enough to grab at Secret Headquarters last summer while on book tour). Now the wait is over, Sub-Life is among us. And regular ol' life is better for it.

For the Affluent Bibliophile, Confused Enthusiast

It occurred to me that I should make at least some note of the books (that I've been working on, in some portion or another) coming out in the next couple of months, if for no other reason than to abate my constant forgetfulness that these are seeing the light of day (it's an easy enough thing to forget, given the lags and turnaround times in the strange world of publishing).

Two of these books are available now, at least according to what I could find on various web sites. The first is Demons in the Spring, by Joe Meno, a collection of short stories benefiting the 826 writing center here in Chicago. It's a great cause and the book's crammed with Joe's words and amazing illustrations, all far better than mine. The other book in stores now is the twelfth installment of Fantagraphics' Mome anthology. In this issue I contributed what was, for me, a real odd ball: an illustrated short prose story. The story, "The Spoils of The Fair," was originally written for The Dollar Store reading series, and then read at a couple stops on "The Three Paradoxes" book tour last summer. The illustrations are equally abnormal, as they were all done directly in a sketchbook, with a brush pen and colored pencils, a decent departure from my usual painfully sterile techniques. (Thanks to the Fantagraphics folks for the video from which I stole this (below) still.)


Two more books, both scheduled to be out October 8th, are The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 (which will house a 32-page full-color excerpt of "The Three Paradoxes"), and the hardcover collection of Omega the Unknown (the dust jacket for which is in a recent post below).

Somewhere in all that mess, the second printing of The Three Paradoxes is making its way out into the world, and though I don't think I've even made an explicit mention of this edition anywhere, the Fantagraphics-published hardbound edition of "Mother, Come Home" is now available for pre-order, due out in February of next year.

I've probably missed something somewhere... I'll remember it at three in the morning, in a cold sweat, then promptly forget it and return to my dream of sentient doorbells and melting game shows.