Hello Mome 17, Goodbye Mome

In Issue 17 of Fantagraphics' anthology Mome, Life with Mr. Dangerous will conclude in a thirty-one page installment (two pages of which is below). For this issue housing the end of the story (and my tenure at Mome), I drew the cover (above) and the back cover.

A million thanks to editor Eric Reynolds for not murdering me as the installments for this book trickled in over the past few years. It's been great being a part of Mome, and I'll be looking forward to future issues.

Old Covers and New Covers From Old Covers

I've wanted to post a couple great archives of book cover work since giving my spiel at The Show n' Tell Show's book design talk and am just now getting around to it:

The first is Thomas Allen's book art photography. His manipulations of these covers coupled with creative use of focus is perfect... and gives the impression that their construction was simultaneously painstaking and ridiculously fun.

(To give proper credit: before coming across the archive, I was first exposed to Allen's work via Chip Kidd's design of James Ellroy's novels, and had always meant to look into his work more. I'm glad I finally had the opportunity to stumble into other examples.)



The second archive is a collection of Penguin science fiction covers from 1935 to 1977. These are absolutely mouthwatering. And it's great to see Kurt Vonnegut's books looking less ashamed to be housed in that world. Cat's Cradle is science fiction after all (as is my favorite Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan), but for the bulk of the last several decades, with genre fiction being a sort of pariah in literature proper, these covers and their amazing art have mostly gone the way of the decoder ring.

(And I have to note another great feature of the archive: the side by side comparison of each edition of the different books.)

All and Sundry cover

Arriving in stores in the fall of this year, All and Sundry is a collection of various illustrations, posters, comics, and drawings that have been scattered in publications and galleries all over the world, but never collected in a single volume. This will include the strip currently running in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, as well as the sixteen page comic recently drawn for the album Yonlu (which I'll discuss in a later post).

The book will be rounded out by over one hundred scans from sketchbooks, documenting weirdness that has never seen the light of day, and projects still in a primitive state.