Tom Gauld for the New York Times.
Tom’s new book, coincidentally called Revenge of the Librarians, is out now.
Comments closed
Published October 19, 2022
Our Town’s Libraries by Tom Gauld
Tag: D+Q
Published February 21, 2020
Department of Mind-Blowing Theories
The previous post about the latest cover of the NYT Magazine reminded me that Tom Gauld‘s cartoons for New Scientist magazine (like the one above, although maybe not actually the one above because it’s new!) are going to be available in book form. Department of Mind-Blowing Theories will be available in April!
Comments closed
Published March 31, 2016
Lost Literature
Tom Gauld on lost literature for The Guardian.
And in related news, Tom’s new book Mooncop will be published by Drawn & Quarterly in September. Can’t wait.
Comments closed
Published June 29, 2015
The Scientist’s Dilemma
In his latest cartoon for New Scientist magazine, Tom Gauld illustrates the temptations of science fiction:
In related news, Drawn & Quarterly are going to publish Tom’s new book Mooncop next year. It looks amazing:
Published May 11, 2015
25 Years of Drawn and Quarterly
This past weekend at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Montreal publisher Drawn and Quarterly celebrated their 25th anniversary. D+Q cartoonist Pascal Girard (Petty Theft, Reunion, Bigfoot) drew a history of the publisher for the National Post:
While in a lengthy profile of the publisher by Mark Medley, the Globe and Mail revealed that founder Chris Oliveros is handing the company over to long-time collaborators Tom Devlin and Peggy Burns:
If Drawn and Quarterly is “like a big family,” as Chester Brown described the company to me earlier this week, then, in a sense, the family is losing its father.
A little more than a year ago, Oliveros pulled aside Burns and Devlin, his longest-serving co-workers, and told them he was thinking of stepping down, and that he wanted them to take over the company.
“It was a complete surprise,” says Devlin. “We kind of assumed he’d just do it forever.”
Burns says she burst into tears upon hearing the news.
“I’ve personally taken it as far as I can take it,” says Oliveros. “It would have been fine if I continued. It’s not like they were telling me to go or anything. I could have been around for the 30th anniversary, for the 35th, and the 40th, if I’m still alive, but I just feel, you know what, I don’t think I can accomplish – me, personally – I don’t think I can accomplish more.”
A new book celebrating the publisher, Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels, will be published later this month.
Published August 30, 2013
Art Spiegelman: Mixing Words and Pictures
Cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviewed at NEA Arts Magazine:
It never occurred to me that comics were anything other than worthy. They were in fact among the most worthy endeavors I could imagine. They were how culture got introduced to me, more than through other media…. I always assumed they were a container big enough to hold whatever I could hold.
Spiegelman’s somewhat delayed book Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps will finally be widely available in September. (Full disclosure: Co-Mix is published by Drawn + Quarterly and distributed in Canada by my employers Raincoast Books)
Comments closed
Published August 15, 2013
Tom Gauld Totes
Tom Gauld drew this bookish astronaut to go on tote bags for his Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. I’m reliably informed that the bags are available from D+Q at conventions and from their store in Montreal.
Published April 22, 2013
Let’s Design a Book Cover!
Tom Gauld’s collection of cartoons, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack* has just been released in US and Canada.
* For the sake of full disclosure, Tom’s new book is published by Drawn & Quarterly and distributed by my employer Raincoast Books.
Comments closed
Published November 9, 2012
Chris Ware on Bookworm
Cartoonist Chris Ware discusses Building Stories with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm:
KCRW BOOKWORM: Chris Ware Building Stories mp3
Ware will be at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival tomorrow (November 10) and the Librairie D+Q fifth anniversary party with Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine in Montreal on Sunday (November 11).
Comments closed
Published April 4, 2012
Midweek Miscellany
Comics critic Paul Gravett profiles cartoonist and illustrator Luke Pearson. Coincidently, Pearson has created an amazing cover for a new Penguin edition of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (pictured above).
Desirable Comparisons — Part three of Mark Medley’s series on House of Anansi for The National Post:
“We want it to appear as a very serious, big, ambitious book,” Bland says. “Which is hard to do in a way that doesn’t look like other big books.”
He shows [Pasha] Malla some text-heavy covers that bring to mind the likes of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem.
“For Pasha, for various reasons that aren’t mine to say, these are not desirable comparisons,” Bland says. “For us, they’re very desirable comparisons.”
Thousands of folk songs and interviews recorded by Alan Lomax are now available for free online.
See also: NPR ‘Alan Lomax’s Massive Archive Goes Online‘
Neue Haas Grotesk — Christian Schwartz has restored the classic Swiss sans serif typeface for the digital era. There’s a history of Neue Haas Grotesk / Helvetica here.
The Books in My Head — The Quill and Quire profile Canadian independent comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly:
Part of what sets D&Q apart is its focus on high-quality design, incorporating elements like glossy embossing on covers. “We want to treat the comic as the nicest object possible,” says [creative director Tom] Devlin.
While Devlin says he collaborates with authors on design, D&Q’s willingness to cede creative control has given the company a reputation as something of an artist’s haven. Seth says he prefers to work independently, providing the publisher with camera-ready artwork for computer production. “They almost never interfere with my design plans,” he says. “I would not be the designer I am today without D&Q allowing me to make the books I see in my head.”
(Full disclosure: As mentioned in the story, D+Q are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)
And finally…
With a retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California and the publication of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, Carol Kino profiles Daniel Clowes for The New York Times:
1 Comment“I never thought of myself as a museum artist who’s doing work for the wall,” he said. “For me the book is the final result.” He assumes that most people who see his work at the museum won’t know who he is. “But if they have some connection to something they see,” he added, “and then they read the book, the more I’ll feel like the show was a success.”
Published December 5, 2011
Raincoast Spring Books
I was out west for the Raincoast Books spring 2012 sales conference last week. Sadly I didn’t get to see much of Vancouver or catch up with half the people I meant to, but I did get to hear about a lot of great new books including one about building (and losing) an android Philip K. Dick. It’s non-fiction. Thanks Henry Holt!
Henry Holt also have a new novel by Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2009, called The Hunger Angel, and the latest from John Banville’s alter-ego Benjamin Black, Vengeance.
Picador are publishing a collected edition of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose trilogy in January — the first time they’ve all been properly available in the US I believe — to coincide with the US edition of his new book At Last (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). They also have a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking.
While there was nothing on the list quite of the magnitude of this season’s long-awaited Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, there are a few art and design titles that caught my eye. Princeton Architectural Press are publishing Woodcut, a book of beautiful prints by artist Bryan Nash Gill (you have surely have seen his work even if you don’t recognise the name immediately) and Up on the Roof, a collection of photographs by Alex MacLean of New York’s hidden rooftop spaces. They are also publishing a long overdue paperback edition of Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and a paperback edition of the beautiful, if overlooked, Typography Sketchbooks by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. Lawrence King are publishing a new book on the history of picture books, Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles, and a new edition of The End of Print by David Carson.
On the comics side, Drawn & Quarterly are publishing Jerusalem: Chronicle from the Holy City, the latest travelogue from Guy Delisle who previous books include The Burma Chronicles, Pyongyang and Shenzhen. D+Q are also publishing a new edition of Chester Brown’s controversial, scatological and long out-of-print comic Ed The Happy Clown.
I’m also looking forward to finally seeing more of Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles in Hamburg by Arne Bellstorf which is being published by First Second in April (I just wish they’d gone in a different direction with the typography on the cover — the German and UK edition’s have lovely swooping hand-drawn lettering).
And lastly — because I am big nerd and recently finished his earlier book Batman Unmasked — I’m excited about Will Brooker’s Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, which is being published by I. B. Tauris in July.
Now, back to the Toronto grindstone…
Comments closed
Published November 2, 2011
Midweek Miscellany
On Record — Rick Poynor at Design Obsever waxes all lyrical about Continuum’s 33 1/3 music series:
The best 33 1/3 titles… have an urgent personal mission, even obsession, and they tunnel deep down into an album’s defining moment and milieu: dark sixties Los Angeles in Forever Changes, isolated seventies Berlin in Low, creative nineties Athens, Georgia in In the Aeroplane over the Sea… Usually around 30,000 words, these detailed studies are hugely challenging to research and write. Continuum has let it be known that a batch of previously announced titles has been canceled after initial high hopes: the authors just couldn’t deliver.
Movies on Paper — Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature (as well as Remainder and C), reviews Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn:
Tintin was always premised on a set of implicit borrowings and relocations from one medium to another. Hergé’s earliest strip-cartoons were billed as “movies” on paper; creatively, he was as indebted to the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd as to the novels of Jules Verne or the illustrated poems of Benjamin Rabier (which, long forgotten now, featured a tuft-headed boy called Tintin-Lutin and his dog). Hergé’s remarkable achievement with the Tintin series was to pluck all these elements from their original contexts and join them together, holding them in perfect equilibrium, in a new, hybrid format whose conventions (speech-bubbles joined with left-to-right action, for example) he established in the very act of assembly.
McCarthy loathes the movie by the way.
See also: Nicholas Lezard getting really quite upset about it.
(If you’re wondering why the British are so bothered by the Speilberg’s movie, my take on it is that we view Tintin as an eccentric, quintessentially British hero — not unlike T.E. Lawrence — rather than a Belgium one, and Spielberg is well… just so American. Or it might just be a shit movie.)
And finally…
Gum-Chewers of the World (Unite and Take Over) — Canadian cartoonist Seth on being awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto:
Comments closedI’ve always believed the comics medium was capable of genuine subtly and grace and complexity… and of telling stories that would appeal to an adult mind. Stories that reflect real human experience. That said, it didn’t look too likely that the literary world or the art world…or even the mainstream pop culture was likely to cut the comic book much slack. Comics were considered entertainment for the gum-chewers of the world. Kid junk at worst – nerd culture at best.