Books, Design and Culture
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:
I know it’s the second Tom Gauld cartoon I’ve posted today, but this one for The New Yorker is magnificent:
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.
This month’s post is very heavy on illustrated and hand-lettered covers for some reason, but it’s all the prettier for it…
All This Has Nothing To Do With Me by Monica Sabolo; design by Justine Anweiler; illustration by Daphne van den Heuvel (Picador / April 2015)
At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón; design by Jonathan Pelham (Fourth Estate / May 2015)
B & Me by J. C. Hallman; design by Christopher Lin (Simon & Schuster / March 2015)
The Bees by Laline Paull; design by Sara Wood (Ecco / May 2015)
The jacket for the US hardcover of The Bees, designed by Steve Attardo, was a book cover of note in May 2014.
Black Snow by Paul Lynch; design by Keith Hayes (Little, Brown & Co. / May 2015)
Boo by Neil Smith; design by Isabel Urbina Peña (Vintage / May 2015)
Conviction by Kelly Loy Gilbert design by Maria Elias; illustration by Christopher Silas Neal (Disney-Hyperion / May 2015)
Eden West by Pete Hautman; design by Matt Roeser (Candlewick / April 2015)
Empire of the Senses by Alexis Landau; design by Janet Hansen (Pantheon / March 2015)
Herzog by Saul Bellow; design by Lynn Buckley (Penguin / May 2015)
How to Clone a Mammoth by Beth Shapiro; design by Jason Alejandro (Princeton University Press / April 2015)
KL by Nikolaus Wachsmann; design by Alex Merto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / April 2015)
Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North; design by Spencer Kimble (Blue Rider Press / May 2015)
Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimechkie; design by Katya Mezhibovskaya; illustration by Christopher Silas Neal (Bloomsbury / May 2015)
Further proof, were it needed, that Christopher would do a great covers for Harper Lee.
Mislaid by Nell Zink; design by Allison Saltzman (Ecco / May 2015)
My Documents by Alejandro Zambra; design & illustration Sunra Thompson (McSweeney’s / April 2015)
Nightmares and Geezenstacks by Fredric Brown; design by M. S. Corley (Valancourt Books / April 2015)
Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / April 2015)
Ohey! by Darby Larson; design by Alban Fischer (CCM / May 2015)
Schlump by Hans Herbert Grim; design by Suzanne Dean; illustration by Clare Curtis (Vintage / May 2015)
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty; design by Peter Adlington (Canongate / April 2015)
The US edition, designed by David High, was a book cover of note in September 2014.
The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow; cover art by Tom Gauld (Allen Lane / May 2015)
Visiting Hours by Amy Butcher; design by Spencer Kimble (Blue Rider Press / April 2015)
Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames; design by Jamie Keenan (Pushkin Press / May 2015)
