Gosh! London – the Culture of Comics

Tom Gauld’s Goliath — Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition

Not only are we throwing a launch party for Tom Gauld’s new graphic novel, Goliath, but we’re doing a bookplate edition as well! Parties come and go but at least 200 limited edition prints will hang around for a little bit longer. Not much, but a little.

Goliath of Gath isn’t much of a fighter. Given half a choice, he’d pick admin work over patrolling in a heartbeat, to say nothing of his distaste for engaging in combat. Nonetheless, at the behest of the king, he finds himself issuing a twice-daily challenge to the Israelites: “Choose a man. Let him come to me that we may fight. If he be able to kill me, then we shall be your servants. But if I kill him, then you shall be our servants.”

It’s the old David and Goliath story told from the giant’s point of view, and you can see a PDF preview of it at Drawn & Quarterly. Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter did a big interview with Gauld recently as did It’s Nice That. Both worth a read.

Tom has produced one of our most beautiful bookplates to date. It’s a signed and numbered edition of just 200 for not a penny more than the £14.99 cover price. If you’d like to reserve a copy, or arrange a mail order, send us an email to info@goshlondon.com and we’ll sort it out for you. We can post it anywhere in the world as long as there’s someone there to catch it.

(It’s £5 P&P within the UK, elsewhere depends on weight.)

Incidentally: if you’re unfamiliar with Gauld’s work Austin Kleon has a good collection of bits and bobs from the wilds of the internet, on his tumblr. I saw stuff there today that I never knew existed, and I’m around this stuff every day.

Published February 2012, launched at Gosh! on Friday the 9th of March.

Things To Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park — Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition

Things To Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park (When You’re 29 and Unemployed) is the latest book by Aneurin Wright and his first autobiographical one. Much like Maus, it’s an anthropomorphic comic about the relationship between son and father, only this one’s a little more medical; a story about a young man coming to terms with his dying father as he takes care of him in his final months.

When Nye’s father phones to wish him a happy birthday, and reveals he has been ‘certified for hospice’, Nye slumps down on the nearest doorstep in shock. Unemployment means that he is free to move in to the trailer park where his father lives, and assume the role of chief carer. Their daily schedule of pill counting and medical checks unfolds into an extraordinary world where the protagonist is a minotaur, his father a rhinoceros, social workers are sea turtles and mobile homes move atop gigantic elephants. Curious neighbours and medical and social care workers – whether man or beast – become their friends, and the family comes together once more. And as the old man battles against emphysema, his shortness of breath becomes more evident until his speech bubbles, previously charged with pithy comment, are mostly filled with pauses.

Wright’s last outing in the world of comics was Lex Talionis: A Jungle Tale, published by Image in 2004 (and reviewed here) though you might be more familiar with his work as an animation director for Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine (specifically the Brief History of the USA bit). Things To Do In a Trailer Park is eight years in the making.

Here at Gosh! we’ll have an exclusive bookplate edition featuring art created just for this purpose, signed and numbered by the man himself. As ever, there’ll only be 200 of these plates produced so miss it now and you’ve missed your chance! The book itself is the standard cover price of £19.99 and we can send it anywhere in the world (P&P within the UK is a flat-rate of £5 while elsewhere depends on weight). If you’d like to reserve a copy or arrange a mail order just drop us a line at info@goshlondon.com and we’ll sort it out.

Published 16th of February, 2012.

Due To Arrive 01/02/12

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

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The Gosh! Authority 24/01/12

Photo by Joel Meadows

Well, we never thought Craig Thompson would have a sit-down chat with every single person in the signing line when we were organising the thing for a mere two-hour time-slot. But that’s what he did, and he didn’t scrimp on the sketches either. Gosh! customer Bruce Marsh gave us a look at just what was going on with those brush pens:

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In Store 19/01/12 – 25/01/12

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Kramers Ergot 8 and De Profundis Launch Signing at Gosh!

Sammy Harkham’s seminal anthology returns in a more tube-friendly/less life-rafty format this February. While the last long-sold-out Kramers brought together over 60 artists, this new 232-page full-colour volume has been pared down to just eighteen. “I wanted a book that was lean (physically, conceptually, aesthetically),” said Harkham (Crickets) over at Publishers Weekly. At Comicbook Resources you can see Comics Journal editor/PictureBox mastermind Dan Nadel interview the man on telly (sort of).

Those eighteen contributors include Anya Davidson, Leon Sadler, Ben Jones, C.F., Sammy Harkham himself, Tim Hensley, Kevin Huizenga, Takeshi Murata, Robert Beatty, Chris Cilla, Gabrielle Bell, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw, and Gary Panter, all doing brand new stuff. There’s also a 40-page reprint of Oh! Wicked Wanda from the 1970s, which is of particular interest to us because its writer is one of three creators joining us at Gosh! for a signing.

Frederic Mullally is now 93 years old and is the kind of guy Wikipedia was made for. In addition to the comic strip that I’ll get to in a minute, Mullally’s career as a journalist led him to be the sole member of press to get an interview with Prince Rainier of Monaco and Grace Kelly on their honeymoon, and as the head of his own PR firm he represented the likes of Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra (!). His first novel was published in 1958 and between subsequent books he wrote the strip for Penthouse magazine that you can find in Kramers Ergot 8. It’s illustrated by Ron Embleton of TV Century 21’s Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

Leon Sadler produces strange and experimental comics of his own while also publishing zines at Famicon Express. If you head on over to his website you’ll no doubt recognise a lot of them from the Gosh! small press shelves. You can check his work out here.

James Jarvis is not part of Kramers Ergot (though Nadel did ask him — “[It was] an invitation I was too lazy and stupid to take up,” he said) and is probably best known for his vinyl toy designs, most famously the character Martin (Computer Arts magazine have a big old interview with him). Most recently on the Gosh! shelves was De Profundis, his first graphic novel in five years, about an artist who travels through a wilderness to arrive at an abandoned city. He’ll be signing copies of that one which is reviewed here and previewed at PictureBox.

Frederic Mullally, Leon Sadler and James Jarvis will be appearing at Gosh! on Saturday the 11th of February from 2pm until 3pm. We’ll have loads of books available on the day but if you’d like to put in a pre-order feel free to drop us a line at info@goshlondon.com.

As for the title: ever wondered what it means? Harkham bursts a bubble over at Publisher’s Weekly. “The title is nonsense. I dropped the apostrophe because it didn’t look as good visually as it did with it on the cover of #1. The ‘ergot’ in the title is not Latin, but the bacteria that grows on rye.”

Saturday 11th February, 2pm to 3pm.
All images courtesy the artist and PictureBox

Due To Arrive 25/01/12

Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.

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The Gosh! Authority 17/01/12

We’re currently unpacking this week’s delivery but before I tell you what’s coming out of the boxes there’s some other important event stuff to mention:

Our Craig Thompson signing is happening this Saturday the 21st of January so cancel your plans and come hang out here for an hour or two. If you want even more Thompson you can catch him in conversation with Marcel Theroux (remember when he visited Gosh?) at the St Albans Centre near Holborn. It’s part of the Comica festival and will cost you 8 earth pounds. Head over to Paul Gravett’s website for more info and tickets.

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In Store 12/01/12 – 18/01/12

Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.

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Brooklyn Dreams

“Remember when you were little, and bedroom shadows loomed like monsters, and you thought sometimes that your parents weren’t your parents at all?

Remember when you hated school, hated your parents, hated everything except stray dogs, illicit substances, and the Beatles?

Remember when? Vincent Carl Santini does… or at least he thinks he does. And now he’s ready to spill the story of his checkered past – a story that embraces life, death, and everything in between – exactly the way he wants to remember it.”

Brooklyn Dreams by J.M. DeMatteis and Glenn Barr. £29.99.