Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.
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First up, IMPORTANT BORING STUFF: [Blah blah Bank Holiday Monday blah blah delay] This week’s comics are arriving on Wednesday ie. the same day we put them on the shelf. They could arrive late in the afternoon, or early in the morning, my point being: nobody actually knows but the truck driver. If you’re able to wait until Thursday to pop your cheery face through the door that would probably be a better idea.

Onward!

Given that the International Alternative Press Festival was held over the weekend just around the corner from this very shop, it make sense that the best stuff on the shelf is of the hand-delivered, self-published variety (mostly dropped in by the artists themselves on the way home from said festival). Becky Cloonan’s Wolves arrived in a FedEx box of course, but that’s no reason to discount it:

“Anyone who has been following my blog for a while might remember that last year I published this short story in an anthology me and some friends published in Japan for a convention in Tokyo – it was originally in Japanese; this version will be in English, and will have a few added pages,” Cloonan said on her blog a while back when she was still looking for a printer. Inside Pulse has a review and tells you what it’s all about. It’s a limited, screen-printed and signed edition of only 1000 copies so if you fancy one you’d best hurry in.

The second issue of The Comix Reader is piled high on the Gosh! counter, full of one-pagers by those you’ll have seen in the previous issue (Lord Hurk, Ellen Lindner et al) as well as new additions to the line-up including our very own ridiculously talented Mr Barnaby Richards. If you missed the first issue here’s Richard Cowdry, the brains behind the whole operation, telling you what the point of it all is:

Hey Comix Reader dudes!
Put some previews on The Internet or I will continue to use year-old flyers!
Love, Hayley

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Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.
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Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.
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Everyone grabbed a copy of Paying For It last week before I got a chance to nab one for myself, so if you (like me) are waiting on news of a restock: this is it. Come get ‘em.

Joining it on the new shelves is Vertigo’s Strange Adventures #1, a science fiction anthology featuring all new stuff by Peter Milligan (Hellblazer), Scott Snyder (American Vampire) and Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth), plus the very first chapter of Spaceman (a new series by 100 Bullets creators Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso), all topped off with a cover by Paul Pope (100%, Heavy Liquid).

Comics Alliance have a full contents page for those who like to open their presents early, but it’s all quiet on the preview front.

Back in 1999/2000 Peter Bagge (Hate) and Gilbert Hernandez (Love & Rockets) teamed up for Yeah! – a nine-issue all-ages series about an intergalactically famous girl group who were totally unknown on their home planet Earth.

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Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.
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Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.
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Chester Brown’s Paying For It has arrived and I’ve been instructed not to say anything rude on the Gosh! Blog. Let’s see how long that lasts.

It’s an autobiographical book about prostitution and being a john from the guy who did I Never Liked You. I can’t remember the last time a book arrived with such anticipation heaped before it (probably it’s because Chester Brown is excellent and the last time we saw a book from him was five long years ago – Louis Riel, an A+ piece of work). There are interviews all over the place but the most extensive one comes courtesy of The Comics Journal. Brown talks about how Dave Sim’s famously misogynistic rant section in Cerebus #186 had an effect on how he viewed romantic relationships:

“Up until [Cerebus #186] I just kind of accepted [that] everyone’s supposed to have a girlfriend and that’s the natural order. If you don’t have a girlfriend, you’re a loser. That’s what men do, they either have girlfriends or they marry—well, as long as you’re heterosexual. So, reading Cerebus #186, even though I didn’t agree with all the misogynistic views—I didn’t agree that women are inferior, all that stuff—still, here was a guy who was looking at male-female relationships in a different way. It kind of showed me, you don’t have to think like everyone else thinks about these things. Part of it was that I respected Dave a whole lot, and I knew him, and I thought he was very intelligent. That issue of Cerebus was a bombshell in a lot of ways. Like a lot of people at the time, I wasn’t sure, “Is he kidding? Is this a joke? Is he serious?” But it got me re-evaluating the whole male-female dynamic, and thinking about it in a different way, even if my conclusions are different from Dave’s.”

“Marriage is such a ridiculous, outdated institution that it almost doesn’t seem worth the energy to point out how stupid it is,” says Brown in another interview in the Montreal Gazette.

Jeet Heer, a friend of Brown’s (“Chester’s sex life has long been a staple of amused and amazed conversation in my social circle”) writes a guest column at Canada’s Globe and Mail. “Ultimately,” he says, “sex work should be considered a trade, like auto repair or journalism. (Some people will never accept it; then again, some people will always hate the media, or mistrust their mechanics.)”

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