Blending intimate memoir with literary biography, the Talbots’ latest offering is a beautifully-rendered study both of Mary M Talbot’s own life and her exploration of the story of Lucia Joyce, the troubled daughter of novelist James. Gosh! is proud to announce that it is the latest title to boast one of our celebrated exclusive bookplates, and that it is released tomorrow, Wednesday 1st February.
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 (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.
Sorry to say this bookplate edition is now SOLD OUT. There are plenty of unsigned copies available.
This November, a 54-strong army of British comics creators launch Nelson, an experimental, collaborative, biography of a girl called Nel.
London, 1968. A daughter is born to Jim and Rita Baker. Her name is Nel. This is her story, told in yearly snapshots. Each chapter records the events of a single day, weaving one continuous ribbon of pictures and text that takes us on a 43- year journey from Nel Baker’s birth to 2011.
The cream of the UK comics community each take a day in her life, beginning with her birth in 1968, and wing their way through her biography in a sort of art relay race, making it up as they go along, much like the surrealists’ exquisite corpse. “The idea came from wanting to do something that reflected the variety and talent in UK comics and also do something unique with the anthology format that created a genuine cover-to-cover read,” said editor Rob Davis (Don Quixote). “The core Nelson idea of using an anthology format to tell a complete story is something I’ve wanted to do for years, it comes from a love of the British anthology titles I grew up with and a novelistic ambition to make all the stories connect.”
Everyone is involved in this unprecedented experiment helmed by Davis and his co-editor Woodrow Phoenix (Rumble Strip). There are people from The Beano, The Dandy, MAD Magazine, children’s books, indie and small press comics, webcomics, 2000AD, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse. Just look at this list:
Paul Grist, Rob Davis, Woodrow Phoenix, Ellen Lindner, Jamie Smart, Gary Northfield, Sarah McIntyre, Suzy Varty, Sean Longcroft, Warwick Johnson–Cadwell, Luke Pearson, Paul Harrison–Davies, Katie Green, Paul Peart–Smith, Glyn Dillon, I.N.J.Culbard, John Allison, Philip Bond, D’Israeli, Simone Lia, Darryl Cunningham, Jonathan Edwards, Ade Salmon, Kate Charlesworth, Warren Pleece, Kristyna Baczynski, HarveyJames, Rian Hughes, Sean Phillips & Pete Doree, Kate Brown, Simon Gane, Jon McNaught, Adam Cadwell, Faz Choudhury, JAKe, Jeremy Day, Dan McDaid, Roger Langridge, Will Morris, Dave Shelton, Carol Swain, Hunt Emerson, Duncan Fegredo, Philippa Rice, Josceline Fenton, Garen Ewing, Tom Humberstone , Dan Berry,Alice Duke, Posy Simmonds, Laura Howell, Andi Watson, and Dave Taylor.
To celebrate the release of this ambitious project from Blank Slate featuring dozens of Gosh! favourites, we’re letting them loose in the shop with pens and paint. They’ll be making their mark on our windows over the space of five days (20th – 25th of November), mirroring the relay race that led to the book’s birth. And when they’re done, we’ll toast their mighty efforts.
THEN
NELSON IS GO!
Signing, Exhibition Opening and Launch Party
25th November
Events kick off at 6pm with a signing
line-up includes:
Roger Langridge, Rian Hughes, Sarah McIntyre, Woodrow Phoenix, Rob Davis
and a host of other Nelsonists.
We’ll have Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Editions available on the night featuring art by Frank Quitely (Batman & Robin) signed and numbered by the man himself. It’s limited to just 200 copies so if you’d like one send an email to us at info@goshlondon.com and we’ll sort out the rest. It costs no more than the cover price of £18.99, and all proceeds on the book go to Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, a very good thing indeed. If you’d like to arrange a mail order we can do that too: it’s a flat-rate of £5 anywhere in the UK (elsewhere depends on weight).
Sorry to say this signed edition has now SOLD OUT. But we have plenty of unbookplated ones.
Since the release of his semi-autobiographical masterpiece Blankets back in 2003, Craig Thompson has been working on a hugely ambitious book called Habibi. He devoted two years to drawing a thumbnailed first draft, immersed himself in Islamic culture, Arabian Nights and a mountain of research — all resulting in a richly detailed story from elsewhere. Like Blankets, Habibi is a story about love in a deeply religious environment (the literal translation of “habibi” is “my beloved”) – but it’s a far cry from the snowy American Midwest, and set not in the Middle East but somewhere else altogether. “It’s more like a fairytale landscape,” said Thompson to Guernica Magazine, who have an 11-page preview.
Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, HABIBI tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them.
At once contemporary and timeless, HABIBI gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.
“The book is borrowing self-consciously Orientalist tropes from French Orientalist paintings and the Arabian Nights,” said Thompson. “I’m aware of their sensationalism and exploitation, but wanted to juxtapose the influence of Islamic arts with this fantastical Western take. This is a constant theme in the book of juxtaposing the sacred and profane. As for the latter concern, I didn’t consider it much as I personally ascribe to a sort of “magical” worldview rather than rational. The book is concerned with the connectivity of everything.”
We have 200 Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Editions featuring art created just for this purpose, signed and numbered by Thompson himself. At no extra cost than the £20 cover price, this is definitely one you won’t want to miss. If you’d like to arrange a mail order* or have a copy held aside for you, send us an email to info@goshlondon.com.
“Comics can now embrace their natural tendencies to be quiet. They’re like letters. No one writes letters anymore, but they’re actually written by hand. And graphic novels are like that. One person draws every picture. The drawing turns into writing and the writing turns into something visual. It’s something readers consume on their own. It’s not like when you go to your local theater and have a movie sort of wash over you. You take it in intimately at your own pace—like a handwritten letter.”
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*A small note on mail orders: postage within the UK is a flat-rate of £5 so you can add some other stuff to your copy of Habibi and we’ll charge you no extra for the weight. We can send you stuff anywhere in the world but because Habibi is so heavy the postage ends up being greater than the cost of the book itself. If that sort of thing doesn’t worry you then send us an email and let me know where you’d like it sent. I will give you your own personally tailored heart attack.
We’ve been waiting so long for this book that not only has the dinner gone cold and been thrown in the bin, we’d very nearly turned out the lights and gone to bed. To celebrate its long awaited and very welcome arrival on our doorstep we thought we’d do something mighty special indeed.
The latest installment of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s hit series is on the presses as I type and due to be on a boat leaving Hong Kong on the 19th of June. It should be in all UK book and comic shops in the week of the 25th of July providing no pirates or fans gone mad with impatience inexpertly commandeer the ship and crash it on foreign shores, littering the sea with psychedelic colours and leagues of extraordinary gentlemen.
Gosh!’s Bookplate Editions are usually limited to just the one volume of a series or stand-alone graphic novel. Never before have we done what we’re about to do. The talented Mr O’Neill is busy illustrating a triptych of mini-prints for each part of the current series, available exclusively at Gosh! and limited to 1000 copies of each. It’s a mighty hike up from the usual 200 copies but that’s just because the demand for this thing is so deservedly huge, and we hate to see disappointment on your wee faces.
Another addition to our stellar line-up of Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Editions is the second instalment of Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan’s Eisner-nominated Demo. This trade-paperback collects all six issues of the hugely popular second series, complete with an amazing Gosh! Exclusive Cloonan-illustrated bookplate to make you want it even more.
The original influential indie series was made up of twelve isolated stories all revolving around the lives of young people: their relationships, emotions and lives. Wood had intended to focus on characters with supernatural powers, but this side of things wasn’t as heavily present as it is in this second series: “These stories have a lot more of a supernatural flair than anything else,” he said, in an interview with Comicbook Resources. “It’s not so much superpowers, it’s supernatural.”
We’re huge fans of Mike Allred here at Gosh! so if you’ve been paying attention you might have seen this coming.
Chris Roberson, a long-time fan of comics, wrote several novels and short stories before breaking into the business with last year’s Fables miniseries, Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love. He’s since gone on to write a comics prequel to Philip K. Dick’s most famous novel, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Dust to Dust. More importantly though, he’s collaborated with the top notch Gosh! Favourite Allred on Vertigo’s “urban fantasy romantic dramedy” iZombie, about a twenty-something gravedigger called Gwen Dylan.
“Gwen quickly learned that, unless she ate a human brain once a month, she would lose her own memories and personality and quickly become a shambling zombie straight out of a George Romero film. But she doesn’t want to hurt anyone, so instead of attacking the living, she gets a job as a gravedigger at an eco-friendly cemetery (because embalming fluid tastes icky), and once a month she sneaks in and digs up the freshest body for a quick bite,” says Roberson, in an interview with Newsarama.
For a whole week after eating the brain Gwen shares her headspace with the memory and personality of that dead person. If they left any unfinished business she sets about finishing it for them.
“It could be that the dead person was murdered, and Gwen is compelled to catch the killer. Or it’s a single mother whose last will and testament has gone missing, so Gwen has to find it so that her kids are sent to live with her sister out-of-state, and not to an orphanage. Or a guy who dies before reconciling with his estranged father and Gwen has to find a way to mend fences between the man and his dead son.”
Laura Allred provides the colours, as usual, so it’s a visual feast to boot.
Still not sure if it’s up your street?
“I think it will appeal to two groups of people: Those who like zombie books, and those who don’t like zombie books,” said Roberson. “There’s a lot going on in iZombie, and if a reader isn’t crazy about the kick-ass kung-fu scene, there’s a tender romantic moment in just a few more pages. Or if they get bored with the scene with two girls talking about their favourite kind of food, hang on a minute because one of them is about to eat a brain.”
iZombie Volume 1 Dead To The World TP contains the first five issues of the series, plus the prequel that appeared in the House of Mystery Halloween Annual which you can read online at Comicvine. Points for anyone who spots the Madman reference.
We’ll have a strictly limited 200 copies of the Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition, signed and numbered by Roberson and both Allreds for the standard cover price of £10.99. If you’d like to reserve a copy or arrange a mail order just drop us a line at info@goshlondon.com.
POSTAGE RATES:
UK/Europe – £5.00
USA/Australia/New Zealand - £7.00
If you’d like it posted anywhere else in the world let us know and we’ll give you a quote.
Available from the 16th of March, 2011.
Gosh! Favourites Gabriel Bá (The Umbrella Academy) and Fábio Moon’s (Casanova) first creator owned series from Vertigo made huge waves in the world of comics. It’s about a young guy called Brás, a writer of newspaper obituaries. Each of the ten issues looks in at a different moment in his life – from 32 to 48 to 18 and so on – letting the reader take a daytrip in one man’s existence. And at the end of each issue, he dies.
“A lot of the stuff that happens to us happens to everybody. Everyone tries and struggles to find out what they want in life. There are defining moments when you are growing up that tell you who you are and what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. And those are the types of moments that are in the comic.”
– Fábio Moon
The story is set in Bá and Moon’s natural Brazil, which sets it apart from every other comic out there. “When you’re done, you actually feel like you’ve been to another land. You get the flair and flavour of another culture. And they sing to your heart. You read the story, and every character is alive. Everything is pulled from real life. And you get Brazil. You get the culture. You’re seeped in their daily lives, and you feel like you’ve taken a trip into another culture,” said editor Bob Schreck in an interview with Newsarama.
It’s a book about one man’s everything, from his loves to his deaths and all the things in between. If you’ve not read it before you can have the first eight pages for free. Craig Thompson (Blankets, Carnet De Voyage) provides the introduction to the collection.
In February, we’ll have a strictly limited 200 copies of the Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition which features art by Fábio Moon. It’s signed and numbered by both Bá and Moon and you can have it for just the standard cover price of £14.99. If you’d like to reserve a copy or arrange a mail order just drop us a line at info@goshlondon.com.
Due February 3, 2011.
“Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.”
Everyone’s heard of Hunter S. Thompson – the man was mythical in his own lifetime, undoubtedly more so now he’s gone. His legendary adventures birthed a style of journalism now synonymous with his name. He’s an icon and a vital force in the history of the 20th century. But you know all this.
Newcomers Will Bingley and Anthony Hope-Smith fill in the bits you maybe don’t know in their debut graphic novel Gonzo from the same publishing house that brought you that other excellent biography, Cash: I See a Darkness.
“Of course everyone is painfully aware of Hunter’s persona in popular culture and to an extent the Gonzo mythos is a terrible mis-representation of the man,” says Bingley.
“Thompson caricatured himself to the point of self-parody, and it sadly became the perception among his many detractors that this was indeed the man himself. We wanted to reflect that aspect of his character, where relevant, but to also peel back the curtain to show the man,” says Hope-Smith, whose beautifully European styled artwork is totally Gosh! approved.
The book is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, and over at the SelfMadeHero website you can see both Bingley and Hope-Smith blogging about Thompson, the book, and their working methods. In fact if you’re thinking of writing a comic yourself Bingley gives you his Nine Rules of Writing Comics that he implores you to ignore.
We have a strictly limited 200 copies of the Gosh! Exclusive Bookplate Edition signed and numbered by both authors for just the standard cover price of £14.99. If you’d like to reserve a copy or arrange a mail order just drop us a line at info@goshlondon.com.
