On Saturday the 8th of December we’ve got British comics dude Warren Pleece (one half of the Pleece brothers) in the shop signing copies of his new book The Great Unwashed – a hardcover anthology 25 years in the making. Here’s the spiel:

The Great Unwashed by Gary and Warren Pleece, published by Escape Books, brings together comically poignant and darkly sarcastic stories of washed-up comedians, prancing rock stars, obsessive compulsive collectors, terrible teenage poets, dead souls, dysfunctional double-acts and decaying sea-side splendour, all into one ‘bumper-packed’, ink laden graphic novel.

Featuring works originally seen in their very own comic mag, Velocity, Escape, Crisis and Revolver magazines, alongside previously unpublished and new work spanning over twenty years, the Pleece Brothers bring you their own slanted take on popular (and unpopular) culture, in glorious black and white and worn out watercolours.

There’s a preview over at Warren’s site.

If you’d like to reserve a copy or want to arrange a signed book/mail order send us an email to info@goshlondon.com and we’ll sort one out for you.

Warren Pleece signing The Great Unwashed
Saturday the 8th of December, 5 – 6pm

The last time we had Bryan Lee O’Malley in our shop was just before he got all gussied up for the red carpet premiere of Scott Pilgrim. That was two years ago so it’s about time we had him back — he still hasn’t seen our fancy new shop! This time he’s joined at the signing table by his phenomenally talented wife, Hope Larson, so you’re getting two great creators for the price of one signing line. It’s all happening on Friday the 7^th of December, from 5pm to 7pm and you are invited. Find out who borrowed your Scott Pilgrims, ring them up and demand them back. You need to bring these tea-spattered and much-loved volumes along to Gosh! Comics and you can tell them we said so. But! If you’re new to the world of Larson and O’Malley and have no need to make demanding phonecalls, perhaps you would like to purchase some of these on the day instead:

From the Larson shelf you can have Gray Horses, her first book after the web-syndicated Salamander Dream (which is sadly unavailable), Chiggers, a story about summer camp reviewed here by Geeks of Doom, and it’s spiritual successor Mercury reviewed at Shelf Abuse. Her latest book is a comics adaptaion of Madeline L’Engle‘s 1962 science-fiction novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Over at MTV Geek she talks about being a lifelong L’Engle fan and about the pressures of adapting well-loved stuff like this one. Lots of preview pages in that link.

And from O’Malley you can have Lost at Sea, a road trip story from 2003, and all six Scott Pilgrim volumes. And! If you already own all the Scott Pilgrim volumes you might also be tempted at the last minute when you see the new colour hardcover editions — volumes 1 and 2 for £18.99 a pop.

If you can’t make it on the day and would like to request a signed book then send us an email to info@goshlondon.com and we’ll sort it out for you.

Friday, December 7

5pm to 7pm

Hope Larson & Bryan Lee O’Malley

On Saturday the 24th of November we’re having a tag-team signing with two stellar British artists behind the great old 2000AD/DC Comics crossover: Batman/Judge Dredd! It’ll be three days before the official release date of the fancy new hardcover edition so come grab a signed copy hot off the press:

It collects Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment On Gotham, Vendetta In Gotham, The Ultimate Riddle, Die Laughing and Lobo/Judge Dredd: Psycho Bikers Vs. Mutants From Hell, by Alan Grant and John Wagner, with art by Cam Kennedy, Carl Critchlow, Jim Murray, Val Semeiks, John Dell and our guests Simon Bisley and Glenn Fabry. This blog fills you in on the history of the thing: the delays, the fill-ins, the long nights of strong coffee and paint.

Bisley’s fully-painted artwork can be found in the first Batman and Judge Dredd huge hit crossover, Judgement on Gotham in the early 90s. He’s best known for ABC Warriors, Lobo and Slaine and can be seen these days mostly on the covers (and sometimes the insides) of Hellblazer.

Fabry painted the sequel, Die Laughing, and is currently on our shelves with Steve Niles in the new five-part horror series, Lot 13. He’s also worked with Neil Gaiman on Sandman: Endless Nights, Garth Ennis on The Authority: Kev, Kevin Smith on Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target, and illustrated Pat Mills’ Slaine for 2000AD. His covers have graced the likes of Preacher, Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, and Hellblazer too.

We’ll have piles of the book available on the day but if you’d like to reserve a copy (or can’t make the signing and would like to get one scribbled on by Fabry and Bisley) send us an email to info@goshlondon.com and we’ll sort it out.

See you there!

2000 AD and Gosh! Comics Present
The Batman / Judge Dredd Collection Signing
Glenn Fabry - Simon Bisley
Gosh Comics, 1 Berwick Street, London
24th November 2-4pm

There’s so much good stuff coming from our pals at Nobrow that if we had separate parties for everything we’d all be too drunk and useless to run a comic shop. So we’re having a three-in-one. Luke Pearson, Jon McNaught and Kyle Platts will be here at Gosh! on November 23rd to sign and launch their respective books in one big two-hour flurry of Sharpie pens, beer and fizzy wine. Are you coming? Let us introduce our guests.

Luke Pearson’s third Hilda book, Hilda and The Bird Parade has just landed on the shelves. This one sees Hilda ends up with a talking amnesiac raven and neither of them knows the way home. Preview over at Pearson’s site.

Dockwood by Jon McNaught really needs nothing else said about it when you’ve got Chris Ware saying things like: “There are few younger comics artists with whom I feel a genuine aesthetic kinship, but the radiant and glowing Dockwood is Jon McNaught’s loveliest argument yet for the beauty of just being alive. It’s a gem.”

Kyle Platts’ Megaskull has been out since September so if you’ve got a copy, skip to the end. Still here? Do you like stuff like Johnny Ryan? This is a book you need on your shelf. Here’s a preview.

Come and drink booze and buy books and meet the guys who did them! Three in one go!

Friday, 23rd November. 7pm – 9pm.

Remember that thing we did earlier this year for Free Comic Book Day? Where we got a bunch of artists to come in with their pencil cases, draw all over our windows then sit down at the big Gosh! table and drew cartoons with kids all day? Sarah McIntyre (Vern & Lettuce) was one of those amazing pen-wielders and has some pictures over at her blog. Missed it? Don’t miss this next event then because we’re doing it again!

It’s not for Free Comic Book Day this time but for stellar weekly kids’ mag, The Phoenix. If you’re yet to pick up a copy of The Phoenix we urge you do so so forthwith for the benefit of your wee one, especially if you’re still mourning the loss of the much-loved DFC. As they say on their website, it’s aimed at 8 to 11 year olds but they’ve got fans as young as three and I’ve seen dudes in suits buying it for themselves. It’s full of weekly strips, long-running stories, one-off strips, competitions and all sorts, by the likes of Jamie Smart, Dave Shelton, Nick Abadzis, Kate Brown, Simone Lia, Chris Riddell and more, for £2.99 a pop. For a full contributor list head this way.

On Saturday the 3rd of November we’re having three Phoenix artists – Neill Cameron, Lorenzo Etherington and Gary Northfield – come over and plaster our windows in cartoons and ink. If you’re aged between 6 and 13, come on down and draw some stuff with people who get to draw stuff as their actual job. It’s FREE! And you can ask them how to be a cartoonist. They’re captive and have to be nice to you.

(All photos are from Free Comic Book Day and stolen from Sarah McIntyre.)

Anyone who’s picked up a copy of UK music newspaper The Stool Pigeon has probably said to themselves “Has uh… has Nick Cave seen this?”

London-based artist Krent Able’s Doctor Cave comics are just some of the batsh*t nonsense collected in his Big Book of Mischief. A selection of spoilers follows: Lou Reed has some trouble with monkeys, Johnny Cash has some drug-related impotence issue, Kraftwerk get shrunk, and Satan crushes Lilly Allen. All of it is stylishly drawn, lettered in a way that makes you think of Dan Clowes, and it’s all completely obscene.

“So far, I’ve been allowed completely off the leash – they just let me get on with it, and the only limits seem to be my own sense of decency. If I didn’t have complete freedom there’d be no point in doing it. Sometimes I think I might have gone too far, like in the Goldfrapp story, when I drew the editor and art director naked and saggy bollocked, living in a filthy hole and eating faeces, but they didn’t bat an eyelid, just asked me to change an incorrect Oxford comma. There’s just no insulting some people.”  The rest of that interview – and a choice panel featuring Goldfrapp that I would be sacked for featuring here – is this way.

On Tuesday the 20th of November we’re launching the book with a party and signing here in the shop. Then when we run out of booze we’ll kick you out and direct you southwards to Brewer Street whereupon you can handover £5 (or £3 if you wave a copy of the book around) to Madame Jojo’s for a post-launch club night with White Heat. Krent himself will be treating you to a DJ set, and there’ll be live music from the likes of Vision Fortune, BITCHES, and main headliners: Teeth of the Sea. Don’t leave your book in the toilet.

Also: the first 200 people to pick up a copy of Krent Able’s Big Book of Mischief will have an exclusive signed bookplate edition in their hands. If you’d like one reserved or mailed out to you just bung me an email at info@goshlondon.com. Here’s what it looks like:

“Krent Able was the name of my imaginary childhood friend – he used to encourage me to do bad things, unnatural acts etc. so I thought it was fitting that I used his name for the comics. He’s 3 and a half feet tall, has big Spock ears and teeth like a wild boar.”

When Fun Home landed in 2006, Alison Bechdel was best known for her newspaper comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. Fun Home suddenly turned her into a best-selling and critically acclaimed author, landing her on best-of-year lists all over the place: The New York Times, Publishers Weekly. It was about her father’s not-quite-repressed homosexuality and suspected suicide, went on to win a bunch of awards, but abjectly failed to do what Bechdel had originally set out to do: “I had this fantasy that this book was going to heal us and bring us all together. I was going to tell the truth and everything would be out in the open.

That didn’t happen.”

And then earlier this year, she went and did it again with Are You My Mother? – another memoir, this time focusing on her (still alive) mother. “It’s a strange, exhibitionistic streak in a person who … I consider myself pretty shy and retiring. I don’t know why I’m compelled to reveal these things in public.”

“I learned during the research for Are You My Mother?, and also instinctively from my experience being a human, [that] mothers are just more difficult than fathers. It’s a much more fraught and complex relationship for everyone whether you’re male or female because this is someone who you’re physically a part of. And so it became very confounding for me, trying to sort that out. The psychoanalyst who I write a lot about in the book, Winnicott, wrote that the mother must be dismantled whereas the father can be murdered. And I feel like somehow I murdered my dad, and that was really a walk in the park. That was so much easier than dismantling my mother.”

There are reviews of her latest everywhere, and here is just one of them.

Alison Bechdel will be here to sign copies of any and all of her books on Tuesday, November 13th, 5pm to 7pm. Don’t miss it.

Alison Bechdel Signing

Dykes To Watch Out For – Fun Home – Are You My Mother?

November 13 

5pm – 7pm

Gosh! Comics, Soho.

Jason Aaron is a frequent and easy recommendation here at Gosh!: there’s his Native American crime series Scalped from Vertigo to point at, plus all the stuff he’s done on Ghost Rider, Punisher Max, and Wolverine. Most recently he’s been dishing out what our own Nathaniel calls “proper comics” in Wolverine & The X-Men, another oft-recommended title. If you’re a CV-enthusiast you can count his Eisner and Harvey nominations among his credentials too.

In November, he’s coming to England and you’ve got not one but two opportunities to meet him. If you’re the kind of person who thinks it’s alright to go out in nowt but a T-shirt in February, you can catch him in Leeds as part of increasingly brilliant Thought Bubble festival (along with dozens of other top names like Kate Beaton and that). But if you’re staying down south with us, make sure you’re here on the 15th of November at 5pm to get your stuff signed by an American in a beard.

Thursday, November 15th
5pm – 7pm

Oliver Jeffers is probably best known to you through his stellar children’s books — like Lost And Found, How To Catch a Star, The Heart and the Bottle — all of which have a regular home on the Gosh! shelves. But it turns out he does other stuff too, and we had no idea.

Neither Here Nor There is a big hardcover collection bringing together the last decade’s worth of Jeffers’ fine art and he’s coming to Gosh! to tell us all about it.

There’s a big interview with him over at Notes From the Undergound. Go see what you’re in for and then come along on Monday the 1st of October where you can find him in conversation with Lisa Dwan at 7:30pm. You’ll also have a chance to ask him some questions of your own before the night is over, and we’ll have lots of his books for sale including the brand new one previewed at Gestalten.