ALERT! ALERT!
At the time of typing Page 45 has an exclusive, swoonaway, signed bookplate drawn by Duncan Fegredo printed on lush watercolour stock. It’s limited to 150 copies, we’ve pre-sold 50 and then there’s the launch party signing on its very day of publication on Wednesday 23rd October (the day we are publishing this review) so I would be pretty swift about this, people!
– Stephen on Hellboy: Midnight Circus
Lazarus vol 1 s/c (£7-50, Image) by Greg Rucka & Michael Lark.
Welcome to the near future.
The economy didn’t just collapse, it imploded taking countries, governments and old national borders with it. Now territories are ruled by those with the most money, for money buys food, money buys guns and money buys people.
These are the Families for we’ve gone feudal again, and family feuds are what this book’s all about.
The Family Carlyle have invested heavily in augmentation technology, bestowing it on loyal daughter Forever who now acts as their ultimate protection. She’s been trained to the peak of human physical fitness, in both armed and unarmed combat. She has enhanced regenerative capabilities closely monitored and backed up at base.
But all is not well within the Family Carlyle. There are vipers in the proverbial nest who may indeed prove sharper than a Shakespearian serpent’s tooth just as it seem another Family is breaking their truce and attacking Carlyle assets so threatening a costly, all-out war. Lastly, there is a secret within the Family Carlyle that not all are privvy to, one which may prove their undoing.
Lord, how I love Michael Lark. He’s worked with Greg Rucka before on GOTHAM CENTRAL alongside Ed Brubaker, and Ed Brubaker’s run on DAREDEVIL. His forms are lithe, his shadows are sexy and brooding, not dissimilar to Sean Phillips’ on FATALE, and there’s plenty of penumbral here. His choreography is as slick as you like, vital for a book with so much close combat. Meanwhile the sunrises and sunsets coloured by Santi Arcas are rich in orange and purples
Greg Rucka has thought long and hard about the world he has built, both its economic and class structure, and the science which he has extrapolated from daily current breakthroughs. There is so much potential here for a series as long-form as SAGA, but don’t think book one is mere set-up. A family nest is a compact thing and in such close proximity secrets aren’t easily to hide.
SLH
Buy Lazarus vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here
Hellboy Midnight Circus h/c (£10-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola & Duncan Fegredo.
“But he wanted to be a real boy.”
ALERT! ALERT!
At the time of typing Page 45 has an exclusive, swoonaway, signed bookplate drawn by Duncan Fegredo printed on lush watercolour stock. It’s limited to 150 copies, we’ve pre-sold 50 and then there’s the launch party signing on its very day of publication on Wednesday 23rd October (the day we are publishing this very review) so I would be pretty swift about this, people!
Shivers ran up my spine, tears welled up in my eyes. A gulp got stuck in my throat: I probably shouldn’t have been drinking.
1948 at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence, it’s late at night and quiet.
Scampering secretly through the sleepy, well appointed HQ, a very young Hellboy, his horns still intact, overhears himself being talked of as a terrible threat. It’s all there in the Visions & Revelations of one Arnot De Falvy:
“I saw a city, silent as a tomb, barren as dry bones, and the angel said, “This is Desolation”. And I went down into it and the only living thing there was the creature… In most ways it had the shape and character of a man and was not terrible to look upon… But then I saw in its right hand it held the key to the bottomless pit.”
So young Hellboy does what you would do at this covert equivalent of a boarding school: he runs away. And something is there to greet him, to entreat him, to seduce and reduce the poor boy to tears.
When the Midnight Circus first appears, the impact is halting. Young Hellboy crouches overlooking through a dry-stone wall the valley the circus’ gigantic tent has been erected in. He’s inked in Fegredo’s Mingola-inspired trademark stark shadows, whereas the circus itself is swathed in misty, miasmatic watercolours as will be everything that transpires within. It’s mesmerising.
And, oh, what the young boy discovers inside. Whom the young Hellboy discovers inside! SPOILERS!
Have you read Pinnochio?
There is so much to commend this graphic, not least of all Duncan Fegredo’s swoonaway art. Long have I compared his gesticulations, dramatically angled wrists and hefty, heavy, laden hands to the mighty French sculptor Rodin. That’s not something I do lightly. But here it suddenly struck me how similar his women are to that of FATALE’s Sean Phillips. And also those washes, as evidenced in our bookplate.
You wait until you see the sunken Galleon.
If you’ve never read HELLBOY before in your life, this is the perfect introduction. It will leave you with questions, yes, but then you have a whole library to explore, all in print and in stock right here, right now.
Mignola has built up a legend which is why this works so well. There has been foreshadowing aplenty and this is another key part of the puzzle.
You’re just a young lad. All you want to do is what’s best, especially as you grow up. Okay, you shouldn’t have had that smoke, you shouldn’t have made that joke and maybe you shouldn’t have run away. But they are your decisions, surely? They can’t affect anyone else.
“Oh, my boy… what have you done?”
SLH
Buy Hellboy Midnight Circus h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Looking Out (£3-99, Hic & Hoc) by Philippa Rice.
Eerie.
Quiet and eerie, this mystery in space almost echoes with melancholy.
On a world that may well be our own but whose landscape is now rigged to the rafters with all manner of spheres, transport systems and other automatic processes, a young women called Lori waits in a crowd for the elevator to come. She looks up and sighs. The building like most is over 2,000 feet tall so no one uses the elevator.
She decides to use the elevator.
That’s how she meets Daniel who reluctantly decides to join her. It’s quite the treck. When they stop to take a breather Lori still has forty-six more floors to while Daniel and fifty. When, after a great deal of mutual encouragement, Lori reaches her door she gives Daniel her number so he can let her know when he’s made it. They begin to text each other, Daniel tentatively, Lori confidently, but when he asks her if she wants to meet up she tells him she’s heading off into space on a work trip.
“Annoying, sorry. – Lori x”
It transpires that this isn’t the first distant voyage and it probably won’t be the last for a very long time to come. Why?
From the creator of ST. COLIN AND THE DRAGON, MY CARDBOARD LIFE, RECYCLOST and – just in! – WE’RE OUT (all signed and sketched in at the time of typing), this will come as a complete surprise, for it is like nothing you’ve seen or felt from Philippa Rice before. It may be black and white line drawing (with grey tone), but it’s still radically different from SOPPY and SOPPY #2 except perhaps for the rosy cheeks and the protagonist’s body form.
The constructions and flora both on and off-world are genuinely alien, with a molten highway hyperstream that cold have been devised by Jack Kirby – I love it when she leaves it – and a cityscape that put me in mind of early Simon Gane. There’s another comparison I’m reaching for that Mark would have been able to put his finger on instantly, but it’s all as brilliantly bizarre in its own way as Yuichi Yokayama’s GARDEN.
As to the sense of space, planetside, and when Lori’s exploring a new world, diligently and undaunted by being the only living creature for what may well be light years, it is vast in spite for being far from empty. And that’s a pretty neat trick to pull off.
This, from American publishers HIC & HOC, was up for an Ignatz Award. Because we had to import it directly from them quantities for this, as for the HIC & HOC ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF HUMOUR VOL 2: THE UNITED KINGDOM curated by Lizz Lunney and Joe List, are strictly limited. There will be no restocks, so please hurry!
SLH
Buy Looking Out and read the Page 45 review here
Moomin: Comic Strips vol 8 h/c (£14-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by Lars Jansson.
“I never thought it was 
so difficult to get wrecked.”
I seem to have no trouble at all.
The Moomin family, however, are struggling to sink their ship. There’s no wind to speak of to bash their boat against the rocks, and the only rocks they can find are far too submerged. There’s not even a decent sandbank in sight.
Only the Moomins would want to beach themselves, but why? Because of their thirst for adventure! It’s what sets so many of their stories en route to delirious disaster: Moominpapa is an insatiable pioneer plus once Moomintroll gets a bee in his bonnet – or an idea into his hippo-like head – he cannot let go, inevitably dragging poor Snorkmaiden along with him while Moominmamma dutifully follows behind, picking up the pieces. She’s rather like Gerald Durrell’s mother in the likes of Birds, Beasts And Relatives, isn’t she?
This time young Moomintroll has become obsessed with Robinson Crusoe, but it’s not just the concept of shipwrecked survival, it’s the very letter of its lore that must be obeyed. They must take everything with them that Robinson Crusoe took, even if it fell to the bottom on the sea like lead and so wasn’t even used.
“Now where shall I get three kegs of gun-powder and ten muskets?”
Once safely shipwrecked Snorkmaiden forages for food leaving Moomintroll to ham-act delirious then despair (it’s all in the book) and drive them all mental with his strict judgements of what other modes of behaviour are or are not genuinely Crusoeish.
I remember my best friend Anita, post-punk to the core, indulging in a packet of peanuts inNottingham’s Dragon Inn. She wore the most beautiful, arm-length, black silk gloves into which she nonchalantly poured the salted contents before picking them off her palm one by one. “NOT terribly gothic!” she said with a moment-relishing smile.
Lars Jansson not only pillories Moomintroll’s manic behaviour but the book itself in which Mr Crusoe Esq failed to fish though surrounded by sea, and never once took a walk around the island.
“He didn’t? How stupid, he might have found anything!”
“But look, he might have found people! He might have been rescued before enough had happened to fill more than a few pages!”
“That’s true.”
As to the cartooning, it’s an exuberant as ever and I loved the strip (for these graphic novels are composed of single-line strips) after which, having irritated the Captain of a ship he’s stowed away on (one that looks rickety enough to sink) with his overenthusiastic pessimism, he sabotages the submerged hull by drilling right through it. The sailors hoist Moomintroll over their heads, pressing him to the top of the ceiling which of course is the panel border itself, and Moomintroll pulls his weight down on it, so wrinkling the very border.
All of which is the tip of the iceberg (which would have been handy): a quick and skinny dip into the first dozen pages. Do enjoy the rest!
[The cover colours as shown are gorgeous, but I’d argue the virtually day-glo orange Drawn & Quarterly have substituted on the spine is even more delicious. It’s turned it into a lemon and tangerine mousse and looks very tasty in our window on these darker days.]
SLH
Buy Moomin: Comic Strips vol 8 h/c and read the Page 45 review here
The Great War: An Illustrated Panorama Of July 1, 1916: The First Day Of The Battle Of The Somme h/c Slipcase Edition (£20-00, Jonathan Cape) by Joe Sacco.
I love my 
comp copies! Originally previewed a few months ago thus:
Clever, clever, clever.
Spectacular, but also clever.
By “spectacular” I mean this accordion-style hardcover folds out into a seamless, ridiculously detailed 24-foot-long panorama silently detailing the events which led up to the Battle Of The Somme, before launching into the offensive itself on July 1st, 1916.
“Almost 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 were wounded that first day, and there were more than one million casualties by the time the offensive halted a few months later.”
It’s clever because although there are no panel borders which leaves the landscape to bleed unstaunched over each successive page, it is nonetheless a comic: it tells the story in precisely the same way with the passage of time represented by space travelled by the eye from left to right.
It kicks off, of course, in the perfect calm and safe, sequestered splendour of General Haig’s personal HQ, the Château de Beaurepaire, where every morning he takes a stroll round the grounds and then, in the afternoons, enjoys a spot of horse-riding escorted by the 17th Lancers. All very orderly. Jolly good!
Gradually the troops who actually have to do the fighting arrive (and by “fighting” I mean charge like sitting ducks onto an open battlefield to be blown to smithereens), along with the heavy artillery, crates of ammunition and fresh supplies. It’s starting to get rather crowded but it’s still lovely and sunny with birds and bi-planes breezing across the sky above open fields, lush coppices and bucolic churches. Look, here comes the infantry, all jovial and jaunty, snaking between officers puffing on pipes and queuing outside a make-shift mess while cannons are being loaded and – yeah…
Welcome to the trenches.
The next sequence is particularly impressive, the shadow of night passing over the miles of maze lit only from the occasional bunker below and explosions in the distance – explosions which, as the sun rises, are growing terrifyingly nearer, obliterating first the horizon then those careering over the top. Suddenly the landscape is no longer flat but pocked with craters, a million man-made volcanoes spewing earth and entrails into the air in a pointlillistic inferno. I think you can guess where it ends.
Every step of the way, Sacco’s art remains perfectly clear and balanced. He does lead the eye but never impedes it which, given the detail and chaos unfolding, is absolutely remarkable. Also, you have to admire the ingenuity with which he brings the background of the battlefield forward by curving the frontline trenches under the bottom edge of the page, so bringing us over the top as well. It recedes behind ruins and the military policemen arresting any soldier leaving the trenches without permission.
If you’re wondering how I know some of these opening and closing details, a 16-page booklet is enclosed which includes an author’s note, an introduction by Adam Hochschild and a reproduction of the plates along the bottom of the pages annotated with these details by Joe Sacco himself.
I honestly believe this will be massive. Well, it is massive: it’s 24 feet long – you could use it as infant’s playroom dado. Give them some crayons to colour it in! However, figure its quality, the anniversary of WWI and the vast numbers of Page 45 customers buying presents for their dads and granddads and – when asked what their relatives are interest in – telling us that both generations are obsessed with war, well, this is what it’s good for: respectfully expressed and powerfully produced protest art.
SLH
The Weirdo Years h/c (£19-99,Knockabout) by Robert Crumb.
Having just retweeted about the phrase “not my thing” and its attempt to diffuse any potential argument and stifle meaningful discussion, I now commit that very crime, for this is very far from my thing. I’ve always enjoyed MR NATURAL and FRITZ THE CAT but, these amazing colour covers aside, a lot of this is far too “heavy” for me. And if you can find a more evasive word than that, good on you.
There plenty of exceptions like ‘Where Has It Gone, All The Beautiful Music Of Our Grandparents?’ in which Crumb laments both the lost age and what was then the present – the New Wave movement he couldn’t abide. He rages at its ubiquity imposed on him in public (oh, how many times did I hear that back then!) but summons a character sympathetic to his alienation who nonetheless challenges his dismissiveness and anger. It’s an autobiographical exploration of Crumb’s ambivalent frustration, hating what he hears yet knowing he shouldn’t get so exasperated and intolerant.
Plus the whole of WEIRDO is highly regarded by those with much bigger brains than I, so I leave you with one such authority, the publisher.
“All Crumb’s work from his very influential WEIRDO magazine. Considered to be some of his best ever work.
WEIRDO was a magazine-sized comics anthology created by Robert Crumb in 1981, which ran for 28 issues. It served as a “low art” counterpoint to its contemporary highbrow Raw. Early issues of Weirdo reflect Crumb’s interests at the time – outsider art, fumetti, Church of the SubGenius-type anti-propaganda and assorted “weirdness.” With issue #10, Crumb later handed over the editing reins to Peter Bagge; with issue #18, the reins went to Crumb’s wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. The three editorial tenures were known respectively as “Personal Confessions,” “Coming of the Bad Boys,” and “Twisted Sisters.”
“The incredibly varied stories include TV Blues, Life of Boswell, People Make me Nervous, The Old Songs are the Best Songs, Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis, Kraft Ebbing’s’ Psycopathia Sexualis, Goldilocks, The Life of Philip K Dick, and many more. Also within are several photo strip stories featuring Crumb himself and various of his trademark well-built women including his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb in tales such as Get in Shape and Unfaithful Husband.
“Includes all his stunning covers from all 28 issues.”
SLH
Buy The Weirdo Years h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Colder vol 1 (£13-50, Dark Horse) by Paul Tobin & Juan Ferreyra.
“These dogs don’t care about fear. You can be as afraid as you want. Just don’t smell insane.”
Mental.
No really, this mental: it’s all about madness and Juan Ferreyra has done a bang-up job of illustrating the impossible, the irrational, the terrible, the physically transitional and all that should be glimpsed from but the corner of your eye.
Once something is seen, it cannot be unseen and therein lies of the peril of a poor, altruistic nurse who took in and cared for a cold, comatose patient abandoned by all after being passed on from one institute to the other, ever obliterating evidence of the long and winding road that brought him to the present from Sansid Asylum, Massachusetts in 1941.
Oh, there are drug trials today, but you volunteer for those. However, there is a long, well documented history that has recently come to light of American authorities conducting drug trials on its black population, plus we all know how those certified insane (or, you know, merely pregnant when out of wedlock) have been treated over the years. When institutionalised, your recourse is virtually non-existent, your vulnerability high. Safety standards: nil.
So what happened to Declan Thomas all those years ago? Who or what is Nimble Jack, the Joker-like japester who can drive a man mad? How can Declan cure them? What is the cost? And what will happen to Nurse Reece Talbot, stuck in the middle, whose only crime was to love a lad insane?
Expect extended food metaphors, a back-up feature on the somewhat striking cover, plus a great deal to worry about.
“What the hell are you?”
“I’m hungry.”
SLH
Buy Colder vol 1 and read the Page 45 review here
Hinterkind #1 (£2-25, Vertigo) by Ian Edginton & Francesco Trifogli.
I don’t want to give the game away, but the opening sequence veers swiftly from ominous to totally sublime to completely ridiculous! Funny, though – and you’re supposed to laugh.
Thanks to Francesco Trifogli, this is the most beautiful apocalypse you will ever behold, and well worth the sacrifice of what we laughably call “humanity”. Nature has reclaimed even New York City: verdant, fully formed trees blooming atop its tallest skyscrapers – vast, billowing clouds of lush, leafy green. The roots have… caused damage.
“Calling it the end of the world was a conceit. The world kept ticking on just fine, it was humanity that took the hit. Seven months from top of the food chain to endangered species.
“Mother Nature breathed a sigh of relief. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, “Fish and house guests smell after three days”. By extension, after three hundred thousand years, we’d really stunk up the place.”
There are still some of us left, though, hunting with bows and arrows – loin cloths thankfully absent. No, I don’t mean we’re naked, which is just as well for one of our cast. I won’t be telling you why. Small numbers of survivors have built a village in Central Park, its relatively formal parkland repurposed for agriculture. There are also stockades scattered across America in Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis, for example. Or at least, there were. They’ve recently gone radio silent, though their channels are still open. The most recent to fall but a few hours earlier was Albany.
Against everyone else’s better judgement their resident doctor, Asa, has determined to make the two-month round-trip to Albany to find out what became of their friends, with Angus and Asa’s accomplished hunter and grand-daughter, Prosper, in quick pursuit. They’re moving fast because something is now hunting them. As to what lies ahead… nice punchline.
It’s a refreshing change to see a post-disaster world so lush even if it hides some pretty grim secrets. It’s not The Last Of Us, but that’s set standards that are impossible to beat and the opening double-page spread here will make you gasp. This isn’t a zombie comic – I should make that quite clear. The enemies within are much more colourful and come in all shapes and sizes.
Many thanks to Francesco for the nicely played, beautifully drawn page of semi-nudity (male). People should knock before entering.
SLH
Buy Hinterkind #1 and read the Page 45 review here
Avengers Kree / Skrull War s/c (£18-99, Marvel) by Roy Thomas & Sal Buscema, John Buscema, Neal Adams.
An absolute classic and oh, my days, but the extras! Twelve pages of gorgeous Neal Adams pencils taken from AVENGERS #93 (‘Journey To The Centre Of The Android’ etc.) and five additional pages of uncoloured excellence toned and inked by Tom Palmer, the last of which originally depicted Rick Jones with six fingers! Roy Thomas’ note to production read, “Rick has six fingers here; please take off, as carefully as possible, whichever one you feel will be missed the least.” Alas, this is the post-production page! There’s also a gallery of covers used for previous reprints formats though I’m delighted to see they have opted this time to merely recolour the majestic cover to #92.
Not exactly recoloured as colour-corrected (eliminating a couple of misplaced yellows and filling in the formerly dotted blues and flesh tones), this new h/c printing kicks off with four issues of enormously sexist silliness drawn by Sal with The Avengers reduced to The Vision, The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. And yes, this is where that oddest of Marvel relationships kicks off with The Vision discovering that not only can an android cry, but he can also love and is quite prepared to beat a bastard to death because of it. That scene, which I probably wasn’t alone in being stunned by at the time, comes later during the Neal Adams climax.
Clint Barton has swapped his bow and arrow as Hawkeye for Hank Pym’s growth serum as bare-skinned muscle-and-metal Goliath, whilst Captain America, Thor and Iron Man return to find they’ve managed to disband The Avengers. How could they?! They didn’t. Nor was it a group of three cows that shot down the Vision. Well, not exactly. We’re going waaay back to earliest days of the FANTASTIC FOUR.
Mar-Vell (Captain), Rick Jones, Ant-Man, The Inhumans and Carol Danvers are also caught up in the war raging above and so below, whilst the public are incited into anti-alien lynch mobs by political opportunism, scare-mongering and imprisonment-without-trial in a McCarthy-esque witch-hunt that will be as all too horribly familiar to modern Americans as it would have been at the time to those who’d witnessed or even endured the U.S. internment camps for the resident Japanese during World War II.
By which point Neal Adams has taken over the art, and it becomes pure, purple-prose, neo-classical gold! With the Vision in a coma after his bovine beating, Ant-Man is called on to shrink even further than ever in order to navigate what passes for the android’s blood stream only to be assaulted as an alien entity by anti-bodies. Superbly visualised by Adams, but that’s just the beginning: the sheer scale of Goliath bashing on a spaceship; Triton emerging from the Hudson, his gloved left hand the very model of foreshortening; and the ever-impassive Vision losing his cool for the first and worst time ever in search of his beloved Wanda:
“Vision – stop! Your android strength — ! You’ll kill him! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Another correction, Iron Man: my brain is a miniaturised, high-speed computer. I always know precisely what I am doing. I – AM – KILLING – HIM!”
SLH
Buy Avengers Kree / Skrull War s/c and read the Page 45 review here
Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy
Reviews already online if they’re new formats of previous books. Otherwise the most interesting will come under the microscope next week, while the rest will remain with their Diamond previews acting in lieu of reviews.
The Park h/c (£15-99, Self Made Hero) by Oscar Zarate
Adventure Time vol 2 Mathematical Edition h/c (£14-99, Titan) by Ryan North & Shelli Paroline, Braden Lamb, Stephanie Gonzaga, Mike Holmes
ERF h/c (£10-99, 2 Badgers And Spitfire) by Garth Ennis & Rob Steen
Fables Encyclopedia Deluxe Edition h/c (£29-99, Vertigo) by Jess Nevins, Bill Willingham & various including Mark Buckingham, James Jean, Joao Ruas, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha
Judge Dredd: Year One s/c (£13-50, IDW) by Matt Smith & Simon Coleby
Marvel Comics The Untold Story s/c (£10-99, Harper) by Sean Howe
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic vol 1 s/c (£13-50, IDW) by Katie Cook & Andy Price
My Little Pony: Pony Tales vol 1 s/c (£14-99, IDW) by various
Simpsons: Simps-O-Rama (£8-99, Titan) by various
Triton Of The Sea vol 1 (£14-99, DMP) by Osamu Tezuka
Batgirl vol 2: Knightfall Descends s/c (£12-99, DC) by Gail Simone & Ardian Syaf, Ed Benes, Vicente Cifuentes
Batgirl vol 3: Death Of The Family h/c (£18-99, DC) by Gail Simone, Ray Fawkes & Daniel Sampere, Ed Benes
Suicide Squad vol 3: Death Is For Suckers s/c (£10-99, DC) by Adam Glass & Henrik Jonsson, Sandau Florea
Age Of Ultron (UK Edition) s/c (£16-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis, others & Bryan Hitch, others
Avengers vol 3: Infinity Prelude h/c (£18-99, Marvel) by Jonathan Hickman, Nick Spencer & Mike Deodato Jr., Stefano Caselli
Journey Into Mystery (featuring Lady Sif) vol 2: Seeds Of Destruction s/c (£11-99, Marvel) by Kathryn Immonen & Pepe Larraz, Valerio Schiti
Thanos Rising (UK Edition) s/c (£10-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Simone Bianchi
Thor God Of Thunder vol 2: Godbomb (UK Edition) s/c (£12-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Butch Guice, Esad Ribic
Super Crooks vol 1: The Heist s/c (£12-99, Millarworld) by Mark Millar & Leinil Yu
Attack On Titan vol 8 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Hajime Isayama
Hayate Combat Butler vol 22 (£6-99, Viz) by Kenjiro Hata
Juicy Cider (£9-99, June) by Rize Shinba
Priceless Honey (£9-99, June) by Shiuko Kano
Sankarea vol 1 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Mitsuru Hattori
Sankarea vol 2 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Mitsuru Hattori
ITEM! Fantagraphics have an extensive preview of Jim Woodring’s new FRAN!
ITEM! Just found a new tumblr to swoon over. If you love Japanese-influenced art (I mean, traditional Japanese), this one’s for you! You can follow its creator on Twitter as @pintendo64
ITEM! Page 45 announces signed bookplate editions from the publisher of PORCELAIN which sold 100 copies at Page 45 in 10 days. BUTTERFLY GATE from the creators of PORCELAIN limited to 50 copies’ KNIGHT & DRAGON limited strictly to 20 copies. We expect both to be sold out before publication, so please pre-order now!
ITEM! Right then, we should probably have a signing now. I wonder if Duncan Fegredo’s free?
– Stephen
