GMN4 Reviewed on TCJ + Shopping Infoz

SO, GMN4 got reviewed on the luxurious webpages of The Comics Journal-- Wahoo!  And it's a pretty positive review to boot.  Cha-cha-check it out!

I gotta split for work in a sec so I will be keeping this short.  Our online shop is now, barely functional.  Which is much better than, not functional at all.  Barely though.

And should you be in Barcelona (yeah the one in Spain), come this Friday, our friends at FATBOTTOM BOOKS will be having their grand opening, so visit if yer in their neck of the woods!

Rob Reviews RDCD Fist (RRRF...)

Well, it finally happened: my first mini made its way through the gates of The Comics Journal and into a thoughtful review by Rob Clough. I feel fortunate to have had Rob take the time to parse my brief, mostly stream-of-consciousness little narrative; it definitely helps me maintain my motivation to plug away at Redcd Fist II. One comparison that has come up at least twice that I can recall (once from Tom K. when I traded him for his first Gabrielle Bell mini, the second from Raighne) before Rob's review is the Cronenburgian undertones of the story, something I didn't think about while making it, but in hindsight makes perfect sense. I'm a huge admirer of his work (Videodrome is easily in my top tier of movies), so I'm not surprised his influence seeped in there. 

I'm also glad to have been reviewed together with Jason Overby, someone I really respect as a cartoonist. I picked up my first copies of his work at Stumptown last April and I'd have to say that his work, along with Blaise Larmee and Jason T. Miles', were definitely my favorite single-creator comics of the show. The blog that he runs with Blaise and Austin English, cometscomets, is also one of the most interesting comics blogs of the moment in the way I used to feel about the Comics Comics blog. Still like those guys, but it feels like that blog finally found a job after college and had to start 'taking shit seriously'. Anyway, what copies are left of this guy will be available on the new 2dc internet store once Raighne creates it. We have a lot of comics I'm excited about slated for 2011, more on those as they become ready (or rather, when we become ready to beg for your monéy!)

You Can't Be Here gets it's first review!

Nic Breutzman got his beautiful newspaper biggie reviewed over at The Comics Journal by none other than Rob Clough. You Can't Be Here will  be colored and collected into Mother Lover early next year, along with another short by Nic and a new story by John and Luke Holden. Some time before that we will get the new web shop up and open and have You Can't Be Here available for sale there as well as some some of Shenton's shops (currently waiting on Nic getting us some more copies as we are a little low).


On a side note, I got to meet with Grimalkin's publisher, Jordan Shiveley, over tea talk a bit about his outfit as he makes the move to Minneapolis. We'll be doing an interview with him over at Itchy Keen at a later time. Our own Reynold Kissling has a very pretty short in the forthcoming fifth volume of Hive! If I haven't said it before, Hive is doing some things really well and I applaud them on their ability to release regularly, the beautiful hand-craftedness of their releases, and their ability to put out better and bigger books with each iteration. Anthologies are hard, this I know.

New Shops, New Review, and a Thanks to YOU!

First review of Justin's wonderfully strange mini RDCD Fist over at Midnight Fiction.  It is an odd little book and my short diddy taking up the rear probably doesn't help make anything more clear.  Anyways--Woohoo!  Thanks Richard Krauss!

Note: RDCD Fist will be for sale in the shop in the next month.  It's a super limited run and will thusly not be made available to shops.

Meghan and I spent the first week of this month in France, more on that soon, but in the mean time we got orders for GMN4 and other books at some new shops!  They are as follows:

Fatbottom Books in Barcelona Spain, Le Pied de Biche Galerie Librarie (The Crowbar Gallery & Bookstore) in Paris France; Desert Island in Brooklyn, NY; Casablanca Comics in Portland, ME; Ada Books in Providence, RI.

And last but not least, 2 of our more usual shops in NY ordered some copies of GMN4, Forbidden Planet and Jim Hanley's Universe!  Thank you for your orders and thank you Tony Shenton!!

Oh, and this is the last page from RDCD Fist (from the story I did).  I don't think it gives anything away other than being weird.

Yearbooks and GMN4 get reviewed AGAIN--Woop Woop!

Over at the excellent Warren Peace Sings the Blues, Matthew Brady writes some thoughtful reviews on a handful of mini's including Yearbooks (which really isn't quite a mini, but--) and Good Minnesotan #4.

Side note: anthologies are generally a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes they work out better when there is a smaller list of contributors and tighter focus on the vision. Sales tend to reflect this as well.  Obviously, I really like GMN4 as it is, but then, I am the editor.  I'll have more masturbatory thoughts on anthologies over at Itchy Keen in the FUTURE.

Oh yeah, the drawing is another image by Luke Holden from the comic/anthology Mother Lover which comes out next year. It's going to be pretty awesome.

2 new reviews at Playtime Magazine and a post thank you

Thanks to everyone that came out to Rain Taxi's Book Festival!  A double thanks to those that stopped by to pick up a book off our table and gave it a sincere look.  Also, it was nice being sandwiched between Will Dinski and Kevin Cannon and that the cartoonists were all tabling together for the event!

In other news, we got 2 new reviews over at Playtime Magazine, one for Yearbooks here, and the other for GMN4 here.  Both by the tall and quite bearded fellow Matt Kessen!  Playtime Magazine is a smart, cool snapshot of arts & culture, an eMagazine covering comix, trash novels, films, video games; leaning towards genre work- it's top notch and worth checking out !  In the back issue's there is a review of a Primal Rage novel!!  Strange and stupidly awesome! In any case, check out them reviews!

Photo of our table at the Rain Taxi Book Fest by Will Dinski-- thanks Will!

2dc @ Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Book Festival

Us 2d Cloud folk were expecting to be pulling double duty this upcoming weekend, having part of the camp over at Fallcon and the rest at Rain Taxi's Twin Cities Book Festival. When we were asked by one of our GMN contributors, Anna Bongiovanni, if she could share our table this year, we realized we hadn't had any formal communication with the MCBA people for a while, so Raighne took it upon himself to confirm our table. We were told that unfortunately they couldn't accommodate as many creators this year due to the smaller size of the show, meaning that we would have to wait until Springcon to peddle our wares in the ghost-town that is the State Fair Grounds. Looking at the creator list for Fallcon this year, it looks like people from the Big Time Attic/Cartoonist Conspiracy clans have spots as well as some of our GMN contributors, such as Toby Jones, Madeline Queripel and Sean Lynch. The rest of the non-superhero/genre comics scene seems to be setting up shop at the Rain Taxi show (as of now I believe that in addition to us will be Tom K., Will Dinski, Tim Sievert and probably a few other people I'm [Justin] not aware of). 


Raighne and I were speculating as to why so many of the indie cartoonists who have tabled at both MCBA events in years past did not have a table this year, and the first reason that popped into our heads was the existence of MIX. Maybe the MCBA feels that since there's a big show devoted to the local indie comics scene, they need to give the superhero/genre comics creators and fans a little more precedence when it comes to a show with limited space. At first I was a little offended that we weren't invited to Fallcon, but the more I think about it, I think it's really just an indication that the comics scene in Minnesota as a whole has grown to the point that there are enough cartoonists and fans to populate two shows simultaneously, which ultimately is just a testament to the health of the medium.


With that said, we are more than happy to be a part of the Rain Taxi show.Their continued support of comics, both locally and nationally, is also encouraging in terms of the increasing legitimacy of comics to the larger reading public. Dealing with the persistence of a sort of inferiority complex that still crops up in a lot of discussions regarding comics as they relate to casual readers can get a little tiresome, but nevertheless we are glad that our work is considered to have enough merit to be included. There will be a panel at the show, Minnesota Comics, that I believe will highlight the current strength of the local comics scene and will help demonstrate what I mentioned above about the diversity and size of the comics community currently in Minnesota. Not to foster any rivalry between the two shows, but we'll be at the one with free admission, which means more dollars to drop on comics! Hope to see you there.