Every year during HeroesCon, we try to find time to run through Indie Island and pick up a few things we think should be in our store.  This year we managed to obtain a few excellent new items that we hope you’ll consider picking up during your next visit.

First up is an assortment of Michael Deforge books from our friends at Koyama Press.  Among them are Lose #2-4 and his newest collection, Very Casual.  Deforge’s art is interesting, trippy, and somehow still capable of appealing to all ages readers, as evidenced by his contributions to Adventure Time.

Speaking of Adventure Time, we stopped by Boom Studios‘ booth and picked up 43 – that’s right – 43 different covers from various Adventure Time comics.  More accurately, we picked up copies of Fiona and Cake #1-5, and Adventure Time (Finn and Jake) #1 – 16 plus copies of this year’s annual.  And, as I mentioned, there are multiple covers for many of these issues, including sought after ones by artists like Scott C., Maris Wicks, Joe Quinones, Stephanie Buscema, the aforementioned Michael Deforge, Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka and more!

It wouldn’t be a HeroesCon if we didn’t stumble on a new small press book, and this year we found two from Galactic Press, a small Georgia-based company that introduced us to their books Galaxy Man and Hero Cats of Stellar City.  These are both fun all ages titles, with Galaxy Man offering up a twist on the Father/Daughter super hero team, and Hero Cats being…well…kind of self explanatory in its title.  We picked these up for our young customers, so if you’ve got young readers at home who are bored with the same old kinds of all ages stories, let them take a look at these during your next trip to Heroes.

As with every year, we had to stop by Adhouse Books.  Not only have they been a longtime anchor of Indie Island, and not only are they really great people, but they always have fascinating books on their tables.  This year we picked up another copy of the dense, epic masterpiece Duncan the Wonder Dog.  We’ve had this book in the past, but I couldn’t resist.  It’s really something to see and read, if you haven’t yet taken the plunge.

We also picked up copies of Pulpatoon Pilgrimage by Joel Priddy (outstanding cartooning), Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain by Debbie Huey(a fine all ages book), Ace Face: The Mod with the Metal Arms by Mike Dawson (another book with an aptly descriptive title), and Nobrow’s The Wolf’s Whistle by Bjorn Rune Lie and Co. (Think a European take on nursery rhymes filtered through the lens of Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox).

Also at the Adhouse booth I saw recent works from the guys behind Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, one of our favorite comics podcasts.  We picked up signed and sketched copies of Jim Rugg’s Drawings 030413.  If you liked last year’s Notebook Drawings, you’ll love this new sketchbook.  Jim continues to impress us with the virtuosity of his work, and his latest offering Supermag only solidifies the fact that he’s one of the most diverse cartoonists working today.  His podcast-mate Jasen Lex also had some books on display, and we picked up copies of Henchman, Washington Unbound #1, and The Bottom Feeders #1.  He’s another creator with a seemingly natural sense of design.  While I didn’t pick up any new books from their podcast-mate Ed Piskor, I did see even more of his pages from his upcoming Hip Hop Family Tree.  You might remember my interview with him about it HERE.  Trust me when I say that this is not only the visual history of a revolutionary genre of music, but one of the finest examples of cartooning I’ve seen of late.  If you haven’t pre-ordered it yet, let us know and we’ll make sure you get a copy.

Finally, as Sunday was winding down, the talented Maris Wicks stopped by the Heroes booth and we made sure to pick up a few copies of her (and Jim Ottaviani‘s) excellent new graphic novel Primates.  This book focuses on the work of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, how they changed the science of Primate study, and brought an increased awareness to these astounding animals.

You can find all of these books and more in our store right now.  Thanks to all these companies and creators, and be sure to pick up some of these titles the next time you visit Heroes.

The most important aesthetic breakthrough in comics in the 21^st century is the increased attention (by both artists and critics) to the picture plane, the exploration of comics as a rapturous visual experience as well as a vehicle for narrative. The book most responsible for this shift is the anthology Kramers Ergot #4 (2003), which juxtaposed the deliberately crude, resolutely non-narrative aesthetics of Fort Thunder cartoonists like Mat Brinkman and Leif Goldberg with such story-based work as Jeffrey Brown’s autobio strips, Sammy Harkham’s Poor Sailor, and early excerpts from Frank M. Young and David Lasky’s Carter Family graphic novel. This mix of approaches made reading Kramers #4 a disorienting experience, a book that, in critic Bill Kartalopoulos’ words,

was clearly packed with a range of comics and art that included things I was comfortable with, things I was uncomfortable with, and things that I didn’t really know how to categorize. I bought it, without much equivocation. It seemed like I had to if I really wanted to know what was going on in comics.

Part of “what was going on” was a generation following Gary Panter’s example, dedicated to elaborate margins, psychedelic colors, ironic appropriations of mass cult logos and symbols, and mark-making independent of a line’s narrative function. It was suddenly OK to draw rough and be bold.

The Fort Thunder/Kramers paradigm shift has cross-pollinated comics culture in various ways. The newfound emphasis on design and decoration has snuck into some more mainstream direct-market books—I’m thinking of the Fort Thunder-meets-Heavy Metal success of Brandon Graham over at Image—even while Kramers #5 (2004) published my favorite narrative comic novella of the last decade, Kevin Huizenga’s “Jeepers Jacobs.” And then there’s Jim Rugg, an artist uncannily able to toggle between straight-forward storytelling and wild explorations of what Rugg himself, in the introduction to his new Supermag, calls “the narrative collapse.” (more…)