Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked: A Publishing News Column

By Tom Spurgeon

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* hey, this is nice news. Nobrow Press (publishing) and AdHouse Books (distributing) are teaming up to bring us a collection of Jesse Moynihan's Forming. It will be 112 pages an in full color. He's been doing that as a webcomic since I want to say 2009, although I'm not 100 percent sure. I'm not sure that I've mentioned them here, but AdHorse has also recently announced fun-looking projects with Stuart Immonen and Jay Stephens.

* NBM may be taking its initial steps towards a more involved digital comics program. May be.

* Richard Sala has completed art on his next big book, The Hidden. It's now 136 pages. As mentioned in a recent Random News update, it looks like the pages for Fantagraphics' Joost Swarte book are in-house as well.

* great news for Dash Shaw, and fans of Dash Shaw.

* Rick Burchett and writer Greg Rucka will be launching a webcomic in July called Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether. Other than Warren Ellis's efforts including the current Freakangels, I don't know of a lot of well-known mainstream comics writers like Rucka that have worked the webcomics part of the greater comics tapestry.

* people really want there to be a Ganges #4.

* somehow it escaped my notice that Mike Mignola is writing a stand-alone graphic novel for his Hellboy character, which is interesting both in and of itself -- I imagine many people that read this blog will want to buy said book -- but also in that the serial comic to collection publishing strategy for the various Mike Mignola-related book seems to have been a successful one over the last several years, enough so that any change in that strategy seems worth noting.

* Neal Adams will apparently be drawing an Avengers-related gateway comic book to come out late Summer/early Fall. The original Avengers titles is one of many with which Adams made his name in his most active mainstream comic book drawing period.

* Michel Fiffe wrote in to say that the alt-comics stories he's been corralling for publication in the back pages of Savage Dragon will be marshaled into their own trade paperback collection this July. He discusses it further and puts up a ton of advance art here.

* the cartoonist and educator Matt Madden is making one of his book available for free through digital means in a limited-time offer.

* the mainstream-oriented writer and critic Graeme McMillan -- whose recent surge of material for Newsarama is a publishing story itself -- has a piece up on DC trying to maybe squeeze another book out of its JLA brand. I'm of McMillan's basic mindset here, and the only thing that really gets accomplished when multiple versions of a not-entirely-super-healthy franchise are put out there is that you secure a few extra slivers of the market share pie and/or avoid publishing something new that might perform worse.

* Theo Ellsworth, Sean Christensen and Amy Kuttab have a new jam comic out there for various comics shows: Play Overlord #1.

* this is kind of cool, and super-obscure and not exactly comics: Craig Fischer organized a bunch of writers-about-comics into penning short essays on their favorite comic books, to be sold at HeroesCon and to benefit the Team Cul-De-Sac efforts against Parkinson's. A fun thing about this for me is that I have absolutely no memory of contributing, although Craig assures me that I did and that I wrote about Death Of Speedy, which is indeed a favorite comic. So I'll look forward to seeing this for my own contribution, in addition to the usual anticipation I have for reading the choices of my peers. I hope unconscious me holds his own.

* did I mention the forthcoming Hugo Tate collection from Blank Slate? Because that's totally worth mentioning.

* Top Shelf sent out a press release about five minutes after I first completed this post, spotlighting their busy forthcoming major books season: League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #2 -- 1969, Lucille, Any Empire, Infinite Kung Fu and Chester 5000, which together pretty much represent the range of the Top Shelf catalog. Chester 5000 and Lucille are set to debut at TCAF.

* David Brothers profiles at length First Second's webcomics line "To Be Continued..." as part of its overall publishing efforts in their fifth anniversary year. I wasn't even aware they considered this an imprint, not really, so that's worth noting.

* finally, the artist and cartoonist Tom Neely has put up the cover image for his next big book, The Wolf.

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