Brighten The Corner

A lot of Narrow Books action this week. For the Unique LA event, we’re adding more titles to the catalog of books we’re selling that we didn’t print. First off, two collections of Neil Swaab’s Mr. Wiggles strips.

Neil published the first collection of his comics strips himself and then the second collection was published by the very eclectic NBM. The Mr. Wiggles strip has been featured as an alt-weekly strip, and Neil’s work in that context has been compared a lot… to other artists… This of course is the insult we often deliver to a unique artist’s work, and I’m going to be no different (see my next paragraph). But yeah, his work on Mr. Wiggles has been compared to Johnny Ryan, Pete Bagge, Tony Millionaire, Bill Watterson, and that guy who does Dilbert (which is such a freakish assortment that it gives lie to the whole idea of comparisons). The strip’s a fun read and he’s not afraid of carrying story lines across multiple strips, which for me has always been a favorite when it comes to strips and of course is why I’m a bigger consumer of strips in book form than in the pages of papers.

But the other thing that I’m really interested in about Neil is his work outside of the strip (see his personal site at www.neilswaab.com). First off, I’ll mention that he’s been part of the team on the cartoon Superjail, which Mark and I were just discussing last week, and which is an amazing freakshow of a cartoon that left us both surprised but very happy. For my part, I caught my first episode just last month, very late at night in a casino hotel room when I was trying to go to sleep… and I couldn’t turn the television off until it was over. Then there’s Neil’s illustration work, which for me (and here’s those damned comparisons) reminds me of Sala, Burns, and even a dash of Dave Cooper (minus the fat bottomed girls). (See above and below for examples.)

And then we’ve also gotten our hands on some of the work of John Pham, who’s this great artist and designer who’s also got a grasp of story, which of course is a perfect marriage—in fact I believe any artist who doesn’t have a respect for narrative is always going to be crippled… John’s never going to have that problem.

We’ll have John’s Sublife Vol. 1 (Fantagraphics), which is an amazing anthology of his comics… Rather than trying to describe it here, just follow the link above to the page at Fantagraphics that has a great slideshow of the book (just scroll down).

But, and! we’ll also have issue 3 of 1-Up megazine, the video game zine that John designs… As an example of how smart a designer he is, I urge you to investigate how rich he’s made the thing using only two ink colors. Of course it’s a great zine, with a lot of great content, but Heck! If you’re at all into printing and publishing, check out the magic trick he did there just from a design point of view.

Over at Narrow Books we’re starting to experiment with carrying books by artists that we like that we didn’t actually have anything to do with pressing. This began as a very casual step when we started selling hand-made books and zines by artists we’d worked with at events, notably Travis Millard’s Who Let the Gods Out and Bite the Bedbugs Back books, and the amazing Chillo

by Mel Kadel, which usually leaves shoppers open-mouthed and leering. (The time Mel takes in coffee staining the pages really… well, it really makes every book feel like an art object, if you’ll pardon my cornball.)  (Both of those books can be found in the shopping section of Travis’ site.)

Then recently came Megan Whitmarsh’s Yeti Logic, published by Rojo. Since Rojo’s in Spain, and the book is a limited edition, and we like Megan’s work so much, we thought, let’s get more of these books over the sea before they sell out. And Rojo very graciously agreed to letting us become another “distributor” of the book, though in fact I suppose we’re more like a store without a storefront.

The thing is the public events we participate in allow us to power-up into store mode, and showcase and sell anything we like directly to the public. There’s this jargon-y term now, “pop-up” stores, which basically you can just substitute the word temporary for “pop-up” and not have to sound like a douchebag. The upshot for Narrow Books is, from time to time, temporarily, we’re a store, not just a publisher. Which is great.

For example, it means that we’ll be able to show people Esther Pearl Watson’s Unlovable Vol. 1, which was a book we’ve known would come into existence for years (always secretly wondering if we might one day be able to press it), and but we weren’t surprised or chagrined when the awesome Fantagraphics put it out this year. The book came out and they did justice to it with a really nice hardcover release and plans in place to print the future volumes. It’s rad. And Fantagraphics is going to let us sell it at the Unique LA event on May 2nd and 3rd. Because now we’re sometimes a store.

See? Awesome.

The LA Times Festival of Books is a pretty big affair, and table prices are beyond what we at Narrow Books like to think of as our “budget”, but writer Joseph Mattson, who has been a contributor, editor, and now the star of our first solo fiction release is going to be signing at the Book Soup booth. I’m sure he’ll be signing our book of his short stories, Eat Hell, but he also might sign some copies of our last anthology, TL Vol. 2, which he contributed to and helped to edit.

Not sure what time he’s signing, but will update here as soon as I know.

Then on May 2nd and 3rd, Unique LA is having its second event, and we’ll be there again. The organizers of this giant independent design market really seem to have their sh*t together. The event happens in an impressive upper story space at the California Market Center downtown, taking up a whole floor—trust me, you’ll want to spend several hours there, at least. And they’ve had the foresight to have press-only openings on the first day so that the many vendors of clothing, handicrafts, and, in our case, books, can have a more relaxed dialogue with bloggers and journalists as they wander through.

It looks like we’re going to be placed next to 826LA, which sounds nice, and sounds as if the organizers may’ve set up an informal “literary section”? (There are currently three formal sections for art galleries, purveyors of kids’ and babies stuff, and green eco-products.)

NOTE: Special to the Unique LA event, we’re going to be presenting some great books from other publishers, including Megan Whitmarsh’s Yeti Logic, which was published by Rojo in Spain. And I think we’re going to have some signings go down, will update here when I know the details!