Now In Stock: Nancy, Aya 3, Talking Lines

We’ve just received some new books from Drawn & Quarterly, as well as a restock on John Stanley’s NANCY, which we’d sold out of last week. Here’s some info:

Talking Lines
By R.O. Blechman

Talking Lines is the first ever comprehensive short story collection of R. O. Blechman, one of the most prolific and influential visual artists of the twentieth century. This oeuvre of his graphic stories is, at once, jocular, wry and profound. Blechman ruminates on such various topics as nuclear weapons, war,wiretapping, Christopher Columbus, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf. The stories have appeared in the seminal magazine Humbug (edited by Harvey Kurtzman), The Nation, Nozone (edited by his son, Nicholas Blechman), The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.

Blechman is a modern master of all things visual whose timeless intellect and stripped-down artistry propels his nonstop relevancy. He is one of the few artists who has been able to balance the commercial and the artistic in a polished and unparalleled career that heralds him as one of the great cartoonists, the author of one of the first modern graphic novels, an Emmy and Cannes Film festival award-winning animator with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, a Hall of Fame Art Director and even as a blogger for the Huffington Post.

Hardcover/6.5X9 inches/272 pages
ISBN: 9781897299852
$36.95 CDN

Aya: The Secrets Come Out
Abouet & Oubrerie

Aya has captured the hearts of North American readers of all ages for the rare portrait it paints of a vibrant, happy, bourgeois Ivory Coast in the 1970s, based upon Marguerite Abouet’s youth in Yop City. Not only is Aya complemented with Clement Oubrerie’s gorgeous artwork but the volumes offer a slice-of-life peek into African culture: complete with recipes, glossaries, and wardrobe instructions for turning one’s pagne (brightly colored fabric) into a skirt, headwrap or baby carrier. Engaging and fun, the universal stories in Aya provide a much-needed context for today’s all-too-common unfortunate and heartbreaking news stories.

Aya is the winner of the Best First Album award at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, the Children’s Africana Book Award, and the Glyph Award; was nominated for the Quill Award, the YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels list, and the Eisner Award; and was included on ‘best of’ lists from The Washington Post, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

Praise for Aya:
“Based on Abouet’s remembrance of her childhood in Abidjan…the story, along with French illustrator Oubrerie’s artwork, brings to life an Ivory Coast not seen before–a place overflowing with vibrant, rich textiles, new words, music, food, and lively characters filled with humor, love, and the hope for a better life.” -Library Journal, starred review

Hardcover, 128 pages, 6.75 x 9.5 inches, color.
ISBN: 9781897299791
$19.95 CDN

Nancy Volume One
By John Stanley

Created by Ernie Bushmiller, the beloved Brillo-headed Nancy starred in her own comic book series for years, written by arguably the greatest children’s comics writer of all time, John Stanley. Most famous for scripting the adventures of Marjorie Henderson Buell’s Little Lulu, John Stanley is one of comics’ secret geniuses. He provided a visual rough draft for all the comics he wrote and then handed off these “scripts” for someone else to render the finished art. No matter what comic he was writing, he breathed life into his characters. In Stanley’s comics, Nancy is no longer a crabby cipher, but a hilarious, brilliant, scheming, duplicitous, honest, and loyal little kid–a real little kid. Her adventures with her best friend, the comically destitute Sluggo, involve moneymaking schemes to afford ice-cream sodas, botched trips to the corner store for Nancy’s Aunt Fritzi, and comically raucous attempts to remove loose teeth.

Drawn & Quarterly will launch several kid-friendly volumes of Nancy and Nancy and Sluggo as companion volumes to Melvin Monster and Dark Horse’s Little Lulu volumes. The books will be designed by Seth (The Complete Peanuts; Melvin Monster; Clyde Fans; It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken) to fill a children’s comic niche that has been largely ignored for the last few decades.

Hardcover, 144 pages, 7.75 x 11 inches
ISBN: 9781897299777
$25.95 CDN

– Chris @ The Beguiling