13 Minutes on Habitat #2

Habitat #2 by Dunja Jankovic just got a great review at 13 Minutes by Justin Giampaoli:
http://thirteenminutes.blogspot.com/2011/03/surveying-habitat.html

Family Store on Heavy Hand

 
The Family Store in LA is carrying The Heavy Hand by Chris Cilla and they've written a really thorough discussion of the book on their blog:
http://blog.familylosangeles.com/2011/03/heavy-hand.html

Everything is coming up Tessa Brunton!

Tessa Brunton (creator of In the Tall Grass) has a gallery show opening in 3 days at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, CA. http://cartoonart.org/2011/03/small-press-spotlight-on-tessa-brunton/
The show will be up March 26th through June 19th this year, so make a point of checking it out. Her art is great!

In fact, Sparkplug likes her comics so much that we are going to be publishing her new book Passage this Summer. Tessa talks about the book and much more in a new interview:
http://www.sfstation.com/tessa-brunton-a34701

For more on Tessa Brunton, check out her site: http://tessab.net/

Milk and Moo, Service Industry and more!

I just added four books to our online store: Milk and Moo by Yumi Sakugawa, Service Industry by T. Edward Bak, I Was Born, But...#2 by Emily Nilsson and Drip by Chris C. Cilla. There are descriptions of each if you click through the link, but you can trust me: they are all four fantastic reads.

The Heavy Hand, Neptune and Whirlwind Wonderland are released by Diamond!

Diamond Comics stores will be putting The Heavy Hand, Neptune and Whirlwind Wonderland on their shelves this Wednesday. Make sure to stop by and take a look.

And if that weren't enough Joe Mcculloch wrote a great piece on the Heavy Hand at the TCJ:
http://www.tcj.com/this-week-in-comics-32311-multifarious-chills/

Papercutter #15 & Mel Stringer

We got the new Papercutter in! Issue #15 is for sale in the store now and includes three excellent stories by Jonas Madden-Connor, Melinda Boyce, MK Reed and Drew Weing. And we also added Goodness, by Australian artist Mel Stringer. If you haven't seen her stuff before, you should check it out. She is fantastic and hilarious.

New in the Store Today! Tessa Brunton and Jason Overby

I know it's now the weekend for y'all, but we here at Sparkplug are still adding stuff to the store! Today we have minis by two very different autobio artists: Tessa Brunton's dense, funny In the Tall Grass #3 and #4 and Jason Overby's sparse, deconstructed Obligatory Artifact and Solipsist's Doodles.

Have a great weekend! And don't forget to go to the Jose Alaniz talk tomorrow!

Our founder.

José Alaniz talk in Portland at the IPRC.

Hello, Portland Comics People!

This upcoming Saturday, Dr. Jose Alaniz is coming to the IPRC to give a presentation about comics in Russia as part of the IPRC's class in World Comics.  Dr. Alaniz is a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Washington in Seattle where he teaches comics and Russian literature.  Last year he published the book "Komiks: Comic Art in Russia" (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).  He is a walking encyclopedia about comics in general, and Russian comics in particular.

Join us, and spread the word!





About the book:
José Alaniz explores the problematic publication history of komiks--an art form much-maligned as "bourgeois" mass diversion before, during, and after the collapse of the USSR--with an emphasis on the last twenty years. Using archival research, interviews with major artists and publishers, and close readings of several works, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia provides heretofore unavailable access to the country's rich--but unknown--comics heritage. The study examines the dizzying experimental comics of the late Czarist and early revolutionary era, caricature from the satirical journal Krokodil, and the postwar series Petia Ryzhik (the "Russian Tintin"). Detailed case studies include the Perestroika-era KOM studio, the first devoted to comics in the Soviet Union; post-Soviet comics in contemporary art; autobiography and the work of Nikolai Maslov; and women's comics by such artists as Lena Uzhinova, Namida, and Re-I. Alaniz examines such issues as anti-Americanism, censorship, the rise of consumerism, globalization (e.g., in Russian manga), the impact of the internet, and the hard-won establishment of a comics subculture in Russia.
Komiks have often borne the brunt of ideological change--thriving in summers of relative freedom, freezing in hard winters of official disdain. This volume covers the art form's origins in religious icon-making and book illustration, and later the immensely popular lubok or woodblock print. Alaniz reveals comics' vilification and marginalization under the Communists, the art form's economic struggles, and its eventual internet "migration" in the post-Soviet era. This book shows that Russian comics, as with the people who made them, never had a "normal life."

AUSTIN STAPLE THIS WEEKEND

Virginia Paine, Chris Cilla, Tim Goodyear and I are all going to Austin, Texas this weekend  (March 5th and 6th, 2011) for our own chainsaw massacre. It will be amazing. Also exhibiting at the show will be Top Shelf Productions, Melinda Tracy Boyce, Aaron Whitaker, James O'Barr and tons more.

ALSO, at this show, you are in for a real treat:

Saturday, March 5th
2:30pm - 3:30pm — Texas Rangers: Austin Underground Comix. Q&A with
Mack White and Al Frank, moderated by Tim Goodyear & Dylan Williams.

We may also get Chris Cilla to ask some questions.  If you've ever needed a reason to go to a comic book show in Texas this is it. Mack and Al are two of the best comic artists in the world who both happen to live in the same historical comix town.

http://www.staple-austin.org/

New in the store today: Papercutter #10-14!

I've just added Papercutter #10-14 to the shop. If you're unfamiliar, Papercutter is an anthology put out by Portland's own Tugboat Press that showcases underrated but awesome artists. Each issue contains three stories and is only four bucks!

Papercutter #14 - Dave Roche, Nate Beaty, Brian Maruca, Jim Rugg and Farel Dalrymple
Papercutter #13 - Matt Weigle, Tim Root and Jonas Madden-Connor
Papercutter #12 - Rachel Bormann, Nate Powell, Joey Sayers, Mark Campos and Dalton Webb
Papercutter #11 - Amy Adoyzie, Jon Sukarangsan, Dustin Harbin and Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg
Papercutter #10 - Damien Jay, Jesse Reklaw and Minty Lewis