Alternative Comics Announces September 2004 Book Releases

Posted: Monday, June 21, 2004
Posted By: Shawn Patty

Alternative Comics has announced that for September 2004, it will release a number of new and eagerly awaited projects including Joel Orff’s second book, Waterwise, Brandon Graham’s Escalator, Jed Alexander’s Turtle, turtle, Jen Sorensen’s SLOWPOKE: America Gone Bonkers, and Josh Neufeld’s Xeric grant-winning A Few Perfect Hours and Other Stories From Southeast Asia and Central Europe.

Waterwise
Imagine a cross between American Splendor and Alice in Wonderland...or imagine a cross between Carl Barks and Carlos Castaneda... In Joel Orff's new graphic novel he explores these concepts and many more. This is the story of two old friends who are reunited for one night and wander together through a surreal, vaguely apocalyptic landscape, pondering life, griping about their circumstances, and trying to connect. Along the way they explore the nature of dreams, the fragile facade of civilization and the tenderness of a true friendship.

By Joel Orff, for Mature Readers, 128 pages, 6” x 9”, $14.95. ISBN: 1-891867-82-2

Joel Orff's first book Strum and Drang – Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll (1-891867-27-X) was nominated for the 2004 YALSA Paperbacks for Young Adults Booklist.

Stapling cast-off newsprint from the local small-town newspaper into little books, Joel Orff churned out a thirty-two page comic once a month for most of his childhood. After his first year of college he threw them all out; a decision that he's still not sure if he regrets. More recently he's been published in several books and magazines around the world, including the Artisti Allibratori Associati publication 'Tattoo Comix' (Italy), Fahrenheit Magazine, (Denmark), 'The Comix Compendium' from Mangijin Books, 'The Stranger' weekly newspaper in Seattle, and 'Heroes of Invention', which was created for the Minnesota Children's Museum. His drawings were included in an exhibition at the National Comic Library in Copenhagen in 1994. In 2001 they were featured at both the Somerville Comix Fest and Curious Brain exhibit in Boston. In 2002 and 2004 he was a finalist for the McKnight Screenwriters Fellowship, and had his first play produced as part of the Minnesota Fringe Festival.

Escalator
It started here and continued to gain momentum. A collection of Brandon Graham's short comics with a cast of sumo heroes, Graffiti writers, truck drivers from the future and alien pornographers as they try to get through their lives with all the demonic possessions and cannibal school girls that get in the way.

By Brandon Graham, for Mature Readers, 120 pages, $12.95. ISBN: 1-891867-81-4

Turtle, turtle
Just off the coast of an unnamed Mexican town is Porta Tortuga, an Island that no one seems to remember but Cesar, a U.S citizen with a Mexican mother and a Jewish father who spent one unforgettably vivid day at the Island’s Dia de los Phantasmas festival. And just what the Dia de los Phantasmas festival is or where the island can be found no one seems to remember either, or what happened that long ago summer of his childhood on an island whose inhabitants are convinced they live on a giant turtle. Cesar returns to Mexico to try and find the island and to try and decipher memories that he can’t let go of, and to search for his father, who disappeared 15 years earlier, and what the adult Cesar discovers will both demystify these early memories, and reveal an even more impenetrable secret.

By Jed Alexander, for Mature Readers, 96 pages, 2-color, $11.95. ISBN: 1-891867-65-2

SLOWPOKE: America Gone Bonkers
As seen in numerous alternative newspapers around the country, it's Xeric Grant-winning cartoonist Jen Sorensen's second collection of her brilliant weekly cartoon Slowpoke. Through her characters Little Gus, Mr. Perkins, and terminal hornball Drooly Julie, Sorensen slams the Bush regime, vapid trends, and corporate crap with her trademark brand of absurdist humor. Anyone who thinks we're headed to hell in a handbasket will laugh until they cry.

By Jen Sorensen, for Mature Readers, 112 pages, 8” x 8”, $12.95. ISBN: 1-891867-78-4

A Xeric Grant winner, Kimberly Yale Award nominee for Best New Talent, and Association of Alternative Newspapers award-winner, Jen Sorensen is rapidly becoming a prominent voice in the altweekly world. She is the writer and artist behind Slowpoke, a cartoon which appears in several alternative newspapers around the country, as well as in the nationally-distributed Funny Times, Z Magazine, and Missouri Review literary journal.

Slowpoke made its debut in 1998, and has since spread to three out of four corners of the continental United States, from the Local Planet Weekly in Spokane to Fahrenheit San Diego to the Gainesville, FL Satellite and many papers in between. In 2001, Sorensen published a grant-funded collection of the first two years of Slowpoke strips, entitled Slowpoke: Café Pompous. Slowpoke was recently featured in Ted Rall’s popular anthology, Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists. Sorensen’s work is also highlighted in Trina Robbins’ book, The Great Women Cartoonists.

Jen Sorensen was a featured speaker at the first annual ACLU membership conference in Washington, D.C. in 2003. In addition to Slowpoke, Jen does freelance illustration for such magazines as Nickelodeon, National Geographic Kids, and Legal Affairs.

A Few Perfect Hours and Other Stories From Southeast Asia and Central Europe
Xeric Award Winner! Autobiographical cartoonist Josh Neufeld (The Vagabonds, Titans of Finance) takes us on an exotic globetrotting tour. Evoking Tintin and the "comics journalism" of Joe Sacco, Neufeld recounts such offbeat adventures as a cave expedition in Thailand, a stint as extras in a Singaporean soap opera, and a train trip through war-torn Serbia. The interlinked collection of stories has the reach of an ambitious graphic novel. Says Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), "I really dig it."

By Josh Neufeld, for Mature Readers, 128 pages, 6-5/8" x 10-1/8”, $12.95. ISBN: 1-891867-79-2

In A Few Perfect Hours and Other Stories From Southeast Asia and Central Europe, autobiographical cartoonist Josh Neufeld takes us on a dramatic tour of such diverse locales as Thailand, the former Yugoslavia and New York City. Highlights include Neufeld and traveling companion Sari Wilson's volunteer expedition to an organic farm in Malaysia, stint as extras in a Chinese-language Singaporean soap opera, train trip through war-torn Serbia, and near-disastrous cave adventure in Thailand. Using gentle humor and a keen eye for revelatory detail, Neufeld explores religion, spirituality and the mysteries of everyday life. In the collection's titular first story, Neufeld illustrates how being blessed by a Thai monk helped relieve his tensions and suspicions about traveling in a strange country. In "On a Mission," Neufeld contrasts the viewpoints of Baptist missionaries in northern Thailand with the traditions of a Buddhist festival. In the collection's final story, "Cremations, Cubicles & Cant," Neufeld juxtaposes his grandmother's Jewish funeral with a Hindu cremation ceremony he witnessed on Bali.
Neufeld uses the conventions of the comics form to experiment with point-of-view and traditional narrative. His stories echo the rootless, amorphous world of the backpacker, mirroring a reality that is constantly in flux.

A Few Perfect Hours' themes and conventions will resonate with contemporary readers, both within and outside of the comics world. In fact, A Few Perfect Hours could navigate outside the "humor" or "graphic novels" section of the typical bookstore and instead be featured in the more appropriate "travel" or "travel fiction" section. Comics Worth Reading observes that Neufeld's comics provide a street-level view of other cultures, with nothing whitewashed.... The stories often remind us of the point of travelling - to experience and come to terms with the unknown, and ultimately to address your own spirituality and reason for being.

Josh Neufeld’s real-life stories about his travel experiences appear in The Vagabonds and Keyhole. With writer R. Walker, he co-created Titans of Finance: True Tales of Money and Business, which premiered to wide notice from the mainstream business press. Josh has been a long-time artist for Harvey Pekar's American Splendor and has contributed to anthologies such as SPX/The EXPO, StripBurger, World War 3 Illustrated, The Big Book of Urban Legends and Duplex Planet Illustrated. His comics have also appeared in Fortune Small Business, mMode magazine, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, and In These Times, as well as many other venues. You can find his work online at JoshComix.com. Josh lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife.

The official Alternative Comics website is: http://www.indyworld.com/altcomics

Got some comments on this item?
Have your say at the Silver Bulletins forum.