Over at the NBM blog, Terry Nantier reminds us that a collection of BRINGING UP FATHER is on its way:

Well, we’re putting to bed the next great entry in our Forever Nuts collection of classic comic strips, Bringing Up Father, and it looks gorgeous. The strips have been meticulously restored and we end up with a colorful foreword by Bill Blackbeard, short but quite sweet, and a great intro by R.C. Harvey who gives us all we could want to know about McManus and this seminal strip in the history of comics.

And if that weren’t enough, we have quite a few annotations/footnotes at the end of the book that explain references in the strips. Allan Holtz, who worked on this with us did painstaking research. His full set of notes even beyond what we culled for the book will be posted up online when the book is out.

BRINGING UP FATHER was the creation of George McManus, and it’s probably familiar to many readers since it ran until 2000. The early strips — it began in 1913 — were stupendously drawn in a clear line style rarely equaled. The broad humor included Jiggs, a nouveau riche Irishman; Maggie, his surly wife, who was quite free with the rolling pin; and Nora, an inexplicably realistically drawn hot young flapper. We could never figure out why Nora looked normal, but we sure liked her clothes.

A year or so ago, our good pal Bryan Talbot started telling us about a new artist that he had met in France, a French-Japanese woman named Veronique Tanaka who had created a rather unusual graphic novel called METRONOME that not only worked as an animated movie but told a story through meta images and syncopated storytelling. We remember thinking that Talbot seemed awfully interested in this artist’s work, as he was acting as her agent, but, well, comics folks are an incredibly helpful bunch, and it’s not all that unusual for them to help each other out. The book was eventually published in the US by NBM, Tanaka was interviewed by several websites — including Publishers Weekly — and then, as with many flavors of the minute, she disappeared into the great scrum of comics, back to her original world of “conceptual art.”

Or did she?

It turns out, Tanaka never really existed.

As revealed today on The Forbidden Planet Blog, Tanaka and Metronome were completely the creation of…Bryan Talbot.

NBM took the book believing Bryan was acting as Véronique’s agent, it was only after it had been accepted but before publication that he revealed the truth to them, when he said - “Terry Nantier… to his credit, he didn’t try and persuade me to put it out under my real name.” The book garnered some good reviews (personally I thought it was fascinating) but the sales didn’t match the good reviews and so Bryan has decided belatedly to come clean via the Page 45 Newsletter, Stephen Holland having been in on it from before publication (and equally as impressed with the book as I was before he knew it was actually Bryan experimenting).

Well, it certainly fooled me! I’ve got to say I quite like the idea of this - famous creators working under another pen name is far from unusual in the book trade, but the majority of the most famous rather spoil the idea by having “Joe Bloggs writing as Stack Powerhouse” on the cover, which makes the idea of having a different type of work from your normal ouevre taken on its own merits rather than as a work by the famous such and such rather redundant (frankly, other than to please the marketing department I never saw any sense in that approach at all, it’s like Batman wearing a top with ‘Bruce Wayne appearing as Batman’ on it.

To which we can only say…well played, Mr. Talbot! Thank goodness no one in comics journalism ever does an actual background check.

Via PR:

Writers Greg Farshtey (creator of the LEGO® BIONICLE® toy universe) and Neil Kleid (Brownsville) will join NBM and Papercutz publisher Terry Nantier and Papercutz and Marvel Comics editor Jim Salicrup to talk with fans and show off new work.

NBM will have copies of its newest graphic novels and comics collections:

• Nocturnal Conspiracies: Nineteen Dreams by David B. (Epileptic)
• Little Nothings, Volume 2: The Prisoner Syndrome by Lewis Trondheim (Dungeon)
• Miss Don’t Touch Me by Hubert & Kerascoet
• Happy Hooligan by Frederick Burr Opper (part of the deluxe series of classic comic-strip reprints, Forever Nuts)

Papercutz will present the latest volumes in its comic-book and graphic-novel series Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tales from the Crypt and Classics Illustrated.

(AP Photo by Thibault Camus)

As previously reported, Paris’s famed Louvre museum is now housing an exhibition featuring comic books by some of the world’s best cartoonists, another signpost on comics’ Road to Global Domination.

The Louvre rarely showcases modern art. That fact alone makes this exhibition worth noting, and since this exhibition is as modern as it gets — the artwork on display is from original books commissioned by the museum. The artists were given essentially free rein, as long as their work included the exhibition’s Theme Ingredient: the Louvre itself.

BoDoi has a look at some pages by the European contributors.

Both Nicolas De Crécy and Marc-Antoine Mathieu have had their contribution to the project published on this side of the Atlantic by NBM Press. De Crécy’s GLACIAL PERIOD was nominated for a 2007 Eisner Award, and Mathieu’s MUSEUM VAULTS achieved similar fame upon its release last January.

The next Louvre book to be published should be Éric Liberge’s ODD HOURS, followed by ROHAN AT THE LOUVRE by Japan’s Hirohiko Araki, and a book by Belgium’s Bernard Yslaire which was created digitally — it seems that the Louvre showed his work on video monitors rather than in frames.

GLACIAL PERIOD was originally published in France in 2005, which testifies to how long this project has been in process, and we’re still years off from seeing all the books published stateside, since Araki and Yslaire have yet to finish their contributions. The exhibition is on display through April 13. Anyone been there yet?

Posted by Aaron Humphrey.

NBM, which has successfully been in the business of publishing full-length graphic novels for longer than most of the people now reading them, has finally launched the NBM Blog, and it’s pretty nice because it has Ted Rall, Naomi Nowak, Jesse Lonergan, Neil Kleid, and Dirk Schwieger all posting pages from their new projects, which is swell. But it also has Rick Geary talking about HIS new projects and posting PENCILS. RICK GEARY PENCILS. That is on beyond the cool.

I am currently finishing the inked pages for my eleventh graphic novel for NBM, the second in the new series “A Treasury of XXth Century Murder.” It’s the story of the still-unsolved 1922 murder of the Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor, a convoluted case that involved many of the motion picture celebrities of the day. I am posting below those of the penciled pages that depict the discovery of Taylor’s body in the living room of his apartment on Alvarado Street in Los Angeles.

My next volume in the series, now in the research stage, will be the bloody tale of the Axe-Man of New Orleans, who terrorized the city, killing a half-dozen people, in the years 1918 and 1919.

It is a law of physics: Rick Geary + murder = great comics.

(l-r, front row Igort, Isabel Kreitz, Max, Nicolas de Crécy; standing, Jaromir 99 and Jaroslav Rudiš)

Euro comics week in NYC continued with an evening of slideshows and presentations by David B., Nicolas de Crécy, Igort, Jaromír 99, Isabel Kreitz, Max, and Jaroslav Rudiš, some of the finest cartoonists in the world, so it was quite the time. B. showed slides from THE EPILEPTIC and described his thinking process behind his powerful imagery. Igort showed off an evocative selection of slides of images and comics that have influenced his own dreamlike stories. Kreitz — perhaps the only German cartoonist we have ever met — described the lack of opportunities for cartoonists in Germany (it’s another Disney-centric country, and there is almost no local comics scene, aside from some self-publishing). She also showed a trailer for her DIE SACHE MIT SORGE, a breathtakingly illustrated retelling of the true-life tale of Russian spy Richard Sorge. (You can watch the trailer below.) The Czech duo of Jaromir and Jaroslav, the least well known of the touring ‘toonists, spoke in broad terms about their influences and work. Max delved into some of the surrealist influences on his character Bardin, the Superrealist, such as Fuseli’s Nightmare paintings. De Crécy rounded out the evening with a slideshow of his pages — the combined effect of seeing so much of his fantastic, gorgeous work was sort of overwhelming, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s a better artist working in comics today. His only large-scale work published here in America is GLACIAL PERIOD, available from NBM, but one hopes that will change.

There was an SRO crowd at MoCCA for the event, and last night’s David Mazzucchelli-led talk at SVA was also packed. Seeing a healthy audience for European artists of this caliber in New York, at least, comes as a nice vindication of the job American and Canadian publishers are doing to get their work over here.

In our humble opinion, Rick Geary is one of cartooning’s unsung treasures. We’re unabashed fans of his series of TREASURY OF VICTORIAN MURDER books, which retells famed murders with all the detail of SNAPPED but all the artistry of a great artist. You can check out the series at Geary’s NBM homepage. Geary has just stepped into the 20th Century with THE LINDBERGH CHILD, a retelling of the kidnapping of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a crime which turned into one of the greatest media circuses of the day.

Like all of Geary’s books, this one is highly recommended, and if you click on the above link, you can even see a preview. Topnotch stuff.

NBM is handing out a booklet with samplers of some pretty good comics to try:

• A complete story from NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACIES by David B. (the acclaimed Epileptic).

• A complete story from MORESUKINE, Dirk Schwieger’s comics blog revealing the oddities of life in Japan. Schwieger will be signing at the NBM booth in the convention’s exhibit hall.

• Sunday comics from HAPPY HOOLIGAN, the new volume of NBM’s series FOREVER NUTS: CLASSIC SCREWBALL STRIPS.

• An excerpt from WHY I KILLED PETER, a tale of an abusive priest by one of his victims.

• An excerpt from MISS DON’T TOUCH ME, a spicy suspense story.

NBM’s booth is #1528

NBM brings a few of its fine cartoonists to the fray this weekend:

NBM Publishing is bringing some of its top writers and artists to the New York Comic Con. Meet them and see their new and upcoming work at the NBM-Papercutz booth (#1917).

Among the stars at the booth:
• TED RALL (SILK ROAD TO RUIN, GENERALISSIMO EL BUSHO), showing pages from his next book, THE YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY
• DAVID AXE (the award-winning WAR FIX), with the forthcoming LOVE AND TERROR
• PHIL YEH (the fun geography comic DINOSAURS ACROSS AMERICA)
• STEPHANIE McMILLAN (ATTITUDE: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists), creator of the strip MINIMUM SECURITY

NBM’s sister company, the kids’ comics publisher Papercutz, proudly presents:
• STEFAN PETRUCHA, writer of NANCY DREW
• SCOTT LOBDELL, writer of THE HARDY BOYS

More big media love for the comics! Newsweek gushes over Papercutz’s revamped Classic line:

Along with Lincoln Logs and chemistry sets, Classics Illustrated was part of that goofy but well-intentioned trend in the mid-20th century that sought both to educate and entertain America’s youth. Each issue contained a retelling of a well-known novel, supplied facts about the author and also included—I am not making this up—a biography of a scientist or inventor and the stirring tale of a brave dog. There were also issues on science and history and fairy tales. If that sounds dreadful—it wasn’t. I should know. That was where I first discovered just how good stories could be.

Now bound in hardcovers, and selling for $15—a hundred times the original cover price—the new Classics Illustrated books don’t closely resemble their predecessors, whose style was generally uniform, more or less like Prince Valiant in the funny papers. (Note to purists: if it’s the old versions you hanker for, they’re still being published by Jack Lake Productions.) The new series will use a different artist with every book, and the styles will vary radically. If the first two, “Great Expectations” and “The Wind in the Willows,” are any indication, Papercutz, the company now licensing the brand, has set very high standards for its new series.

NBM is putting up a weekly art blog by Lewis Trondheim to promote his upcomingbook LITTLE NOTHINGS:

LITTLE NOTHINGS Vol.1: The Curse of the Umbrella

The great talent behind the new generation in Europe, the Dungeon series, A.L.I.E.E.E.N. and Mr. O, pours his heart out in funny snippets of everyday life. His paranoia, little annoyances, big annoyances, chase of rainbows, love of comics, travel impressions from around the world, dealing with kids, being a kid: it’s all about life as we know it. A collection from his comics blog that expands his palette with full color painting, one can only be awed at Trondheim’s uncanny sense of observation and relate to all his experiences closely. Another touch of genius by one of today’s best and most influential comic artists.
6×9, 128pp., full color trade pb. with flaps, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-56163-523-8