A D&Q preview

So where was I? Oh yes, Drawn and Quarterly.

For those of you who don't know, Farrar, Straus & Giroux handle the book distribution for D&Q. Thus, the fall catalog contains a sneek peak at what the little Canadian comics publisher has cooked up for later this year.

The biggest, or at least most surprising book on the list is issue 17 of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. Apparently now he's jumped ship from Fantagraphics (yes, I know he's now self-publishing his series, but Fanta was still handling it last I heard). I wonder if there's any big story behind this move. Probably not, but I still find it rather surprising since Fanta has been publishing ANL since it debuted and had no small part in helping break Ware into the mass media. Over at The Comics Journal message board, someone asks the same question, before they start talking about Marisa Tomei conspiracy theories that is.

Other upcoming D&Q books include:

* Shenzhen by Guy Delisle. This time Delisle takes a look at life in Southern China. I think this runs the risk of coming off as "Pyongyang redux," but Delisle's a talented enough cartoonist to avoid such criticism.

* Abandon the Old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. This is the second volume in the ongoing collection of Tatsumi's work. A bit has been said about the book already, with Tatsumi on the cover of Paris Review and all, so I don't have much to add other than I'm looking forward to this book.

* Moomin Book One by Tove Jansson. I'm pretty sure D&Q had announced that they were going to be collecting this much-beloved comic strip some time last year, right? So I doubt this is too big of a surprise to anyone.

* Curses by Kevin Huizenga. This appears to be a collection of Huizenga's short stories that have graced anthologies like Kramer's Ergot, Time and the Or Else series. If you don't already have these stories in one form or another, you should definately pick this up.

*Lucky by Gabrielle Bell. Bell chronicles "the mundane details of her below-minimum-wage, twentysomething existence in Brooklyn." Cause no one's ever done that before.

I'm kidding. Bell's a very good cartoonist as recent issues of Mome bear out. If Lucky is at all as good as her work in that anthology, it'll be a very good book.

Apart from a paperback edition of Louis Riel, that's about it. All in all it's a pretty impressive line-up. I see that Huizenga book in particular garnering a good deal of attention from the mainstream press.