Intruder #5 free with every order to the DOMINO shop!

Hey we just got a stack of copies of the new issue of Seattle-centric anthology Intruder! Every order to the DOMINO shop will get a free copy until we run out.

We particularly love the center spread of this issue, by DOMINO favorites Jason T Miles and Darin Shuler!

Check-Marks at OPEN SPACE Galery in Baltimore, opens March 8th

Excited to announce this group show that OPEN SPACE Gallery in baltimore was nice enough to ask me to curate. Opens March 8th, as the kick-off event for Open Space’s Publications and Multiples Fair held March 9th and 10th. There will be lots of art stuff happening in Baltimore that weekend, so well worth your time to head out there for this show and much more. Here’s some more info:

Check-Marks

at Open Space

above image by Nick Payne

Running March 8th through April 15th

Opening March 8th from 7 to 10pm

Curated by Austin English

Featuring works on paper by

Nick Payne

James Ulmer

Leif Low-beer

Jason T Miles

Molly Colleen O’connell

Wiley Guillot

Becca Kacanda

Above image by Becca Kacanda

The 7 artists in this show believe in images. Characters, abstraction, text—all are used in the pursuit of making pictures that strike the viewer both for their gestalt and for their love of refining a personal library of visuals for the most intense potential. Each artist pushes their image-making to the point where its creativity aches in front of us. Most of these artists work with characters, the face and body are used almost as a template—a solid structure to build wild expression upon.

Each artist in this show will present a selection of works on paper. This opening also serves as a kick-off party for Open Space’s Publications and Multiples Fair held March 9th and 10th at the D Center (16 W. North Ave.). To celebrate this, each artist will have an original, extremely low print run zine available at the show.

For more information, contact openspacebaltimore@gmail.com

Open Space

2720 Sisson St.

Baltimore, MD 21211

openspacebaltimore.com

Ridge Street and Greatest Fear back in stock!

We just published a very affordable book—Tusen Hjartan Stark at $3—so we thought it wouldn’t be in bad taste to bring back a couple of our most expensive items: two limited edition artist portfolio’s by Austin English

I Used to Live on Ridge Street Artist’s Book by Austin English

Lithograph Portfolio containing 13 images that tell a story. Extremely limited edition of 14 portfolios. Signed and numbered by the artist.

The Greatest Fear by Austin English

Limited edition portfolio of Dry Point Copper prints. 10 editions made, 13 images in all. Tells a short story about two men who share a secret.

Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1 in stock at DOMINO!!!

The blizzard couldnt stop the early printing of Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1!

Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1 is now in stock and available for order

And remember, if you order DARK TOMATO, SPIDER MONKEY, DIFFICULT LOVES, FACE MAN or SPACE BASKET, you automatically get a copy of Tusen for free!

Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1 now available for pre-order!

No happier day here at DOMINO than when we have a brand new book to announce as available! Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1 can now be PREORDERED. Orders will ship by February 20th.

Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1. Edited by Austin English with work by Warren Craghead, Joanna Hellgren. E.A. Bethea and a cover by Wiley Guillot. 24 tabloid size pages, newsprint. Ships folded.

$3

Roughly translated from Swedish as ‘a thousand strong hearts,’ this anthology attempts to present difficult, challenging work alongside the art of rarely-translated European artists in a package that is cheap and accesible. All too often, the most experimental work and the strongest-yet-unavailable-in-the-USA European comics are only available in price prohibitive editions. Tusen Hjärtan Stark will present uncompromising work for an entry fee of $3. Each contributor also has 7to 8 pages to work with. Anthologies—in my view—suffer from short unfocused contributions. A 50 page anthology full of one page strips often never rises above being a sampler. 8 pages allows for the reader to enter any artists world and stay there for a solid amount of time. As this anthology features 3 artists with radically different approaches, the reader will move from one aesthetic to another, with just enough time in each to feel and think.

Our debut voulme of this anthology begins with a text-dominated cover by artist Wiley Guillot. It acts almost like a ‘stamp’ on top of our package. Warren Craghead delivers a dense piece assembled from many different drawings and composed for maximum effect in our tabloid format. Read it slowly and over and over. Joanna Hellgren—maybe the strongest artist working in Europe today who has not had enough of her work presented to English readers—introduces us to characters so delicately drawn in their characterazation and rendering that one might fear for their plight. But Hellgren’s work is not to be pushed over and there is teeth within these pages. Elizabeth Bethea ends the volume—Bethea is one of my personal favorite cartoonists working today. Her comics are drawn at a uniform size, always one page (as far as I’ve seen). But each page is an opportunity for widely different writing and drawing—the uniform nature almost as a set template for wild creativity. Bethea’s writing is heartfelt but in the way that we dream of true poetry: we overhear its heart instead of it being explained to us.

Also, all orders for other DOMINO publications (DARK TOMATO, SPIDER MONKEY, DIFFICULT LOVES, FACE MAN and SPACE BASKET) will automatically receive a free copy of Tusen Hjärtan Stark #1—this offer extends to pre-orders AND regular orders once the book has been printed.

Books from Larsson, Ferrick and Campbell in the shop!

Some beautiful new items jsut added to the shop, including two hard to find books from Sweden by peter Larsson. Grab em:


Raska Steg at Pipan by Peter Larsson

Jive Yams by Peter Larsson

Spiders Visit by Sarah Ferrick

Untitled by Cooper Campbell

Castle and Wood in the Domino Shop

Hey, we jsut added Darin Shuler’s  cool, inky serial comic Castle and Wood to the DOMINO shop! Go get ’em:

Castle and Wood #1 by Darin Shuler

Castle and Wood #2 by Darin Shuler

Castle and Wood #3 by Darin Shuler

Castle and Wood #4 by Darin Shuler

Jonathan Petersen Original Art For Sale!

In the coming year, DOMINO will be offering more and more original art from our favorite artists through our webstore. We’re proud to start things off with a series of drawings by Jonathan Petersen, the Montreal based artist behind our publication Space Basket. All of these drawings are $100. Click on the link to be redirected to a page where they are available for sale!

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper. 11 x 7.

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper. 11 x 7

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper.

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper.

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper.

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper.

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper.

Drawing by Jonathan Petersen, pen & ink and marker on paper.

Checklist 3

Here are some quick little reviews of comics knocking around DOMINO HQ:

Spiders Visit by Sarah Ferrick

This was one of my favorite comics I’ve come across lately. It’s hard to tell if this is the author’s first comic—but it feels that way. That is to say, while the artist has certainly done a lot of work exploring their own world of images prior to making this book, the way this strong imagery is translated into a comic is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, thrilling. A least thrilling for an artist like me. There is a strong, strong sense of storytelling here, but removed from all the accepted ideas of what comics ‘needs’ to have to constitute good storytelling. Grids are not considered, nor are word balloons. That’s good—because Ferrick is more interested in more important things: a inventive sense of drawing that, while scraggly, is very downbeat. Unlike a lot of shaky line artists, Ferrick’s aesthetic is not one of manic assault but instead more matter-of-fact. Her characters are solid units of drawings and her rooms are expressive without being filled with throw away gestures. But it’s Ferrick’s compositions that strike me the most, particularly when she gives us a large drawing of Lumpy (one of the two characters here in this one-act play like narrative) sitting and talking to Spider. Lumpy is a ragged piece of drawing at the center of an almost bare room—I get the comfort of a children’s book from this image, but also the deeper satisfaction of looking at a fully articulated style of personal drawing—and, what’s more, Ferrick shows us Lumpy and Spider talking, deftly moving the story along without any strain or showiness. The story itself is quite moving—one friend visits another one, and one suggests that the others home is bare and uninviting. What Ferrick does that so few other art comic creators seem interested in is develop these characters through sparse dialogue and reactions and opinions subtle but rich with feeling and intelligence. These characters don’t ask you to like them or impress you. They act out something hard to define—my reactions to their story was all over the place, and that’s what true comics-as-poetry ought to be. I’m less interested in fractured sentences written within a panel than I am in difficult emotions and intentions being achieved so well.

The Golem of Gabirol by Olga Volozova

This is Volozova’s follow up to her book The Airy Tales. As much as I like that book, I greatly prefer this one. Sparkplug founder Dylan Williams once told me that he thought of the work of Trevor Alixopulos and Chris Cilla as being the modern equivalent to the greatness of prime-era New Yorker art. It might be a stretch but I could see some of that quality being what attracted Dylan to Volozova’s art, especially this project. Volozova’s drawings are not hip, they are not showy—and at times within this comic they are very thin, barely there and grounded only by lots of ink wash. But in that imagined spirit of what-The-New-Yorker-could-be-today if it still followed through on the spirit of Steinberg and Thurber, Volozova applies the approach of a painter to the medium of pen & ink and wash. It’s hard to imagine the reception of a rich work like this one in an average comic store, when a complicated approach like this often needs to be paired with ‘weird’ content. Volozova has presented us with a folk tale drawn with the visual rush of Fort Thunder but without the counter-culture trappings. And the fact that this is a black and white stapled comic instead of a paperback (like her last project) means that the majority of people who encounter it will be comic-book people. It’s up to the reader to do the work to embrace this richly deserving work—there is no hook other than that it’s a strong work of art. The comics world likes to think of it as a place that embraces such things, but here this book sits, waiting for the reception it deserves.

Dionysian Spirit by Leslie Weibler

Like Volozova and Ferrick, Weibler gives us a rich world of imagery that elicits a range of emotions and thoughts. I bring it up not just because this is a strong work and deserves people’s attention, but because the seriousness of its purpose is notable for the same qualities being absent in so much of the work I see being placed on ‘best of’ lists this year. What is admirable about a young artist like Weibler is that there is no attempt to drag the reader in by dressing the work up in the clothes of trendy drawing styles so that this complicated book of thinking-on-paper goes down any easier. Weibler’s comics are nothing but her art, her unique style and presentation. It’s interesting to think of Weibler, Ferrick and Volozova putting these strong books out in a field that seems more interested in well-executed but basically limited work by artists like Alex Schubert. I spend a lot of time reading virtually every sentence that comes out of ‘major’ online comic writers, and their blind spot to work like this is probably a question of personal taste, but is still pretty depressing. Art is what we all care about, right? Here is a work of art that doesn’t impose any limitations on itself—the artists working mind and heart is what we are confronted with.

Metamorpho #7

I’m not sure if Ramona Fradon drew this issue or not. Maybe it is Joe Orlando? Either way, I love the goofiness of this comic and the cartoony drawing. That checker border bar on the top of the comic is beautiful too. I would give this comic to a kid—a funny looking character in a bright rubbery world. I love Fradon’s interview in Alter Ego, where she basically says how horrible it was working in comics. I bet it was! But I’m glad she gave us this sane, well made comic for children. A hard fought creation!

Victor Cayro’s Bittersweet Romance Preview!

Victor Cayro and Keenan Keller were nice enough to let me see some preview pages of Cayro’s upcoming book Bittersweet Romance. I really can’t say enough about this book—it’ll be published in early 2013 by Drippy Bone, but just staring at these pages has made it my favorite book of 2012. I’m glad to be able to share these images here.

I was honored to be asked to do a pin-up for this comic, which appears alongside a drawing by the great Jesse McManus (I hear there’s also an incredible pinup by Matthew Thurber)

While the first thing that hits you with these pages is obviously the visual crush, what I’m most excited about is a tome of newly WRITTEN pages by Cayro. His drawings are so intense that I think the equally complicated/rich writing that every Victor Cayro comic displays gets lost in the shuffle. This promises to be a hulking work of art, and I’m so thrilled that it’s almost here. It’s hard to believe that a solo Cayro comic doesn’t exist yet, but as far as I can tell, every story so far has been in an anthology. Due congratulations to Drippy Bone for all the loving attention they put into this project—look at those endpapers!