Get 4 books for $55 + S&H. Ships May 2023.
4 new books, bundled together, a designed set:
frozengirl by Iku Kawaguchi.
Parc by Jul Gordon.
Compact Magazine.
The Necrophilic Landscape by Morgan Vogel.
$35 savings over individual retail price. Now shipping all at once.
9781937541644 • 6 × 8.75” • 140pp
"A macabre, ritual auto-da-fé, scratching and consuming fresh scabs from the festering exhausted spacetime of present sssocial fabrik." —Tom Kaczynski author of Beta Testing The Ongoing Apocalypse
A book disguised as a magazine; a magazine disguised as a book. Lush, ambivalent, sacramental & subtweeting. With poetry, photography, comics, & prose. And 50 pages previewing future books from the publisher. Compact Magazine; a salon in print. A Magazine About Feelings.
Featuring new work of post-Covid Science Fiction by Nova-award winning author Samuel R Delany, Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures author Yvan Alagbé; including work by Morgan Vogel, Stephen Z Hayes, Sarah Cuje, Brian Bamps, Liza Kotlar, Ellen Plant, Ash H.G., Blaise Larmee, and Katherine Dee.
With book previews by Maggie Umber, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, Lale Westvind, Ash H.G., Tara Booth, Paul Peng, Clair Gunther, Stephen Z Hayes, Josiah Parker, Jason Overby, and Steve Grove.
9781937541637 • 5.5 × 8.515” • 76pp
"Gorgeous" —Margot Ferrick, Yours, Dognurse
Iku Kawaguchi’s drawings of girls who are refined, fashionable, sleeping. Young women who are collapsing, vamping, strutting. Laughing ruddily, reading, petting, leaning, smoking, & looking in the mirror. In ballpoint pen, pencil, and watercolor.
Iku Kawaguchi lives and works in Tokyo. frozengirl collects drawings made between 2008 and 2023.
"Most of my motifs are women, but I think I draw something different. I'll leave it up to the viewer to decide what it is." - Iku Kawaguchi
“Their charming features had ceased to be indistinct and impersonal. I dealt them like cards into so many heaps to compose (failing their names, of which I was still ignorant): the big one who jumped over the banker, the little one who stood out against the horizon of sea with her plump and rosy cheeks, her green eyes; the one with the straight nose and dark complexion, in such contrast to all the rest, another, with a white face like an egg on which a tiny nose described an arc of a circle like a chicken's beak; yet another, wearing a hooded cape.” —Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. II Within a Budding Grove - Seascape with Frieze of Girls
9781937541590 • 6 × 7.692” • 104pp
“An eccentric, wonderfully trashy story, a subtle and unusual way of translating it into pictures.” —Dr. Brigitte Helbling, Berthold Leibinger Foundation
“Jul is responsible for the funniest and most absurd comic panels I have ever seen. There is nothing like Jul’s dark humor out there. Her scratchy line and wonderful color palette are absolutely perfect for the surreal sceneries and priceless dialogues. If you’re looking for something truly original in contemporary comics, keep an eye out for Jul’s comics!” —Anna Haifisch, The Artist
“Jul Gordon‘s drawing is magnificent. You feel every line and blob and smear of her world in your bones. I love this book.” —Anders Nilsen, Big Questions, Tongues
“Parc is a great touching picture story, by Jul Gordon, excitingly told, wondrously comically drawn, about life as it really is: With the ancestors, the weather, the vermin and love.” —Anke Feuchtenberger, W the Whore Makes Her Tracks
“Reading Jul’s books is a mystical experience. Every detail speaks to me in an unknown language while I can’t stop listening.” —Max Baitinger, Röhner
“While there are scenes that sear themselves into your genetic make-up, like a guy in a wheelchair shooting his guns into an empty swimming pool, there emerges a burning, all-engulfing anger from Gordon's vivid comics language.” —Oliver Ristau, The Comics Journal
Parc is inspired by a German comic opera and drawn from scale architectural models built by the author. Starring Theresa, the quintuplets. The cat, the physical therapist and the subtenant. Sophie, her father, her brother, and the dog. Each lives under different constraints with distinct personalities and in a variety of spaces within the park. We, voyeuristically, zoom into and come to understand each. Violence and despair are portrayed casually, with humor and irreverence, but the contrast between the grave content of the panels and the levity in the way they are drawn creates a friction which underscores Gordon’s social critique. Things are messy, there are consequences. And yet, there is hope, resilience, caring, beauty, and art.
9781937541620 • 7.75 × 9.25" • 44pp
“[A] solo masterpiece...one of the most stunning works of comics art in the last decade.” —Austin English, The Comics Journal
"Finally, we are permitted to peek into the horrid pile left in the bin outside the building of the former Xeric grant office. The building has been closed for a while now, and like one would expect, the state of this original manuscript has been compromised considerably over the years, some might even say 'edited' by the forces of nature." —Noel Freibert, Old Ground
"THE BODY TAKING PRECEDENCE OF THE SOUL...THE MANNER SEEKING TO OUTDO THE MATTER, THE LETTER AIMING AT OUSTING THE SPIRIT." —Henri Bergson
In Morgan Vogel’s The Necrophilic Landscape the world is split between adult men and male children— we’re told they’re identified and separated at birth. Men live in the city and children live in quasi-feudal, agrarian zones on its outskirts. But children may pass themselves off as men by merely standing on top of one another while wearing a trenchcoat. And the disguise is employed en masse, systematized, with untold numbers of paired children disguised as adults crossing into the city to become its criminals, terrorists, and illegal immigrants. Satire. An unfinished work which feels epic by sheer density of ideas per page and panel. Nikolai Gogol under the influence of Edogowa Rampo. Previously published under the pseudonym Tracy Auch, this second edition features an afterword with texts by the author and photographs.
Get 4 books for $55 + S&H. Ships this winter.
—Grand Electric Thought Power Mother by Lale Westvind
—Sometime All The Time by Tara Booth
—zine by nuie
—Altcomics Magazine 7 ed. Liza Kotlar, Stephen Z Hayes
PRE-ORDER • Ships December 2023 • 9781937541576 • 7.5 × 10” • Hardcover 340pp
Grand Electric Thought Power Mother is a collection of Lale Westvind's critically acclaimed risograph comics, with new work. This highly influential body of work is comprised of epic stories with spiritual themes. Poetic and intellectual, the content explores the line between thoughts and reality and perception, the nature of energy and consciousness, collective consciousness and experience, and how will and intent can create collective action. It all plays out in narratives of women warriors literally battling and wrestling through these states and concepts against science fiction, mythological and psychic backdrops.
Muscular women warriors fill the pages with their energy, power, speed, force, gravity, and weight. This powerful collection fills a space for physically and psychologically strong female characters that is rarely occupied in our culture or comics as a whole. Comics included in this collection: Now and Here, Other Way, Trial One, Tornar and Riparna; Double Head Tour, Yazar and Arkadas, and Mary.
This is the birthing of an entire cast of truly original characters, the likes of which Marvel and DC have not imagined. These are stories which are queer in their essence. They seek to describe that which does not exist yet. Within these tales are countless new technologies, philosophies, creatures and beings; A treasure trove of new ideas. The author sought to explore the idea that thought has an effect on one's surroundings. To explore the beginning of the cosmos. Thought as a force unto itself. Intention as a force of energy to be controlled.
Grand Electric Thought Power Mother reads like the found spiritual scripture of an alien world.
"In a series of mind-expanding sci-fi stories, Lale Westvind channels the power of myth to manifest beings of light and shadow, meat and motorcycle. Clones, doppelgangers and girl gangs, temples in ancient town squares and gleaming cities of cast iron and chrome teem from these pages. First and foremost, the book is an anthem, an ode, a hymn and an incantation to the transformative power of love. Minds meet across time and space, connecting against impossible odds, reaching together towards morning. “Is it by imagining day that I see a glow? The glow grows...Is it dawn?" —Anya Davidson
"I first read Lale’s work after picking up one of her comics at a zine fest 10 years ago. Knowing absolutely nothing about the artist, I read it on the subway, expecting to simply pass the time. Instead, that moment remains one of the most exhilarating comic reading experiences of my life, as an intensely charismatic artistic vision revealed itself to me. For a lesser artist, that formidable high would have been enough to sustain me through thousands and thousands of mediocre pages. Westvind, instead, ups the ante with every new comic...maybe she’ll disappoint someday, but it’ll be against a standard of her own excellence, a benchmark rarely seen in this medium."
"Lots of people in comics gravitate to Lale’s work as being some kind of synthesis of Kirby/Heavy Metal, etc. I think what’s happening is far more noteworthy than the pastiche genre fever dreams everyone wants to live in: I took as key an offhand remark by Westvind that ‘understanding what happens in my story isn’t really that important.’ Yes, exactly, someone finally speaks the truth & understands their own worth. What IS important, obviously, is all the things you experience and feel in a Westvind story beyond mere understanding. This is work that should appeal to the most radical and conservative comic readers simultaneously, while destroying all their prejudices from within. In summary: top notch, 10/10, A++, you are at the register purchasing this book now if you are not a dunce." —Austin English
PRE-ORDER • Ships December 2023 • 9781937541545 • 7 × 9.8” • 104pp
Time is running out on our love.
Sometimes All the Time is a Tara Booth comics magazine. Humor, heartbreak, honesty, and astonishingly uncensored scenarios drawn in vivid color. Drawing from over 900 scans of original art, sketchbooks and diaries, ‘Sometimes’ is an intimate and mesmerizing book that took years to create and to assemble. The book closes with an interview with Tara and her editor Raighne, including a 10 page preview of the next volume, and a poignant short story by Tara’s friend and cartoonist Tommi Parrish.
PRE-ORDER • Ships December 2023 • 9781937541651 • 6 × 8.5” • Singer sewn in white thread • 28pp
2 lovers enter the ring. A slugfest. Dancing slowly in water color. Disintegration.
PRE-ORDER • Ships December 2023 • 9781937541583 • 6 × 9” • 28pp
Our return issue after a 5 year hiatus. Altcomics Magazine is the printed companion to our documentary film—in—progress. This issue features fireside conversations about Morgan Vogel and is edited by Liza Kotlar and Stephen Z Hayes. Front and back cover by Kristina Tzekova.
Altcomics Magazine 7 comes with Altcomics Magazines issues 4-6 while supplies last.
9781937541422 • 6 × 8.2” • 216pp • b&w • 2 color offset • smyth-sewn softcover • poster (18.75 x 8.2")
"Röhner expertly shows off Max's inventive draftsmanship, droll wit, and precise cartooning. It's one of my favorite books for 2020." —Gina Wynbrandt, author of Someone Please Have Sex With Me
"Max is such a good observer of interpersonal relations, and therefore a great storyteller. Needless to say that his drawings are magnetic. I keep staring at them and think: How did he do that? Röhner is one of my favorite books." —Anna Haifisch, author of The Artist
"Designs whole worlds with a few lines." —Sabine Danek, Critic
Baitinger leaves the reader in the dark about the big picture. He prefers to show details: how the protagonist spins his appointment calendar in the air to indicate that he has no time. The way aluminium confetti pours out of a letter onto a shag rug. Baitinger breaks up an everyday matter like brewing coffee into many small steps, each in an individual image: ‘Switch on boiler. Insert pot. Fill tank. Insert filter. — Josa Mania-Schlegel, journalist at Krautreporter
Previously published in German by Rotopol Press, Röhner is a delightfully detailed field guide to the every day tasks of living in an apartment — making coffee, watering plants, and maintaining order and a careful balance with neighbors — until that order is upset.
Max Baitinger’s dry humor and precise drawings deftly personify his über persnickety protagonist, simply referred to as P., whose regimented life is disrupted by the arrival of Röhner, an unloved houseguest, who imposes upon his psyche and offsets the careful balance with his gregarious, omnipresent neighbor. Devious tricks and hilarious imaginations of Röhner’s elimination take shape, from painstakingly making up Röhner’s guestroom and then piercing the air mattress to cause a slow leak — to visions of an exploding coffee pot tearing off Röhner’s face.
A CAT LOVES A BOY.
Exquisite, intricate graphite drawings in landscape view. Chock-full of hidden details, little worlds of signification. Beautiful, opulent, emotional.
REVIEWS FOR COPY KITTY:
“...intricate, hypnotic…” —Selena Gallery
“A shimmering fake moon, opulent costume changes, and Depression-era Art Deco set the backdrop for this spellbinding new narrative from Kyung-Me.” —The Editorial Magazine
REVIEWS FOR CONIUNCTIO:
“Kyung-Me’s ultra-precise ink drawings, which resemble both Renaissance etchings and finely wrought computer-generated renderings, are windows into starkly glamorous modernist interiors.” —The New Yorker
“In a series of grayscale drawings, Kyung-Me renders every wood grain and textile fiber with ink, charcoal, or graphite in crisp detail, with no loss from foreground to background. The meticulous clarity is dizzying, even hallucinatory. With no singular focus or discernible narrative, the subjectless interior induces a horror vacui through its elaborate, often competing patterns.” —The Offing
REVIEWS FOR BAD KOREAN:
“A charmingly self-deprecating show, Bad Korean is a deeply personal exploration of feeling alienated from both one’s own body and one’s environment. Kyung-Me’s sketches initially appear rough and hurried, with loose outlines and plain washes of color that carelessly overstep their bounds. Her facial expressions are an exception. Consistently illustrated with profound sensitivity, her drawn avatar’s face elucidates a complex conflation of conflicted feelings. She offers a rare feminist window into second-generation intersectionality, achieved at a human scale.” —Hyperallergic
“Kyung-Me’s drawings, rendered in colored pencil and pastel on paper, show flattened visions of everyday life in New York — images of being optimistic and confused and gross and lonely and lost and hungry and in love.” —Huffington Post
An adult picture book comprised of intricate, surreal graphite illustrations that tell the tale of obsessive love and longing and the maddening, self-inflicted contortions of identity endured to fit perceived expectations and norms.
Copy Kitty explores themes of identity, belonging and love through a cat who painfully and continually reinvents itself in pursuit of adoration and an elusive ideal. Autobiographically driven, the narrative strikes a chord through common experiences conveyed authentically, with sharp perspective and deep reflection on the self-destructive consequences of perceived ideals and sublimation of identity.
The format of the book presents each of the highly detailed illustrations alternating with a blank page. Copy Kitty is based on a series of illustrations Kyung-Me exhibited at galleries in New York, which were met with strong critical acclaim. In 2018, work from Copy Kitty was featured in Artspace, having been selected on the favorites list from the New York NADA preview by prominent art collectors Susan and Michael Hort.
Kyung-Me is an artist and illustrator living in New York. She is represented by Bureau, NY. She holds an MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York galleries and beyond. She is best known for her series of illustrations and debut graphic novel, Bad Korean, critically acclaimed by Vice, Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic.
9781937541514 • 6 × 8” • 108pp • CMYK offset
"This is not a comics anthology that just compiles various contributions by different artists but rather one that can only exist as one piece, one that was created by three parts of one body with a shared vision. These stories don’t make you see the individual artists behind them — these stories want to tell you that they created themselves and will keep recreating even after you put the book down. A living organism of the most convincing examples that show how masterful and unpretentiously poetic comics can be." —Aisha Franz, author of Shit is Real
"Lush dancing forms in kaleidoscopic color and style, Mirror Mirror 3 is animated, playful and delicious. A collection of delightfully joyous work vibrating with creative vigor. An ornate dream box of beautifully wrapped candies you've never tried before." —Lale Westvind, author of Grip
Mirror Mirror 3 is a vibrant maelstrom of mixed media, arriving at a stunning intersection of innocence, joy, and color.
The third volume of 2dcloud’s flagship anthology is created in partnership with Plum, a Brooklyn-based artist collective and publisher. This volume of the anthology series is divided into three sections, one by each of the Plum artists, with collaborative work connecting the stories. Themes throughout include nature, introspection and interpersonal relationships. Plum’s imagery is vibrant, emotive, and mythic.
Plum Press is a small press located in Brooklyn, NY. They publish comics, zines and other printed materials and products. They host events and work in a variety of media. Plum is run by Haejin Park, Paige Mehrer, Sophie Page.
9781937541248 • 6.4 × 8.4” • 140pp • CMYK offset • smyth-sewn • red gilded edges • printed by TWP in S. Korea
"Margot Ferrick makes reading a true act of synesthesia. I hear their colors, and feel rhythms in the repetition of their words and how they draw their letters. They are breaking down the boundaries of what we consider a "comic book", turning words into pictures and pictures into punctuation. It’s not just formalism—Yours has a visual poetry all it’s own, expressing on behalf of the protagonist, a desire and longing that goes right to my heart." —Lauren Weinstein, author of Being an Artist and a Mother, and Goddess of War
"There is so much love in Margot's lines. Their art is so brave! I have never seen drawing like this before." —Anna Haifisch, author of The Artist
"Their spare, crushingly meaningful choice of text is similar to the words left behind on the back of a photograph." —The Comics Journal
With Yours, the notions of art, poetry, and form collapse into one of the most singular approaches to comics in recent memory. Ferrick's intimate love letters read as both a confession and a seduction.
Margot Ferrick’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies, as small-run editions with presses such as Sonatina and Perfectly Acceptable, and in galleries in Baltimore, Virginia, Chicago, Scotland, and San Francisco.
9781937541149 • 6.8 × 8.5” • 104pp • flexibound
"A thought-provoking, richly entertaining collection from some of the most exciting comic artists working today. A must read for fans of the horrific and perverse." —Bryan Cogman, co-executive producer/writer, Game of Thrones
"An impressive collection of beautiful depictions of grotesque things and grotesque depictions of beautiful things." —Alan Resnick, writer director, Adult Swim’s Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It
"Great horror is the pursuit of meaning through defilement, a conscious and inquisitive violation of the mind, the body, the beloved, the home; the concentric circles of security that comprise our lives. Great porn proceeds from a similar root, grappling with that which delights and with that which abases in the context of their inextricability." —Gretchen Alice Felker-Martin (from the foreword)
"This book is like a porn stash you’d find in the cupboard of a medieval demon. It feels truly forbidden, and reading it induces an exquisite sense of deviance." —Hyperallergic
"Mirror Mirror II invites the most innovative creators working in the form today and proves just how expansive the pornographic and gothic can be, encapsulating the pop cultural, fantastical, and realistic in one fell swoop." —Rachel Davies, Rookie Magazine
"Editors Sean T. Collins and Julia Gfrörer have assembled an exquisitely creepy and seductive new collection of comics with Mirror Mirror II. From Uno Moralez’s pixilated noirs to Dame Darcy’s ornate Gothic ghost stories, the wide range of horror here is fantastic, as characters creep and fuck in the shadows of unimaginable darkness throughout. It’s certainly the perfect, freaky anthology for you, your lover, and all the demons in your mind." —Hazel Cills, MTV News
For volume two of 2dcloud's annual anthology, editors Julia Gfrörer & Sean T. Collins have amassed some of the darkest talents within as well as outside of comics to create a wholly singular reading and visual experience. From masters of horror like Clive Barker to leading figures in altcomics such as Simon Hanselmann, this collection transcends the expectations of what a comics anthology can do.
Lala Albert • Clive Barker • Heather Benjamin • Apolo Cacho • Sean Christensen • Nicole Claveloux • Sean T. Collins • Al Columbia • Dame Darcy • Noel Freibert • Renee French • Meaghan Garvey • Julia Gfrörer • Simon Hanselmann • Claude Paradin • Aidan Koch • Laura Lannes • Céline Loup • Uno Moralez • Mou • Jonny Negron • Chloe Piene • Josh Simmons • Carol Swain • Trungles
shop illustration by Maggie Umber
"Award-winning author MariNaomi (Kiss and Tell) returns with this charming and intimate collection of vignettes and meatier personal histories. ... The book is utterly absorbing, funny, intimate, and even philosophical." —Publishers Weekly
"The art sparkles, combining bold, clean lines with wonderfully expressive faces. Add in a great ear for dialog, and the result is a winning collection that brings the reader genuine laughs and a powerful emotional punch. MariNaomi is definitely a name to watch in the years to come." —Library Journal
"Dragon's Breath is a funny, intimate and sometimes sad ode to multiplicity. Each episode comes over you like a puff of smoke, and with it comes both a little cough and the rich scent of fresh tobacco." —Graphic Novel Reporter
"MariNaomi knows how to weave in a sense of the comic, so that moments of deep despair are always balanced with some levity and even mirth ... A highly recommended read from a new and exciting independent publisher." —Asian American Literature Fans
"Mari's comics are a special, one-of-a-kind thing. They live in this mesmerizing area of honesty and authenticity ... their quality is wildly impressive and present throughout." —This Is Infamous
"MariNaomi cuts to the quick with her emotionally resonant comics collection that offers variety and a comforting voice." —Foreword Reviews
"As a memoirist, MariNaomi has wit, focus, and a sense of when to stop telling a story. The comics in Dragon’s Breath are both compact and emotionally resonant." —The Comics Journal
"Different comics in Dragon's Breath will cause different reactions depending on your experience, but it's bound to touch you somewhere." —Panel Patter
"Mari is a brilliant artist, compelling storyteller and bonafide dragonslayer." —Brodie Hubbard
"What is so appealing is how MariNaomi shares a life, one that is distinct in its details, yet connected. Here is another woman searching for love, risk, and connection amid the hubbub of the contemporary -- boyfriends, best friends, bedbugs, exes, rock music and rentals." —Bookslut
"[MariNaomi] reminds us about those special fleeting moments of beauty and those dark places in our psyches that we bury." —The Great Comic Book Heroes
In this collection of raw, emotionally honest stories, MariNaomi explores a wide range of topics including youthful rebellion, mortality, disillusionment, and compassion. Many of these stories were first serialized on the popular site the Rumpus. These poignant stories, some filled with hope, others tinged with remorse, are sure to appeal to even the most discerning reader.
shop illustration by Nayef Nebhan
9781937541194 • 7 × 10” • 160pp • CMYK offset • smyth-sewn • printed by TWP in S. Korea
"The Ultimate Graphic Novel For Artists, Weirdos And Renegades." —Huffington Post
"Dirty erasures, tense scrawls, and compulsive stretches of pattern seethe with intensity and urgency and rub up against profound bewilderment." —Bomb Magazine
"Unique and vibrant and seductive-to-the-curious." —The Comics Journal
"Dirty erasures, tense scrawls, and compulsive stretches of pattern seethe with intensity and urgency and rub up against profound bewilderment." —Bomb
"Is your style a reaction to — or even a rejection of — more traditional comics storytelling?" —Andy Oliver
"Anything resembling a typical comic vocabulary is being abandoned." —Comics Bulletin
"Austin English’s drawing is gelatinous, daubed, stroked, smeared, erased, redrawn, sculpted, twisted, cringes, flattens out as it squashes inward, maybe reminds one of a landscape and populace for Stravinsky folk songs, or a dream program for tragic Polish puppet plays, crowded, self-replicating and worth checking out." —Gary Panter
"A thoughtful artist pushing at the boundaries of what modern comics will accept in terms of an artistic approach." —The Comics Reporter
6 years in the making. Finally here. Full color. Uncompromising. The new book from Austin English. Featuring New York Story and four more. Designed by Best American Comics editor Bill Kartalopoulos.
"Where did this man come from? [...] lines so delicate they’re like hairs that have dropped onto a scanner from above. Who knew making a series of pictures in navy triangles and circles could be so beautiful?" —It’s Nice That
"We often expect comics to tell us the stories of adventures. Alexis Beauclair does precisely this and nothing else, but his work extends, synthesizes, crystallizes, refines and intensifies this tradition. "Action" is the watchword of his narratives, which follow the path of looking and the stages of perception to reconstitute the movement of an intelligence. Alexis Beauclair's comics tell us the story of the adventure of drawing. And (almost) nothing else." —Laurent Bruel, Editions Matière
"Alexis Beauclair's minimalism makes generous play of the act of reading comics. Recalling the lively abstract animation of Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, and Al Jarnow, Beauclair's formalism is intellectual but never academic. His precise, linear images reveal themselves to be shaded with humor and humanity in their juxtaposition and arrangement." —Bill Kartalopoulos, Series Editor for the #1 New York Times best selling Best American Comics series
The Sol LeWitt of comics delivers sublime beauty of abstract art as never before in a graphic novel.
Nothing stretches or bends, there is no movement, no animation, no life in static images. But by looking at these pared-down and simple pictures in sequence, you catch glimpses that would indicate otherwise—and that indication is magical. Before your eyes, these abstract simple lines, geometric shapes, and grids come to life. Vanishing Perspective is a comic book in which the reader is light itself.
Includes Kim Jooha interview + Bill Kartalopoulos essay.
Alexis Beauclair lives in France. His acclaimed illustrations and comics have been featured in the New York Times, Pitchfork Review, and Real Life.
shop illustration by Tara Booth
"Finally, we are permitted to peek into the horrid pile left in the bin outside the building of the former Xeric grant office. The building has been closed for a while now, and like one would expect, the state of this original manuscript has been compromised considerably over the years, some might even say 'edited' by the forces of nature." —Noel Freibert
"THE BODY TAKING PRECEDENCE OF THE SOUL...THE MANNER SEEKING TO OUTDO THE MATTER, THE LETTER AIMING AT OUSTING THE SPIRIT." —Henri Bergson
Drawn in 2010 and never completed or published, Tracy Auch's gothic, grotesque, and fragmentary epic is presented for the first time in this riso-printed ashcan edition. The anxious and darkly comic narrative takes place in an all-male world in which sexual reproduction does not exist and the primary class division in society is between men and children. With the thematic sensibility of Nikolai Gogol's short stories and the suggestive, world-building scope of British roleplaying fantasy art, The Necrophilic Landscape is certain to enthrall and disgust readers who can finally encounter it for the first time.
shop illustration by Jake Terrell
9781937541361 • 7 × 10” • 176pp • 2017
"2001 is strange and fascinating in its fragmentary, elusory nature."—Biblioklept
A conceptually tight and dense book of intellectual and romantic comics, drawings, and related materials, jacketed by Japanese and South Korean flags. 2001 begins at the center with the titular comic and expands outward, leaving twin wakes of character sheets, architectural plans detritus, comics characters dialoguing about subjects such as love, sociology, and practice, drawings made with lighters, letters from his mother, short texts on linearity and goal-orientation in 5th grade.
9781937541408 • 8 × 5.1” • 184pp • 2 color offset • o-wrap
"I think Leif Goldberg made Lost in the Fun Zone using automatic writing—after absorbing all art of the twentieth century and comics from the past forty years. How else do you get Dubuffet, synthetic cubism, Garfield, Italian Futurism, Luis Buñuel, and Gary Panter in a story about two cats traveling a digressive and banal path to nowhere? It's boldly weird. Goldberg has hijacked the comics form, for its benefit and ours." —Nicole Rudick, Managing Editor at The Paris Review
"Alleluia!!! Our favorite Artist has made a Graphic novel unlike any other. Going Commando in Black'n'White Rodeo style, the better to spin his lasso spiderweb of narrative, Goldberg performs the great trick of steering time neatly down two railroad tracks. A metamorphosis per page, at the speed of synapses sprouting digression radicles... This story echoes, spins, and convulses with a thousand sweaty puns- you will laff on the bus, in the bathroom, and at Harvard. Truly unlike no other artist in the galaxy (Borblefluzz is related).... Do you want to understand the world by walking through a pumpkin? Is your favorite drug Funny Animals?... Well then get "Get Lost"!!!! To Find Yourself!! in the Fun Zone!!!" —Matthew Thurber
Lost in the Fun Zone is the long-awaited debut graphic novel from respected underground printmaker, animator, musician, and zinemaker Leif Goldberg. Transposing buddy and road film dynamics into the world of underground art comics, Goldberg adroitly balances absurdism with cultural snark and art history commentary to produce a book worthy of its name.
Leif Goldberg is a visual artist and musician living in Vermont. As a member of the highly influential art-collective Fort Thunder based in Providence, RI in the late 1990's and early 2000's, Goldberg is known for his bold screenprint work as well as experimental animation and contributions to the band Forcefield, who were part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
"'Extended Play' is an apt title. The pleasure of Terrell's line, and his storytelling, is infectious. It’s a battle cry for cartooning as mark making, as line design, for thinking of drawing as handwriting and a form of searching and discovery. It may be his first book, but already he seems to understand what IT is, better than most. I could read his work all day long." —Sammy Harkham
Extended Play, the debut collection by Jake Terrell, seizes upon the millennial zeitgeist from an array of angles. From the haze of summer to the conflicting feelings of ennui and hope that guide the figures in Terrell’s magical realist landscapes, there’s an effortlessness to his work that obscures the heightened sense of understanding he brings to the form. Jake Terrell is a cartoonist and illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. His comics have a loose, confident line, often focusing on a youth-centric cast of characters written into magical realist or measured fantastical narratives.
shop illustration by Margot Ferrick
"Really liking this."
—Sammy Harkham
"I want to whisper through the feathery light hair of Jakes Terrell's characters. They're beautifully drawn!"
—Anna Haifisch
"Jake Terrell has spent his time well learning to manipulate a fine pen line so that it resembles the amorphousness and confusion of daily life and human interaction. In his work I feel the dizziness of knowing other people."
—HTML Flowers
"Through her dense drawings, Powerpaola is able to show us the magic in the mundane." —Inés Estrada, author of Alienation
"Powerpaola has a gift for expressing an entire world with a thin black line, building up textures and details that are a joy to get lost in. In Virus Tropical, her memories of a unique family life are so vividly portrayed that you feel like you are living through all the laughter, joy, tears and door-slamming right along with her. It's a treat of a book." —Sarah Glidden, author of Rolling Blackouts
"Rich experimental visual storytelling." —Bomb
"A frayed patchwork of tension and love." —Publishers Weekly
"Both true and surreal, unmistakably personal in their distorted contours, but universal in their insights about sisterhood and adolescence." —The Globe and Mail
In Virus Tropical, Powerpaola uses a series of vignettes to transform the simplicity of middle-class family life into a thought-provoking narrative that would have been inconceivable prior to Colombia's sexual revolution. Focusing on the lives of a family of women in the 80's-90's, Powerpaola's tale highlights the excitement, danger, and struggles of a country in the midst of radical change.
shop illustration by Powerpaola
9781937541170 • 5.1 × 6.5” • 140pp • 1, 2 color, CMYK offset • smyth-sewn • printed by TWP in S. Korea
"It’s impossible not to fall in love with this hilarious minx as she lunges across the page, nostrils flared, hurling herself into increasingly ridiculous romantic misadventures. Bow down to Gina as she explores what it means to be horny as hell!" —Lisa Hanawalt
"Faces laid more bare in their sorrowful eyes, than their naked bodies..."
—Shawn Starr
Fragmentary and fleeting, an avatar stands in an empty space — naked in front of cloud cover.
Nou is puzzling in a way that is different from experimental writers like Georges Perec. Her puzzles are orchestrated not so much by formal rules, but by the complexities of life today. Much of her past work consists of love letters, screen-caps, stickers, zines, and graffiti — which through her oeuvre — collide with panache. Nou lives in Portland.
shop illustration by Maggie Umber
"One morning at a gig space in Baltimore I watched Andy Burkholder pick up a tube of leftover frosting and use it to casually draw a simple but legible comic strip onto a piece of cardboard. His uninhibited intelligence and direct style create the conditions for breakthrough work. ITDN is the laboratory from which his later achievements have emerged." — Bill Kartalopoulos, series editor for Best American Comics
"A safari through the wilderness of human behavior." — Anna Haifisch, author of The Artist
"Broad range." —Publishers Weekly
"One of the most profound aesthetic experiences I’ve had in the medium in a long time." —Daniel Elkin
"[A]n objectified acid flashback [...] that will boggle your mind..." —San Diego Book Review
ITDN Group published a series of comics pamphlets from 2010—2014. Each issue was anonymously authored and included the possibility of being created by a different person. The 'group' — plural, informal, and rigid — is the only thing cohering the series together. A follow-up to Qviet, this collection documents Burkholder's earlier years, providing insights into his explorations of the themes and concepts that underpin many of his more broadly received works.
shop illustration by Margot Ferrick
"Burkholder uses line in fresh and startling ways to cast new light on humanity's most enduring obsession." —Anya Davidson, author of Lovers in the Garden and School Spirits
Qviet focuses on the abstractions of sex, of seeing, and the fluid relations between the two. Using the strip, one of the oldest formal modes in comics, as the misleadingly benign container for his explorations, Burkholder challenges the reader to reimagine not only what falls under the purview of this form, but the larger conceptions of sex as a whole.
Andrew Burkholder is a cartoonist and visual artist. His comics are abstract yet playful, oftentimes dealing with very adult themes twisted through an extremely dry sense of humor. His 2013 comic Pretty Smart was included in the Jonathan Lethem edited Best American Comics 2015.
shop photos by Blaise Larmee
"Jaakko Pallasvuo has a gift for rendering the anxiety of contemporary life with complicated sincerity. He blends art-world satire and queer tragedy with a cosmic sensibility that can ruminate on ecological deep time and crack absurdist jokes on the same page. Retreat is his most accomplished comic to date: an ambitious, fully-realized post-apocalypse narrative in lush, impressionistic watercolour. Like everything he makes, I adore it." —Saelan Twerdy, critic
"Currently nothing excites me more than a new project from Jaakko. I don't care if he's making films, masks, comics or papier mache hats, I'm in for anything, but I'm very happy he's come back so strongly to comics over the past few years. I generally find his stories of 'pretentious groups of art-people' to be actually very unpretentious and quite matter of fact. I found RETREAT to be propulsive and full of emotion and 'social action'. It made me feel for the characters. It felt real. And most importantly: I LOL'd. <|:-) (i heard a rumour that james van der beek purchased the screenplay rights in a secret google hangout.)" —Simon Hanselmann, author of Seeds and Stems
The angst, ennui, and malaise of the queer apocalypse sublimated to the equally ravishing graphic novel.
A gay couple flees the city from the impending apocalypse. They meet another artist on the way. Their clashing relationships, emotions, ideologies, hopes, and plans all transform unpredictably at the twilight of the human race. Jaakko Pallasvuo tells the convoluted and beautiful drama in the face of oblivion with stunning colors and visual and literal innovations in the way that are only possible in contemporary comics.
Jaakko Pallasvuo is a Finnish artist and novelist working in painting, sculpture, video, photography, books, and digital media. He has exhibited his work all around the world including Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, Berlin, London, Paris, Stockholm, Warsaw, and Seoul. His previous graphic novels are Pure Shores and Easy Rider, both by British artist book publisher Landfill Editions.
Cover by GG
ed. Sab Meynert
Production Design: Jake Terrell
Contributors:
GG
Juli Majer
Eli Howey
shop illustration by Powerpaola
This first collector's issue features Aidan Koch drawing in Central Park, Sab in the Upper West Side, Lala Albert & Leah Wishnia in Lala's Bushwick bedroom studio, and Nou, the cover artist. Ed. Blaise Larmee
shop illustration by Jake Terrell
"Time Capsule is almost wordless, with the few passages that contain words functioning more as poetic framing devices or just lush expressions of a human trying to deal with the confusion of existence. Throughout the book there are letters and numbers rendered as drawings that become decorative design elements on the page, and though they occasionally remind me of where we came from, they also make me think of code, as if in Umber’s words, she is seeking an “innate algorithm [that] breaks down the world hungrily.” It’s this revolving door of collecting and processing with no ultimate sense to come from the endeavor that I find both mysterious and compelling." —The Comics Journal
"Maggie Umber's intimate drawings evoke a sense that life on earth, no matter how microscopic, can be immensely beautiful and complex." —Jason Murphy
Snapshots of moments that would be filler in a nature documentary but that, when collected and cataloged together, delve into the intimacy of those moments and the complexity of animalistic relationships we can never fully understand. —Shawn Starr, critic
Time Capsule made Rob Kirby's Rob’s Top 30 Comics and Comics-related Things of 2015
Time Capsule is a cache of sketchbook drawings, animals, and insects. Letterforms are treated with a casual randomness, punctuating a non-linear narrative. This is a book of beautiful, ambiguous visual poetry and questions.
shop illustration by Jake Terrell
This second issues features interviews with cover artist Margot Ferrick (Chicago), Frank Santoro (Pittsburgh), Austin English (New York), & Dylan Williams. Ed. Blaise Larmee
shop illustration by Margot Ferrick
Edited and Designed by Marc Bell
Foreword by Samuel Andreyev
"Rudy is the best." —John Porcellino, author of King-Cat
"Intuitive and spontaneous rather than practiced and formalistic,[these] hilarious, doodled-in-a-notebook-style comics emerge triumphantly from the id." —The Comics Journal
"A comedic timing worthy of Bushmiller has been transplanted into an anarchist scratch-scape… I LOVE RUDY!" —Matthew Thurber, author of Art Comic
"After reading Rudy, my brain began to rewrite itself... Connery inverted my artistic values..." —Jim Munroe, author of Sword of My Mouth, and Therefore Repent
"When I first saw his work it felt truly and completely new. And the funny thing is, reading the material in this book over a decade later, it still feels that way." —Anders Nilsen, author of Tongues, and Big Questions
Rudy, a collection spanning over 20 years of comics and zines by Mark Connery, is a delightfully strange, funny, and metaphysical trip. With pants-wearing fish, shape-shifting triangles, talking eyeballs, rude ugly duckling youths, and of course our titular magic cat, Rudy, Connery’s absurdist irreverence permeates his work. With the turn of every page, Rudy beats with a poet’s heart. Words alone cannot capture the magic that is Rudy. It must be read to be believed!
shop illustration by Nayef Nebhan
4 × 5” • 24pp • CMYK offset • saddle stitched
"I feel myself getting further and further away from the truth of this comic with every word I write." —Shawn Starr
8.5 × 11” • 16pp • CMYK offset • corner stitched
Cover by Maggie Umber. Altcomics goes to Canada to get color offset printed. Maggie Umber, Juliacks, Christopher L. G. Hill, Stephen Hayes, Wiley Guillot, and Tracy Auch answer our questions and give us text unasked for. Kim Jooha and Blaise Larmee interview. Ed. Blaise Larmee
Interviews with Paul Peng, Ashlee H.G., and Almon @roman_bulge. Altcomics expands to 24 pages. Ed. Blaise Larmee. Cover by Paul Peng.
shop illustration by Maggie Umber
In-depth interviews between artists alongside essays and portfolios. Issue 6 features cover artist Kyung-Me, Michel Esselbrügge, Robin Vehrs, Helen Stefanie, Cynthia Alfonso, Óscar Raña, Julia Huete, and Kevin Huizenga. Rocky Bostick and Blaise Larmee interviews. Ed. Blaise Larmee
"Excessive, mysterious, wonderful, Juliacks work takes the graphic novel to a new and more plastic dimension." —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, Torpor, Summer of Hate
"Juliacks is a comic artist whose work—crude, ornate, subjective and dreamy—is not for those who prefer their narrative crisp and tidy." —The New York Times
"ARCHITECTURE OF AN ATOM is a long, deep breath before a dive. It’s a Piscean tale of survival, harrowing and surreal, a dreamlike escape, a delight. Dive into this pool of misfits and watch how wreckage becomes magic, hunger becomes adventure, and human questions about love, intimacy, and community unravel and manifest in beautiful washes of color. The language matches the vibrancy of the drawings and paintings that describes a cast of characters surviving on the brink of a disaster, in the end forming a magnificent poetic experience." —Sally Wen Mao, author of Mad Honey Symposium
Juliacks is an artist, filmmaker, performer-choreographer, cartoonist, and playwright who splits her time between New Jersey, where she recently received a 2016 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Netherlands. She's been published and performed in various cities across North America and throughout Europe, her most recent project being the trans-media story Architecture of an Atom.
photography by Blaise Larmee
"Umber captures the spirit of nature — its glory and grace — in her beautifully crafted, mixed media comics." —Alyssa Berg, author of Alpenglow
"Maggie Umber’s 270° is beautiful to experience and the narrative engrossing. I was pulled in to the reality of the Owls. A fascinating read, gorgeously depicted." —Mike Dawson, author of Why Did They Come?
"When 270º, Maggie Umber’s second beautifully illustrated book on owls reached me I could not put it down until I had absorbed all its delightful owl and other artwork from cover to cover. This book will turn heads and make the viewers turn pages. The playful layout and creative and diverse artwork seduces the reader into absorbing the subtle but factual information woven throughout these pages. The words sometimes blend into the images, like grass, twigs and branches of the owls’ habitats. Maggie has created a book of owls that reminds even the most objective owl scientists like me that there are other aesthetically pleasing ways to know owls." —Dr. James Duncan, Balmoral, Manitoba, Canada
Informative, colorful mixed-media work that bridges nature science and fine art — quintessential comics with an ornithological bend.
An artist's field guide on owls and owl behavior. Maggie Umber once again takes readers into nature, showing the beauty and sophistication of animals in their natural habitats. 270º is an educational glimpse of owls found in North America and beyond.
Maggie Umber is a cartoonist, painter, printmaker, and programmer. She has published three graphic novels with 2dcloud: Time Capsule, Sound of Snow Falling, 270º. Her comics have appeared in BOMB magazine, NOW, Warmer, The Shirley Jackson Project. Maggie's work has also been included in group shows like ZINE NOT DEAD VIIII: A New Comics Reading (WE ARE HUNGRY!), zeitraumexit in Germany ("...and other stories") and The Learning Machine in Chicago (Plants and Animals). She is one of the co-founders at 2dcloud.
"This has the potential to be a downright fascinating series when all is said and done." —Optical Sloth
"The way [Umber] draws her parents as having blank eyes behind their eyeglasses is almost as perfect as the way she draws herself: a crazy-haired curmudgeon with either a glint of mischief or a permanent scowl on her face." —Rob Clough, critic
"[I]t’s hard not to fall prey to the charm of this book." —Justin Giampaoli, Poopsheet Foundation
Startled Maggie made the Salon Saloon's Heavy 100 list for 2012.
Startled Maggie is an auto-bio serial focusing on a mischievous little spit-fire. Drawn in light pencil, this new series is pointed at the ephemeral qualities of memory and what makes early life such a funny and charming place.
Cover colors by Raighne.
shop illustration by Keiler Roberts
32 pp
5.5 × 8.5"
4 color offset
saddle stitched
"Illuminating." —Aaron Turner
"It floored me, so beautiful and intimate and visceral. reading it was like being submerged in an ocean of blood, listening to a heart beating and organs pumping and squelching." —Laurie Piña, cartoonist
"Margot Ferrick is doing some of the most intimate and innovative comics out there." —Shawn Starr, critic
"When sometimes I feel dead inside, Margot's comics wake me up." —Erik Nebel, cartoonist
"Margot Ferrick is one of my favorite cartoonists." —G.W. Duncanson, cartoonist
Margot Ferrick is currently producing what may be the last in a series of love letters chronicling 2014—2016. In Sec, their penultimate letter, Ferrick reaches a fever pitch of desire.
shop illustration by Margot Ferrick
9781937541279 • 6.2 × 8.9” • 72pp • CMYK color offset • spot gloss on cover, o-wrap • printed by TWP in S. Korea
"Parrish is great at making panels that you can both read and linger over. The locations and bodies are exaggerated to reach a more realistic and sensorial state. This is an awesome debut comic." —Dash Shaw
"Parrish has one of my favourite traits in a cartoonist: intense passion for the craft. They are rapidly evolving and experimenting wildly and it’s joyful to watch." —Simon Hanselmann
"Lonesomeness, dread, selfhood — these are some of the main themes touched upon in the 72 pages of Perfect Hair. These topics are never easy to talk about or even comprehend, but Parrish fully realizes them and with surefooted confidence, doesn’t shy away from anything, delving deeper and deeper into distressing psyches." —The Comics Journal
Parrish’s art excels at worrying these boundaries between symbolic thinking and actual experience, endowing big, clayey bodies with rarefied grace. The Globe and Mail
In Perfect Hair you see what you hate most about yourself, and it reminds you how strong you are as you make your way through. Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
This is an audacious debut by Parrish. It's interesting that Dash Shaw offered up a blurb, because among the many influences that Parrish cycled through in the course of this book, Shaw was the most significant. The layout, the use of diagramatic text, the use of textual onomatopoeia in place of more typical sounds effects, and simple line are all there--except when they're not. Eleanor Davis is another obvious influence, and there may be hints of Gary Panter, Chris Ware and many others. What's remarkable is the way they are able to dial in and out of a particular visual style, often in the middle of a story. In "Train Scene", Parrish begins with a naturalistic color setting at the station, then switches to a pencils-only page, and then to the big, blobby character design they use for much of the book. In other words, the "real" image, the self-image, and the way she looks at others. The result is a style for Parrish that becomes uniquely theirs, whipping the reader from narrative fragment to narrative fragment while still retaining a cohesive set of character profiles.
A vivid cross-section of relationships, identity, and the gradations of emotion that color them.
Tommi parrish is a cartoonist who lives in-between Melbourne, Australia and Montreal. Their work has appeared in various anthologies, magazines, mini comics, gallery shows in New York, Argentina, and throughout Australia. Tommi has work in the permanent collection at the gallery of Western Australia and has presented talks and workshops for the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers Festival, and the Girls Write Up Festival.
A brief meditation on representation and loss, thoughtfully composed yet seemingly tossed off.
shop illustration by Casey Carsel
7.5 × 5.5” • 28pp • saddle stitched • CMYK digital • printed by Peak Printing in Saint Paul, MN
"A [2dcloud] sampler platter: brushy adventure and collaged jump and shake." —Edie Fake, author of Gaylord Phoenix
Art/sketch zine, companion to Motherlover.
Brothersister includes contributions from Benjamin Söderström, Saman Bemel-Benrud, Eric Ruby, Peter Hodapp, Tom Neely, Noah Van Sciver, Nic Breutzman, Justin Skarhus, Chris Adams, Vincent Stall, Tom Kaczynski, Maggie Umber, Raighne, Jonatan Söderström, Maxeem Konrardy, Luke Holden, Eric Schuster, Coleman Gilbert, Greer Lawson.
"I loved your memory comic." —Gary Groth
"How it happened remembers the precious moments like we do." —Kim Jooha
"The new comic – How It Happened – great." —Dash Shaw
How it Happened careens through memory and friendship like a wistful comet over the night sky. There and gone.
shop illustration by Casey Carsel
A broadly sketched remembrance both confrontational and elusive, Archie’s latest continues their deft ability to push and pull within a single beat.
5.5 × 8.5” • 100pp • CMYK offset • perfect bound • printed by Print Ninja in China
"Truly strange. It's like stills from an unrealized, slightly scary kid's show."
—Alex Schubert, creator of Blobby Boys and Vice contributor
"'Characters' are identified; 'plot' is ascertained; 'actions' are linked, 'consequences' experienced; and emotions – true emotions – felt. [...] There is something satisfyingly jazz-like in Nebel’s effort." —The Comics Journal
A window into a surreal, spiritual world that twists and turns unexpectedly from one emotion to another. Well Come emotes with bright color and pathos.
Erik Nebel is a non-binary Speech-Language Pathologist, who works with students that are non-verbal and students with Autism and students who are Emotionally Disturbed. Part of their therapy with these students involves drawing pictures as a way to communicate, instead of using words. Well Come, originally published by Yeti Press, is in part, a result of these drawings.
9781937541439 • 6 × 8.75” • 64pp • 4 color offset hardcover • printed by TWP in S. Korea
"Tara understands the language of comics fully. Her stories slide past the analytical part of the brain and directly into a deeper, more gratifying kind of understanding. Her bright colors bring joy and humor to the heaviest, darkest follies hidden inside ourselves." —Gabrielle Bell, author of Everything is Flammable
"As an artist, Booth works to push the boundaries between comic arts and fine art, and she lives up to no standards of appropriateness other than her own. Her social commentary is sharp and her visual storytelling unassuming." —Megan St Clair, Hyperallergic
"Comic book artist and illustrator Tara Booth’s work is candid, funny and chock full of personal details. The textures and patterns she achieves using gouache paint give her work a wonderfully awkward tone and she brings her characters to life through short vignettes that unfold on the page." —Rebecca Fulleylove, It's Nice That
Unable to sleep, Tara takes too much sleep medication and enters a dream soaked fantasia. A vivid and moody, euphoric journey where dreams and hallucinations intersect.
In this wordless graphic novella, Booth covers autobiographical themes of mental health, anxiety, and issues of consent. Nocturne is Booth's first wide release, following her critically acclaimed, short-run debut, DUII.
Tara Booth is a 28 year old illustrator and comics artist from Philadelphia. Her work has been featured on Mashable and in Bloomberg Magazine, Hi Lo, and The Lifted Brow, among other magazines and websites — but she’s probably best known for her content on Instagram, where she has over 139K followers. Her work was recognized and featured by It's Nice That as part of World Mental Health Day in 2017.
"Eli Howey's Fluorescent Mud pulls the reader in with drawings so haunting and hallucinatory that the pages seem to pitch and swell, like the surface of the ocean at night lit up by bioluminescent algae. As I read, I felt that I was becoming a presence in the mind of the protagonist, looking over their shoulder while they navigated eerie moonlit landscapes, and vividly sensing the intensity of their turbulent mental state." —Sophia Foster-Dimino, Sex Fantasy
Entirely hand painted in watercolor and gouache, Fluorescent Mud is a surreal art comic with underlying themes of transition and dissociation.
Flourescent Mud follows the main character through a series of seemingly unrelated and unexplainable experiences, taking into account various states of mind/memories/ thoughts/feelings and sensory experiences that affect a subjective retelling of events.
Eli Howey is an artist and printmaker currently based in Toronto. They use traditional analogue printmaking techniques to create contemporary narrative artbooks and large-scale works on paper. They use a combination of images and poetry to construct narrative artwork that expresses multiple dimensions of each situation. Their work attempts to go beyond what can be seen, to incorporate the emotional and imagined spaces within environments and stories.
"'Gustave Flaubert Trois Contes' beguiled me on my first read and opened up to greater and greater depths on each return visit. It is a funny and complex book about the porous border between art and life that operates on more than trois levels—a comic about its own making whose self-awareness is intimate and revelatory." —Conor Stechschulte, author of Generous Bosom
"Wtf did I just read? I've gone back to it over and over and the details get funnier and more bonkers with each pass. There are so many subtleties, it's not for the casual reader. Must pace with pure joy, this arcane glimpse into the mind of Chris Adams." —Melissa Foley-King, librarian at the Harford County Public Library
"haha wow this is really weird chris. ok oh jeez i've never tried to blurb before it's harder than i thought! if you enjoy a one-word blurb i would say "disorienting" which i mean as a compliment but it might not read that way i guess? dunno? i put a letter complaining about how my comics suck on the back of my book so i might have a different approach to this than someone else in general i now realize lol or how about:"
"Like finding out you're the people in Powers of Ten just before getting kicked out of the theater you're watching it in." i worked on that one! is that a blurb? i might not know how to do this also can i just say i am in love with this radiator you drew i don't know why" — Dina Kelberman, creator of I'm Google
Drawn with ball point pen in late 2016, Gustave Flaubert Trois Contes is lent a level of immediacy with its stream of consciousness narrative. A seahorse guides the reader through CB radio chatter, intimate apartment living, dinosaur sitcoms, and the authors own memories.
Christopher Adams is an artist and musician. He has published several books with 2dcloud including "Strong Eye Contact" and "Yule Log", both listed as "Notable" in Best American Comics.
shop illustration by Tara Booth
"[Motherlover] has a way of evoking dread and malaise in equal measure." —Rob Clough
"Breutzman’s style is unusual in that he mixes naturalism in terms of his backgrounds and character designs with slightly loose, rubbery expressions on his characters’ faces." —The Comics Journal
"...the world is weird and the world is uncomfortable." —Comics Bulletin
Motherlover is a tightly-knit anthology, modeling itself off of Drawn & Quarterly’s since retired annual showcase. This one-off volume pairs Minnesotan creators Nicholas Breutzman, John & Luke, and editor Raighne together for woodsy and weird excursions in dark comedy. Mood rings, disaffected twenty-somethings in NYC, unsupervised nine-year olds in the pursuit, nay, NEED, of finding a porno tape, and suburban white boys buying fake crack — Minnesota’s finest!
Funding provided in part by kickstarter.
shop illustration by Ash H. G.
5.5 × 8.5” • 28pp • 4 color offset • saddle stitched • printed by Print Ninja in China
9781937541064 • 6 × 6” • 104pp • perfect bound • french flaps • printed by McNaughton & Gunn in MI
"A shadow smeared dream-cycle rife with haunting symbolism."—The AV Club
"An unsettling and haunting debut."—Publishers Weekly
"Just from looking at Bongiovanni’s style, you know you’re about to experience something deeply personal."—Autostraddle
"There’s a beautiful eeriness to Bongiovanni’s work that I find irresistible. Like an old black and white film about some forgotten fairy tale." -Noah Van Sciver
"Haunting, disturbing, breathtaking and beautiful — this is a story that will stay with you."-MariNaomi
"Archie’s scratchy, understated line unerringly evokes helplessness, violation, and a lingering sense of psychic revulsion, dropping the presumed morals out from under you and then implicating you in the inevitable disaster. The effect is smart, chilling, viscerally disturbing but never showy or cruel."
-Julia Gfrörer
Out of Hollow Water, the debut book by Archie Bongiovanni, is an exercise in the fantastical and intensely personal, plumbing hidden depths both real and imagined. It is a work that wanders into the dark recesses of the female experience, where the only escape is through cathartic release, taking myriad forms. This book draws and expands upon themes Bongiovanni has cultivated in past works, while signaling a shift in presentation. Moving from the rough, scratchy inked pages of their minicomics to the hazy imperfection of pencil on vellum, Bongiovanni has constructed a space befitting their oblique narratives. This triptych of stories showcases a stark, emergent voice in the ever growing world of comics, one worth following down whatever path they might take you.
"Skarhus is an interesting thinker, and I like the way he juxtaposes simplistic scenes of violence that are the core of most genre comics with a sort of phenomenology of the entire experience of exploring the space, experiencing the fight and watching the fight all at once, both as a "real" event and as a contrived ritual done for putative entertainment." —Rob Clough
"[A] discrete objet d’art. Inside, it offers a dizzying descent into wavy black and white lines, like an old TV scramble, toward an authoritarian environment of some possible future reality." —Justin Giampaoli, Poopsheet Foundation
An Art Brut ghost story. A silent protagonist navigates a vacuous cyberspace.
shop illustration by Casey Carsel
Rudy the magic cat explores the mystery of the bus in this new mini by Mark Connery.
shop photo by Raighne
"This is one of the most unique, 'no similarities to any other working cartoonist whatsoever,' totally out of left field books I've come across in a while." —Austin English
"I like this Strong Eye Contact thing... LOL. Fucking weird [a]nd quite pretty." —Simon Hanselmann
"Rarely have magic markers worked such luminous brilliance." —Matt Seneca
"Weird, imaginative, and raw. Adams creates a textural experience leading you through the follies of his character's life." —Aidan Koch
"A bloody Q-tip, the crumbs of a waffle and an airplane on fire...it all comes together with Christopher's unique drawing system. Is the comedian dreaming or is the comedy a dream?" —Eamon Espey
"Like a Mr. Hulot transposed into the America of soft-serve and mini-golf, Adams’ comedian is a normal guy trying to deal with work and relaxation in a landscape of perplexing patterns." —Matthew Thurber
"...Adams takes [comics] further, deconstructing linear storytelling and blurring the line between wakefulness and dreaming." —Panel Patter
"There's a vividness to each image that speaks to Adams' background as a painter [while t]he way that he "rhymes" images back and forth speaks to his background as a musician; each strip very much feels like the verse of a song..." —Rob Clough
"This is the graphic novel as abstract expressionism ... at once disorienting and mesmerizing..." —Indie Reader
Strong Eye Contact stars an unnamed immigrant and aspiring comedian as he tries to make his way in America. It is a BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2014 Notable title, selected by Bill Kartalopoulos.
Part comic strip collection, part art book, the reader is led by this quixotic, Buster Keaton-like figure through a kaleidoscope of crystalline memory fragments, he tries, with limited success, to be a typical American: using consumer products, failed vacations, and fabricated family life.
Using mediums often associated with childhood mark-making (crayons, colored pens, markers) gives the book a simplistic sheen that belies the formal sophistication operating just beneath the surface. This day to day saga is wet and alive; landscapes pop with mountainous close-ups, cacti, abstracted-patterns, confusion, vast empty spaces and gaps – cartooning as a potent puzzle where the strangest magic happens inside the reader's mind.
9781937541255
2dcloud has never been afraid to publish books that don't neatly fit into categories, and Meynert's book is no exception. I believe it's best described as an illustrated prayer and invocation for healing. The lush illustrations, including delicate pencil drawings, elaborate design work and vibrant use of color, give the eye something powerful to work with when paired against the relatively spare use of text. The prayer is about staying open, staying aware, looking for help and looking for connections. There's a repeating visual motif of flowering amidst an open hand, representing perhaps that it's important to understand how to be open to the things life can offer you, that one's mental state is key to accepting or not accepting what life has to offer, in all of its incarnations. The comic is all about flow, fluidity and water's paradox in being droplets and a wave all at once. That metaphor is used to explain our position relative to others: we are all water, whether we realize it or not, and we can either flow or resist--but the river will always keep moving. —Rob Clough
Meynert's work is both graphic and lush, whether it's a hand-printed zine or full-scale drawing. —CBC Arts
Sab Meynert is a Toronto illustrator whose works look like they could have been created digitally, but really they are meticulously rendered pen/marker drawings. —Juxtapoz
Sprawling Heart is an intimate musical of paper, paint, and ink. Inward rumination's reach outward as exhalation's and a whisper becomes a sumptuous song.
Sab Meynert is an artist & writer based in Toronto, whose work has been recognized as a melodic counterpoint to the independent arts publishing sector. Their work spins poetic imagery & text to weave maps of visceral emotions and the multiformity of life's infinitely unfolding nature. Between independently published artist multiples, national & international gallery shows, grant-funded bodies of work, collaborative initiatives with high profile musicians & artists, and their September world-distributed publishing debut, Sprawling Heart, Meynert is an embodiment of the artist working in dynamic multiplicity.
Hands, faces, cutaways and traces. The phenomena of the physical world set against a wordless one.
"Things You Carry [is] amazing." —Farel Dalyrmple
"I would love to see more creators try and limit themselves this way, with no words and no facial expressions. It really forces Stall to draw environments that have emotions." —Inkstuds
Things You Carry is a visually stunning wordless mediation on isolation and loss.
Dinski is an astute observer of the human condition, transcribing our fears, anxieties, delusions and desperation in his every line, taking care to remind us of the humor that can be found in one's ongoing struggle with the myriad impediments inherent in our species.
— Joshua W. Cotter
Dinski has created a comic that explores the fundamental brokenness of people and the whitewash surfaces we paint over them. Sequential State
Are you a conservative? Zine Tree
Will Dinski's new book is one of his best. One of Dinski's go-to themes has been the ways in which people's lives become intertwined in unexpected and frequently toxic ways. In Trying Not To Notice, each of its four chapters are told from the point of view of one of four principal characters: a struggling stand-up comedian named John, his grizzled veteran comic friend Kyle; John's wife Amanda, who is unable to use her legs; and John's co-worker Summer. At first, it's not clear who's leading the narrative with each chapter title; for example, the first chapter is "My friend Kyle has it all figured out." It takes a couple of pages before it's clear that while the title refers to John's relationship with Kyle, it's all from Kyle's point of view. Rob Clough
"Most of us arrive at adulthood armed with stories about youthful misadventures, told over and over to prove that, once upon a time, we were willing to embrace instability and take risks. Such navel-gazing can be exhausting, but not in the case of MariNaomi's autobiographical comics and graphic novels. Her work is deservedly acclaimed for its perfect balance of heart-wrenching honesty and searing wit. And her latest, Turning Japanese: A Graphic Memoir, focuses on a stretch of time in her early twenties that will feel relatable to many Americans who feel stuck between two cultures." —Bitch Magazine
"The best comic about being Asian American in Japan. Like Fun Home and Persepolis, Turning Japanese is at once modest and grand. MariNaomi is a master of the small, intimate moments that build to a surprisingly emotional climax." —Jason Shiga
"In Turning Japanese, Mari’s unflinching honesty, open heart, and hard-earned wisdom challenges us to embrace the unexpected detours that unfold in our own lives." —Yumi Sakugawa
"A tour guide for all of us wandering souls who haven’t given up on finding home." —Idle Time
"A compelling tale of a traveling youth, seeking to find something meaningful on the other side of the Earth." —Coal Hill Review
"A vulnerable, searching, raw record." —Smithsonian APA Center
"MariNaomi renders the in-between spaces of culture and identity in her distinctly simple yet bold style." —BitchReads
"Turning Japanese shows that a picture can indeed be worth a thousand words." —New York Journal of Books
"This book has something of [a balming] effect in its exploration of the many complexities of identity and romance." —Publishers Weekly
"Sure to resonate most strongly with females facing similar challenges of young adulthood." —Kirkus Reviews
"MariNaomi's newest memoir, Turning Japanese, is on the one hand a chronological continuation of her first memoir, Kiss and Tell, as it picks up more-or-less right after the final relationship depicted in that book. On the other hand, it also has a good bit in common with her shorter works that were originally published on The Rumpus and later collected as Dragon's Breath And Other Stories. Turning Japanese is all about not just contradictions and opposites, but also about how someone can be and feel two things at once. In a society that privileges binary distinctions (and almost always creates a hierarchy based on those distinctions), MariNaomi's status as someone frequently in-between points out how simply living her life in certain places and spaces created a tension born from social mores being stretched. She's a person, not an accumulation of traits, and as such this book is about the thoughts and feelings that go into creating and presenting one's identity as well as exploring different aspects of one's roots. All of this is done with an absence of pretension and an emphasis on humor, and it's served to the reader in the form of both extended narratives and bite-sized vignettes." —Rob Clough
"What are some of the responses that have been particularly memorable to you?" —Robert Kirby
"How do you think your work changes when it's performed lived rather than read, in a sort of intimate way, from a book?" —VICE
"What made this a story you felt like you needed to tell?" —CBR
"What are some of the responses that have been particularly memorable to you?" —The Comics Journal
"How many people are aware that you’ve written about them?" —Daniel Barron
—> You can support MariNaomi on Patreon
shop illustration by Powerpaola
6 × 8.75” • 40pp • 1,2 color risograph • spiral bound
"Wander Maunder looks out the window, and explores the panoramic scope of the comic page." —Will Dinski, Trying Not To Notice
"Primal stoner comics that play with the geometry of grids and visual experience of comics on a 'high' level." —Kevin Huizenga, Ganges
"Skarhus' comics are sharp at first glance, confounding at second and ultimately overflow with information that the reader is richly rewarded for unraveling. A puzzle of thought and emotion surge through these pages." —Austin English, Gulag Casual
Rough hewn cartooning pulls against a tightly formalized page logic as we're led through a memoryscape of dead-end friendships.
The strange, brooding style evokes teenage sketchbook drawings that, when coupled with the fatalistic stoner narrative, conjure feelings of youthful confusion cut with brutal certainty. Friendship is the body: skin, muscle, bones; the body comes together, the body comes apart. Wander Maunder manages to relate despite itself.
Justin Skarhus is a former associate publisher at 2dcloud and cartoonist based in Minneapolis. He has published small editions of minicomics via 2dcloud and appeared in Jason T. Miles' NOME anthology. He has new work forthcoming by way of his new publishing venture, Entropy Editions, later this year.
Every day is Christmas. There is a santa suit. You put it on. A painful smile spreads on your face. It's blinding and bright. A last minute holiday flight begins boarding.
As a part of The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium, Christopher Adams & Conor Stechschulte gave talks about their work process, inspirations, where they are in their careers. Sophia Wiedeman put together an excellent writeup via The Rumpus.
"[A] hypnotic use of the page..." —Broken Frontier
"...wonderful artwork that manages to keep the scene in focus and out of focus at the same time..." —Comics Bulletin
Want to learn more about Yule Log? Read Christopher Adams: Creating Comics that Can Be Enjoyed Like Songs or Poetry on Comics Bulletin
5 × 7” • 32pp • saddle-stitched
"Apolo Cacho’s work [is] a mixture of perverse, obscure, morbid but also magical and beautiful." —Juxtapoz
"A dystopian wasteland stretches as far as the eye can see in the world of Apolo Cacho." —Creators Project
• A short red sci-fi story from Apolo Cacho. •
Apolo Cacho is from Mexico City. Since 2011 he has self-published his work through photocopies and low cost printing systems, developing an activity that covers painting, comic books and drawing. He was selected for a residence at La Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France, in 2014, where he worked on a project based on the violent events that took place in his country.
co-authored by Shaun Feltz, colored by Raighne.
The schoolhouse is filling with drowning children. Bizarre and garish colors dominate this surreal high school story. Breutzman's rubbery realism reminds one of characters from Daniel Clowes’ Eightball, while the narrative contains elements of overwhelming dread not unlike a Todd Solondz film, and the vivid colors evoke the work of a Lauren Weinstein comic. Yearbooks was given an honorable mention in the Neil Gaiman edited Best American Comics 2010.
Yearbooks made several 'Best of Lists': The Comics Journal's Top 50 Comics of 2009 at #24, File Under Other's Best of 2009, Cartoonist Noah Van Sciver described it as one of his favorite comics of 2010 on Inkstuds
Chilling... [Yearbooks] raises an interesting issue vis-a-vis the relationship between an artist and their responsibilities as a moral agent in the world. Can art be evil if it's made by predators, or is this entirely in the eye of the beholder? —Rob Clough
The story, from creepy dream sequence to almost apocalyptic ending, perfectly captures the creepiness and angst of high school, and Nicholas' art only adds to the effect. —Size Matters
Breutzman's comic is vivid, unsettling and altogether more believable than you’d perhaps like it to be. —Exquisite Things
Strange, gross, and lovely, Yearbooks is just connected enough to real high school memories to really freak you out...
—Jessica Abel
Nic Breutzman's comics are often beguiling, sometimes disorienting, and always formally inventive. Yearbooks is a quick sucker punch that will leave you feeling uneasy but eager for more.
—Matt Madden
30 pp
11 × 17.5"
2, 1 color offset
double truck broadsheet
Levitating disembodied cow heads, crack witches, mutant children, urban myths, half-remembered folklore: from the minds of Noah Van Sciver and Nic Breutzman comes Deep in the Woods, a double feature that pairs two of 2dcloud’s cartoonists in one oversized newsprint.
Robin, the dutiful daughter of a drunk runs away from her home, an evil step-family, deeper into the haunted woods. Who knows what she’ll find? Whiskey's solace? A floating cow head's kiss? Find out in Noah Van Sciver’s The Cow’s Head.
Heartbroken Sammy must convince her grandfather to crawl out of the well he’s holed himself up in. But first, it’s a walk through the woods with googly eyed mutant brothers and a stop at the crack witches hut for a ssssmoke. Take a toke with Nicholas Breutzman’s The Mayfly.
The tales provide a nice one/two, with van Sciver’s art style typically looser, visceral, all dense blacks, while his comic is lighter in tone and humour, providing a complimentary contrast to Bretzman’s fine lined, clean, cartoony illustrations, but inherently darker story. Comics Beat
Van Sciver provides an atmospheric and creepy little adventure in these pages revolving around ideas of self-sacrifice and integrity. Broken Frontier
Is Noah Van Sciver the finest cartoonist of his generation? It certainly seems like he’s on the path to earn that title... and Breutzman does [] well enough here that I’m going to keep an eye out for what he does next time. Robot 6 / Comic Book Resources
...two words that first come to mind when I consider Breutzman's story are bleak and surreal. Every character is fucked up in some way -- either they're on drugs, or they're emotionally devastated, or they're some sort of bizarre mutant, or they're an oddball combination of all three. Your Chicken Enemy
9781937541132
Salz & Pfeffer glimpses into Émilie Gleason’s taboo-soaked world of the inane and the intellectual, the profane, profound, and parodic.
"A rollicking adventure in surrealism."
—The Comics Beat
”[A] very “free” comic, in the sense that it seems unbeholden to any particular genre — but it is very much about cartoons and the dopey culture of it all. Funny, very nicely drawn and immersive." —Dan Nadel, former Picturebox Publisher and Editor at The Comics Journal
"Émilie Gleason’s comics have a visceral punk aesthetic on top of an absurd sense of humor. You can’t beat that combina-tion. There’s so much going on that you can almost hear it." —Noah Van Sciver, Eisner-nominated author of Fante Bukowski and Saint Cole
Salz & Pfeffer glimpses into Émilie Gleason’s taboo-soaked world of the inane and the intellectual, the profane, profound, and parodic. Abduction, damnation, hell, brain-washing, fart jail, murderous machinations, magical kingdoms are all bandied about as Gleason lets loose across 76 pages of pencil-born sequential art. Salz & Pfeffer will earn a place in your farty heart.
Émilie Gleason was born September 26, 1992 in Mexico. She is an illustrator and cartoonist currently residing in Strasbourg, France.
An odyssey of the everlasting nature of boyhood told via poems, short stories, crude scrawls and xeroxed doodles.
“Small naked creatures populate the page...buzzing [with] kinetic energy to the quick-paced tales...hilarious but [featuring]rough, provocative, naive art...” — Publishers Weekly
“[With] an undeniable cumulative power ... Detrimental Information is at its best when John Holden shares accounts of an expanding sexual consciousness, which the stories capture with unflinching specificity.” — The Comics Journal
An odyssey of the everlasting nature of boyhood told via poems, short stories, crude scrawls and xeroxed doodles. 13 years worth of American tales are strung together in a fast and loose zig-zag formation, leaving the reader out of breath and full of tearful laughter.
John Holden is a spoken word artist, video storyteller, and a goddamn poet. His videos on Youtube have eclipsed over 2 million views.
Luke Holden is a visual artist and a musician. Detrimental Information is his second book with his brother John.
2016 design from the Spring Collection. Books and zines (sold separately) featured in this collection: Turning Japanese by MariNaomi, Someone Please Have Sex With Me by Gina Wynbrandt, Virus Tropical by Powerpaola, Trying Not To Notice by Will Dinski, Altcomics Magazine 3.
shop illustration by Raighne
T-Shirt design by Margot Ferrick featuring the books Gulag Casual, Mirror Mirror, ITDN, Sec, and an issue of Altcomics
Still have a handful of these zines by Simon Hanselmann. Originally produced for one of our Collections on Kickstarter. Never sold through the meager print run we did. A rarity! But like most of our backlist, they gotta go. Books and zines belong in hands and on bookshelves!
9781937541026 • 160 pages • full color • perfect bound
This was made for a Minnesota based non-profit in 2012. The goal was to raise awareness for marriage equality. MN Love, the non-profit it was designed for, dissolved in the middle of raising funds for the book.
Contributors include: Tuesday Bassen, Emma Reynolds, Tim Sievert, Michael DeForge, Alex Fukui, Ellen Redshaw, Anna Bongiovanni, Hannah Blumenreich, Megan Tulius, Hedwig Vinson + Rachel Kowarski, Christopher Adams, Milkyboots, Luke Holden, Ed Choy + Sam Sharpe, Tammy Ray, Noah Van Sciver, Sally Madden, Jeremy Sorese, Emily Carroll + Kate Craig, Sean Lynch, Joseph Remnant, MariNaomi, Maurice Vellekoop, Zak Sally, Maggie Umber, Barbara Schulz; with Christopher Butcher handling the introduction/foreword.
A successful Kickstarter was generated to raise funds for the books printing and payment of all contributors.