AdHouse Books

AdHouse Books

Title	Creator	Publisher	Price
Pulphope: The Art of Paul Pope	Paul Pope	AdHouse Books	$25.00 ($29.95 list)
Read more and comment...	It's here: the Paul Pope coffee table book. Who would've thunk it? There's everything from comics to posters to CD covers to prints to sketchbooks and more. The book is divided into sections grouping the work in a variety of categories including the just stated formal divisions as well as thematic units such as Ukiyo-e and erotica. Connecting it all together is an ongoing exegesis of the works by Pope himself. It turns out that he has quite a bit to say as the text roves far and wide: personal reminiscences, ruminations on art and literature, technical explications, insights into the processes of artistic creation, manifestos and more amply fill the spaces between the artwork on display.
The Aviary	Jamie Tanner	AdHouse Books	$11.00 ($12.95 list)
Read more and comment...	This 312 page trade paperback collects fourteen of Jamie Tanner's idiosyncratic mini comics into one fat volume, for a great price. Copacetic regulars who've spent time going through our self-published comics section are sure to have come across his work, as we've been stocking it for years. Tanner's quirky aesthetic is hard to peg, but it has a strong narrative component flavored with a sense of the absurd, a tendency towards the bizarre, and a predilection for birds and robots. Fans of Richard Sala might want to check this out, as well as anyone looking for a great comics entertainment value.
Project: Romantic	Hope Larson, Jim Rugg, Nick Craine, Debbie Huey and more ...	AdHouse Books	$15.00 ($19.95 list)
Read more and comment...	This is the final installment of the "Project Trilogy" which provides the up-and-coming generation of cartoonists to work with traditional comics themes. Inititated by Project: Telstar, which dealt with science fiction themes with a focus on robots, and continued by Project: Superior, which had super heroics as its unifying theme, this time around, as the title suggests, the same generation of cartoonists is given a chance to tackle the romance comics genre. As with the first two anthologies, the works assembled here bear little semblance to their generic progentiors in the mainstream comics of yore, a guided tour of which we are given in the introductory essay by Bill Boichel (which is currently available online as a downloadable .pdf). "True" romance seems mostly a thing of the past in the stories that follow, which here primarily focus on -- at best -- snatching a moment of happiness with a fellow being. Many of the pieces center on unrequited love, heartbreak, romantic disaster, murder, mayhem and confusion. Sometimes it's played for laughs and sometimes for tears. Exceptions include Aaron Renier's "Reflectors and Rutabegas," which comes closest to being a traditional romance, and McGovern & Leandri's Dr. Id story, which employs a 1960s-Dr.-Strange-as-sex-therapist narrative that is certainly traditional in its form, if not in its content. As with all AdHouse Books, the production values are excellent and the quality of the artwork is uniformly high. Stand-outs for us include the contributions of Paul Rivoche, Hope Larson, Roger Petersen and Junko Mizuno, but doubtless every reader of this anthology will find their own favorites. And there's no way we can avoid singling out Robert Goodin's contribution: if there were an award for excellence in the service of perversion, this one would have the comics category all wrapped up.
Forlorn Funnies #5	Paul Hornschemeier	AdHouse Books	$10.95 ($10.95 list)
Read more and comment...	With this issue, Hornschemeier answers the question, "What do you do for an encore?" After his critical success of the past three issues which have been subsequently collected by Dark Horse as a TPB titled, Mother, Come Home, this issue is a bit of a departure -- but not too much. It is, purposively, a bit on the schizophrenic side. Structured as a flip book (i.e. two separate comics which start at each end and meet in the middle, forcing you to "flip" the book to read the second story, regardless of which you start with), the issue is composed of two distinct comics titled "My Love Is Dead" and "Long Live My Love." These two stories are clearly intended to each comment on the other, with the hope (forlorn?) that the whole will be greater than the some of its parts as a result. Thesis + Antithesis => Synthesis. Yes, it's a bit on the despondent side, but it offers up the ususal high production values that we've come to expect from Hornschemeier, and will certainly be appreciated by most if not all fans of his previous work. WIthout doubt, the work here is some of the most challenging being produced today. 80 pages; full color; square bound; 6 1/2" x 7 1/2"