It Never Happened by Sam Alden
Courtesy of Uncivilized Books, we finally have a Sam Alden collection, an actual book, with a spine! It Never Happened Again collects two works: the 64 page "Hawaii 1997" and the 90 page "Anime." "Hawaii 1997" is the work through which many readers first encountered Alden. When it was first posted on Tumblr, it blazed through the eyeballs of many an internet surfer. The pencils here are strong, bold and decisive, executed with quick, deft strokes which crackle with emotional energy. The figures and landscapes in "Hawaii 1997" feel like they are flowing non-stop out the tip of Alden's pencil and onto the paper in an automatic recollection that is magically transmitted from the mind to the hand. In this respect the energetic linework recalls some of the pages in Frank Santoro's seminal masterwork, Storeyville, which was originally published in 1995. Like "Hawaii 1997", "Anime" is a story told largely through images. It is a more calibrated work, however, one that spans family, work, relationships and continents in a bold attempt to portray the perceptions of a personality that had been led to, and a consciousness that has been shaped by, animé. Employing an informed and disciplined use of the grid, Alden is successful in implicitly conveying a sense of the irrevocable ticking of the clock, as time marches on while the concurrent personal growth necessary to survival sometimes has trouble keeping up...
PLEASE NOTE: The Copacetic Comics Company is on vacation this week. The shop is closed Tuesday, July 8, Wednesday, July 9 and Thursday, July 10. In addition, all internet orders received this week will not be processed until the weekend, and will ship on Monday, July 14. We apologize for the inconvenience and/or delay.
THIS Saturday, June 28, Copacetic will be joining with building mates Mind Cure Records and Lili Cafe to celebrate our fourth anniversary of being all together here at 3138 Dobson Street with one gigantic building-wide sale! We don't know exactly what will be in store for you at Mind Cure and Lili, but we can say that here at Copacetic we are working hard to make this sale the best yet! Our focus this year will be on the $5 price point: our goal is to squeeze so much into it that minds will be boggled.
We've posted some of the deals up on our FB event page.
Ed Steck Trifecta w/ Bill Wehmann
Please join us from 7:00pm to 9:00pm on Saturday, June 21 to celebrate the recent releases of three new works by Pittsburgh's own Ed Steck:
The Garden (a novel)
sleep as information / the fountain is a water feature (a book-length open)
The Abyssal Yawn (a comic book collaboration with Bill Wehmann)
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The Garden is "Composed in part from technical military intelligence text, Ed Steck's The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation is a formally complex representation of cultural brain damage, the damage left by war in language and thought."
sleep as information / the fountain is a water feature is a "book-length poem confronting the nebulous associations of fragmented memory: a pseudo-taxonomical investigation with plywood-like consistency, an expository web of mall food court fare, anti-memories of a large indoor water fountain, and cheap paperback science fiction novels."
The Abyssal Yawn is a comic book collaboration with Polish Hill-based artist – and Copacetic Stalwart – Bill Wehmann, who, in addition to pencilling, inking and coloring the work, also acted as designer and publisher. It has been described as a "full color 32 page comic book sports a card stock cover and is printed on high grade glossy stock throughout. These heavy duty production measures were necessary to carry the weighty concepts that are herein delivered. The Abyssal Yawn is a far-flung multi-dimensional science fiction tale in the tradition of Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin – think the Silver Surfer and Warlock – that took a detour through the meta-comics dimensions of Fort Thunder and navigated the Kramers Ergot force field with the aid of contemporary post-modern literary techniques and a bit of gage."
One of the great allegorical novels of the twentieth century, Crash, originally published in 1973, is one of the definitive mile-markers of the transition from modernism to post-modernism. A novel in the grand tradition of the science fiction cautionary tale, Crash places the car at the center of technologically acculturated concsciousness. Ballard's clinically precise language is pitch perfect in the creation and presentation of a milleau in which human sexuality is channelled through an eroticization of the automobile in which the act of driving becomes the equivalent of love making which climaxes in collision. (fair warning: during the reading of this book, you may find yourself feeling disoriented and uneasy when you get behind the wheel; driving may become difficult; you may need to pull over and collect yourself; you might have to just get out of the car and walk) As part of a special purchase, we've secured a healthy supply of this excellent UK edition (along with two other classic Ballard texts) that we can now offer at a price so low that there's simply no excuse to put off reading this seminal text any longer.
