Picture Poetry

Friday, May 16, 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TOP SHELF 2.0 GOES LIVE!

American indie-comics publisher Top Shelf Productions launches today its new free digital comics initiative, playfully titled Top Shelf 2.0. Updated 5 days a week, the new program will showcase a huge variety of talent both old and new, introducing creators to new fans — and fans to new creators — with a constant stream of new stories.

Updates to the site, posted every weekday, will take many forms, ranging from one-page gags to short stories to chapters in an ongoing series. With each day’s new story, co-editors Brett Warnock and Leigh Walton will unveil another piece in a rolling assortment of previously featured artists and new debuts. As a special bonus for the site’s launch, the initial offering features ten stories by twelve creators, demonstrating the vast diversity of comics and cartoonists involved. According to the editors’ welcome message, “that’s just the tip of the iceberg!”

Among those currently or soon to be featured on Top Shelf 2.0 are:

• the haunting avant-garde imagery of Bart Johnson and Ben Constantine…
• the globe-spanning high-kicking funkadelic fury of Kagan McCloud, serializing his indie classic Infinite Kung Fu in preparation for the collected edition to be published by Top Shelf in 2009…
• a stunning painted fable by John C. Ralston…
• Jed McGowan working his color wizardry with a beautifully limited palette…
• the freewheelin’ mythic imagination of the inimitable Bernie McGovern…
• a pair of young artists whose energy and charm practically shines from every panel of their cartoony adventures: Chris “Elio” Eliopoulos and Michael DeForge…
• the monumental TENTH 24-hour comic by the master of the form, David Chelsea (whose new book, 24×2, is on sale now from Top Shelf)…
• an inky poetic parable from young Slovenian prodigy Domen Finžgar, and a Japan-flavored short from Belgian brush-master Stedho…
• the brilliant wit and charm of notable webcomickers Jessica McLeod and Edward J Grug III…
• the Ignatz-nominated architectural hijinks of Jeff Zwirek…
• plus Aaron Navrady, Steve Lafler, Lizz Lunney, Sean T. Collins, Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, Nik Daum, Will Dinski, Willow Dawson, Emily Block, and many more to be revealed as we keep rolling!

With its unique one-story-per-day format, Top Shelf 2.0 is a hybrid between a webcomics portal’s stable of ongoing strips and a print anthology’s stand-alone short stories. As Walton puts it, “We’re somewhere in between Keenspot and MOME.

Similarly, Walton’s web-savvy youth, combined with Warnock’s decade of experience editing the Eisner- and Harvey-Award-nominated anthology Top Shelf, makes for a killer curatorial combo.

Of course, the new program is no replacement for Top Shelf’s primary business: the print publication of critically-acclaimed and popularly treasured graphic novels. “People will never stop wanting books,” says Walton, “especially when the books are as lovingly crafted as ours (and those of other alt-comix publishers). Rather, Top Shelf 2.0 is like a little online spin-off of the big Top Shelf brand, like MTV2 or BBC Two. To a certain extent, we see Top Shelf 2.0 as a laboratory for new ideas and new creators — any webcomic that gets an outstanding response will naturally suggest that we consider it for print publication, but in the meantime we’re happy to give these creators and fans an opportunity to discover each other. Throughout the process, I should add, creators fully own their work — it’s an experiment for them as well as for us. We’re all excited to see where it goes!”

Top Shelf 2.0 is live at http://www.topshelfcomix.com/ts2.0 and updates Monday through Friday.

http://www.topshelfcomix.com/ts2.0
http://www.topshelfcomix.com/ts2.0
http://www.topshelfcomix.com/ts2.0

This particular cat has been clawing at the bag for some time, and I’m happy to finally be able to let it out.

Laura Hudson of PWCW has broken the story of the new project that Brett and I have been working on:

The most gratifying thing for me has been seeing the excitement that some of our (amazing, awesome, patient) cartoonists have been showing on their livejournals:
Elio
DeForge
Grug
Jessica

I’m so lucky to be a part of this.

HOW AMAZING IS THIS?!?

Good as Lily artist Jesse Hamm earned his bandannaed self a fan for life when he revealed — after a weekend spent sitting across from us sketching — what he’d been working on.

Check it:

Left to right, that’s intern Sam Alden, former intern Carlos Hernandez Fisher, cartoonist Tim Sievert, publisher Brett Warnock, and publicity ninja Leigh Walton.

Makes me want to get a haircut, but he totally nailed us all! Thanks, Jesse!

Tim Sievert comes through with proof. That’s David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners,” by the way — I was so surprised to see it in the book that I couldn’t pass it up.

Charles in charge.
Originally uploaded by slieber234

Well, that was a fantastic weekend for your humble correspondent — shown here at the feet of industry wise men Charles Brownstein and (off screen) Larry Marder. Thanks to Steve Lieber for the photo. for Not much time to recover (and bask in the glory of Sunday night’s karaoke tour de force, featuring Carolyn Main and a duet between myself and Tim Sievert), as there’s piles of exciting work to be done ahead.

Including — hey, what’s this exciting announcement?

More photos:

• Tim in his Clark Kently studness
• Brett looking surprised to be awake
• Nick Gurewitch, probably the star of the show
• Panorama! (Top Shelf is unfortunately out of sight on the other side of the hall)
• Corey Lewis, who totally could have brought the commissioned piece he drew for me months ago BUT DID NOT
• The impossibly photogenic Erika Moen, triply a winner this weekend
• Actually, just check out this fantastic set of photos by Lori Matsumoto
• It’s true. Everyone in Portland is beautiful.

Note to self: for future shows, schedule time in the mornings to, like, shower and stuff.

Just look at that guest list! This might be the best Stumptown yet.

Douglas Rushkoff and Scott McCloud are both great thinkers and I’d love to have been in New York this morning listening to the panel discussion between them.

But when Heidi MacDonald posted these pictures of the two of them:

I found myself unable to think of anything but:

Via Boingboing, another interesting new project from the chaps at Penguin UK — easily the most classy and innovative big-money publisher that I know of, full of great designs (Fairey on Orwell! Why did no one think of this earlier!?) and new ideas (sometimes combining both at once).

It’s We Tell Stories, a project in which “six authors are telling six stories in ways that are completely original to the web.” To formalist readers like me, this stuff is like candy. Unfortunately, the latest story — “Hard Times” by Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton — is not nearly as impressive as it could be. Mason’s layout seems pretty clearly derivative of Chris Ware, which would be fine except that it’s a dozen times more confusing than anything Ware’s ever done. At least once per page I found myself uncertain whether I was supposed to go down or across, and sometimes I finished the page still uncertain.

More fundamentally, there are much more interesting ways of presenting statistics visually. Especially if you’re trying to be all formalist and groundbreaking. H5’s video for “Remind Me” by Röyksopp remains my favorite piece of infographics-gone-wild. Imagine if all those graphs in the video actually meant something.

“Hard Times” still has some compelling things to say, as in the screen shot above. 86 percent?!

What a rotten idea to spend millions destroying
This masterful tale kids spent decades enjoying!

The Onion has a nice tribute to the greatest versifier of the 20th century — although they inadvertently highlight his genius by making some pretty clumsy errors in rhythm. Writing that stuff’s not as easy as it looks, folks.

Seuss is a joy to read. Here’s one of my favorite bits:

What’s more, snapped the Lorax (his dander was up),
Let me say a few words about Gluppity-Glupp.
Your machinery chugs on, day and night without stop
making Gluppity-Glup. Also Schloppity-Schlopp.
And what do you do with this leftover goo?…
I’ll show you. You dirty old Once-ler man, you!

Now that’s tasty.

An early draft of my undergraduate thesis contained a bizarre little digression on the nature of free verse vs. rhyming couplets:

It’s the difference between a Japanese sword routine and a juggling act. A free verse performance may be forceful and affecting, but ultimately it consists of waving words about in the air with no resistance. The couplet form is fundamentally different, incorporating countless small crescendoes and denouements, risks, recoveries, tensions and releases. The inevitability of rhyme, like gravity, can lend force and weight to one’s statements. A couplet, nicely put, is stunning in its audacity: a clever phrase seems more clever, almost inhumanly clever, when executed within such a restricted format.

Ah, I see some similarly-snooty editor at Wikipedia is with me: “Geisel generally maintained this meter quite strictly, until late in his career, when he no longer maintained strict rhythm in all lines. The consistency of his meter was one of his hallmarks; the many imitators and parodists of Geisel are often unable to write in strict anapestic tetrameter, or are unaware that they should, and thus sound clumsy in comparison with the original.”

It’s an outrage, I tell you! A horrible shame!
That these trite, tacky tentpoles should taint his good name!
Might the sacks of cash raked in by film adaptations
At least fund improvements in verse education?