EDWARD GAUVIN

Titan Comics partnered up with Hard Case Crime to start releasing crime comics, and one of their launch titles was Triggerman, released in floppy issue form starting last fall. Now the first arc is available in an edition collecting issues #1-5, with preview pages at Comics Alliance. Here’s a description:

An operatic prohibition era crime caper! Locked up for a life of murder, Roy Nash never thought he’d walk the mean streets of Chicago again… let alone rescue his beloved, Lena. But when the city’s Mafia elite spring the notorious gun-for-hire to handle one last assignment, Roy once again finds himself thrown headfirst into a life of bloodshed and bullets as he sprints a breathless race to save the girl he left behind. From legendary screenwriter and director Walter Hill (The Warriors, Red Heat, Last Man Standing) and French comics writer Matz (The Killer), comes this hardboiled crime thriller set in the bullet-ridden streets of 1930s Chicago.

Working on this book was a unique experience, as I got to speak with Walter Hill on the phone a few times. I’d translated Matz’s The Killer for Archaia, but it turns out he got his hands on an old unproduced screenplay of Hill’s, and turned it into a graphic novel in France, where Jef’s art lent a juicy, overripe, almost feminine menace to this squalid, hardboiled gangland saga. Walter Hill was kind enough to send me his original screenplay, and give me notes on the sort of middle ground I navigated between it and my translation of the French book, tweaking the dialogue for period authenticity.

In the New York Times, Suzanne Joinson writes:

At a time when the tensions that will produce World War I are simmering but have not yet exploded, Samuel, a Lebanese man who “speaks Arabic but looks like an Englishman,” is asked by an eccentric British colonial administrator to intervene in various tribal battles in the North African desert. During these escapades, he becomes embroiled in a scheme to transplant an entire palace, brick by brick, from Tripoli into the Sahara, in hopes of selling it (or pieces of it) to the region’s rich princes. Thus begins a Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream, occasionally turning nightmarish, but is always rendered with a hypnotic quality beautifully captured in Edward Gauvin’s elegant translation.

Serge Brussolo’s The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome from Melville House has been nominated in the translation category for the 36th annual Northern California Book Awards! Winners will be announced at the ceremony on Tuesday, June 27, 2017, in Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin, at Grove, at 5:30 p.m. Immediately following the awards, a brief public reception with book sales and signing for all of the nominated books will begin in the Library.

The Walking Dead, but with werewolves, and maybe a little bit of Stephen King’s The Stand thrown in… This series in love with all things American hails from Soleil’s new French Comics imprint, with page layouts and panel designs more like American floppies, resulting in pacing that’s less like traditional Francophone bande dessinée. Written by Jean-Luc Istin, with B&W art by Kyko Duarte and grayscale by Ellem. The longer French volumes, coming in at about 100 pages, have been divided in half, so you’re still getting bang for your buck: twice the length of the average American comics issue. The conclusion of the first arc, God Has a Sense of Humor, is now available as a digital exclusive from Soleil at Comixology.

Riker’s Island prison is now a gigantic larder for the wolves, and prisoner Malcom Spolding owes his continued existence only his talent for mechanical repairs.

Two years ago, I began a series by Arthur de Pins called March of the Crabs: a gentle satire about a French seaside resort, a pair of nature documentarians, and self-actualization for an evolving crab species. De Pins, an animation veteran with other books in English to his credit (NBM’s Zombillenium), deploys bold, colorful art in the service of a rather unique saga probing such topics as environmental disaster, revolution, and personal fulfillment.

This year, BOOM! Studios continues the series with Book 2 of the crably epic, an Angouleme and Eisner nominee. Will one giant step forward for crabkind bring about enlightenment or only collapse? As Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is rumored to have said, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, “It’s too early to tell.” But you can preview the art at Comics Beat!

 

Olivier Guez’s latest op-ed, in The New York Times, on the upcoming French elections: “At Stake in France’s Election: What It Means to Be French”. An excerpt:

What Europe’s heads of state have not done, and simply must begin to do, is prepare their citizens for the one great requirement for progress toward more unity — an enormous leap of faith and optimism, even while in the grip of fear. Instead, they betray their peoples’ fondest dreams by pecking at one another. And even my generation, who were 15 to 20 years old when the Berlin Wall fell, fails to stand up to them and demand that they save the dream we were promised — a Europe finally at permanent peace and working in unison after all the divisions and horrors of the 20th century.

Goldy, Volume 4 of Golden City, an all-ages series written by Daniel Pecqueur with art by Nicolas Malfin, is  now available as a digital exclusive from Delcourt at Comixology.

Surviving his incarceration, Harrison Banks has ended up on an ice-cold lake… Where a young woman, who looks like strangely like Lea, his childhood sweetheart, takes him in and looks after him. But their time is short and their reverie is interrupted by assassins…

French YouTube star Cyprien Iov, a.k.a. “Monsieur Dream”—blogger, vlogger, podcaster, and animator—delivers his first comic here, with art by Paka. A series of gag strips revolving around the titular robot and the couple who adopt him gradually gains depth and scope, becoming more serious and more moving as a conspiracy narrative develops around Roger, a military deathbot on the lam.

Things look like they might be starting to turn around for thirtysomthing slacker Hugo when he finds a robot in his house on his birthday. But, as he soon discovers, this is no birthday present (no one actually remembered to get him anything)! Rather, it is the handiwork of his cousin, an engineer in the French army, who realized that the robot he had been building was designed to destroy humanity. Forced to hide out with Hugo, Roger – as he decides to call himself – must learn to live with humans… No mean feat!

The first volume of this ongoing series is now available as a digital exclusive from EuropeComics on a number of platforms (Izneo, Kindle, Kobo, Google Play, and Comixology).

Catch a trailer here for this first volume of the kid-friendly adventure series FRNK, from writer Olivier Bocquet  and artist Brice Cossu.

When a 13-year-old orphan sets out to find his parents and ends up in prehistoric times, he realizes he’s got his work cut out for him if he wants to survive. So many things haven’t been invented yet, like fire, soap… and vowels! Not to mention all the terrifying creatures and knuckledragging cavemen he has to deal with!

This first volume of this series, The Beginning Begins, is now available as a digital exclusive from EuropeComics on a number of platforms (Izneo, Kindle, Kobo, Google Play, and Comixology).

Publishers Weekly says: “Majdalani’s writing sparkles… Those looking for an enjoyable and brisk literary adventure will be very satisfied.”

At Bookwitty, M. Lynx Qualey pens this insightful appreciation:

The one thousand pieces hardly seems a coincidence, as Samuel Ayyad is carrier of a sort of 1,001 Nights-esque fantasy, hefting his disassembled story through the desert, to be reassembled elsewhere in a different context, an echo of The Nights’ movement from China and India to Arab lands, and from there to France.

Professor Joe Geha, for North Carolina State University’s Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, calls this:

[a] wildly entertaining novel. By the end Charif Majdalani has joined together all its disparate elements––the elegant and the ironic, the historical and the imagined––to leave us with a renewed sense of wonder.

And for those on their own lengthy odysseys, a 6-hour unabridged audio version read by Jonathan Davis is available.