Normally, we wouldn’t promote in such blatant promotion efforts. Heck, we haven’t even gotten around to publishing our own GrimJack press release. But this touching effort by Stephan Pastis for his latest Pearls Before Swine collection was so earnest, we just had to show you.

Pearls Sells Out: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury, the 12th book in the series, comes out August 18. Order now.

As it turns out, the man who wrote Understanding Comics
and Making Comics
is pretty good at understanding and making the multimedia presentation too. (This isn’t a real surprise– in the mid 90’s, at the initial boom of the World-Wide Web, a lot of web designers and artists had copies of Understanding Comics
on their desk, because it helped them get a handle on this new medium and how to communicate in it.)

Here’s Scott McCloud at the TED Conference. Enjoy the lazy Sunday afternoon and enjoy Scott’s speech:

Just when you think you’ve gotten the hang of Asian comics – you can read right-to-left without blinking, speak of shojo and shonen with ease and have even been known to bring up seinen in casual conversation – you get caught up short with the realization that Japan is not the entirety of Asia. There are other countries with their own comics traditions, and you (well, me) suddenly realize that you (no, it’s still me) don’t know all that much about them. But there will always be more books you haven’t read than those you have, so the only thing to do is dive right in….

Mijeong
By Byun Byung-Jun
NBM ComicsLit, July 2009, $19.99

If Bret Easton Ellis was a Korean cartoonist – and about twenty years younger – he might have produced a short-story collection like Mijeong; Byung-Jun’s characters are mostly urban young people, disaffected more often than not. There are seven stories here, in a wide variety of art styles – some painted, some drawn, and all absolutely stunning in their virtuosity – but they’re all quite bleak.

Byung-Jun’s stories traffic in rape and abduction, murder and suicide, but his viewpoint is distanced and quiet, as if to say that this is just life, and none of it can be helped. Some of the stories end on a relatively upbeat note and some the other way, but it doesn’t really matter – they all have that quiet, detached tone.

Byung-Jun’s art is amazing in its textures and environment, though his people, deliberately, have mask-like faces that show little emotion most of the time. It’s harder to judge his writing – there are passages like “For weary lovers, love seems distant. But they’ll endure it all. Overwhelmed, they endure. But, in the end, they’ll manage.” that clunk around like a tire with a bald spot, but it’s impossible to say if that was clunky in the original Korean, or if the translation (by Joe Johnson) is responsible. In either case, the writing aims towards sublimity but doesn’t always make it.

Mijeong is an Asian comic for people who usually like European comics – it’s nuanced and subtle, quiet and vaguely depressive, with gorgeous art and a deeply jaundiced view of the world. Perhaps the fact that it reads left-to-right – since it’s Korean, and that’s the way their books run – will help it find that audience. (more…)