The Amazing Harry Houdini !
Here's what editor Ron Fortier had to say about it:
This awesome books stars perhaps the most famous magician-escape artist of all time in four fictional adventures set against the backdrop of his world tour. The first two stories are set in London and written by Jim Beard and James Palmer, the third has Houdini in Paris by I.A. Watson and finally writer Roman Leary puts him on the Nord Express bound for Berlin. The cover art is by Carl Yonder with beautiful interior illustrations by Pedro Cruz. To say we are proud as punch about this book would be a gross understatement. As ever it is now available at Amazon.com in both hard copy and on Kindle….and eventually some time next year as yet another of our Airship 27 Audio titles.
Labels: Airship 27, Carl Yonder, Gordon Dymowsky, Harry Houdini, I.A. Watson, James Palmer, Jim Beard, Michael Vance, Pedro Cruz, Rob Davis, Roman Leary, Ron Fortier
posted by Pedro Cruz at 7:30 PM
I wish I could come up with comics as good as this. Someday, when I grow up, maybe. I find this comic so good on so many levels, from the "high concept" to its "execution". It's so refreshing, inspiring and personal. Jesse Jacobs builds a cartoon world that is coherent, charming, creative, whimsical, amusing and terrifying too... and it's all his own too, like handwriting. Don't let yourself be deceived by the apparently simple façade of the ornamental and doodly-oriented art of Jesse Jacobs. Like the biological ecosystem invented and depicted right in front of the readers (and of the protagonists) eyes, within its pages, Safary Honeymoon has layers over layers of themes and questions that kept wondering about the hypothesis long after I've closed the book.
Following on our previous post and keeping on the theme of Ancient Astronauts and english language indie comics, it seems appropriate to bring up Forming. Originally a webcomic by Jesse Moynihan, one of the many creators behind one of my (if not THE) favorite contemporary cartoons - Adventure Time - this incomplete epic is one of the craziest and most inspiring comics I've had the pleasure of reading in the last few years. Moynihan's ambitions in terms of characters, multiple storylines, themes, scope and even different genres touched upon this work are dangerously close to being too much for the casual reader and, I speculate, even for his own command of the craft... as it should! 
I confess: I am a fan of History Channel's Ancient Aliens series. Not just that series specifically. I always make an effort to watch almost any documentary or read anything about UFOs, aliens, ancient astronauts and even tangentially related things like cryptozoology or paranormal phenomena. You see, I was around during the UFO craze of the late 1970's. My mom was a huge fan of the theme (and a believer, I suspect) so I was surrounded with photo magazines, books and comics about UFOs and the ancient astronauts theory from a very tender age. I read books by authors/investigators on this subject. I am a huge fan of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I wached E.T. at the cinema when it was first released. I never missed an episode of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World on t.v. I love Jack Kirby's Eternals. Now, I have never seen UFOs, aliens or any paranormal stuff ( that I know of ) in the real world, nor can I really say I believe in these tales, but this whole mythology is in my DNA. I love it and I find it an incredible fountain of inspiration.
There are few cartoonists who manage to navigate with success between the sometimes opposite fields of mainstream and independent comics. Jean Giraud Moebius was one of those lucky few. Le Major is one of his works that falls clearly in the independent league: a self-published fac-simile limited edition of an A5 hardcover sketchbook he carried through the years, slowly filling it with his trademark freestyle improvisational comix and (surprise, surprise) a few collaborative panels with guests like Lorenzo Mattotti or Andre Juillard. This bijou is one of my most favorite comic objects ever and the perfect antidote to nausea inducing assembly-line comics. Although this limited original collector's edition is long sold-out, I hear there is an affordable standard spanish edition available for those interested in checking out the contents.
This is one comic which should definitely be on the same cannon as Carl Bark's Duck stories or Goscinny & Uderzo's Astérix as far as all-ages classics of the comics medium are concerned ... and I was lucky enough to have followed it as it was being originally published. There are many comics with an epic feeling, but very few manage to be actual epics; Bone belongs to those happy few. It marvels with its scope, yet, like the best popular works in storytelling media, it is filled with a human touch and sense of humour that prevents it from falling into pretentiousness. Plus, Jeff Smith's brilliant draftsmanship doesn't get a day older as time moves on. One of the major contenders for best north-american comic book of the last quarter-century!
Charles Burns, another author whose comics I was first introduced to through the Comic Book Confidential documentary. In that film, he reads a passage from Curse of the Molemen. an interesting riff on 1950s pop artifacts like EC horror comics and B-series movies. The strange yet familiar atmosphere of the drawings and the deceptively simple, layered storyline were mesmerizing and left a deep mark on my imagination. It would take years before I'd finally get a copy of the anthology featuring the adventures of Tony Delmonto ( also known as Big Baby ) and read other stories set on the world of Burns. His comics brought back feelings I hadn't experienced since my early comic book reading days discovering 
Don't let yourself be deceived by the pop culture contraptions. Jason is a genius and his comics are among the very best being done right now. Really, there's no other way for me to put it. Each new comic from this norwegian cartoonist feels like a gold nugget found on the river sands of the comic book market. Classic but fresh; humble yet bold; succint and sophisticated, All at the same time. Jason's comics are never hard on the eyes, they always read smoothly, his storytelling is crystal clear and his characters feel much more human (for antropomorphic animals) than the usual stack of types that populate comics.
It has come to my attention that the site 
What's not to like about this bande-dessinnee, the long-lost love child of David Lynch and Walt Disney? Much has been said about comics innability to genuinely scare but this is one of the creepiest works I've ever experienced, in or outside comics. Answers remain elusive after a first reading and subsequent raids into this wordless masterpiece will only deepen the mysteries. Coincidentally, I remember reading somewhere in the internet that it could be interpreted as Nicolas De Crecy's comeback on Sylvain Chomet for the uncredited inspiration, to put it mildly, that The Triplettes of Belleville (which I quite like, btw) owe to the creative works of De Crecy and that terminated any hopes readers might've had of a Leon La Came follow-up from the duo. All in all, whichever way you wish to read it, this is one of those comics that will linger on long after its final panel. Like I said, creepy...
Ah, Gilbert Hernandez, one of the madmen of comics! Nowhere is this epiteth more adequate than on this volume collecting diverse short-stories originally published on different magazines. I´m probably on the minority here but I tend to prefer Beto's work when he's off Palomar, so naturally this one comes off as a personal favorite out of his cannon. Besides, whenever I want to be reminded of what comics can do but often fail to, I just reach out to my worn-out copy of "Fear of Comics" and let good ol'boy Roy show me.
It would be so easy to pick up the whole Locas stories as a favorite but I'd rather not, I think it's much more fun to single out one story... A long time ago, during my idle spent teen years, I discovered the incredible world of Jaime Hernandez through reprints on a now defunct brazilian comix anthology. The artwork was drop-dead gorgeous then and still is now. A few years down the line I came across a Titan Books compilation with a bunch of Jaime's stories. Among them was this little gem of which I had seen the author himself reading a few pages on Comic Book Confidential, a documentary featuring a bunch of luminary north-american cartoonists which I had been lucky enough to catch on tv! So, I decided to pick "100 Rooms" to run here for purely nostalgic reasons. Jaime, Maggie, Hopey and co. have since then gone on to much greater heights in terms of storytelling... but I'm still waiting for Casey and Maggie to meet again ;-)
I found the work of Tezuka later on, as a young adult, which, I suppose, may not be the most apropriate age group for the majority of Tezuka's works. Nevertheless, it captivated me in a way that other more "serious" and "mature" comics from contemporary authors almost always fail to do so. Why? Well, beyond the beautiful artwork, filled with characters with incredibly cute and captivating designs, extremely appealling and sensual ink lines against very detailed and naturalistic backgrounds, there's this recurring approach to narrative through an emphasis on emotion and reader/character empathy that never fails to get ahold of this incurable romantic reader. The forbidden romance between Masato and Tamami, the jealousy of Rock, Professsor Saruta's desperate quest... on lesser hands it would all sound fake and clichéd. The surprising miracle, then, is that, somehow, Osamu Tezuka while createing these epic dramas with cute little fictional characters, manages to go against the odds and makes it all work beautifully. Amazing!
If I had to pick one single comic that helped raise my consciousness of the social injustices and crass exploitation at the heart of the mainstream american comic book industry this would be it. Ironic then, that given the content of this book, Dylan Horrocks, the author of this "independent" comic would then fall for the siren song of the system and end up writing corporate comics like Batgirl and burnout, but I digress...
Where else but in comics can you get an experience that goes from personal confessions to scathological annedoctes to bizarre dream-like situations to segments from the christian gospels all in the same package? If what I've just described sounds impossibly strange, then chances are you've never dared into the realm of canadian cartoonist Chester Brown's Yummy Fur. I should note that I wasn't aware of Yummy Fur when it was being published, even so, reading it later on was an experience unlike anything else in comics. Issue to issue, its author grew and experimented and boldly succeeded at going beyong safe, familiar territory into realms of seldom charted (at least for comics) wild human experience and imagination. And even now, he continues to do so. Like him or not, Chester Brown is one of the current prophets of the comics medium leading the way into wild, dangerous territories.
What's better than a comic? A comic about comics! What's better than a comic about comics? Why, a comic about the comics industry, of course!
I first came across the softcover edition of this comic (originally serialized in the series Palookaville between numbers 4 and 9) without any previous knowledge of its content or its author. The beautiful design and obvious care taken on its production and packaging attracted me in a "love at first sight" manner. The almost pulpish paper, the lush brushstrokes and cartoony style of the artwork, even the smell of the object were inviting, to say the least. It took me only a cursory glance to realize this was one to keep.
Para quem ainda não sabe, participo como desenhador em quatro pranchas de BD na nova antologia da 
