Ragged Claws Network

Here’s a book I never expected to see reprinted. It’s Barron Storey’s The Marat/Sade Journals, a visual diary that uses the play Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss as the jumping off point for a raw, painterly exploration of the deep despair of “an ageing artist” forced to deal with the end of a romantic relationship. The book was first published in 1993 by Tundra Publishing and limited to 1,000 copies, and the price of a good, used copy has since climbed into the hundreds of dollars in the collector’s market. The new edition by Graphic Novel Art, re-edited by the artist — 80% of the art has been re-scanned from the originals — with an introduction by David Mack, a new drawing by Dave McKean, and an afterword by Storey himself, is printed on silk-varnished 140gr paper and includes a sewn binding (rather than the glued binding of the first edition) to make the book feel more like one of Storey’s actual journals.

DETAILS:

Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals
132 pages
6.4″ x 9.4″ x 0.8″
Full colour

PURCHASE LINKS:

Buy Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals from the publisher on ebay

Buy Barron Storey: The Marat/Sade Journals from Gallery Nucleus

Buy Barron Storey: Life after Black (the sequel to The Marat/Sade Journals) from the publisher on ebay

[N.B.: I receive no money at all from the sale of this book, which I ordered for my personal library just yesterday; my recommendation is free.]

BONUS LINKS:

Barron Storey: The Journals — follow the progress of Storey’s latest journal pages on blogspot.

Paint it Black: Carl Wyckaert on Barron Storey’s Life After Black — an interview with Barron Storey’s publisher, the owner of Graphic Novel Art, based in Belgium.

Review of Barron Storey: Life after Black

Today, ICv2 is reporting that the venerable alt-comics publisher Fantagraphics has acquired the rights to reprint two classic adventure strips: Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant (which Fantagraphics held the rights to not so long ago) and Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy. Click here for details…

Volume 1 (of 2) of the collected Journey by William Messner-Loebs is available for pre-order at an online bookstore near you. Here’s the cover:

From the publisher: “A realistic and absorbing account of life in the 19th century frontier wilderness finds Wolverine McAlistaire enduring tornadoes, Indians and even the walking dead, all in Messner-Loebs’ unique neo-Eisnerian style. A classic adventure series from Eisner nominee William Messner-Loebs, Journey introduced the world to Joshua ‘Wolverine’ McAlistaire and the Fort Miami settlement populated by both real-life and fictional characters. Now, IDW is re-presenting this acclaimed work in two comprehensive volumes, the first of which collects issues #1-13.”

I would post my own comment on Journey, but it has been a long, long time since I read the comics, which were originally published first by Aardvark-Vanaheim, then by Renegade Press, and finally by Fantagraphics Books, and I simply can’t be bothered to dig them out of storage (I do own them). Anyway, suffice to say, I have fond memories of Messner-Loebs’ work — if memory serves, the series opened with a virtuoso first issue that consisted entirely of Wolverine McAlistaire being chased by a bear — and I look forward to owning the collections, which I know from experience will be so much easier to store and read than the original comics.