Come join three Conundrum Press authors as they launch their new graphic novels, plus... one special guest! The event will be hosted by up-and-coming comics artist Sam Alden!
Local artist Meags Fitzgerald will be on hand to present her process making the formidable Photobooth: A Biography.
Meags Fitzgerald has chronicled the photobooth’s fortuitous history
and the events which gave rise to the desperate need to save them.
Having traveled in North America, Europe and Australia, she’s
constructed a biography of the booth through the eyes of technicians,
owners, collectors, artists and fanatics. In this ground-breaking book
Fitzgerald struggles with her own relationship to these fleeting
machines, while looking to the future.
— Jillian Tamaki
“Fitzgerald has created something that’s more than candid personal memoir, more than carefully researched cultural history — she’s created a work brimming with that rarest of things: love. That I should use such a word to explain a young woman’s feelings for photobooths certainly sounds improbable and maybe even a little crazy. And that’s precisely why this book is so wonderful.”
— Jonathan Goldstein
Celebrated Quebec comics artist Jimmy Beaulieu will launch My Neighbour's Bikini, his second translation for Conundrum's BDANG imprint.
During a major power outage in the heat of a Montreal summer, two shy
young neighbours finally take the time to slow down, meet, and spend
time together. Beaulieau takes a microscope to the lives of a few
citizens at a certain time and place and weaves their stories into a
romantic tapestry. The perfect book to get you through the cold winter (or even a cold spring!).
Originally published in 2006 this translation is the second by Beaulieu
in our BDANG imprint.
Canadian Hall of Fame artist Réal Godbout will present his first work in English, an adaptation of Kafka's Amerika.
In his adaptation of Amerika, which took seven years to achieve, Godbout
has tried to remain as faithful as possible to Kafka’s novel, while
using the clear line aesthetic he perfected in his series Red Ketchup.
Unlike the common cliché of Kafka’s work, Amerika is not a dark and
sinister novel, but a dynamic and colourful story, with a touch of
absurdist humor. Perfect for an adaptation into a graphic novel. It
tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an
embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself “packed off to America”
by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of
opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying
reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures. Despite the
fact that Kafka never set foot in America, his novel was uncannily
prescient about certain aspects of the country that advertised itself,
particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as “the
promised land.” Godbout provides a unique perspective, as a quebecois
artist and outsider to America.
There will be an onstage Q&A between Jimmy and Réal.
"Mark Connery's work is incredibly inspiring. His zines are portals to other dimensions where cats and ducks and fish-men engage in metaphysical shop-talk. At first it may seem that logic has been abolished, but the cartoon laws of punchline and gag still hold, creating hilarious friction. A comedic timing worthy of Bushmiller has been transplanted into an anarchist scratch-scape. Importantly, Connery connects comix with spiritual predecessors: artist books, punk rock utopianism, psychedelic nonsense, surrealist automatic writing, dreams and daydreams...which is exactly what I want to read. I LOVE RUDY!"
- Matthew Thurber, 1-800-MICE, Infomaniacs
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