Michael Hoskin, librarian and fan of James Turner, went to Toronto Fan Expo at the end of August and describes meeting James: "And what a bounty he had at his table! Magnets, buttons, an Ordo Bibliotheca official membership book...and the unpublished 2nd Warlord of Io story! Wait, unpublished? Yeah, except for the ten copies Turner printed himself. Now, one of them is mine."

That issue two of Warlord of Io will soon be available in our website's digital comics section and on iPhone applications -- I'll let you know when it's up.

It's sounds like Michael had a good conversation with James. The final verdict? "James Turner is no slob."

James Turner, creator of Rex Libris, has a prolific imagination, so we're never short on awesome digital art from him for the Boutiki. (He also designed the Boutiki's mascot, who really should have a name.) The walls are covered with his art, and it will be until August. Here are some photos!

Remember, the Boutiki show opening party is tonight at 8 at 577 South Market St., San Jose, CA!

I failed at giving a little promo for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. It's probably because I was just managing to suppress the profound melancholy that would have overcome me if I thought about it, since I wasn't attending. It sounds like an awesome show, and it's free! Canada, go figure. Some SLG-related people there were Faith Erin Hicks, and James Turner, so here are some interviews with them.

The National Post interviewed Zombies Calling and The War at Ellsmere (a nominee for a Doug Wright Award, which were presented at TCAF) creator Faith Erin Hicks in advance of the festival. Faith talks about her working style, distractions, and her favorite comics.

Newsarama asks James Turner about The Warlord of Io and his future in the comics industry. It is sobering.

- JdG

Greg Burgas reviews Warlord of Io and Other Stories by James Turner at Comics Should Be Good: "Not only is Turner’s art stupendous, with his odd pop-art renderings and intricate detail, but his storytelling is brilliant as well."

You can get Warlord of Io and Other Stories at comic book stores and our website, where you can also download a digital version for only $1.49 and the not-to-be-found-in-stores Warlord of Io #1 for $0.99!

We also got our sample copies of the reprinted Rex Libris Volume Two: Book of Monsters (the first printing, you might recall, had some quality problems), and all looks well now! We're hoping to get the new Rex in stores by June.

Oh, and all that discussion about the direction of the comic book industry that Diamond declining to list Warlord of Io #1? It's still going on. I like it when the comics commentati (I made that up! Horrible, no?) get a subject that they want to examine and weigh and theorize about. I'm not being sarcastic; I really do. In this case, it's one of the recurring themes (well, it's always one of the recurring themes), the structure of the direct market distribution system. That sounds really dry, and that's because it is. To you, the readers, comics should be about stories and art, but to us, the producers, they're about stories and art and, on top of that, how to get those stories and that art in front of your eyes and into your hands.

And we're going to keep trying to be better at doing that.

- JdG

Here is a quick post to set a couple of things straight regarding the Warlord of Io mini-series and Diamond Comics decision not to list it in Previews.

First thing is a small issue of semantics. Lot of people are using the word "rejected" when describing what happened with the comic. While this is an easy assumption to make, it is not 100% accurate. It would be more accurate to say that they declined to list the product as formatted. The Warlord of Io one-shot which came out earlier this month sold pretty poorly and did not make the benchmarks laid out by Diamond. Their assumption (probably not inaccurate) was that if a $3.95, 48-page comic could not sell well enough to make the benchmark of $2500, then a $3.50 comic with similar content would not make it either and that subsequent issues would all be below the minimum.

I can't and don't take issue with the reasoning, I can argue that the benchmarks being too high, but, seriously, the one-shot only sold 900 copies in the direct market, so who really made money from that?

Diamond did say that they might be open to a larger, more expensive comic (say something at 48-60 pages in the 6-7 dollar price range) but that seemed to be a wasted effort given that a product that size would only serve to cannibalize the sales of an eventual trade paperback, which Diamond would certainly list when or if it ever saw the light of day.

The other small bit of confusion is about whether this comic has already appeared in Previews. It has not. The decision to not list the book means that consumers and retailers will not have the opportunity to say they do not want this comic.

While James and I are both disappointed with the turn of events, I for one was not surprised. I had hoped that perhaps 23 years in business and the previous success of Rex Libris might buy us a little grace on this project, but I am not stunned, as the marketplace has been telling me for years that the only thing they want from us are comics by Jhonen Vasquez. The funny thing about that is that the first issue of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac would not have made the current Diamond purchase order benchmark, so the subsequent issues would never have seen the light of day. The same can be said for Milk and Cheese, whose first issue barely sold 2,000 copies. We have always depended on being able to build circulation and readership on our books; the current climate seems to indicate that that is not going to work anymore.

Only James can tell you whether he plans on completing Warlord of Io. My guess is he will at some point, but that he will focus his current energies on something else and will continue to work on the Warlord project in his spare time. We will continue to offer Warlord as a download and we will be printing a small quantity of the declined book for sale on our website and at conventions.
 
Lastly I want to say that, again, this is to me is not solely a Diamond issue and that attempts to vilify them are off base. I have enjoyed a long and productive relationship with that company and I would expect to work with them as my distributor to the book market in the event that we publish a Warlord graphic novel and I do not wish them ill. I have said before that the issues and problems facing comics as an industry today had their seeds planted a long time ago and are just now coming to the surface. I have to take my share of the blame for some bad decision making in the past five or six years as well which no doubt have contributed to the fact that it is harder for us to bring work by someone like James Turner to market.
 
So, thanks all for the support on this, while it might be too late for Warlord hopefully some of our supporters can use this as an opportunity to at least take a peek at our upcoming comic book projects Captain Blood and Zeke Deadwood and, if they feel inclined, let their local retailer know in no uncertain terms that they would like to buy these comic when they come out.

- DV

I have a lot to do this week, but I'm going to go ahead and skim some time from the top to note the response to Diamond Comics' decision not to carry Warlord of Io, the new mini-series by Rex Libris creator James Turner. The most considered one comes from Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, who uses Warlord of Io's fate as a case study in analysis of the changing direction of the comic book industry:  "A shift from a model where an artist like Turner fails in the marketplace to a model where an artist like Turner is denied the opportunity to try, I think that's worth noting."

In doing a little research of the sales in our Boutiki store (where we stock all of our in-print books, as well as comics and graphic novels by other publishers), I made a discovery about just how much James "fails" in our little marketplace. I'll get into it in my Publishers Weekly column this week. Admittedly, the Boutiki isn't an accurate microcosm of the comics direct market as a whole, but that's kind of the point. As Spurgeon notes: "James Turner should be on-line and in comics shops, and the reason he's not going to be is because that's been decided for him. This decision was not solely made by market forces: he's able to make the comics and has someone willing to publish them. It was made in one leg of the capitalist stool by an interpretation of what those market forces should mean, not the forces themselves."

Warlord of Io, meanwhile, is going digital --  issue one is available to download now at our website -- and will be published as a graphic novel. To get an idea of what it's all about, check out Michael May's review at Robot 6* of The Warlord of Io and Other Stories, a kind of "issue #0" that was printed and distributed by Diamond. May calls James Turner "Rip-Your-Brain-Out-Of-Your-Head-Because-You-Won’t-Need-It-Anymore-After-This Awesome" and gives Warlord of Io and Other Stories five out of five tiki pirates.

- JdG

*disclaimer, as always: I do freelance work for Robot 6.

The statement of purpose at the review blog Things I Like is admirable: "Too many on-line reviewers focus on the negative. All they do is complain about stuff they don't like. This blog is about the things I do like." I wouldn't want every review site to be like this, but it's nice to have a pleasant place to go after your enjoyment of Tucker Stone's disembowelings of comics starts feeling a bit gratuitous.

One of the liked things recently is Jame's Turner's Warlord of Io and Other Stories: "The book is full of the same weirdness Turner employed so well in Rex Libris."

Warlord of Io is available now at our website and in stores (Things I Like got theirs at The Beguiling) and a mini-series continuation of the main story Warlord of Io will begin in July! ETA 4/29/09: We just got word from Diamond Comics that Warlord of Io #1 has been rejected because they do not expect it to meet their benchmark. We will be proceeding with it as a graphic novel.

- JdG

I know I said I'd be writing about T-shirts this week, but I got hit with an old complaint: my neck problem. Mmm. It makes it tough for me to hold up my head, so I'm sorry that I'm only giving you links here.

James Turner is best known to comics readers as the creator of Rex Libris, but he's also a great graphic designer and illustrator, and we have serveral shirts designed by him, many of them inspired by his oft-overlooked graphic novel Nil.

Optimists are the enemy of the Nihilists in Nil, and this T-shirt features a bit of Nihilist propaganda against them: Optimists Eat Babies.

The Nihilists are big on their coffee, too, to the point that they'll risk their life on a battlefield for a coffee run. Thus, the Death By Coffee T-shirt.

You have to imagine the working conditions are pretty bad in Hell, right? It's only a matter of time before there's a strike, and that's when the Hell: Unfair T-shirts will be useful.

And of course there are the Rex Libris T-shirts -- the Ordo Bibliotheca T-shirt, which carries the seal of the distingushed Order of Librarians and the "Have YOU Returned Your Library Books?" T-shirt, which is perhaps the iconic image of Rex.

Rex Libris has always been reliable as a source for funny extraneous expository dialogue, but in issue eleven there was the immortal narration "The phone! It's ringing! I... I'll answer it!" that had me cracking up more than usual.

Of course, the tension is palpable in Rex Libris #11 by James Turner as the librarians prepare to battle the biggun, Cthulhu. But first they must match intellects with Professor Murtlebee, who posits, "Perhaps it is not Cthulhu who is insane but humanity." To which Circe replies, "Just what genre do you think this is?"

Andrew Speed shares my amusement in her review of Rex Libris #11 in her review at Comixtreme. As she notes, Rex is drawing to a close and "Everything’s building to a crescendo, and you just know it’s going to go out in much action and weird humor, pretty much the way it started."

Rex Libris will end at issue #13. After that, there might be the movie to continue Rex's adventures. Let's hope they get it right.

Another review of Rex Libris #10 by James Turner has rolled in, this time from Graig Kent at Rack Raids. Kent writes about the metatextual nature of Rex Libris, and of course about the allusion to the movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. I am going to use this opportunity to preach the gospel of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, which is one of my favorite novels: Shandyism and resistance to the Line of Gravitaiton, people!

The movie Tristram Shandy was not an adaptation of the book Tristram Shandy but rather a movie about the troubles encountered while trying to make a movie based on the book, which no one was actually trying to do -- the adaptation of the movie is fictional, and the main actors play fictionalized versions of themselves. This is layer upon layer of metafiction, "And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard."

Similarly, Rex encounters the problems in trying to make a comic book based on his life, with evil-sorceress-turned-benevolent-librarian Circe calculating that at the rate it's being told, one year of Rex's life will take 104 years to tell. Like the narrative of The Life of Opinions of Tristram Shandy, the narrative of Rex Libris is often a series of digressions. Tristram, narrator of his Life and Opinions, expounds on digressions thusly:

...in all my digressions (one only excepted) there is a master-stroke of digressive skill, the merit of which has all along, I fear, been over-looked by my reader,--not for want of penetration in him,--but because 'tis an excellence seldom looked for, or expected indeed, in a digression;--and it is this: That tho' my digressions are all fair, as you observe,--and that I fly off from what I am about, as far, and as often too, as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so that my main business does not stand still in my absence.

And thusly:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;--they are the life, the soul of reading!--take them out of this book, for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them;--one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

True enough in Rex Libris, too, but, still... 104 years for one year! Well, it's a good thing that Rex Libris, as Kent writes in his review (I didn't forget the main business of this post!), "This book never fails to entertain, not just yanking the old funnybook bone, but tweaking the smart receptors in the brain too."

B. Schatz at ComiXtreme reviews Rex Libris #10 by James Turner, giving it a 4.5 out 5.

Greg Burgas also reviews this issue at Comics Should Be Good (scroll, scroll, scroll!) and includes a handy link to a painting James references in the issue: "As usual with this book, it’s very funny, pretty darned exciting, and is densely packed with plot and hilarious asides"

To answer Burgas''s question, "damned" is grammatically correct as an adjective modifying a noun, but when people speak, most say "damn." Dialogue in comics is supposed to more or less approximate speech -- and people make grammatical errors when they speak. (So, yeah, Burgas's "Greg's Grammar Notes" are overly picky by even my picky standards.) I suppose this could be written as damn', the apostrophe indicating the truncated -ed, but that just looks awkward.

Also -- a comma after the penultimate item in a list is called a serial or Oxford comma. It is considered old-fashioned, but it is still standard in many publications. The graduate department made me add serial commas to my thesis. I hated them for it. They also made me put two spaces after periods. More hate.

Anyway, "A Cock and Bull Story"! Man, I love Tristram Shandy. And everyone who knows anything loves Rex Libris. Yep.  

Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter interviews Nil and Rex Libris creator James Turner. Of creative work, James says, "Feeling passionate about an idea or an issue is something that compels me to work. Having something to say is vital. Without that driving imperative, there's not enough energy to get it all done."

So true!

Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good! names Rex Libris one of his favorite ongoing series.

Lori Mortimer at BlogCritics.com recommends Rex Libris Volume One: I, Librarian by James Turner to "experienced readers" -- rife as it is with parody of Silver Age comics as well as literary, mythic and historical references: "The volume teems with references to world history, mythology, and literature. It's also full of inside jokes and riffs on comic books and the comic book publishing process."

You know how Hollywood can't pass up a chance to toot its own horn? Yeah, we're all like that, aren't we? The insider perspective is sometimes frightening. I happened to be at a family party when we watched the episode of The Simpsons with Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes in it; my niece declared it "an Auntie Jen episode" while I laughed at the inside stuff they didn't get. "You see, it speaks to one of the underlying tensions in the comic book industry!" I said. "Comic book fanboys versus nerdy hipsters ! Ha, he totally looks like Brett Warnock! Bart told Alan Moore that he likes the way he draws! God, writers hate that!"

It then occurred to me that much of the humor was being lost on my non-comics-savvy family and I just looked like a total dork to them. It was the same way with the episode where Lisa goes to the literary conference. Oh well.

If The Simpsons can do it, so can we, right? Issue #9 features use of the "Wilhelm scream." If you know what that is, chances are you're just the kind of experienced reader Rex Libris calls for.

ComiXtreme recently reviewed Rex Libris #9 by James Turner and the anthology comic Haunted Mansion #7.



In the review of Rex Libris #9, B. Schatz deems the issue "a story of heavy action, filmnoir ambiance and square-jawed know how only James Turner can deliver."


Blake Petite has kinds words for all the stories in Haunted Mansion #7 -- including a story by Jon "Bean Hastings and Jon Morris and two stories written by Chris Reilly and Steve Ahlquist, one drawn by Stephanie Freese, the other by Chris Grine -- but he calls "The Misery of the Manse, part one," penned by SLG's very own Supreme Commander Dan Vado and drawn by Drew Rausch, "the gem of the collection."

James Turner, creator of Nil: A Land Beyond Belief and Rex Libris, is interviewed at Comixology about his comics work, technique and inspirations. He also explains to librarians and other people who are fussy about such details why Middleton Library does not seem to have many library clerks or pages. It has to do with insurance premiums.

Rex Libris #9, which features the first use (that we know of; we don't have powers of research on par with Rex's) of the famous "Wilhelm Scream" in a comic book, will be in stores tomorrow!

Which, as it happens, is also my birthday. Woo.

Here are a few quick hits for you before I dash on out of here for blessed food and rest:

• The charming and talented Miss Serena Valentino is interviewed at Cut Out + Keep about her work writing Nightmares and Fairy Tales, GloomCookie, and other comics, as well as her new forays into prose novels and film. She's a busy lady! You might see her zipping around San Francisco on her magical pink bicycle, but you won't be able to catch her!

• The Clarence Princple by Fehed Said and Shari Chankhamma is reviewed at Manga Life. Stephen Mortiboy writes, "To me, this book’s greatest strength is that to each reader it offers an individual experience far greater then our favourite characters or scenes. This tale poses many questions and answers and I believe that the ones I asked and answered are potentially different then other readers."

• Gabe Bullard at PLAYBACK:stl reviews Rex Libris Volume One: I, Librarian by James Turner: "This is a very well-planned comic. Everything, each line, letter and shape is expertly placed for maximum enjoyment."
  

Someone recently commented in regards to James Turner's Map of Humanity that Love does not appear on the map. As far as I can tell, that is true, but Eros, which is what most people mean when they say "love," is there -- on the continent of Wisdom, its peninsula jutting precariously close to the Libidinous Islands of Lust, just across the Strait of Kinsey.

Still not feeling it? Well, don't be alarmed. We're now offering prints of Turner's Cartography of Love -- love may be a many-splendored thing, but that means it's also really complicated and difficult. It needs its own damned map.

These prints are 13 x 9" and printed on fine art paper.

At least part of the struggle has proven triumphant!

A couple of people have been confused as to why the Bay of Cardigan is off the cast of Lust and Hedonism. "Cardigans aren't sexy, har har," they yuck. To that, I say, for god's sake, people, this is the Internet. You can figure this out. Look up Bay of Cardigan in Wikipedia and follow a link to another Wikipedia article found there. Then verify what you find from outside sources if you want to be safe. You will find the mythical background and it will all fall into place.

UPDATE: The site is back up. The solution was to take down the large image of the map that people were linking to. So you can once again buy The Map of Humanity (please change your link to this page if you have a link up and use it if you're putting up a new one) and other SLG products at www.slgcomic.com.

--
This is astounding and frustrating: Links to James Turner's Map of Humanity (blogged about here) are turning up all over the actual map -- blogs, Digg and sites in Russian and Arabic are pointing to our website. Meanwhile, here at SLG headquarters, we're like characters in a commercial for a server company because the traffic has crashed our website.

"The links are coming in from everywhere! Digg! Some Russian blog! The orders are going to be through the roof!"

"But our server's down! Our site won't load! The orders can't come through!"

"Oh, if only we'd called Nev-R-Crash Web Hosting!"

It's the Russians that are really killing us. There sure are a lot of them! Who knew? Incidentally, Moscow is the capital of Tyranny on the Map of Humanity that you could order if our site weren't down.

So sorry about the inconvenience, everyone. The company that hosts our site is trying to resolve the problem now. In the meantime, we're going to put the poster up on Amazon.con and eBay (links to come -- check back at this post), and you can also order one from us by calling 1-877-754-7877.

One of the many new offerings on at www.slgcomic.com is this Map of Humanity art print by James Turner, creator of Rex Libris. This map represents one of those rare instances when the phrase "Must be seen to be believed" legitimately applies. It's 12 24 x 36", printed on heavy art paper with our large format 12-color printer in archival quality inks.

Click on the link to be taken to our site, where you can get a bigger view of this impressive work.