Mark and I are working on an interview with each other to be posted soon to go with this.
This was a great short story to work on, I'm very happy with how the collaboration with Mark tuned out, very excited about this one.
Comic Book Tattoo is going to be an amazing showcase book, i haven't read the other stories yet, but i've seen lots of the pages here and there - the book looks amazing!
This is the first of three anthologies I'm going to be in between now and December, what a way to kick things off.
Trailer for Therefore Repent! a post-rapture graphic novel
So i heard this song recently - Dogs by Michelle Breslin! - i've been planing to do a trailer for Therefore Repent! for a while and this song just fit so perfectly.
Hey all, some nice stuff for the clip pile here; stumbled across this a bit late, Comic News Insider featured the book on their weekly top three list when it came out in January. This is a clip from Episode 125 - Tue, 29 January 2008!
I'm Going to be at the upcoming New York Comic Con - April 18-20, 2008!
Also i've confirmed with Vito, I'm booked to do a singing for Therefore Repent! on the 21st the Monday after the con with my co-creator on Sea of Red, Rick Remender (Fear Agent) and Tony Moore(Walking Dead) @ Jim Hanley's Universedowntown store in New York City [map]! If your in town i hope you can make it out to the store.
Also really look forward to meeting the guys, Tony did some awesome work on my covers for Sea of Red, I've worked with both of them but i haven't met either of them in the flesh so it's going to be cool to actually encounter the real people! Hope it goes well :)
Time TBA and last...
And we got a nice short blurb in the March 2008 issue of Rue Mourge!
Was out for lots of walking today, brunch at a diner then off to exchange the scanner.
After that spent a few hours working on a short story gig that's popped up. It's top secret but very cool! Made a lot of progress visualizing the story and imagining the characters. Going to be a pretty one i think, like what i came up with.
Scanned a few inked pages later when i got the replacement scanner hooked up, posted those are on Flickr.
The hits have slowed a bit, but I'm happy to welcome a bunch of new regular readers to my new Solo project, Dream Life. about 700 of you have visited this site in the last few days, 3800 of you at flickr, and i have a lot of new friends on live journal and flickr.
Thanks to you all! The feed backs has been really positive, very encouraging.
I've had a fallow blog on Live Journal for a few years, but i never found a good use for it, other than cross posting from my home page here.
That's not so great so really i just didn't use it. But as i considered how to distribute my new book online, i thought about how groups i've been admiring such as Act-i-vate and Transmission X have been doing things and hit on making use of the old LJ blog.
Also, if all went as planed, then the IDW edition of Therefore Repent! hit the stands today! Officially yesterday, but most places get new books Wednesdays. But in any case, go check it out! and if they don't have the coolest book of the new year in yet, ask them why the hell not!
Some art without the wash work, I'm feeling like a really good stride if being hit right now with this. Nothing against the last project at all, but it's so nice to be doing something i wrote myself right now. Primarily because of things like this: this was NOT in the script for these two pages, was just going to have a big panorama of the landscape. But the idea hit and i ran with it. No one to check with, i could strike while the irons were hot and it came out lovely, and will add a nice bit of layering to the story with this figure showing up in Charlie's dream here.
Local illustrator Salgood Sam and author Jim Munroe create a post-Rapture work in Therefore Repent!
by VINCENT TINGUELY
When prolific indie author, quick and dirty filmmaker and DIY organizer Jim Munroe got a grant to create Therefore Repent!, a full-length "post-Rapture" graphic novel, Montreal-based, long-time Munroe fan and sometime collaborator Salgood Sam jumped at the chance to render it. "I'd read an early Munroe novella at a zine fair when I was 19 or 20 and I really liked it," says Sam. "I've been following his stuff ever since. When you really identify with a writer's vision, they've tapped the voice you hear inside yourself, they're appealing to you on that level." Sam spent more than a year meticulously bringing Munroe's ideas to life, drawing on skills honed in both the indie comics realm and through years of grunt work for the likes of Marvel. "Jim's a good writer to collaborate with because he was into gearing it into what I was into doing," Sam says. "I didn't have to do any contortions to visualize the script as I was reading it." Munroe agrees. "He's perfect, because he can do the hipsters and the hellspawn," says Munroe. "He can do urban settings very well and true to life, but also fascinating fantastical things."
Therefore Repent! begins with the arrival of the fascinating and fantastical Raven and Mummy in a near-future Chicago. Munroe, who's based in Toronto, set the story in an American city because, as he quips, "They go together like peanut butter and jelly, America and the Rapture." 144,000 Christians have floated up to heaven, Jesus has joined George W. in the White House, and heavily armed angels from on high are descending to do the Lord's dirty work on Earth. Things would seem quite hopeless for the rest of us godless (i.e. not fundamentalist) sorts, except that magic is afoot...everything from Eastern cosmic insights to transubstantiation actually works. Soon enough, a grassroots magical insurgency starts to form.
"I was inspired by this idea that the most powerful people in America purport to literally believe in Christians floating into the air, into heaven, which is what George W. Bush says he believes in," says Munroe. "That's pretty mind blowing, that in their own mythology they'd have something that wild-especially when the conservatives have problems with Harry Potter."
After a more ambiguous approach to the idea of evil in An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, Munroe decided to go for a dark fantasy scenario in which, if miracles, angels and such were to be given free play, then other forms of magic would be just as valid. "Well, if people are going to float into the air, how about less top-down magical manifestations?" Munroe says. "Religion is very top-down, it's God or who God specifically anoints. But if there is magic from on high, then it is going to emerge from below as well, if people are willing to explore it and not kowtow to the powers that be. I like the idea of it being nascent in all of us, but only if we embrace it-individual power, rather than waiting for other people to anoint us. The whole DIY, coming from the grassroots thing."
Therefore Repent! launches this Saturday, Dec. 8 at 7 p.m. at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore (211 Bernard W.)
It's in this November Previews! published by IDW in the US. Diamond # NOV073660
Very important info; There was an error in the listing,
the cover price will be $14.99 us, Cheep!
not $24.99!
Here's the info off of the IDW site
Therefore, Repent!
Jim Munroe (w) Salgood Sam (a)
What if the religious right... are right?
Therefore Repent! is a graphic novel set in a Chicago neighborhood after the Rapture. Once the Christians have floated bodily into the sky, life goes on pretty much as usual for the immoral majority... except that magic works, if you're willing to risk demonic mutations. CNN reports that Mr. Christ and Mr. Bush are on a speaking tour of the red states. And an angelic army appears to have been deployed to mop up the sinners. But through it all, outsiders Raven and Mummy face the possibility of a bigger problem than the end of the world: the end of their relationship.
In the tradition of The Book of Revelations, Therefore Repent!, courtesy of novelist Jim Munroe (Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask) and acclaimed artist Salgood SamSea of Red) is a lurid, dark fantasy tale. By taking the apocryphal scripture as literal truth - as the American powers-that-be claim to do - the story also explores the political and spiritual ramifications of God abandoning humanity.
TPB-FC 6" x 8" $14.99 160 Pages ISBN: 978-1-60010-146-1
Been trying to get stuff ready for Expozine, but ended up being up late working on mixing down ISR #99, messed up my plans for today. Got to get on it. Got some books to print and was thinking buttons....
Right, so in case you missed it the big Zine fest, the monster of Indy Montreal, EXPOZINE is coming up. Two days this year, by popular demand. Being run by da' man, Billy Mavreas.
We has high hopes.
Going to go in a double capacity, along with my new Graphic Novel, I'll be taking a list of people I want to put a mic in front of for a quick 5 questions routine to post on Sequential and maybe include in a podcast or two to come.
I will be there with Therefore Repent! of course, and think I'm going to plan for a signing shortly after Expozine, want to book it so i can make fliers for the show to have at EXPO. So come to the show and get your hands on a copy of a book people keep telling me they can't seem to put down.
You can still order the book now from NMK, but soon it will be hitting the comic shops all over - January 15 2008 is the date!
I have to take some time to spread the word on that in the next few days. But please, anyone reading this feeling like pitching in, it will be much appreciated! :) Bug your comic shop clerk to check it out.
In other news; Keep and ear out for a Radio spot i did this weekend for Therefore Repent! during Indie Spinner Rack Issue #99, with help from Cass and Bernie Mireault! Going to post it here probably in a few days too. Just a last min swing at the thing for ISR #99. Will be taking some time to refine it and maybe do some others as well in the next while so i can send it out to a few other shows too.
And about the references toISR #99, the show is a fun comix podcast I've been listening to for a while, and recently offered to pitch in and edit a few episodes for while tec and host Charlito is busy with an off Broadway play! Doing it for fun, love working in sound. But it also gives me a great excuse to do some reporting on Expozine and of course i get to promote my baby too, nice deal all round for me i have to say. ~B-) sweet. completed the first of my episodes this morning, it will go up Wednesday here.
Meanwhile: Jim told me about this a while ago, we got a big widow display at the super hip and excellent pages book store in my hometown of Toronto [also the shop in TO that moved the most copies of RevolveR One too]. Nice to have this record of it - thanks to my mom ;)
He's presenting our post-Rapture graphic novel THEREFORE REPENT! along side new issues of Fred Grisholm's HATESONG, Brian Fukushima's JOBGOBLIN. And Jason Turner & Manien Bothma's True Loves 2!
Then it's back to old Hog town for Word on the streetSunday Sept 30th to present Therefore Repent! He'll be signing books at his table in Fringe Beat as well as giving a presentation called Be Your Own Boss In The World Of Publishing.
And you can also catch him participating in a panel with Willow Dawson and Ray Fawkes called "I Have A Great Idea For A Story, But I Need An Artist!"
And not only is it free to read, it's also free to use: we're licencing the jpg versions of these as remixable under this Creative Commons licence.
So, if you've ever wondered what'd it'd be like to be the writer of a comic book and work with as talented an artist as Salgood Sam, now you can.
Download them from this site, and open the pages up in Photoshop or Gimp to replace my words with more interesting ones.
Colour the pictures.
Use the images as graphics for your non-commercial projects. Send the results to us and we'll put 'em up on the site: even better, we'll send the three most inspiring remixes a free book.
So are you Game? I'd love to see what you can come up with...
I have two more Zines to share with you, this time in CBR format so you'll need to grab the popular CDisplay reader here for those.
First is the second issue of Nisrigion. A lit zine I illustrated, designed and published. It Features both the alternate covers for the issue, and the conclusion to J.F.Sugerman's futurists gonzo dystopian play Drowning. You can catch the first part in Nisrigion one, posted here in PDF form a year ago.
And the other is a sketchbook journal titled CscdcC, I'll leave the slightly embarrassing long form for you to read yourself. I've excised some unworthy early attempts to write from this, but most of it's there still.
Wanted an excuse to work with a few new tools, some stuff I'll probably apply to my own site soon, to help tidy it up some.
+Told Bernie a while ago I'd help fix up his old site, and move it to a better host.
Sooo....
The new url is bem.spiltink.org, and while it's still got some stuff to tighten I'm officially launching it today. Drop buy and bug the guy to post some new stuff! :)
Well, I didn't end up taking too many photos at TCAF, planed to but on Saturday I twisted my ankle and it kind of slipped my mind. So I just got a few good ones at the Awards on Friday.
Had a blast at the show, and the launch went well. Not really in the mood to talk more about it all right now but I'll try to find some time to go on latter.
Hey all, the book is almost done! I can taste it, it tastes good!
Also, something i can talk about because got the contracts in the mail last week, we've signed a deal with California's IDW Publishing to publish the US edition of THEREFORE REPENT! in January.
Yay!
Negotiations went really smooth with them and Ted Adams was enthusiastic about the book so that's all great, feel good about them handling it.
The NMK edition is still launching next month, Aug 14 I think is the date, as part of the events leading up to TCAF festivities [aug 18-19], I'm just wrapping up the book now I'm happy to say, awaiting edits and looking forward to sending her off to the printers in less than two weeks.
This was done for Festival, the FCBD giveaway profiling creators participating in TACF this August. The books been out for a bit so i figured it was ok to post it now.