comics


Slated D&Q


comics]. I liked the superhero stuff—when DC would say, ‘Oh, we’re having Green Arrow do something new’, I would say, ‘Sure, I can get behind that.’ But the titles I really gravitated to always had an author and clear creator behind them”.


Forthcoming from D&Q


Tunnels


Rutu Modan; Ishai Mishori (trans) Modan’s latest is a satire on modern Israel, combined with an Indiana Jones-style archaeological adven- ture and a look at the ethics of the antiquities trade. Modan won Eisner awards for her 2008 début Exit Wounds and 2013’s The Property.


Secret Life Theo Ellsworth & Jeff Vandermeer Illustrator and author Ellsworth’s “mind- bending” satirisation of office life is adapted from a short story by Nebula-winning SFF writer Vandermeer.


AND D&Q FOUNDER CHRIS OLIVEROS


PEGGY BURNS


don’t think the films help now. Marvel movies are so far beyond comics, they don’t translate back for us. I don’t think they translate back for Marvel comics any more.” But comic-cons have been a boon for D&Q, or at least those comic fairs on the more alternative end, as they are a vital part of book sales and breaking first-time creators. Not having them for the past two years has been a blow, Burns admits: “The biggest challenge of the pandemic was that it was really hard to début a new author.” But she adds that the D&Q team adapted quickly to


virtual events and pivoted to online sales (both through its own website and pushing customers towards Bookshop. org rather than Amazon). Aſter a dip early on in the pandemic, sales picked up, particularly for D&Q perennial authors like Lynda Barry, Adrian Tomine and Jansson.


The next step Burns is a Syracuse, New York native who became a publicit director at DC in New York Cit shortly aſter universit. Though she enjoyed her time with DC, Burns says it was “inevitable I turned the corner [to independent


TheBookseller.com


Acting Class Nick Drnaso Drnaso’s follow-up to Booker-shortlisted Sabrina is a “tapestry of disconnect, distrust and manipulation” as 10 strangers are brought together in an acting class under a “mysterious and morally questionable” teacher.


The Third Person Emma Grove Grove’s 888-page début graphic memoir, the bulk of which takes place in a therapist’s office, is a “singular, gripping depiction of the intersection of identities and trauma” in which a trans woman looks for clues to her troubled past.


She had become friendly with Oliveros over the years


(“it’s a small industry”) and one day he emailed her asking if she knew a publicist who might fancy a job in Montreal. She says: “I wrote, ‘Yeah, me.’ I was in my late twenties and I was thinking, ‘This is the chance to do something big now’—if I didn’t, I’d be locked in forever.” She wasn’t moving north alone, however, as Tom Devlin, her then-fiancé and now husband, was also offered a job. He is now D&Q’s executive editor.


RUTU MODAN’S TUNNELS


PANELS FROM What sets D&Q’s list apart from even a lot of other


alternative comics publishers, but certainly the superhero conglomerates, is the number of women creators. From Beaton to Woman World author/illustrator Aminder Dhaliwal to Emma Grove, whose début memoir, The Third Person, is one of the publisher’s spring 2022 lead titles, D&Q is no boys’ club. This reflects a change in culture— and not just in gender balance.


Burns says: “I’ve been at D&Q for 18 years and in that first year we only published one woman. So, every year we’ve made a concerted effort to publish more women, but also to publish more people of all different identities and backgrounds. We try to balance the list as much as we can: by genre, by person, by translator, by country. The thing with independent cartoonists, though, is you can’t make them work faster. The work comes in when it comes in, so sometimes we have a season where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, we really killed it [on balancing the list].’ And then the next season not so much.” As a comics publisher in a Francophone cit, D&Q is “a silo within a silo” and sits outside much of the rest of Canadian publishing. That said, Burns praises the Canada Guest of Honour organisers for their support, and says the two-year stretch as the GoH, owing to last year’s fair’s cancellation, has given a boost to rights trading. D&Q’s rights strategy in the UK is interesting, as it makes “book by book decisions” on whether to go direct through its distributor PGUK or let a British publisher take it on. The Moomin titles, for example, are direct, but Drnaso’s Sabrina was sold to Granta. Burns says: “We really want to make sure that all of our books find the right home. Sometimes they are the right fit for a Granta, Faber, Canongate or Cape. But we publish very idiosyncratic comics, and sometimes it’s beter for the author if we keep it to ourselves.”


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