Paperback
"In a world where dogs are revered as gods, what’s the worst possible thing to be accused of? Dogcrime!
Our protagonist finds himself embroiled in a set up which will land him on the wrong side of the law. He ends up running for his life caught up in a conspiracy that will set off a war to ravage the land. Dogcrime is the precursor to a much longer story by Blexbolex entitled No Man’s Land (a 200 page graphic novel which follows the path of our unfortunate protagonist as his mind explores the possibilities of what might have been before his self inflicted summary execution takes effect). Printed in 3 spot colours in the style that Blexbolex has come to be so famous for, Dogcrime is a stunningly beautiful book to behold and has an equally zany story to match."
Paperback
"With his first independent publication for Nobrow Press, Blexbolex’s graphic novella Abecederia is an incendiary mix of intrigue, artwork and extremes. A play on the Greek practice of Abecedarium inscriptions, the story is illustrated one letter a time, incorporating A-Z onto the page in ever more ingenious ways.
For his comic, Blexbolex transports the municipal film-noir genre into the jungle clearings of Abecederia, where our protagonists, Leon and Bernard Blanchett, two French born gangsters hiding from an international warrant for arrest in central Africa, are fleeing the police after a far from perfect bank robbery.
A work that confounds with its twists and turns just as much at it impresses with its imagination, Abecederia explores themes such torture, totalitarianism, alienation and dehumanisation in a brutal world where no one is safe."
Accordion book in illustrated folder
"The beautiful concertina book folds out to a stunning 136 cm panorama detailing the demise of some of our planet’s most dominant and long standing occupants only to be replaced by another group of breastfeeding placental creatures that would come to reign over the globe millions of years later.
Micah’s seamless use of line and adeptness with a limited colour palette recalls the intricate patterns of traditional Japanese kimono design and the murals of 1930s New York Deco in a book that is really more of a work of art, to be coveted and cherished. The nature of the concertina book also means that it is easily displayed on your mantelpiece or shelving unit, and printed on heavy card stock, it will stand the test of time."
Hardcover
“Another neat little hardcover beauty, The Wolf’s Whistle is a Richard Scarry meets Wes Anderson fusion of art comics and children’s books. It’s a superhero origin story made with the deft touch of a printmaker, and which might be the title in NoBrow’s catalogue that best showcases the care and attention given to the printing process. The artwork itself is created with the colour separations in mind from the beginning. It gives the artwork a particularly thought-out and cohesive look, and the pages have a tactile quality that you don’t find online, and rarely find in other books.” -John Martz
"Albert is a comic-creating, scrawny little wolf who spends his lunch breaks sharing tales of the ‘Lone Wolf’, his heroic graphic alter ego, to his group of misfit friends; dreaming of one day selling the story to the esteemed Wonder Comics. In reality, Albert and his friends did regularly make battle with an evil force, the Honeyroast brothers. The school’s alpha male sports jocks, the three bratty pigs, the sons of the local property magnate, will stop at nothing to torment their weaker classmates.
The story resumes many years later when Albert is a mail room assistant at Wonder comics, living in a dingy one bed studio in Brooklyn where the Honeyroast brothers are now reigning as slumlords…"
Hardcover
“From Hildafolk to Everything We Miss, Luke Pearson seems to have a ‘thing’ about the unseen, the invisible, those uncanny occurrences and critters sharing our world but never being noticed by us. Hilda and the Midnight Giant pursues this fixation. Little Hilda is back, savvy and sweet, all big eyes, pointy nose, blue hair, freckles, beret and big boots. She longs to stay in the home with her Mum where she was born, high in the hills, deep in the countryside. But the local “hidden people” have other ideas and have been bombarding the household with tiny letters demanding that they leave. Hilda will have none of this but then chaos ensues as the “people of the Northern Elven Valley” start to implement their forcible eviction from the premises. Hilda’s Mum is all for moving out to the town but Hilda insists they stay. Her Mum gives in but only on the condition that Hilda finds a way somehow to befriend these elves. Channeling Tove Jansson and Hayao Miyazaki, Pearson is developing his chops still further here, crafting pages as crisp and appealing as the best all-ages bande dessinée albums of today. Hilda is the perfect plucky little heroine for this endearing 21st century folklore.”
Hardcover
"For some the city is their birthplace and home, but for most of us, it is somewhere arrived at after years of hard work and perseverance and it becomes our home, gradually, in the place of far calmer, more serene and frankly altogether less entertaining origins.
Birchfield Close recalls these places of apparent mundanity. Endless horizons of prefabricated suburban houses with carefully tended back gardens and trimmed hedgerows; each abode with it’s own minute manifestation of individuality yet still somehow identical to the next. This is a world that many of us know and think of as home, and as many of us will attest to, is a place most unsuited to being an adolescent.
In his first graphic novella, Jon McNaught provides us with a sympathetic portrayal of what most of us ended up doing on those sleepy days: allowing the idiosyncrasies of our neighbours and our imaginations to entertain and amuse us and stave off the boredom. What makes this book so special, however, is that whilst capturing the frustration one can’t help but feel in such surroundings, McNaught somehow also manages to capture its beauty and peacefulness and transport us back to those clear evenings dotted with pink fluffy clouds and the sound of that silence we have come to yearn for after so many years of living in the centre of the bustle of the city."
Accordion book
"This beautiful concertina book, on the other hand, gives you an intimate look at what animals you may have actually seen or at least have seen photographs of, look like on the inside. In the great spirit of those diagrammatic natural history books we all loved as children, Nobrow and John bring back the sense of wonder the natural world holds in all its awe inspiring complexity. Flesh and Bone folds out to a stunning 136 cm double-sided panorama, one side displays the animals as they appear in nature (with some playful twists) and the other side shows those same animals stripped down to bone. Only an experienced artist with as intimate a knowledge of animal anatomy as John, whose clients frequently include National Geographic and Puffin books, would be capable of such feats of visual dexterity.
The concertina can be coloured in, left as is, read or folded out and displayed on your mantle peice, Flesh and Bones: A Colouring Concertina is a great gift for a kid as much as it is is for a student of nature, draughtsman in training, or any illustration afficionado."
Paperback with 7" vinyl record
"Featuring Mcbess’ signature stretched and deformed figures set in an entirely monotone world, where backgrounds blend into the fore and aside jokes and little details litter the page, Malevolent Melody centres on the exploits of shipwrecked amnesiac Mcb, whose attempts to remember the melody of a certain song awaken spontaneous choruses in Pirates, Alpine Giants and Amazonian women taking him on a journey from the coastline to the mountains.
Accompanied by a vinyl 7” featuring songs by Mcbess’ band The Dead Pirates, Malevolent Melody’s pages are lit up by the band’s pulsating rhythm and blues, recorded in a way to sync and mimic the comic’s storyline."
These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:
Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147
215 592 1207
Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday
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