It's at the printers! The artist list is finalized! After some predictable delays in production, my new anthology, Best Erotic Comics 2008, is moving forward, with an expected publication date from Last Gasp of December 2007!
Here's the skinny. (Yes, in this case "the skinny" is the book's official blurb, but I wrote the blurb myself, so it actually represents the book very accurately.)
A literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality -- and a fun dirty book, featuring today's smartest, raunchiest, funniest, filthiest, most beautiful, and most arousing adult comics! Best Erotic Comics 2008 smashes the divide between literary/art comics and adult comics by including both the hottest work from the literary/art comics world -- and the highest-quality work from the adult comics world. Artists include Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Gilbert Hernandez, Michael Manning, Toshio Saeki, Colleen Coover, Ellen Forney, and many others. The wide variety includes work that's kinky and vanilla, sweet and perverse, and straight, lesbian, and gay. Features recent comics, a handful of vintage Hall of Fame gems -- and some works never published before! Color and b&w.
Work by: Belasco
Marzia Borino & Mauro Balloni
Susannah Breslin
Katie Carmen
Cephalopod Products
Daniel Clowes
Vince Coleman
Colleen Coover
John Cuneo
Dave Davenport
El Bute
Jessica Fink
Ellen Forney
Phoebe Gloeckner
Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa
Justin Hall
Gilbert Hernandez
Molly Kiely
Ralf Konig
Dale Lazarov & Steve MacIsaac
Michael Manning
Erika Moen
Quinn
Sandez Rey
Trina Robbins
Toshio Saeki
and Dori Seda.
Cover art by Ellen Forney.
I am enormously excited about this book. It really is both dirty and arty, mind-expanding as well as dick- and clit-expanding, which is exactly the line I was trying to walk with it. And everyone who's looked at it so far has said that they're struck by the sheer variety of the material... something that makes me very happy indeed. Variety -- not just variety of sex acts and sexual orientations, but also variety of sexual moods and attitudes, relationships and settings, narrative tones and visual styles -- was one of my top priorities in choosing the material, and it tickles me that this jumps out so clearly.
I'll be blogging about Best Erotic Comics a lot more as it gets closer to publication. I'll be posting artist interviews, explaining more about my selection process, gassing on about why I did the book in the first place, and more. But I wanted to start spreading the news now.
And I want to start spreading a related piece of news: Best Erotic Comics is an annual series, and the deadline for the next volume is fast approaching! For details, please check out the guidelines below the fold. (Even if you're not a comic artist, you might be interested in the guidelines, as they explain a lot about the book.) Thanks, and see you in the funny papers!
Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, "Best Erotic Comics 2009" (the second in an annual series). The series is intended to showcase the most artistically interesting -- and most sexually arousing -- recent erotic comics, from both the literary comic side of the field and the smut comic side. We believe that the divide between literary comics and adult comics is unfortunate and unnecessary, and we plan to make "Best Erotic Comics" enjoyable both as a literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality... and as a fun dirty book.
In keeping with this vision, submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should be both:
a) Hot.
b) Interesting in some way in addition to being hot.
Here are some more details:
IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A SMUT COMIC ARTIST:
Submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should not simply be hot sex comics. They should have some literary and/or artistic quality, as well as being arousing. We are looking for hot sex comics that are also thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn.
IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A LITERARY COMIC ARTIST:
Submissions to "Best Erotic Comics" should not simply be about sex. They should also be hot. We are looking for thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn comics that make the reader want to have sex and/or whack off.
IF YOU ALREADY WORK IN LITERARY SMUT COMICS:
Excellent! Send us your best work.
We are looking for a wide variety of erotic content -- straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and other; kinky and vanilla; from the points of view of women, men, and others. Both single-panel and multi-panel comics will be accepted. We are primarily looking for black-and-white work, but will be including a limited color section. We are accepting both original and previously-published comics; previously-published work should have been published or reprinted fairly recently, ideally after January 1, 2000. You can submit individual stories or excerpts from longer works. You can submit more than one piece at a time. Work should be in English or wordless.
The editor of the series is Greta Christina. Greta has been writing about sex professionally since 1989. She is editor of the anthology "Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients," and author of the erotic novella "Bending," which appeared in the three-novella collection "Three Kinds of Asking For It" edited by Susie Bright for Simon & Schuster. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, and the Skeptical Inquirer, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2003 and 2005. She has worked for Last Gasp Books and Comics since 2002.
Submissions must be sent on paper in the regular mail. (You may accompany your paper submission with a disc if you like.) The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2007. Please send submissions to:
Last Gasp
Attention: Best Erotic Comics
777 Florida St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
Please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Do not send originals, or your only copy. All submissions with SASE will be answered, but submissions will not be returned. Deadline: November 1, 2007.
If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].
It's amazing to be in!
:)
Hi' Greta,
have you seen my others short story I've sent to you?
Best
M
Posted by: Mauro Balloni | October 15, 2007 at 03:01 AM
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ICQ:844407328
msn:[email protected]
Posted by: EAST | November 08, 2007 at 11:54 PM