ELECTRIC ANT ZINE BLOG

Here's an update to the growing list of stores carrying Electric Ant. As of last Wednesday, our neighborhood boats an awesome new comic shop, Mission: Comics & Art! I was alerted to the new place by Ryan Germick, who introduced to the proprietor Leef Smith over email.

Tooday, I stopped by and met Leef in person-- he's a cool dude, born and bred San Franciscan who lives in the Mission. The shop features a nice, clean layout similar to Comix Experience but with a little more space. We talked about the balance between indie comics, mainstream TPBs and catering to the Wednesday new comics crowd.

         

The store is still working out the inventory levels, but I saw a great mix of stuff I am into: new floppies from last week, DC's newsprint Wednesday Comics, Tom Gauld's THIS GIGANTIC ROBOT from Buenaventura, etc. At this time, I didn't see any manga in stock at the store, which is okay since I rely almost entirely on Kinokuniya for my English and Japanese langauge manga fixes. I bought a copy of Sweet Tooth #1, and a surreal Green Lantern tpb illustrated by the late (and great) Seth Fisher that was recommended to me.

Mission: Comics & Art also features a nice-sized gallery space in the back, with three walls for curating comics/fine art exhibits. I can think easily think of a bunch of local cartoonists (EAZ contributors, all of 'em!) who could do a great show there! Was fun talking shop with the owner, and I'm stoked to see what the next months hold. They will be open 'til 8pm Tues - Sunday, so I plan to head here after work on New Comics Day (every Wednesday) instead of Lee's in Mountain View.

On a final note, Leef is interested in stocking out a Local/minicomics/zines section there, and took on some copies of Electric Ant #1. If you are in the hood and want to recommend it to someone, they can now grab a copy there while supporting local business.

EDIT: Made some corrections from Leef

Like with MY SEAT IS YOUR BEHIND, I've put up a preview of ELECTRIC ANT #1 online. Unlike that preview, this one only lets you see 50% of the total content. It's now on the main page of the site, gonna re-work the entire site once Issue 2 is at the printers.
DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE

You can click the Buy this book link above to be supportive! Feeling stressed out right now, thanks to all the contributors for being awesome and bearing with me...

your faithful editor,
Ryan!

Exciting and crazy news, the badass indie manga publisher Editions IMHO has opened a storefront in Paris called Village/Vanguard! I probably won't have the luxury of seeing the store in person any time soon, but I seriously wish I could.

Editions IMHO is an excellent publisher of manga, European comics and punk/trash genre books. In addition to zines and domestic comics, they publish french editions of manga by Suehiro Maruo, Atsushi Kaneko (Bambi, Soil), Tori Miki (they have 4+ volumes of Anywhere but Here), Hideshi Hino, Junko Mizuno, Shigeru Sugiura, and Nekojiru. DAMN, DUDES. They also have in stock an original edition of the infamous 1988 art book by Suehiro Maruo & Kazuichi Hanawa (& Yoshitoshi), 28 Atrocities in Blood. Don't buy the bullshit Creation Books junk reprint!

The most exciting news (to me)? They are the first (and only, so far!) shop selling Electric Ant #1 in Europe!!!

           

That's right, an awesome boutique carrying the zine-- I couldn't be happier. Above are screencaps from their site, along with images from their blog.

I'm going to add a new post to Same Hat specifically about The Beguiling (to add to the series of TCAF posts) this weekend. But before that, I wanted to share these photos and sightings from the shop. (I know Comic Relief lovers will be shocked by this, but I contend that The Beguiling is the best comics/manga shop in North America).

         

Exciting news on the sales front: Austin from Forbidden Planet in New York placed an order for copies of the zine to sell at their store!

The shop is located right in Manhattan, and know for curating a rad indies section (alongside the normal mainstream and manga sections). This was the first time a shop came to me(instead of me throwing myself at them. They made the "biggest" wholesale order to date, and I'm mailing copies out today.

Tell your city folk friends: by the end of the week they can now easily snag a copy at FPNYC-- on the shelf next to Jin & Jam #1!? (that would be rad).  I have updated the STORES link accordingly.

Quick update today, Electric Ant #1 is available for sale officially at one new shop, and has been added to a few book review sits.

 

The interview with Frederick Schodt is good. Hall of Dark Lords is pretty great and the first kiss theme and related comics stories are fun. The feature comic, Love Entity, is alright. The NINlibs are hilarious (mad libs of Nine Inch Nails songs). And the photographic tour of the Department for Implementing 15 kinds of Violent Death is neato (Daoist Dongyue Temple of hell).

We had a rare and lovely day of NO RAIN in San Francisco today, so I did a bit of aimless wandering in my hood. Stopped by the small-but-impressive zine shop, Needles & Pens, for my fix of local goods. While making mental lists of things come back and buy, I was pleasantly surprised to see restock copies of Electric Ant #1 gracing the front display and featured shelf inside the store!

   

hello my peoples,

I just noticed this morning that the Ada Books blog posted a short blurb about Electric Ant #1: http://www.ada-books.com/blog.htm

View Ada Books on Google Maps

Yesterday I received a nice email from someone in Germany that wanted to buy a copy of the zine. The only problem? She doesn't have a credit card. As I've already done about 10 times with domestic folks, I'm having her hide some cash in a letter, and I'll send her the zine directly. For anyone that wants to buy a copy but doesn't do credit or paypal, just shoot me an email at electricantzine AT gmail DOT com and I will send along an address to send cash or money order!

Just now, I realized that she is probably gonna be sending me euros. I still have about 13€ leftover from my 2007 trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair:



What should I do with these euros? Coincidentally, I was just emailing with Christian (editor at Reprodukt) about a few manga projects they are working on and trying to figure out an easy way to buy some of their books. If all goes well, I'm gonna combine the euros I get from the zine sale with my little stash and mail them back to Germany... like the Circle of Life but with weird florescent bills and heavy-ass EU coinage.

The thing on the top of my list is ORANG Magazin... ORANG 7 has been out for a while (with a lovely cover by German painter Moki), and issue 8 is coming later this year. ORANG is a fantastic and international comics anthology, created and co-edited by German cartoonist, Sascha Hommer. I met Sascha in Frankfurt in 2006, and managed to get ahold of his Charles-Burns-meets-Charles-Schultz debut, INSEKT. He contributes short comics to his own magazine, but ORANG really features indie comics from all over (as seen on their blog)... It's basically like MOME, but if MOME had artists our age from Germany, Poland, China, and Greece. One thing that I like (sometimes more in theory than in practice) is that they don't re-letter the comics from their source language, but put English translations at the bottom of each page, panel-by-panel.

I can't wait to get issue 7 finally (and I hear that it might feature a manga surprise in issue 8 that will rawk for european readers). Also included in this post, the cover to the new REPRODUKT catalogs,Dungeon covers for volumes not out in English yet, and Sascha latest book, Im Museum.