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Living the Line Publishing

Living the Line Publishing Publisher of visually-exceptional avant-garde graphic novels and comics.

31/01/2025

Very pleased to see that Publishers Weekly has graced the imminent arrival of Koga Shinichi's MANSECT with a Starred review! Always thrilling to see (and doubly so since this is the second of our three Smudge titles thus honored.) "Admirers of Junji Ito and Kazuo Umezz will revel in this." Got to Publishers Weekly for the full text!

30/01/2025

Get hyped, friends... Koga Shinichi's MANSECT is nearly here!

MANSECT coming soon.... Translated and edited by

29/01/2025

I just received two advanced copies of The Pit, the new book by the great artist/writer Erik Kriek , and the follow up to his 2023 Viking Western The Exile. Like the Exile, The Pit plays with genre and color in quite extraordinary ways, developing and thwarting your expectations at every turn.

The book won't be out until April at the earliest, but I will have the sample copies with me at MOCCA Arts Fest in mid-March, so if you're in NYC, stop by to take a look! We have published some wild stuff in the past few years, and let me just say this will fit in quite well with that company.

28/01/2025

Here are a few cell phone snaps from the packing line of our first SMUDGE reprint, Her Frankenstein by Kawashima Norikazu. We have successfully moved the printing of our SMUDGE series to our Canadian supplier Marquis, who are doing an excellent job printing our next two SMUDGE titles simultaneously (Mansect is being packed now, after being bound and finished last week).

Although the title is still in stock from some suppliers, on our distribution side Her Frankenstein has been out of stock for many months, so it'll be a relief to have some copies available soon. I look forward to having a full complement of SMUDGE represented at MoCCA Arts Fest in March, for instance.

More soon as the titles arrive!

19/01/2025

Working this morning on completing the long essay for our October title, The Complete CD Gibson: A Widow And Her Friends by Charles Dana GIbson, the first released book in our long-awaited survey of the works of one of America's greatest cartoonists, the legendary CD Gibson.

After a lot of deliberation, I decided to start mid-way through Gibson's career for the publication order of the series, mostly because I wanted the first book released to be the most graphic novel-like of his work. Specifically, this book will include his two long-form narratives, The Education of Mr Pipp, and its follow-up, A Widow And Her Friends. Both books offer an excellent entry-point to Gibson's work, as they are filled to the brim with his peculiar mixture of humor, social criticism, and streaks of sadness that puncture the humor a bit and bring a real humanness to even his most exaggerated characters.

The page featured here is from The Education of Mr. Pipp, which first appeared in the September 8, 1898 issue of Life. The titular Mr. Pipp is a new-money American iron magnate who travels to Europe on a pleasure cruise with his stout, stern wife and his two lovely daughters. This fish-out-of-water story of cultural collision was a runaway success with the public, prompting Gibson to extend the serial to meet demand.

Only one of four Gibson works that will appear in this inagural volume of the Complete CD Gibson!

Available October 2025, lovingly-restored from several different original editions of the book overseen by Gibson himself during his lifetime.

14/01/2025

Run don't walk to your nearest podcast platform to hear the latest episode of 11 O'Clock Comics Podcast, to hear a nearly 30 minute discussion of the upcoming MANSECT by Koga Shinichi, translated by Ryan Holmberg for our SMUDGE line. Listen for the horrified and perplexed reactions, stay for the thoughtful and insightful commentary!

The book, which drops in late February, is potentially the biggest bit of horror coming in 2025, a devastating, gorgeous, horrific dive into the life of one loner butterfly collector.

11/12/2024

Living the Line 2024 Year in Review!

We put out seven spectacular books this year, a fact that would have been quite unbelievable to me had you told me just two or three years ago. This includes ongoing titles by some of my favorite artists, like Moonray book two by Brandon Graham, our first reprint in the Exile by Eric Kriek, and no less than two titles for our debuting horror manga line Smudge, translated by Ryan Holmberg. It also includes other series that will continue next year, like the anthology Tihiku by Kutikuti, which will see a follow-up in Roihu in February.

Which Living the Line books did you pick up this year, and which ones do you have plans for in the future? Let us know in the comments, and happy reading!

You'll notice that Her Frankenstein by Norikazu Kawashima is represented here with a photo of the Japanese re-release by Magazine House. That's because her Frankenstein has now officially become our second sold out title. Although copies are still available from some retailers, we have no more stock and won't until February when we have a reprint.

As exciting as this year has been, 2025 is looking even more full of interesting projects, with 10 books so far on the docket. I think you could argue this is truly another golden age for small press comics, a time and place where quirky individual expression and stunning art can find an audience and a home.

06/12/2024

If you've been following on Instagram you'll have been seeing samples from our upcoming (May/June) release of Bonten Taro's FACE MEAT, a wild horror short story collection from the great cartoonist/tattooist/singer/raconteur Bonten Taro.

We've been working from files supplied by the Bonten Taro Office in Japan, files of which consist mostly of raw print scans from rare, increasingly fragile magazine clippings of his work, which were kept by his wife as a way of archiving his disparately-published stories. As Bonten was an outstanding artist and the highlight of many of the venues in which he was appearing, there are a good amount of two-color pages included in the collection. Rather than reproduce these two-color pages as full-color images, and thus running the risk of muddy, difficult-to-read printing, we've been separating these elements back into their constituent "plates", and recombining them as Pantone print files. This separation process is delicate and a little tedious, but it also gives interesting insight into how Bonten, who was an excellent full-color painter and designer, planned out his duotone images, revealing as it does the way that the constituent images were separated and created.

I don't have any inside information as to how the second plate/image would have been created, but standard practice at the time in America anyway would have had the second plate painted on a vellum overlay, or most likely, on a second piece of paper with the aid of a light board, with registration marks to keep the images aligned. You can see from this separated image how he used combinations of color densities to achieve a wide tonal range, and used the second color to emphasize and separate areas of his composition. A masterful painter, using the two colors at his disposal in very effective graphic ways.

22/11/2024

Thrilled to announce that preorders are now open for the english-language debut of horror legend Koga Shinichi, for delivery in February!

Humans grow and age. They change. But always we are the same person, the same creature. Not so with insects, whose powers of metamorphosis alter not only their shape and size, but also their very beings. And now, because of one young man's unhealthy obsession with bugs, humans also find themselves transformed into disgusting, decrepit, bloodsucking insect monsters! Published in 1975, Koga Shinichi's MANSECT is a shonen horror classic by one of the undisputed masters of the genre. Swarming with mesmerizingly gnarly imagery and freakish bio-evolutionary speculation, Koga here demonstrates why his name is uttered with the same quivering reverence as horror manga legends Mizuki Shigeru, Umezz Kazuo, and Ito Junji. MANSECT is the third volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

You can order MANSECT from your local comic store, book shop, or right now directly from LivingthelineBooks.com!

6" x 8" 224 pages

11/11/2024

New title announcement!! Coming spring 2025 from and Living the Line...

The Rabagoo Race, the most famous boat race in the world, sees contestants face certain death throughout its frantic stages, all in the impossible hopes of reaching that mythical finish line, and winning everything their hearts desire.

Only three ships have survived the 100 brutal stages of boat racing. Having fought mega sea monsters, riptide hell storms, and whip smart competitors, they must now face each other in the final sprint to the finish line. Does the humble sailboat the Boulie Bear have what it takes to beat the Slick Van Vex and the Indestructible Solid Slope?

The Rabagoo Race is the first graphic novel by the mononymous Garresh, a young Scottish artist who leverages complex gallery-worthy abstraction and impeccable color and figurative work into comic pages of unsettling power. This debut puts Garresh square in the center of an international graphic tradition that stretches from Moebius to Cam Kennedy to contemporaries like Linnea Sterte, Taiyo Matsumoto, and beyond.

09/11/2024

Coming February 2025! Living the Line's second English-language anthology from the brilliant Finnish comics collective Kutikuti... An inventive graphic adventure into worlds unseen.

What would the suburbs look like if fire was never invented? Can a person get pregnant from a single look? What's it like growing up as the only gay person in a village in Lapland? Another carefully woven set of cutting-edge Finnish comics storytelling.Roihu is a joint work by twelve artists and the second part in a series. Kutikuti is an association and collective of about sixty contemporary comic artists living in Finland. Roihu/'roîhu/Blazing flames. The astronomical term is solar flare; a powerful but transitory emission of the Sun.

17/10/2024

Very pleased to see Her Frankenstein by Kawashima Norikazu make the New York Public Library's Best 50 Graphic Novels for Adults list for 2024!

Translated and edited by for our Smudge imprint of historic pulp and horror manga.

09/10/2024

There's nothing like the feeling of cracking open a beloved historic horror manga, throwing it into the microwave, dissecting it with an exacto knife, and utterly destroying it, with the knowledge that you're helping it live again.

Koga Shinichi's Mansect (as we're calling Yochu in English) went under the knife in July in preparation for translation. We were working from a gorgeous copy, pristinely printed back in 1976 or so, and as always there was a little regret at the destroyed copy, along with the satisfaction of knowing that the book will look fantastic in English because of the sacrifice.

Pictured-- post dissection, and a nice in-process microwave shot.

Mansect, coming Feb 2024 from Smudge.

04/10/2024

SURVIVING ON MARS, the remarkable graphic memoir by Brandon Graham, is NOW OUT in comic stores, will be in book stores NEXT WEEK, and is now available for order on LivingtheLineBooks.com! Pick up this tale of art, aesthetics, depression, and po*******hy from your favorite source of comics, now!

“An artist tries to stay above the churn of depression in this low-key lovely graphic memoir.” Publishers Weekly

If you're going through hell, KEEP GOING. From daily routines and art-making, to dealing with depression, and living among p**n performers in Las Vegas, Eisner Award winning cartoonist Brandon Graham (King City, Rain like Hammers, Prophet, Moonray) offers a funny and touching look into the life of an artist making his way in the 21st century.

Graham, who has been known primarily for his strange far future science-fiction and pun-filled fantasy works, has been making memoir comics for decades. This is the first major collection of this work, exploring Graham's life in the seedy alien landscape of Las Vegas, while he strives at making art as a tool for surviving the chaotic universe.

29/09/2024

Our French correspondent, House on Fire artist Matt Battaglia , reports that Paris' Centre Pompidou has a comics exhibition currently running featuring PLAZA artist Yuichi Yokoyama! If you're currently in Paris, go check it out .. and if you're NOT in Paris, be sure to pick up the English edition of PLAZA, his biggest,most ambitious book yet.

A few drawings from Some Other Cartoonists thrown in for scale.

11/09/2024

The UFO Mushroom Invasion IS UPON US!

Shirakawa Marina's pulp classic UFO Mushroom Invasion is in comic stores NOW and will see bookstore release next week! Heralding our imminent destruction is the Library Journal's Tom Batten, who says, "Shirakawa plumbs the existential dread of the unknown to audacious effect..." We're thrilled to be bringing Shirakawa's extraordinary work to English-language audiences for the first (and hopefully not last!) time, and we hope you'll pick up a copy now from your local shop, bookstore, or direct from Living the Line.

09/09/2024

How hot is this book? So hot that ten copies appear to have spontaneously caught fire en route to Living the Line HQ from the printer! Surviving on Mars b Brandon Graham, a memoir of art, p**n, and ennui, hits stores two weeks from now! You can preorder at your local comic shop or bookstore NOW, and directly from LTL very soon!

With

28/08/2024

Coming May 2025 from Living the Line!

In the aftermath of personal tragedy, Hugh and Sara retreat to an old family home in the woods of the Veluwe in the hopes of getting their lives back on track. But can you run fast enough to escape the past? And what do those strange glyphs carved into the old beech trees really mean? Erik Kriek's latest graphic novel is a contemporary work of magical realism, that is not set in the dark forests of North America (In the Pines, Fantagraphics, 2017), nor in the cold hills of medieval Iceland (The Exile, Living the Line, 2023), but in the rural countryside of the Netherlands.

Hailing from the Netherlands, Kriek is an internationally-decorated illustrator known for his work on In the Pines (2015) and Gutsman. Lushly told with gorgeous traditionally-drawn brush work, and a limited palette illustration style reminiscent of the great limited-color illustrators of the 1940s and 50s.

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A New Ninja Turtles Game & the release of Lightyear in the same weekend? Seems like a perfect time to watch (or rewatch) our 3 part interview series with Ken Mitchroney, designer of Emperor Zurg and prolific Archie Era TMNT Artist. In our interviews Ken speaks about his mentorship under artists like Jack Kirby and his time working in animation with other masters like @brucetimmofficial. Check out our inteviews to see how Ken puts magic on the page (or screen, more accurately). #kenmitchroney #tmnt #archietmnt #lightyear #zurg #buzzlightyear #buzzlightyearstarcommand #lightyearmovie #teenagemutantninjaturtles #emperorzurg #toystory #toystory2 #legomovie #thelegomovie #legostopmotion #legoanimation #necatmnt #necatmntactionfigure #shreddersrevenge #shredder #tmntshreddersrevenge #tributegamestmnt #mirageturtles

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