Joe Meno & Tim Lane Book Signing/Film Screening
08/06/2010 7:00 pm
08/06/2010 9:00 pm
Joe Meno (Demons in the Spring) and Tim Lane (Abandoned Cars) will be reading from (in Joe's case) and signing (Joe & Tim) copies of their books. Tim will be screening his new short film based on a story from his new book.
How cool of a double bill is this?
You might know Joe from Hairstyles of the Damned, which still sells like crazy (it's been 6 years people). Demons in the Spring is this crazy book of short stories paired with illustrations by twenty artists from the fine art, graphic art, and comic book worlds--Todd Baxter, Kelsey Brookes, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Nick Butcher, Steph Davidson, Evan Hecox, Kim Hiorthoy, Paul Hornschemeier, Cody Hudson, Caroline Hwang, kozyndan, Geoff McFetridge, Anders Nilsen, Laura Owens, Archer Prewitt, Jon Resh, Jay Ryan, Souther Salazar, Rachell Sumpter, and Chris Uphues.
Abandoned Cars is this really great graphic novel? Graphic vignettes? I'm just going to copy the publisher pr because it's much better written than anything I could do and we're such Tim fans here that we'd hate to give him short-shrift:
Abandoned Cars is Tim Lane's first collection of graphic short stories, noirish narratives that are united by their exploration of the great American mythological drama by way of the desperate and haunted characters that populate its pages. Lane's characters exist on the margins of society-alienated, floating in the void between hope and despair, confused but introspective.
The writing is straightforward, the stories mainstream but told in a pulpy idiom with an existential edge, often in the first person, reminiscent of David Goodis's or Jim Thompson's prose, or of films like Pick-Up on South Street or Out of the Past. Visually, Lane's drawing is in a realistic mode, reminiscent of Charles Burns, that heightens the tension in stories that veer between naturalism on the one hand and the comical, nightmarish, and hallucinatory on the other. Here, American culture is a thrift store and the characters are thrift store junkies living among the clutter. It's an America depicted as a subdued and haunted Coney Island, made up of lost characters-boozing, brawling, haplessly shooting themselves in the face, and hopping freight trains in search of Elvis. Abandoned Cars is an impressive debut of a major young American cartoonist.
Here's an awesome interview that friend-of-Subterranean/Noir at the Bar organizer Jed conducted.
Location:
- Street:
- Subterranean Books
- Additional:
- 6275 Delmar Blvd
- City:
- Saint Louis ,
- Province:
- Missouri
- Postal Code:
- 63130-4716
- Country:
- United States
