Drawn + Quarterly has been slowly revealing their Fall 2021 line-up ove rthe past several weeks, including new titles by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Philippe Girard and Rutu Modan.
Here’s a rundown of what to expect next year:
Leonard Cohen: On A Wire by Philippe Girard
Leonard Cohen: On A Wire by Philippe Girard is a biography of the famous musician and poet. The graphic novel will be released in French in March 2021 by Belgian publisher Casterman, and then in November 2021 by D + Q. It’s set on the last day of Cohen’s life, as he reflects back on his past in a series of flashbacks, starting with his early life and making his way through his musical career.
Along the way he encountered a who’s who of musical luminaries, including Lou Reed, Nico, Janis Joplin, and Joni Mitchell. And then there’s Phil Spector, the notorious music impresario who held a gun to Cohen’s head during a coke-fueled, all-night-long recording session. Later in Cohen’s life, there’s the story of Hallelujah, one of his most famous songs, and its slow rise from relative obscurity when first recorded in the 1980s to its iconic status a decade later with covers by John Cale and Jeff Buckley. And then there’s the period when Cohen went broke after his manager embezzled his lifetime savings, which ironically sparked an unlikely career resurgence and several worldwide tours in the 2000s.
You can find more details on the D+Q website and in this interview with the CBC.
Tunnels by Rutu Modan
The Eisner Award-winning creator of The Property returns with a new graphic novel, Tunnels, which is about a race to find the Ark of the Covenant.
When a great antiquities collector is forced to donate his entire collection to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Nili Broshi sees her last chance to finish an archeological expedition begun decades earlier—a dig that could possibly yield the most important religious artifact in the Middle East. Motivated by the desire to reinstate her father’s legacy as a great archeologist, Nili enlists a ragtag crew—a religious nationalist and his band of hilltop youths, her traitorous brother, and her childhood Palestinian friend, now an archeological smuggler. As Nili’s father slips deeper into dementia, warring factions fight over the Ark of the Covenant!
You can read more about it on the D+Q website and in this article by Haaretz.
Library by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber
This collection of paintings follows two previous collections D+Q published, Animals with Sharpies and Constructive Abandonment. Each of the paintings is a library book with a humorous title:
In Dumontier and Farber’s Library, titles like “I Lost the Human Race,” “Change Your Relationship to Your Unchangeable Past,” and “I Have a Medical Condition That Makes it So I Don’t Have to Talk to You” offer surprising and astute observations, all in the duo’s characteristic deadpan style. The simplicity of the shapes and text evokes an immediate but lasting profundity, with each piece causing one to wonder about the thoughts that roam their consciousness, and the books that take up residence on their—and our—shelves.
You can find out more on the D+Q website.
The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Finally, D+Q announced the followup to Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s award-winning Grass. It’s titled The Waiting, and it’s set during the Korean War as thousands of Koreans marched from the north to the south, resulting in many families becoming separated.
The Waiting is a fictional graphic novel about the heartache and devastation caused to a family by the division of the country into North and South and is the life story of elderly Gwija, told by her daughter Jina, who is a novelist. Gwija was one of the thousands of Koreans who joined the chaotic march to the south at the start of the Korean War, and who was separated from her loved ones en route. Gendry-Kim was inspired to begin The Waiting after hearing her own mother’s story of losing her sister during this tumultuous period. Supplemented by extensive historical research and interviews with her mother, as well as South Koreans who were part of the several North-South family reunions arranged in the last twenty years, The Waiting will be translated from Korean by the award-winning translator Janet Hong.
You can read more about it on the D+Q website.
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