Salgood Sam's Page

Up side to the insanity of visiting Toronto is all the exercise, reminds me to keep it going at home. With the always present list of things to do when your freelance, it easy to forget to get off your ass sometimes.

And of course the net always calls to be fed. To bad it doesn't take walks and crap itself. Been contemplating getting a dog friend lately.

. And i love this shot Sarah Jaffe took of herself with the book. There's a set here of one of the signings. And bellow is Rantz with some folks who posted this on their feed, proud owners of a limited edition. I believe word is everything that went with them to SDCC is gone, all sold out! There's a lot of buz on this thing.

In anticipation of the debut of Comic Book Tattoo at Comic-Con International in San Diego, CBR TV, in association with MySpace Comic Books, caught up with Tori Amos at Amoeba Music in Hollywood for an exclusive one-on-one interview about the new massive Image Comics anthology, which features new work by a host of sequential art's brightest and most innovative talents, all turning in new work based on the songs of Tori Amos.

quote: theglobeandmail
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.

Remember my dad or someone going on about how cool this dude was, first time i became aware of him when i was a toddler. I loved listening to him and Cheech and Chong, trying to inmate them, though it was a long time till i was allowed to hear the most infamous of his routines.

Always thought he was insanely funny even before i had a clue about how 'blue' he was.

So big news! A little while ago the first quarter update for the IDW edition came in the mail, and I'm very pleased to say we had a very respectable first go at the plate - with book and direct markets combined; the book market pulling over twice the numbers; Therefore Repent! has moved 3216 copies! Add to that NMK's 1000 so far, and you get 4216 post-apocalyptic graphic novels, ha ha ha!

Cool. As I have been reminded, the book market orders can boomerang on you, but in a lot of the shops that had it that I've been in, it seems to be moving pretty good so I'm optimistic about that.

Also was talking to a Literary agent recently when I mentioned this, and he thought there was a good chance 4000 was an ideal middle number - not so many that sending them back in most store's cases would be worth it - a lot of single units left over not worth the hassle - and still big enough to result in us getting a decent first royalty check.

At any rate they hold back half our checks right now in case they do come back, and even with that I'm pretty pleased.


So, hey, if you have been thinking about getting it, well I'd sure love to see those numbers stay hi so don't hesitate on our behalf ;)

If you want to get one signed by Jim you can order from NMK here, & IDW makes it available on their site too.

I have a list of shops I know carry it here, and it seems to be in most of the mega book shops i've checked out. And most of the web based book retailers like Amazon carry it too.

But hey, if you want to help us a bit, look for shops that don't carry it, and ask them about it! Tell them Junot Diaz thinks we're nuts and loved it, that'll get their attention. ;)

Read the press.
Read the first 60 pages.
Buy the book.

Been a slow month; with all the spring cleaning, recovering from con flu, and finding a roommate i've not got a lot done on dream life - grumble - nice chunk of the layouts but wanted to have more of the art done by now too. Any who, starting to get going, here's some stuff from the last few nights whittling.

Imagine what would happen if all the right-wing Christians suddenly floated up into the sky, and your wiccan lesbian neighbors could suddenly do real magic. That's the premise of magic realist/scifi/defies description graphic novel Therefore Repent!, written by the awesome scifi author Jim Munroe and drawn beautifully by Salgood Sam. What appeals about Munroe's post-rapture tale, aside the believable characters in outlandish situations, is the way it serves as a progressive, humane rejoinder to the Christian scifi novels in the Left Behind series, whose premise is almost exactly the same.

Munroe is one of my very favorite scifi writers — he's the creator of the nanopunk film Infest Wisely (free online!), as well as the author of Everyone in Silico, Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask (free online!), and An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, the prequel to Therefore Repent! This is his first foray into comics, and he takes to the medium well.

We meet Mummy and Raven, a couple of artists who used to do an act where they dressed up as a mummy and a raven, as they are searching for a home in a world turned upsidown by the rapture of hundreds of thousands of Christians. Those left behind are divided between "splitters," people who are trying to go as Christian as possible so they'll be taken up during the Apocalypse (this includes George W. Bush), and people who are happy to live in a world free from Christians. Mummy and Raven are among the latter, and they've moved into a cozy squat left abandoned by its raptured inhabitants. Things start to get even more unhinged, however, when angels in military uniforms start machine gunning "sinners," and dogs start to talk. Plus, ordinary people are starting to develop weird magical powers — one woman can send email by attaching ethernet cables to her piercings, and Raven herself can create birds out of smoke.

As the wiccans, lesbians, and punks start to band together to fight the paramilitary angels, Raven and Mummy start to have relationship difficulties. Mummy is flirting with the cute indie rock girl at the bar down the street, and Raven is keeping her feelings so bottled up that she's become psychologically stuck. This is the great thing about Munroe's writing, always: he manages to write weirdly sweet romantic stories set against a backdrop of the apocalypse or some kind of huge technological emergency. Salgood's drawings manage to be both dark and funny, cute sketches that shade into shadowy gloom, which perfectly harmonizes with the mood of the narrative.

There's a terrifically great twist ending which despite my love of spoilers I won't give away. Suffice to say, the story stays consistently surprising and weird, and the message is never a simple "Christianity is stupid" dogma at all. Instead, the point is to be careful about what kind of paradise you wish for. You just might get it.

You can buy all of Munroe's books, including Therefore Repent, here.

Some readers are never going to pick up Therefore Repent! when they hear about the plot. The graphic novel imagines the biblical Rapture, with the righteous floating up to heaven, and the sinners stuck on a miserable earth roiling with war and suffering. It just sounds too much like it might be the work of a smug Christian author, offering a book-length Jack Chick tract to a general comics readership. Bible camp for the heathens.

Not only is that an erroneous conclusion, it's a far too simple one. What writer Jim Munroe and artist Salgood Sam have done here is to join mystery, horror, romance, and the lurid excitement of eschatology in a complex tale that manages to be spiritually moving without resorting to organized religion.

We begin with Mummy and Raven, a couple of free spirits wearing the costumes it sounds like they are, as their way of protesting this whole Rapture business. They wander the post-Tribulation streets, squatting in apartments abandoned by the righteous, trying to cook up food without electricity and survive by their wits in a collapsed America. They confab with Jews, Muslims, drinkers, hippies, and "unbelievers" of all stripes, looking for resources, friends, and meaning in a bereft world.

The cover to Therefore Repent. Click for a larger image.Gradually, we witness stranger and stranger doings in this post-Rapture life. Dogs eat the voice boxes of dead people and acquire the power to speak. Some women have the ability to conjure living birds of ash, and cats of dust. The newly pious can walk on water, multiply loaves and fishes, and turn water into wine. Bisexual soldier-angels descend to earth to kill survivors practicing the "dark arts" of divination -- levitation, invisibility, and even drumming circles. It's a mishmash of horrors and wonders that reminded me, with its sheer oddness, of the vibe you get from some Clive Barker stories. Of course, the idea of this particular sick world is only as "new" as the New Testament. I wish I knew more about the Rapture so I could appreciate more here. The genital-less angels, for instance, are a Biblical idea, I understand.

Munroe and Sam convey the action with a deceptively sleepy pace. The practical considerations of what Mummy and Raven should do with their daily surfeit of free time, the bumps in their relationship, and the challenges faced by a few other minor but memorable characters are the meat of the book. We, along with these characters, are waiting for answers. Will there be another, final Rapture? Can the impious yet be saved? Should the stunned non-Christians fight the gun-toting angels of vengeance, or would that be sacrilege? What does anything mean in a world where god has passed judgment, and everyone left is a loser?

The ending is a revelation, in several senses of the term. Let's just say that the Christians may have been right about how the world will end, but wrong about who's on either side of the chess board. And the potential for good people to fight their way to salvation -- and transformation -- in the darkest of times is presented so lovingly, via the delightful couple that is the cosmically tripping Mummy and the defiant Raven (and their talking dog, too), you just marvel at your journey as a reader.

Salgood Sam (the nom de plume of one Max Douglas, spelled backwards, more or less) is a gifted illustrator. His black-and-white drawings are slick like a film storyboard drawn by an exacting crafter. Check out one panel near the end of the book, in which our band of heroes takes out an angel. He falls through the sky upside-down, his huge black wings fluttering helplessly above him on the way down. It's gorgeous.

It might be a good idea to read Therefore Repent! twice, even. Any confusing plot points at the beginning will be revealed as clever little breadcrumbs.

"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammo" takes on new meaning with this one. Highly recommended. | Byron Kerman