Al-Qaeda’s Super Secret Weapon
Turns out the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was just the opening that the terrorists were waiting for! This witty, sexy, spy tale sends up Republicans, the War on Terror™ and gay clichés from A to Z. The end of the world was never so fabulous!
$5.99 – $14.99
Turns out the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was just the opening that the terrorists were waiting for! This witty, sexy, spy tale sends up Republicans, the War on Terror™ and gay clichés from A to Z. The end of the world was never so fabulous!
ISBN: 9781938720291
Publisher: Northwest Press
Publish Date: 2013
Page Count: 72
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The Lavender Menace: Tales of Queer Villainy! $3.99 – $9.99
Thirteen short stories of terror, mayhem, and destruction which offer something highly unique in a genre that demands certain characters be only heroes or victims… gay villains! Prose collection with an introduction by Lambda Literary Award winning editor Tom Cardamone.
Cover by Joe Phillips.
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Dash #2 $2.99 – $3.99
After the shocking events of the last issue, Dash is now on the hunt for the mysterious Zita Makara. But will a violent interrogation by his former colleague turned rival, Detective Bruno Fernez, prevent him from stopping another murder?
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QU33R $9.99 – $39.99
Winner of the 2014 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology!
QU33R, from editor Rob Kirby, features 241 pages of new comics from 33 contributors—legends and new faces alike.
In 2012, Justin Hall edited a book called No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, that took readers on a journey from the beginnings of LGBT comics history to the present day. QU33R is an all-new project featuring queer comics legends as well as new talents that picks up where No Straight Lines left off. We’ve set down our history, now QU33R shines a light on our future!
QU33R had its genesis in an all-color queer comic zine called THREE, which featured three stories by three creators or teams per issue. Rob Kirby published three installments of THREE annually from 2010 to 2012, and the series did well, garnering not only an Ignatz nomination for Outstanding Anthology or Collection but also earning Rob the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant in 2011.
Producing the anthology was immensely gratifying, but featuring just three comics and publishing only once per year meant a lot of cartoonists weren’t getting the exposure they deserved. The publishing opportunities for queer cartoonists and queer subject matter are still limited, even today, and Rob longed for a wider distribution than he was able to manage on his own. He approached Northwest Press about doing a bigger compendium of all-new work.
While THREE was happening, Justin Hall was preparing his book No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, which Fantagraphics published in the summer of 2012. No Straight Lines traced the history of queer comics from their humble beginnings in the late 60’s/early 70’s all the way up to the present. The book was a whopping, award-winning success. Rob got to thinking that a follow-up volume—a sort-of-sequel focusing on all new work—would seal the deal, informing the world at large that we are still here, still queer, and still producing fresh and innovative work. He wanted to include not only several queer comics veterans, but also some fresh new faces and a few folks who haven’t necessarily belonged to the orthodox “queer comics scene” but have been doing non-heteronormative work all along.
QU33R features over 240 pages of new comics from a cross-generational lineup of award-winning LGBTQ cartoonists.
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Dash #1 $2.99 – $3.99
Los Angeles, 1940: Private investigator Dash Malone can’t shake the feeling his lover, Johnny, is hiding something. Strange deaths start occurring throughout the city while a mysterious woman named Zita Makara begs Dash to take her case. When a grisly murder connects all three, a terrifying mystery unfolds.
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The Legend of Bold Riley $9.99
Leia Weathington’s sword-and-sorcery epic The Legend of Bold Riley is illustrated by Leia and a host of talented artists.
“Who is Bold Riley?” you might ask. She has hunted the wildest game and dallied with countless beautiful girls, but still longs to know the world beyond the city walls. Princess Rilavashana SanParite, called Bold Riley, leaves behind her station and sets out to travel through distant lands and find forgotten ruins, fearsome enemies, inscrutable gods and tragic love.
She’s as capable with a sword as she is with her wits—man, does she carve things up when the need arises—and is a strong, beautiful, confident woman who doesn’t wear a bikini into battle. And she always gets the girl!
Created by Leia Weathington, with art by Weathington, Marco Aidala, Vanessa Gillings, Kelly McClellan, Konstantin Pogorelov, Liz Conley, and Jason Thompson. Cover artwork by Brinson Thieme. 232 pages. 7″x10″. Full-color with metallic ink cover.
Retailers! Download a Bold Riley Promotional Display that highlights the foreword by fan-favorite writer Jane Espenson and helps encourage customers to check out the book.
PREVIEWS:
You can download a 67-page preview of the book in PDF or EPUB (iPad-only) format right here on the site. The preview includes excerpts from four of the stories in the book, bonus artwork and more.Additionally, there’s a ZIP file of preview images available for use in reviews and articles. Download it here. (11MB ZIP file.)
INTERVIEWS:
Feature on Panel Patter by Rob McMonigal — “Ms. Weathington, working with a variety of other artists, has created a fantasy world ripe for exploration, with our guide being Bold Riley, a young woman with royal (but restless) blood. It’s great to see the ‘Uncharted Fantasy World’ idea given a new twist by having a protagonist that’s not only female, but queer as well.”
Feature on Portland Comic Books Examiner by Christian Lipski — “Author Leia Weathington is releasing Bold Riley, her first book, at the end of June, and spoke with the Portland Comic Books Examiner about her own journey.”
Interview on Portland Comics by Doug Dorr — “I worked with 5 other artists for Bold Riley and made the mistake at first of trying to really tightly control the visuals of the comic. That was something I learned to back off from pretty fast. If you are working with artists you probably decided to get into a collaboration with them for a reason. SO TRUST YOUR ARTIST! What I’ve started doing is making model sheets characters, objects and places that must look a certain way to maintain continuity in the story, after that I send photo references, script and descriptions of mood and setting and turn the artist loose to have fun with it.”
Interview on The Hathor Legacy by Maria Velazquez — “Like many creators I started writing the kind of story I always wanted to see. Like most women I was raised with fairy tales and the complex feelings that go with them. Sure they focus primarily on female leads, but those leads tend to be passive objects. The women are what things happen TO not people who make things happen themselves.”
Interview on Sequential Tart by Lee Atchison — “We like the anti-hero right now. And with reason. Things are shit, we’re all pretty jaded. How can you not be when at the click of a button you can see the latest string of atrocities played out before your eyes. I like the anti-hero, but somewhere amid all of the horror and the skepticism, I wanted to place a story about a hero who, while not beyond reproach, is good and wants to do good and tries her hardest.”
Sequential Tart –
“If you’re looking for something with good production values that is totally out of the box, this might be something worth checking out.” Read Katie Frank’s review on Sequential Tart.
Sequential Tart –
“The art is fantastic. Clean and open, drawing the focus to the characters. While the main characters are probably best described as ‘hot’, there is some variety of body types throughout the book (though, with the military aspect, most of them are also fit). Body mechanics are excellently rendered and realistic. I also really appreciate the time it takes to draw that much body hair and make it look good. ” Read Sheena McNeil’s review on Sequential Tart.
David Quantic –
“Of course, things go horribly wrong in the most hilarious ways. The terrorists soon become distracted by the everyday realities of the American Gay Lifestyle that include boyfriends, three-ways and learning how to make a mean arugula salad. Another result of the mission is the bombing of the Dallas airport (mostly for aesthetic reasons.)” Read David Quantic’s writeup David Quantic Film.
Zachary –
I should say this up front: I don’t read a lot of erotica. I come to literature for intellectual stimulation, not erotic. That said, for all its erotic content, Al-Qaeda’s Super Secret Weapon is an extremely intellegent riff on the fundamentalist values of conservative America, the fundamentalist values of certain sects of Islam, and gay culture itself.
The protagonist, Mahmoud, is a member of an Al-Qaeda cell. After hearing McCain state on television that the American’s military’s ban on homosexuality should stay in place so that soldiers are not “distracted,” Mahmoud’s cell decides to learn “the gay lifestyle” and introduce it into the American military. Over the course of the novel, Mahmoud falls for the blonde-haired American man Steve, who he enters into a relationship with. Steve calls Mahmoud his “swarthy little lamb kebab.”
The jokes are a mile a minute and span gay culture, military culture, Middle Eastern culture, and on and on.
Now, if that had been all there was to tell, I might not have proceeded to write up this review. But the real gem of this piece is its thematic core: Mahmoud’s struggle to reconcile his feelings for Steve with his identity as a terrorist. He feels trapped between two conflicting worlds and struggles to find himself.
That the novel succeeds in blending its satire with this deeper element and be simultaneously entertaining, is a great feat that few stories achieve, but Al-Qaeda’s Super Secret Weapon pulls it off with extraordinary finesse. I have one qualm with its execution. There is a page of text near the center of the novel that breaks the narrative in order to explain this thematic core directly. Big no-no. While itself humorously written, the story would have been stronger if I could have been allowed to arrive at that conclusion myself.
Overall, this is a very solid story—excellent satirical social commentary woven elegantly into thematic underpinnings—and I can highly recommend picking up a copy. Though if you are offended by religious commentary or graphic depictions of sex, you should steer clear of this one.