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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Positive $3.99 – $12.99
Cartoonist Tom Bouden (Max and Sven, The Importance of Being Earnest) invites you to meet Sarah, a young woman whose life is about to be turned inside out when she discovers that’s she’s HIV positive.
Join Sarah and her partner, Tim, as they take the journey together through shock and uncertainty, pre-dawn pill schedules, side-effects, well-meaning friends, tasteless jokes, medical missteps, and ultimately, hope.
“Positive is a story with the universal message of how to live life without being afraid,” writes GayLeague.com‘s Joe Palmer in the introduction. “This is the story I wish I’d been able to read after my diagnosis years ago. It is the story I hope everyone regardless of his or her sero-status will have the opportunity to read and by which to be inspired.”
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The Power Within $2.99 – $4.99
A comic book tackling the subject of teen bullying and suicide, written by Charles “Zan” Christensen and drawn by Mark Brill.
Shannon gets picked on a lot; his dad and teachers think he should just “fit in” more, but that doesn’t help. So Shannon escapes into a super-powered alter-ego whenever he’s in a bad situation. But will the power within be enough to save him?
In addition to the main story, the book contains bonus pages by a collection of comics industry heavyweights, including Gail Simone (Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey), Phil Jimenez (New X-Men, Wonder Woman), Greg Rucka (Detective Comics, Gotham Central), Matthew Clark (Outsiders, Wonder Woman), Stephen Sadowski (JSA, Warlord of Mars), Dan Parent (Archie, Kevin Keller), Donna Barr (The Desert Peach), Andy Mangels (Gay Comics, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor) and Carla Speed McNeil (FINDER).
Copies of The Power Within are available free of charge to youth services organizations and teachers’ groups. Please contact us by email to request copies. The book contains discussion questions so that the book can be used as a tool to start a conversation about issues of bullying and harassment.
PREVIEW:
Read the first part of the story right now!
INTERVIEWS:
Review at Gay.com by Jase Peeples — “Moved by the rash of suicides committed by bullied LGBT teens last year, Christensen and Brill took it upon themselves to create a story they hope will reach others in a way only comics can.”
Interview on Tacoma KOMO — “Imagine a world in which bullied teens are protected by muscled superheroes. It sounds fantastic, but this is exactly the world Zan Christensen and Mark Brill have created in a new comic intended to help teens cope with bullying and harassment in school.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCXzxJ-qDA4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGaSZfBpqM
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A Waste of Time #1 $2.99 – $4.99
Rick the cartoonist rabbit is growing desperate for success, while his creations—including a coke-addicted teddy bear and a broken robot—have their own plans for his career. Things start to take a sinister turn, and Rick surprises even himself with the depths of pandering to which he’ll sink.
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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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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.
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.