Great Beast Comics is happy to announce the loooong awaited third issue of Adam Cadwell’s Northern Slacker Vampire series Blood Blokes is released TODAY after a successful debut at Toronto Comic Arts Festival last weekend.

It is now available in both print and digital editions from the Great Beast store.

Blood Blokes #3 sees Vince awaken in the vampire house with more than a few questions. When he discovers the hard way that going home isn’t an option he finds the life of a vampire to be alarmingly familiar, yet Vince still longs for a certain someone.

Issue 3 features 26 pages of story and back-up illustrations by Tula Lotay, Josceline Fenton, Priscilla Tramontano and Sammy Borras.

And here’s a two page preview for you from slap bang in the middle of the issue.

For our Birthday WeekEND Marc will be shaking his hips and selling his wares (comics) at the FREE Comica Comiket from 11-7 TOMORROW at Saint Martin’s College, London. Swing by and see him and all the other talent there. Adam will be at home, alone, drawing like crazy, wiping his tears away with leftover cake.

ANYWAY, today’s exciting news follows the announcement back in February that the hot new comic Dangeritis by Robert Ball and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell (currently updating on Tumblr plus tons of great fan art) will be released by Great Beast. Dangeritis follows the misadventures of poundshop James Bond, Derek Danger. Interestingly, Ball and WJC draw each page in turn. Today we can reveal the absolutely stunning cover and tell you Dangeritis: A Fistful of Danger will debut at the MCM Comic Con in Manchester on the 20th July. The print and digital edition will have bonus content that won’t appear online.

Well, Happy Birthday Us! We hope you’ve all enjoyed this week of news about some sweet lookin’ new comics and the chance to buy some books on the cheapcheap. Have a cracking weekend, bye for now!

Hitsville UK is a pop art, surreal, musical soap opera following the weirdos and wannabes of an indy record company. Issue 1 introduces has-been, record label boss Gerry Corden and drug addled, maniac producer Greg Studio as they audition new acts for their new label. Cue an angel voiced grotesque, a mystery solving teen gang, a schoolboy DJ with a robot fascination, Nazi punk zombies and the rest.

Hitsville UK hits the ground running with barely a 1… 2… 1-2-3-4 to prepare you. Hurtling along like the Clash song it’s named after, each page is a rush of playful artwork shifting styles fast and loose to match each genre of music and the jokes come as quick and sharp as shurikens.

“A bloody great accumulation of inspired madness, musical insanity and general chaos… a pure, unadulterated hit of a comic” – Rich Bruton, Forbidden Planet International

“A perfect three minute chemical-infused rush of a comic” – Comic Heroes magazine

“Hitsville is a hoot!” – David Hine

Hitsville UK #1 is 35 pages of fun and mayhem and will be re-released through Great Beast in July with #2 following in November.

Winter’s Knight is a wordless tale of an old Knight on a mysterious personal quest through an icy wilderness encountering nightmarish battles with the dark things in the forest and much, much worse. Sublimely depicted by Ball’s sharp and elegant shapes and his deft use of striking colour, each scene drips with emotion and atmosphere. This is feast of rich imagery which draws you in to this icy world and demands multiple readings.

“This is all about the narrative driven by the art, pacing delivered through the beautiful pictures. …A wonderful blanket of a world, icy cold, blood red, all utterly stunning.” – Richard Bruton, Forbidden Planet International.

Winter’s Knight: Day One had a small print run last year which sold out very quickly but it will be available again to a wider audience in May both in print and digitally.

AND we can announce Winter’s Knight: Day Two will be released in November, debuting at the Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds.

To kick things off we can reveal the cover to the long awaited issue 3 of Blood Blokes, Adam Cadwell’s northern slacker vampire comedy. And if that wasn’t enough scroll down for the fantastic back cover drawn by the magnificent Tula Lotay!

Blood Blokes #3 will feature 26 pages of story and back up illustrations drawn by Josceline Fenton, Priscilla Tramontano and Brenda Lopez Sammy Borras! The issue will be on sale from May 15th.

We never though we’d see Ellerbisms next to a photo of Salman Rushdie but it’s happened. Newcastle based magazine The Crack has made Ellerbisms Book of the Month! Not Comic or Graphic Novel of the Month, proper BOOK of the Month! HUGE thanks to our ever-faithful intern Bobby MacPherson for putting us in touch with them and handling all of our press like a pro.

Also, this week the staff at Comixology have picked Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter Omnibus as one of their, um, Staff Picks alongside such amazing titles as All Star Superman (by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly) and the sensational Saga (by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples)! If that’s not a sign of the quality of Great Beast comics, then I don’t know what is! You can buy the first wave of Great Beast titles on Comixology now, The Everyday and Blood Blokes #2 are coming very soon.

(Look at Marc letting his phone battery drop below 50%, what’s he like? A chatterbox, that’s what!)

Currently you can buy Ellerbisms, the Chloe Noonan Monster Hunter Omnibus and Blood Blokes #1. The Everyday and Blood Blokes #2 will follow shortly and all our forthcoming releases will be available as and when.

“ComiXology is the leading digital comics distribution platform with over 100 million comic downloads as of October 2012. It offers a selection of more than 30,000 comic books and graphic novels across iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Windows 8 and the Internet.” so says Wikipedia.

There is no stopping this Beast!

Dangeritis is the new collaborative web-comic from the impressive talents of Warwick Johnson-Cadwell and Robert Ball (going by the collective name of Cadballs) and stars Derek Danger, a pound-shop James Bond who has a habit of getting into high espionage (mis)adventures even when warming a microwave pasty at the local 24 hour petrol station. Half Steve McQueen, half Alan Partridge, Derek has already garnered a number of fan art tributes on the Dangeritis Tumblr where Cadballs post new pages every Monday and Friday as well as concept art and other fun stuff.

Great Beast is very proud to announce that the print and digital versions of ‘Dangeritis: The Misadventures of Derek Danger’ will be published under the Great Beast banner in Summer 2013.

We are very happy to welcome Warwick and Robert, both hugely talented and unique artists, to the Great Beast fold. Dangeritis is intended to be fun for as many people as possible, which fits with the Great Beast ethos perfectly.

“Our idea was to create a comic where you had a character and you put him in danger at the end of every page,” says Ball talking to the Walthamstow Guardian, “Then you pass it onto someone else, they rescue him and put him in danger again. I do a page, which I publish on Monday, and Warwick does a page on Friday.”

“We’re trying to appeal to all age groups, so there’s no swearing in it, instead more choice phrases such as ‘ruddy hell’ or ‘bum’ or ‘flippin’ Nora’. It’s full of euphemisms. And the violence is also silly and cartoon-like.”

You can read page 1 of Dangeritis below and read 4 more right now on the Dangeritis Tumblr. We’re as excited as anyone else to find out what danger lurks in store (literally) for Derek and also if Danger is his last name, what’s his middle name?

It’s been just over a month since we published Marc Ellerby’s Ellerbisms collection and it’s a hit with critics and journalists alike. Here are some choice pull-quotes from the reviews so far…

“I mention this because Marc sends out special thanks in the back “to Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka, Liz Prince and Craig Thompson who do this sort of thing better than me”. And certainly they did, when Marc first set out. But with publication of this ELLERBISMS collection, with its range and heart and its tenderness and his weaknesses – as well as his outright buffoonery – Marc has earned his seat right alongside them. I’d rack this right between James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown and rank it their thoroughly affecting equal both in insight and entertainment value.”

Page 45, December 12th, 2012.

“Ellerbisms drags the reader through a series of emotional cruxes with minimal explanation or editorialising. And it’s this, I think, which gives Ellerbisms a lot of its rawness and power as a story and as a book.”

ConSequential, December 12th 2012.

“Ellerbisms is just a great read. It’s touching, often hilarious, expertly crafted (let’s not understate the quality of work involved in shaping a largely unconnected web strip into a coherent narrative) and contains a number of references to Weezer. How could we not love it to pieces?”

Alternate Cover – Best Comics of 2012 – December 22nd 2012

“Many autobio comics can feel disjointed and jagged in their day-to-day reportings, but Ellerbisms has a lovely flow and narrative arc that will make you laugh and tear up. “

Paste Magazine – Erika Moen’s Best Comics of 2012 - December 28th 2012.

“Hopefully it will find the audience it deserves, and give Ellerby a ticket to riches. But Ellerbisms is proof that he can do much more than just that.”

The New Statesman, December 29th 2012.

 
“Ellerby has made something very special in Ellerbisms, but in collecting it here, he has turned something special to something sublime.”

Forbidden Planet International – Richard Bruton’s Best Comics of 2012, December 29th 2012.

Thanks also to podcasts Comic News Insider and Alternate Cover for chatting about the book.
You can buy Ellerbisms directly from us as a print edition and a digital edition right here.