we are now open 7 days a week!

That's right! We used to be closed on Mondays, but now Desert Island is open every day. (...at least until New Years.)

new hours:
Mon - Sat // noon - 9 pm
Sunday // noon - 7 pm

Cancel all plans, Marc Bell is in town.

Marc Bell signing at Desert island
Sunday October 25th, 5 - 7 PM
book-debut for Hot Potatoe [Marc's supernaturally good art monograph by Drawn and Quarterly]
PLUS a new Marc Bell print by Desert island for only $30
PLUS general good-times
AND fun

540 metropolitan avenue
Brooklyn NY
http://www.desertislandbrooklyn.com/

Best of New York 2009

Taffy Hips release party and anniversary celebration

Taffy Hips is a fun publication with comics and interviews with cartoonists. It was started by zara messano & gil gentile a year ago, and they're releasing their 5th issue tomorrow at Desert Island starting at 7 pm. Come check it out! I think it's only $2, and they'll have some back issues too.

Join us as we celebrate one year as a magazine !

We will be releasing the 5th issue of Taffy Hips, as well as back issues #2 & #3 and various zines & "merch" at Desert Island in Brooklyn.

_Artists featured in Issue #5:
Blaise Larmee
Davis Weir
Emma Furman
Evan Neal
Gil Gentile
Harrison Sherrod
Jack Rohman
Jaime Kansler
Jason Overby
Margaret Powers
Maggie Wong
Mallory D'Alessandro
Myles Lawson
Patrick Kain
RT Peters
William Cardini
Zac Singer
Zara Messano

_As well as interviews with :
Lilli Carré & Benjamin Marra
_Cover #5 by :
Margaret Powers

John Porcellino signing + slideshow this tuesday the 29th - be there!

JOHN PORCELLINO was born in Chicago, in 1968, and has been writing, drawing, and publishing minicomics, comics, and graphic novels for over twenty-five years. His celebrated self-published series King-Cat Comics, begun in 1989, has inspired a generation of cartoonists. Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man, a collection of King-Cat stories about Porcellino’s experiences as a pest control worker, won an Ignatz Award in 2005, and Perfect Example, first published in 2000, chronicles his struggles with depression as a teenager. King-Cat Classix, published in 2007, is a comprehensive overview of the zine's first fifty issues, and Thoreau at Walden is a poetic expression of the great philosopher’s experience and ideals. According to cartoonist Chris Ware, "John Porcellino's comics distill, in just a few lines and words, the feeling of simply being alive."

Porcellino's work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian. He currently lives in Denver with his wife Misun, and two Skweezil-Cats named Liz and Charlie.

More info: www.king-cat.net.

Map of My Heart celebrates the twentieth anniversary of John Porcellino’s seminal and influential comics zine, King-Cat Comics, which he began self-publishing in 1989. In this collection, Porcellino, while living in isolation and experiencing the pain of divorce, crafts a melancholic, tender graphic-ballad of heartbreak and reflection.

Known for his sad, quiet honesty, rendered in his signature deceptively minimalist style, Porcellino has a command of graphic storytelling as sophisticated as the medium’s more visually intricate masters. Few other artists are able to so expertly contemplate the sadness, beauty, and wonder of life in so few lines.

The Book of Other People

Haven't seen this mentioned on any of the other comics blogs and thought I should spread the word. The recently released "Book of Other People," edited by Zadie Smith, has new pieces by Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, and a cover by Charles Burns. Considering how infrequently we see new work by Clowes and Ware, this seems like a significant development.

Matthew Thurber on September 11th

Quoth Thurber: "to rotate the juju of that day"


Release party from 7 - 9 pm at Desert island, with a live acoustic performance by Ambergris around 8.
Come check out Matthew's new comic and have a beer!

Matthew Thurber is a cartoonist from Washington State, now residing in Brooklyn. His comic book series, “1-800-MICE” is to be collected by Picturebox. His comics have appeared in anthologies such as Kramers Ergot, The Ganzfeld, and Yale University Press' Anthology of Graphic Fiction. He has exhibited at Adam Baumgold Gallery, Southfirst in Brooklyn, and the Fumetto festival in Lucern, Switzerland. In 2006 he was named “Mini Comics Artist of the Year” by The Comics Journal. He has performed at venues from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to Issue Project Room in New York with his musical project Ambergris, and played saxophone from 2006-08 with Soiled Mattress and the Springs.

Smoke Signal #2 release party this saturday at Death by Audio

Come out and celebrate the new issue of our free comix newspaper!

Performances by
Antimagic [former These are Powers],
Cat Chow [she plays a sweet Hello Kitty guitar],
Driphouse [member of Raccoo-oo-oon],
and more, lots of amazing artists in attendance, free stuff, and maybe a dance party.

Death by Audio // 49 S. 2nd st // Brooklyn
saturday august 29th

10 pm seems about right


The new issue kicks ass, featuring unseen work by:
Dash Shaw
Julien Langendorf
John Brodowski
Gabrielle Bell
Avi Spivak
Desmond Williams and Richard Livesey
Leslie Stein
Daniel Locke
Sam Henderson
James Turek
Alyssa Berg
Bucky Cox
Dina Kelberman
Sam Gaskin
Jason T. Miles
Michael Kupperman
Vincent Giard
Shoboshobo
Frank Santoro
Mika Oshima
Max Evry and Nick Rose
Travis Millard
José Medina
Marc Bell
Joshua Ray Stephens
Ron Regé Jr.
Rich Guzman
Taylor McKimens
Victor Kerlow
Noah Lyon
Kerozen
Matthew Thurber
Jesse McManus
Chris Cammett
Leon Sadler
Becca Kacanda

LOOKING FOR BANDS FOR AUG 29TH @ DEATH BY AUDIO!

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LOOKING FOR BANDS FOR AUG 29TH @ DEATH BY AUDIO

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if you want to rock, please get in touch at desertislandbrooklyn@gmail.com

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it's a release party for our free comix newspaper Smoke Signal

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this one has new or unseen work by Gabrielle Bell, Dash Shaw, Michael Kupperman, Shoboshobo, Frank Santoro. Marc Bell, Leslie Stein, and ton of other awesome people

pen and ink vs computer

I've been complaining about bad photoshop work in comics for a while, so I thought it was time to give an example. (I accidently started a debate on another blog by voicing my distaste for crappy photoshop work -- you can read it here.)


Here's an object lesson from Dave Berg of Mad magazine:


On the top is "The Lighter Side of..." from 1977; the bottom from 2002. Berg was never one of my favorite Mad artists, but his transformation to digital is clearly a nose-dive into inferior work. What is happening here? Maybe Berg is too old to learn new computer skills, but why do I keep seeing this lazy wacom-tablet aesthetic coming from 24 year old artists?


I'd like to add that digital comic art "originals" have zero value as artwork. Can you imagine what the Masters of American Comics exhibition would look like if the artists were all working in Photoshop?

huge news

Desert Island will be organizing a one-day comics fest in a large church basement in Willamsburg Brooklyn on Saturday December 5th 2009. We're very excited to get involved with the comic community on this level, and welcome your input in advance of this awesome event.

More info about individual table rates as we figure out the costs involved.

I finally got a flickr pro account

And I'm posting tons of goofy shit like this:


take a look!

video of Al Burian reading at the store

recorded by Brian Heater

Any interview with Al Jaffee is a good interview

Maybe you guys have seen this already? http://www.viceland.com/int/guide_comics/htdocs/
I'm glad to see more decent comics content coming from the Vice magazine people. (Even though their main writer has an unbearable novelty mustache).

Al Jaffee is seriously a genius.

Fletcher Hanks screenprint

Check it out!  You can get one of these from our web shop: http://desertislandbrooklyn.com/store.html