Band for Life collects the beloved series that follows a misfit band of Chicago punks trying to be self-sustaining with their finances and friendships as they navigate the often confounding art world. It’s the story, told in comic strip form, of a noise rock band and their community of friends and acquaintances based in an alternate reality version of Chicago. Though beset with disaster at every turn and frequently reduced to squabbling, they stick together because the band is the fulcrum of their otherwise confounding lives, and together they help each other find their way.
Fusing elements of the classic British sitcom The Young Ones, as well as classic kids comic strips like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and John Stanley’s Melvin Monster, Band for Life is a work of dark humor, but also infused with genuine affection for its cast; in many ways it is a love letter to creative people compelled to create, with no hope of financial reward.
“I was raised on old school adult comics from the ’60s to ’80s, the artwork of Pedro Bell, Overton Loyd and Ronald Stozo of the Parliament-Funkadelic Universe, Ralph Bakshi movies, and the like. When I came across Band For Life, I was immediately drawn in. The art reminded me of Funkadelic album covers, but with its own original swagger. The storylines spoke to my personal experience as a lifelong musician and band leader/member, in the same way that This Is Spinal Tap made me cry once I realized my life was as absurd as the movie. Anya Davidson is tapped into the very human experience that makes life in a band the story of family.” — Norwood Fisher (Fishbone)
“Anya Davidson gets that being in a band is generally about 5% playing music and 95% anything but. In true punk form, Band For Life kicks into high gear with page number one and never lets up.” — Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt)
“Anya’s comics look like Dick Sprang and Boody Rogers got locked in a Pez factory and were told they would not be released until they produced hundreds of pages of a gutter punk Herculoids meets Josie and the Pussycats soap opera dripping soul and neglect.” — Gary Panter (Jimbo)
“Band for Life is a warped and hilarious portrayal of the banality and adventure of bandhood from someone who lived it, but embellished gloriously by Anya’s imagination. Fucked up, feminist and funny. If you have ever ground away late nights in a basement trying to desperately remember the bad songs you just wrote, you will recognize your strife here with ‘the Wildest Band on Earth’.” -Jessica Hopper, author & Editorial Director, MTV News
Anya Davidson was born in Sarasota, Florida in 1983. She graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. She is a cartoonist, musician, teaching artist and printmaker whose work appeared in many zines and anthologies, including Kramers Ergot and Best American Comics. Her debut graphic novel, School Spirits, was published by Picturebox Inc. The Ignatz award-winning series, “Band for Life” is her first book with Fantagraphics.
Dame Darcy is one of the sui generis artistic talents of the past two decades — musician, actress, fortune teller, dollmaker, Gen X/feminist icon, and last but not least, cartoonist to the core — and has been bewitching readers for more than 20 years with her neo-Victorian horror/humor/romance comic Meat Cake. Alternating between one-off (often cruelly tragic) fairy tales and ongoing romps starring her eclectic cast of characters, including Effluvia the Mermaid, the roguish rou. Wax Wolf, Igpay the Pig-Latin pig, Stregapez (a women who speaks by dispensing Pez-like tablets through a bloody hole in her throat), the mischievous Siamese twins Hindrance and Perfidia, Scampi the Selfish Shellfish, the stalwart Friend the Girl, and the blonde bombshell Richard Dirt, all delineated in her inimitable luxurious scrawl, Meat Cake is like a peek into the most creative, deranged dollhouse you ever saw. The Meat Cake Bible is the definitive collection of the series, collecting every story from all 17 issues (1993-2008) — including “Hungry is the Heart,” Darcy’s legendary collaboration with Alan Moore — as well as new stories from the unpublished 18th issue. A gorgeous, unjacketed hardcover edition replete with cloth deboss, gold foil stamping, and a die-cut cover.
About Dame Darcy:
Renaissance woman Dame Darcy won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art institute at the age of 17 in 1989. There she majored in film and animation, studying under George Kuchar and Larry Jordan. During this time, she self-published Meat Cake Comix; joined the band Caroliner with Lisa Carver, where she performed, released albums and toured; and illustrated Lisa’s magazine Rollerderby, as well as other Bay Area magazines and papers.
Darcy moved to New York in 1992. Her Meat Cake comic-book series began publication with Fantagraphics Books Inc., who publishes Meat Cake and its compilations, which are distributed internationally, to this day.
When not working on her comics, illustration, and fine art, Renaissance woman Dame Darcy also works as a touring musician, dollmaker, animator, fashion model and designer, celebrity interior designer, art teacher, and reality TV star.
It’s the 25th anniversary of Quimby’s Bookstore, and Marz Community Brewing Co made a beer to celebrate this milestone. Quimbrew is a pale wheat ale with rooibos tea packaged in 500 ML bottle with label art work designed by Laura Park.
This special edition beer is available for pre-purchase at The Beer Temple and comes with the 132 page zine: Ever Evolving Bastion of Freakdom: A Quimby’s Bookstore History in Words and Pictures.
Ever Evolving…is an oral history of the notorious and glorious Quimby’s Bookstore, in the tradition of Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me. The story of the early days of Quimby’s up through today. Pictures, graphics, juice, from employees, shoppers, consignors and artists that have frequented the store’s hallowed doors. This special “ashcan edition” is a limited print run zine to celebrate the store’s silver jubilee, and was created to accompany the Marz Community Brewing Quimbrew beer pre-purchase.
Signal 05 a Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture ed. by Josh MacPhee (PM Press) $14.95 – Dedicated to documenting and sharing compelling graphics, art projects, and cultural movements of international resistance and liberation struggles.
My Damage: The Story of A Punk Rock Survivor by Keith Morris with Jim Ruland (Da Capo Press) $24.99 – Over the course of his forty-year career with Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and OFF!, vocalist Keith Morris battled diabetes, drug and alcohol addiction, and the record industry…and he’s still going strong.
*ZINES*
Library Excavations #3 Periodical Business by Marc Fischer (Half Letter Press) $6.00 – From the publisher’s website, written by Marc Fischer: “The Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center is home to a vast collection of bound business periodicals. The many shelves are filled with titles that will be foreign to industry outsiders. Some date back to the late 1800s. These are primarily publications sent directly to business executives and their company offices, or to institutional libraries, rather than newsstands. The beauty of a public library is that visitors with zero credentials can enjoy decades’ worth of these insider publications, without ever improving our work wardrobes or falsifying our credentials. This booklet is also an appreciation of the binderies that collate and sew these magazines into indestructible bound volumes. The foil stamped titles on the hard covers have a leveling effect, allowing us to consider Modern Power Systems alongside Quick Frozen Foods, as though power plants and pizza are equally important. These photos were taken in July and August 2016. I hope that they will entice others to explore these periodicals, and interrogate the value systems, ideologies, and visual pleasures they contain.”
2 Atomic Elbow thingies:
Atomic Elbow #18 by Robert Newsome $5.00
Atomic Elbow Professional Wrestling Fanzine, The Second Four Issues $10.00 – Collects issues #5-#8!
Kimchi #1 by Seth Ginsburg $2.00
Pill Bottles Make Terrible Roller Skates photo zine by Clarisse Casalino $8.00
This Cook Book is Made for Jesus by Susan Cianciolo $10.00
I Don’t Give A Shit About Your Star Sign by Franky Mariachi $8.00
Nightcore by Matthew Moen $6.00
Arty zines from Draw Down Books!
Lady Parts by Kristen Liu-Wong $14.00 – A zine of fierce females and sci-fi warrior women by American artist Kristen Liu-Wong.
Face Only A Mother Could Love by Will Bryant $10.00
Working It Out by Justyna Szczepankiewicz $14.00
Dead Ringer by Daniel Zender $14.00
Who Claims by Tim Lahan $14.00
2 zines by Nichole:
A Visitor In Myself #5 Win 16 $2.00 Pieces #13 On Being A Romantic Asexual $3.00 – Goes into Nichole’s experience of living as a romantic asexual. A little asexuality 101, mostly focuses on growing up as a gray-a in a sexual world, navigating relationships, dating site ignorance, desexualizing touch, common phrases of invalidation, and using self-transformative psychodrama to process it all. Recommended.
*COMICS & MINIS*
Donald Trump is the Antichrist by CJ & Troy Davis $3.50 – Jack Chick style! Perhaps the best way to describe this is the review of it on the publisher’s website from um, cultural critic spectral_ev who comments: “I have read many a Chick Tract but none so great as this.” You don’t need to know much more than that, that it’s awesome. -LM
New Flyer by Tim Brown $9.00
Island #10 $7.99
*GRAPHIC NOVELS*
Koyama Press graphic novels!:
Hot or Not: 20th-Century Male Artists by Jessica Campbell $10.00 – The history of twentieth-century art is filled with men, but one key component has always been missing: which of these men are boneable, and which are not. Local comics artist Jessica Campbell has created the definitive resource on the subject in this hilarious rundown of male artist hotness and notness. With scratchy-off stuff on the cover!
The Collected Cat Rackham by Steve Wolfhard $19.95
Exits by Daryl Seitchik $15.00
March (Trilogy Slipcase Set) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell (Top Shelf) $49.99 – By and about congressman John Lewis, a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement.
Sprawling Heart by Sab Meynert (2D Cloud) $9.95
*ART & DESIGN BOOKS*
Cleon Peterson by Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Sleboda (Draw Down Books) $24.95 – Compellingly gory beheading and riots in this first monograph from this artist.
Avies Dream: An Afro Femenist Coloring Book by Makeda Lewis (Feminist Press) $13.95
*MUSIC BOOKS*
Don’t Suck Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh (U of Texas Press) $14.95 – A quadriplegic who could play only simple chords on his guitar, Chesnutt recorded seventeen critically acclaimed albums before his death in 2009. Everybody from Madonna to Fugazi have covered his songs. Kristin Hersh from Throwing Muses writes about being friends with him. Now in soft cover.
David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel, Rebel by Theodore Ammon (Open Court) $19.95 – Among the topics explored in David Bowie and Philosophy are the nature of Bowie as an institution and a cult; Bowie’s work in many platforms, including movies and TV; Bowie’s spanning of low and high art; his relation to Andy Warhol; the influence of Buddhism and Kabuki theater; the recurring theme of Bowie as a space alien; the dystopian element in Bowie’s thinking; the role of fashion in Bowie’s creativity; the aesthetics of theatrical rock and glam rock; and Bowie’s public identification with bisexuality and his influence within the LGBTQ community.
*FICTION BOOKS*
Black Wave by Michelle Tea (Feminist Press) $18.95 – It’s the end of the world! In a bookstore!
Jason Stevans and the Mayan Apocalypse by Matt Goralka $10.99
*OUTER LIMITS*
Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing, and Psychedelics by David Jay Brown $19.95
*MAGAZINES*
Boneshaker #43-500 A Bicycling Almanac $8.00 – Not based in Chicago, but there are Chicago-specific things in here! All old-timey and penny-farthingy. Tally ho!
School #3 Women and Japanese Culture $10.00
*LIT MAGS*
The Point #12 Sum 16 $12.00 – This issue: What is poetry for?
Black Fox Literary Magazine #14 Five Year Anniversary Issue $14.00
Parody vol 5 #1 $5.00 – The Weird Al of lit journals!
*FOR THE KIDDIES*
Burts Way Home by John Martz (Koyama Press) $17.95
Ape and Armadillo Take Over the World by James Sturm (Toon Books) $12.95
Quimby’s is proud to be participating in the Wicker Park and West Town Lit Fest! This year it runs September 15th-18th. And it kicks off at Quimby’s on Thurs, September 15th, which is our 25th anniversary! Founder Steven Svymbersky will be here with slides and video to talk about the mayhem that was the beginning of Quimby’s two and a half decades ago. And we’ve got surprise commemorative swag we’re rolling out! More details about the Quimby’s event here.
Lit Fest last year was only one day. Perhaps you recall that we celebrated it by giving people a free mini-comic and Chicago-based food puns then served them shots of Chicago-based Malort, demanding we post pictures on our Instagram of their face afterwards?:
Well guess what? Now Lit Fest is FOUR DAYS!
So now…
Wicker Park & West Town Lit Fest’s Second Year Celebrates Neighborhoods’ Literary Past and Present
Join partners from the West Town and Wicker Park neighborhoods for a weekend of programming that will entertain and educate all ages. The weekend has a full calendar of activities planned. Highlights of the weekend include our celebration to kick it off…
…and there’s stuff elsewhere too, besides Quimby’s! Check out this stuff elsewhere (see www.wwlitfest.com for the details of when and where):
*a tribute to Chicago literary legend Nelson Algren
*a community book swap at the Wicker Park farmer’s market
*a special edition of Chicago Story Slam at Subterranean music hall
*workshops, author readings, comic book signings, children’s story time and much more!
A calendar of events for each day is available on the official fest website www.wwlitfest.com. Weekend updates and photos will be available on the official Facebook Page facebook.com/wpwtlitfest Follow the fest with the hashtag #wwlitfest
Lit Fest planning partners include: Quimby’s Bookstore, Volumes Bookcafe, Chicago Publishers Resource Center, Young Chicago Authors, BookClub, 826CHI, Impossible Industries, Myopic Books, and Guild Literary Complex. Other neighborhood partners include Reckless Records, Subterranean, Wicker Park Farmer’s Market, and Chicago Public Library.
Read Local & Shop Small! Help us fight the big box on-line stores!
