Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, kickstarter, Luc Bossé, Lucius Vile, Pow Pow Press, Samuel Cantin, Vile and Miserable

Bringing Pow Pow Press To English Readers

Luc Bossé writes for Bleeding Cool:

Pow Pow Press is based in Montreal. It has been publishing books in French for the last four years, and has grown to become one of the largest indie comics publishers in Quebec. It now wants to translate some of its best-selling, most critically-acclaimed books in English.! !

Lucius Vile works in a bookstore that also happens to be a used cars dealership. That might explain why he doesn't really get along with his co-workers. His life is a mess. Even his therapist seems to think so. Lucius also happens to be a demon who only has access to his genitals on Groundhog Day. Which means he can only have sex once a year. Which means he has grown quite frustrated over the last few decades…! !

That's the plot outline to Samuel Cantin's Vile and Miserable, one of the handful of comics Pow Pow Press hopes to translate by way of the "Translating Pow Pow Press" Kickstarter campaign. It might sound a wee bit weird, and it only gets weirder once you start reading the actual book – but the strangest thing might be that Samuel's odd little graphic novel has become a cult hit in the last year or so, with people actually coming up to him and reciting lines from it during festivals and conventions.! !

When you publish books you love, you want as many people as possible to be able to read them. That's why we launched our Kickstarter campaign. Because we want books such as Vile and Miserable to be able to reach a larger audience. Quebec is a pretty small market, all things considered, especially for bizarre indie comics about demons who only have access to their genitals on Groundhog Day. Which means we needed to expand.! !

The most common practice among Quebec publishers is to cross the ocean over to France, where it is said that the people tend to speak French. But Montreal being a bilingual city, we've spent the last few years meeting anglophone readers who seemed very interested in our books but couldn't read them because they were in French. It only felt natural to make our books available to those who already knew about them, instead of trying find an audience on an entirely different continent where nobody had ever heard of us.! !

One of these books is Michel Hellman's Mile End. For those of you not familiar with Montreal, Mile End is the name of the city's hippest neighborhood, which Michel has been inhabiting for the last ten years or so. Working as a sort of surrealist diary, Mile End is filled to the brink with funny anecdotes, casual observations and daydreams about AT-ATs descending upon the streets of Montreal to shovel snow. It also happens to be Pow Pow's best-selling title. And it hasn't even been translated yet!! !

Zviane's For As Long As It Rains is the third and final book we'll translate if we reach our $20,000 objective. Zviane recently won the Joe Shuster award for "Best Cartoonist" on the strength of this amazing graphic novel. It's hard to believe Zviane's work hasn't been
available in English so far : she's definitely one the most talented cartoonists in Quebec right now, and she's been getting a lot of attention in the last few years. Getting this book translated is the next, logical step for her. But we need your help in order to do so.! !

If we get to $25,000, we'll also translate Vampire Cousins by Cathon and Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau. One of our most recent releases, it's an amazing homage to old school horror films that also happens to be really funny. It manages to capture that classic Hammer vibe without ever feeling derivative. We really hope to have Vampire Cousins ready for the 2015 Toronto Comics Art Festival, which is where we want to launch our first wave of titles. But in order to print that one, we're gonna need a little extra support.! !

Which is why, with only a couple of days left before the campaign is over, we're reaching out to you guys. We know that some of you are not living in North America. So we offering a limited Bleeding Cool pledge. That's right, we've added a FREE WORLD SHIPPING pledge! But don't wait too long, because it will be a limited offer. For $91, you're getting ALL THE BOOKS (including unlocked stretch goals) + TWO BONUS BOOKS (Croquis de Québec and Dessins) + ALL SCREEN PRINTS (we are up to 5 now) + 3 PINS

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