Top Shelf Productions

In a list packed with solid choices, Paste Magazine has honored Craig Thompson's Blankets with the #1 spot on their "20 Best Graphic Novels of the Decade" countdown! Year after year, Craig's incredible book continues to find new readers to fall in love with it, and we're extremely proud to be the publishers of this modern classic.

Almost there! The release of Eddie Campbell's must-have masterwork Alec: The Years Have Pants is getting mighty close. Eddie recently sat down with John Geddes of USA Today to reflect on the process of assembling this, the largest and most comprehensive collection of his work ever published. (Yep, it's bigger than From Hell!) Check out the interview here!

What a decade! The good folks over at The AV Club have just stuck their necks out on the line by announcing their picks for "The Best Comics of the '00s." The war rages on in their comment threads, of course, but that's what these things are for -- starting conversations!

For our part, we're chuffed to see Top Shelf take three of the top 25 positions, with James Kochalka's American Elf, Craig Thompson's Blankets, and Alex Robinson's Box Office Poison taking their places among some great works from other publishers. If you haven't experienced these three masterpieces for yourself... well, what are you waiting for?! Details and previews of each book can be found below:

Eddie Campbell's domination of all media continues, as he's recently done interviews with Library Journal, Comic Book Resources' Robot 6, and the fine folks at Publishers Weekly!

What major theme has Eddie recently discovered in his work that he never noticed before? What's his next book about? What makes Eddie say "suddenly, my wife had to deal with the possibility that I might be the well-known author I’ve always been claiming to be"? You'll have to read the interviews to find out!

It's all in anticipation of the full release of ALEC: The Years Have Pants, coming to you next month!

The good folks at The AV Club got an advance look at the upcoming Eddie Campbell omnibus Alec: The Years Have Pants, and they're calling it "one of the must-own releases of the year." Click here to read their review (as well as another rave review, of Kevin Cannon's awesome Far Arden)! Then mosey on over to the great interview between Eddie and The AV Club's Leonard Pierce, and watch Eddie drop some serious insight about his book, his life, the comics medium, the art of autobiography, and everything under the sun!

We're delighted to learn that Minneapolis cartoonist Will Dinski has won the prestigious Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics for his pitch-black mini Covered in Confusion! You can read the story here on Will's web site as well as order a copy (with a beautiful 2-color silkscreened cover) from his online shop!

Will has contributed a few stories to Top Shelf 2.0, which you can read here!

Great things are on the way from Will and Top Shelf in 2010... stay tuned for details!

Alex Dueben of Comic Book Resources has just posted a great interview with Eddie Campbell about his massive upcoming omnibus, Alec: The Years Have Pants! Click through to see Eddie's characteristically clever responses, as well as plenty of preview pages!

...in fact, he's exactly cool enough, according to the Harvey Awards committee and voters! This past weekend at the Baltimore Comic-Con, Alex was honored with the Harvey for Best Graphic Album - Original, for his latest book Too Cool to Be Forgotten.

The Harveys, which are nominated and elected by a ballot of comic professionals, have crossed paths with Alex before: Box Office Poison was nominated in 2001, and 2006 saw Tricked win the "Best Graphic Album" Harvey. He now has a second Harvey, which joins an Eisner, an Ignatz, and an Angoulême Prize for Best First Book, on Alex's crowded metaphorical mantel.

Congratulations to Alex and all the other Harvey winners!

Funny what a big-budget film adaptation starring Bruce Willis will do for your book... now more than ever, people are diving into the world of The Surrogates! Top Shelf is delighted to announce that Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele's graphic novel has now held on to the New York Times Best Seller list for three consecutive weeks! See for yourself at the Times' Arts Beat blog, and join us in congratulating the two creators. If you still haven't experienced The Surrogates, you can read a short preview here or download the first chapter for free for your iPhone.

And how about that Nate Powell?! On top of the 2008 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Debut, the LA Times Book Prize nomination, and the Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel, Nate recently continued his streak of honors by winning the 2009 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist! Nate's Swallow Me Whole is an incredible book that speaks to the confused teenager in all of us, and we're grateful that it's been so warmly received.

Rising superstar Nate Powell, whose Swallow Me Whole was previously awarded "Best Debut" in the 2008 Ignatz Awards (for the best book to debut at the 2008 SPX), has just been announced as a nominee for Best Artist in the 2009 Ignatz Awards, to be held at the 2009 SPX in Bethesda, MD from September 26-27. This marks the latest in a string of honors for Nate and Swallow Me Whole, which most recently received the Will Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel in July.

We offer loud congratulations to Nate and to all the Ignatz nominees, and we hope you're all looking forward to SPX! We at Top Shelf certainly are.

New footage continues to roll out of Touchstone Pictures' film adaptation of The Surrogates, debuting next month! Today, it's a host of never-before seen moments from the film, embedded in the tie-in music video "I Will Not Bow" from alt-rock band Breaking Benjamin. Notable parts include a shot of Ving Rhames in action as the Prophet and some amazing stunts from Radha Mitchell's character, Agent Peters! You can watch the whole thing here or click "MORE" to view it after the jump.

IGN has an exclusive new look at more Surrogates movie footage, combined with interviews with almost everybody -- director Jonathan Mostow, actors Bruce Willis, Rosamund Pike, Radha Mitchell, and James Francis Ginty, as well as Top Shelf's own Robert Venditti, author of the Surrogates graphic novels! Check out the video here or click "MORE" to view it after the jump.

Our pals at Diamond Comic Distributors are hosting an exclusive ten pages of the upcoming third book in Jeffrey Brown's SULK series of mini-graphic-novels: The Kind of Strength That Comes From Madness!!! Check out those never-before-seen pages, as well as a generous sampling of Sulk 1 (Bighead and Friends) and Sulk 2 (Deadly Awesome)!

Talk to your retailer now about Sulk 3 (in Previews now) and get ready to dive into Jeffrey's fevered imagination when the book arrives this October!

Touchstone Pictures and Wired have just made public this awesome new featurette exploring the real-life technology that is making The Surrogates -- both book and movie -- sound less like science fiction and more like, well, science. It also features some new footage from the Surrogates film as well as interviews with the cast and crew! You do not want to miss this incredibly cool little video. Click "more" to watch it!

The luscious new one-volume edition of Lost Girls, by Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, has reached stores in all its gold-foil-stamped beauty -- and in huge quantities! Alan and Melinda's erotic epic has been riding the "graphic books" section of the New York Times bestseller list for two weeks now, first at #2 and then again at #4. Congratulations to the creative couple, and we encourage readers over the age of 18 to investigate the book by clicking below!