Angoulême Foreign Rights 2023

ANGOULÊME FOREIGN RIGHTS 2023

Forecasts

A Story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster

By Caroline E. Schuster Illustrated by Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno

© 2023 | ISBN: 9781487542238 Series: ethnoGRAPHIC 240 Pages | Dimensions: 7" x 10"

AVAILABLE MAY 2023

Based in the agrarian world of commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, Forecasts tells a story about what happens when global insurance companies promise financial safety nets to local farmers struggling with the effects of climate change. This striking graphic novel brings together original ethnographic research and Paraguayan gothic art to confront the limitations of finance to respond to a deteriorating environment.

Taking a human-centered approach to complex weather and financial models, Forecasts offers new ways of looking at overlapping speculative futures in a more-than-human landscape. Based on more than a year of fieldwork in Paraguay, the book follows one man's possible journeys through a season of planting and harvesting, buffeted by losses and sustained by the hope that he can cultivate conditions that will help his family thrive. Forecasts makes a sweeping account of environmental and financial risk accessible through the intimate story of one family's triumphs, heartbreaks, and hopes for the future.

Messages from Ukraine

By Gregg Bucken-Knapp and Joonas Sildre

© 2022 | ISBN: 9781487559830 Series: ethnoGRAPHIC 68 Pages | Dimensions: 8" x 10"

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that dominated headlines around the world. Millions of Ukrainians would flee the country, and a third of the population would be displaced. In the days following the invasion, Swedish migration expert Gregg Bucken-Knapp sent text messages to his Ukrainian colleagues, offering support and assistance. These were their responses.

In a series of graphic vignettes, Messages from Ukraine takes the words of Ukrainian migration professionals and transforms them into snapshots of how war affects the lives of everyday people: those who are forced to flee home and seek safety elsewhere, those who choose to stay and volunteer or fight, those who witness events unfolding from afar, and those who find themselves trapped in cities under siege. Messages from Ukraine captures a moment in time to tell a timeless story about war, displacement, determination, and resilience.

Proceeds from the sale of Messages from Ukraine will go to the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, a national charitable foundation that provides humanitarian aid to the people of Ukraine.

Lazarillo de Tormes

A Graphic Novel

By Enriqueta Zafra Illustrated by Jesús Mora

© 2021 | ISBN: 9781487529383 Series: Toronto Iberic 144 Pages | Dimensions: 8" x 10"

This is the first graphic novel adaptation of Lazarillo de Tormes, an anonymous sixteenth-century work that is credited with founding the literary genre of the picaresque novel. This genre includes not only works by Spanish authors like Miguel de Cervantes but also famous novels in English and American literature featuring the "anti-hero."

This translated and modern retelling of Lazarillo de Tormes offers a new approach to old questions about a book that has puzzled readers and critics alike for centuries. Who was its mysterious author? Why did the Inquisition forbid this seemingly harmless book? Who read the book and how was it understood? These and other questions are recreated in the graphic novel, offering a broader vision of the fortunes and adversities of a book that against all odds became a literary classic.

Contact: Kiley Venables | kvenables@utorontopress.com

Light in Dark Times

The Human Search for Meaning

By Alisse Waterston Illustrated by Charlotte Corden

© 2020 | ISBN: 9781487526405

Series: ethnoGRAPHIC

160 Pages | Dimensions: 6" x 9"

What will become of us in these trying times? How will we pass the time that we have on earth? In gorgeously rendered graphic form, Light in Dark Times invites readers to consider these questions by exploring the political catastrophes and moral disasters of the past and present, revealing issues that beg to be studied, understood, confronted, and resisted.

A profound work of anthropology and art, this book is for anyone yearning to understand the darkness and hoping to hold onto the light. It is a powerful story of encounters with writers, philosophers, activists, and anthropologists whose words are as meaningful today as they were during the times in which they were written. This book is at once a lament over the darkness of our times, an affirmation of the value of knowledge and introspection, and a consideration of truth, lies, and the dangers of the trivial. In a time when many of us struggle with the feeling that we cannot do enough to change the course of the future, this book is a call to action, asking us to envision and create an alternative world from the one in which we now live.

Gringo Love

Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil

By Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan Adapted by William Flynn Illustrated by Débora Santos

© 2020 | ISBN: 9781487594527 Series: ethnoGRAPHIC

200 Pages | Dimensions: 6" x 9"

In the city of Natal in northeastern Brazil, several local women negotiate the terms of their intimate relationships with foreign tourists, or gringos, in a situation often referred to as "sex tourism." These women have different experiences, but they share a similar desire to "escape" the social conditions of their lives in Brazil.

Based on original ethnographic research and presented in graphic form, Gringo Love explores the hopes, dreams, and realities of these women against a backdrop of deep social inequality and increasing state surveillance leading up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. It touches on important contemporary issues, including sexual economics, transnational mobility, romantic imaginaries, gender representation, race and inequality, and visual methods.

(Brazilian Portuguese rights sold)

Things That Art

A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity

By Lochlann Jain

© 2019 | ISBN: 9781487570552 Series: ethnoGRAPHIC 128 Pages | Dimensions: 8" x 8"

Lochlann Jain’s debut non-fiction graphic novel, Things That Art, playfully interrogates the order of things. Toying with the relationship between words and images, Jain’s whimsical compositions may seem straightforward. Upon closer inspection, however, the drawings reveal profound and startling paradoxes at the heart of how we make sense of the world.

Commentaries by architect and theorist Maria McVarish, poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, musician and English Professor Drew Daniel, and the author offer further insight into the drawings in this collection. A captivating look at the fundamental absurdities of everyday communication, Things That Art jolts us toward new forms of collation and collaboration.

Lissa

A

Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution

By Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye Illustrated by Caroline Brewer and Sarula Bao

© 2017 | ISBN: 9781487593476 Series: ethnoGRAPHIC 304 Pages | Dimensions: 6" x 9"

As young girls in Cairo, Anna and Layla strike up an unlikely friendship that crosses class, cultural, and religious divides. Years later, Anna learns that she may carry the hereditary cancer gene responsible for her mother's death. Meanwhile, Layla's family is faced with a difficult decision about kidney transplantation. Their friendship is put to the test when these medical crises reveal stark differences in their perspectives...until revolutionary unrest in Egypt changes their lives forever.

The first book in a new series, Lissa brings anthropological research to life in comic form, combining scholarly insights and accessible, visually-rich storytelling to foster greater understanding of global politics, inequalities, and solidarity.

(All rights available except Arabic)

Amplify

Graphic Narratives of Feminist Resistance

By Norah Bowman and Meg Braem Illustrated by Dominique Hui

© 2019 | ISBN: 9781487593629 184 Pages | Dimensions: 6" x 9"

In this highly original text—a collaboration between a college professor, a playwright, and an artist—graphic storytelling offers an emotionally resonant way for readers to understand and engage with feminism and resistance.

Issues of gender roles, intersectionality, and privilege are explored in seven beautifully illustrated graphic vignettes. Each vignette highlights unique moments and challenges in the struggle for feminist social justice. Brief background information provides context for the uninitiated, and further readings are suggested for those who would like to learn more. Finally, carefully crafted discussion questions help readers probe the key points in each narrative while connecting specific stories to more general concepts in gender studies and feminist theory.

Consequential Art

Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain

Edited by Samuel Amago and Matthew J. Marr

© 2019 | ISBN: 9781487505035 Series: Toronto Iberic 60 b&w illustrations 280 Pages | Dimensions: 6.25" x 9.25"

Spanish comics have attracted considerable critical attention internationally: dissertations have been written, monographs have been published, and an array of cultural institutions in Spain (the media, publishing houses, bookstores, museums, and archives) have increasingly promoted the pleasures, pertinence, and power of graphic narrative to an ever-expanding readership – all in an area of cultural production that was held, until recently, to be the stuff of child’s play, the unenlightened, or the unsophisticated. This volume takes up the charge of examining how contemporary comics in Spain have confronted questions of cultural legitimacy through serious and timely engagement with diverse themes, forms, and approaches – a collective undertaking that, while keenly in step with transnational theoretical trends, foregrounds local, regional, and national dimensions particular to the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century Spanish milieu. From memory and history to the economic and the political, and from the body and personal space to mental geography, the essays collected in Consequential Art account for several key ways in which a range of comics practitioners have deployed the image-text connection and alternative methods of seeing to interrogate some of the most significant cultural issues in Spain.

Comics Versus Art

By Bart Beaty

© 2012 | ISBN: 9781442612044 288 Pages | Dimensions: 6" x 9"

On the surface, the relationship between comics and the ‘high’ arts once seemed simple; comic books and strips could be mined for inspiration, but were not themselves considered legitimate art objects. Though this traditional distinction has begun to erode, the worlds of comics and art continue to occupy vastly different social spaces.

Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world, including museums, auction houses, and the art press. Bart Beaty's analysis centres around two questions: why were comics excluded from the history of art for most of the twentieth century, and what does it mean that comics production is now more closely aligned with the art world? Approaching this relationship for the first time through the lens of the sociology of culture, Beaty advances a completely novel approach to the comics form.

(Polish and Turkish rights sold)

Unpopular Culture

Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s

By Bart Beaty

© 2006 | ISBN: 9780802094124 Series: Studies in Book and Print Culture 318 Pages | Dimensions: 6" x 9"

In the last fifteen years or so, a wide community of artists working in a variety of western European nations have overturned the dominant traditions of comic book publishing as it has existed since the end of the Second World War. These artists reject both the traditional form and content of comic books (hardcover, full-colour 'albums' of humour or adventure stories, generally geared towards children), seeking instead to instil the medium with experimental and avant-garde tendencies commonly associated with the visual arts. Unpopular Culture addresses the transformation of the status of the comic book in Europe since 1990.

Increasingly, comic book artists seek to render a traditionally degraded aspect of popular culture un-popular, transforming it through the adoption of values borrowed from the field of 'high art.' The first English-language book to explore these issues, Unpopular Culture represents a challenge to received histories of art and popular culture that downplay significant historical anomalies in favour of more conventional narratives. In tracing the efforts of a large number of artists to disrupt the hegemony of high culture, Bart Beaty raises important questions about cultural value and its place as an important structuring element in contemporary social processes.

(Polish rights sold)