#1-2 SELL OUT (AGAIN!)
June's ACTION PHILOSOPHERS GIANT-SIZE THING TPB reprints #1-3 of the award-winning series
Comic books have boasted many popular genres over the decades — super heroes, horror, war, crime, science fiction, romance, and more — but who knew that philosophy would join them?
No one’s more shocked than writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan
Dunlavey, co-creators and publishers of the award-winning non-fiction humor series Action Philosophers!, as they announced that their first issue has sold out of its second printing and, thanks to a onrush of rabid fans at the first New York Comic Con, the second issue has vanished as well.
With quantities of #3 almost gone due to strong reorder activity, Fred and Ryan’s company, Evil Twin Comics, has announced that a 96-page trade paperback, ACTION PHILOSOPHERS GIANT-SIZE THING Vol. 1, will ship in June, collecting all three of their sold-out and/or soon-to-be-sold-out issues: Original flavor Action Philosophers #1, Action Philosophers All-Sex Special (#2), and Action Philosophers Self-Help for Stupid Ugly Losers (#3).
“We basically started this as a lark, just to do a different kind of humor comic” said artist Dunlavey. “Fred and I are totally blown away that we’re as successful as we are.”
“I think the bottom line is that people everywhere are hungry for
ideas, and as the work of Scott McCloud and Larry Gonick have already proven, comic books are a terrific medium for conveying them,” added writer Van Lente.
“In fact, I would go so far to say that the more complex the ideas – like hardcore philosophical concepts – comics are in fact a superior method than prose to convey them,” Van Lente said. “Look at political cartoons and how they convey complex ideas about current events in newspapers around the world everyday … in many ways we think of our Action Philosophers stories as really long political cartoons.”
A Shocking True Story of Earth-Shattering Genius (or: How They Think of This Stuff) Van Lente originally wrote the first Action Philosophers story for Dunlavey as a submission to the Small Press Expo anthology, when that indy stalwart produced an all-biography themed edition.
“At the time, Ryan was a big collector of action figures, and I thought it would be funny to do a little comic that would be bundled in an action figure package, like the old Masters of the Universe figures used to have,” Van Lente remembered. “So I wrote a script that was meant to go with a Friedrich Nietzsche action figure, and thus the concept for Action Philosophers! was born.”
The SPX ended up rejecting the story, however, but Ryan submitted it to a start-up comics magazine, Prophecy, which commissioned more installments. Ryan and Fred produced two more philosophy comic strips, about Plato and the founder of Zen Buddhism, the Indian monk Bodhidharma, before Prophecy’s financing fell through.
“We had a full issue’s worth of material and nowhere to print them,” Dunlavey said. “We tried a couple of the big-name publishers, but they turned us down. It was actually Chris Staros of Top Shelf who recommended that we apply for the Xeric Grant, for which we will be eternally grateful.”
Fred and Ryan won a Xeric Grant for self-publishing in 2004; though, thanks for their success, they are now entirely self-funded. And with a ISBN-bearing, bar-coded TPB on the way, will an invasion of schools, libraries and bookstores by their patented variety of highbrow wackiness soon follow?
Fred and Ryan wouldn’t say.
But they did cackle evilly.
ACTION PHILOSOPHERS GIANT-SIZE THING Vol. 1 (ISBN # 0-9778329-0-2) is a 96-page squarebound trade paperback detailing the lives and thoughts of history’s A-list brain trust in a hip and humorous fashion that proves that philosophy is not just the province of boring, tweed-enveloped history professors.
Profiled in this book with the ActPhilo posse's award-winning combo of insightful graphical commentary and toilet humor are:
• Plato: Wrestling Superstar of Ancient Greece!
• Nietzsche: The Übermench!
• Bodhidharma: Grandmaster of Kung Fu (and Zen Buddhism!)
• Thomas Jefferson stars in “I Was the President’s Love Slave!”
• The hard-drinking, hard-loving St. Augustine!
• Ayn Rand and her Non-Objectivist Love Affair!
• And the trifecta from Stupid Ugly Losers:
o Hit the couch with Sigmund Freud!
o Unlock the unconscious with Carl Jung!
___o Go on the Hero’s Journey with Joseph Campbell, the ________Master of Mythology!
A black-and-white TPB retailing for $6.95, the book solicits in the Evil Twin Comics section of the April 2006 PREVIEWS (for shipment in June).
Learn more about Action Philosophers than you can possibly stand at http://www.actionphilosophers.com
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