Page from the upcoming PETER PAN: excerpt from Brecht Evens’s Neverland.
We begin a whole new decade and I’m as excited as any of you! I feel that we have no time to lose to own this new emerging era. As for the world of comics and graphic novels, I direct your attention to a new leader in all things beautiful and unusual, the publisher, Beehive Books. Beehive Books has demonstrated a commitment to excellence that will only continue to grow into 2020 and beyond. Here are some compelling facts and enticing news from Beehive Books:
DRACULA: THE EVIDENCE
ARTEMISIA
At Beehive we don’t believe in Instagrammish humble-bragging, so here’s some straight up old fashioned bragging about things we did this year
- We won three Cubes (two bronze and a silver) from the Art Director’s Club for the work of Paul Kepple, Yuko Shimizu and Maëlle Doliveux on THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE and our ILLUMINATED EDITIONS series!
- Those same two projects won the annual Communication Arts Design Annual competition for book design!
- THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE and LAAB MAGAZINE were nominated for a whopping three Eisner awards!
- LAAB MAGAZINE was featured in The New Yorker, which called it “the hottest comic at recent comic conventions!”
- LAAB #4 was listed among The Comics Journal’s Best Comics of 2019! THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE was one of Hyperallergic’s Best Books of The Year! Folio Magazine listed MADNESS IN CROWDS as one of 2019’s Best Books for Print People!
- We were profiled in The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Jewish Exponent!
- We won our first grant grant from the French Consulate to translate ARTEMISIA, by Tamia Baudouin and Nathalie Ferlut!
- We had our biggest Kickstarter ever: $179k for our second set of three Illuminated Editions… and then beat that record a few months later when we raised $225k for DRACULA: The Evidence!
ILLUMINATED EDITIONS
We are, first and foremost, dreamers of the wild-eyed variety. But publishing, this exercise in the possible, requires a keen eye on the bottom line. We’re learning to be better business-people as we go.
Due to the intimacy of our thousand-odd readership, the projects that have sustained us financially and kept this ship afloat have been the ambitious and elaborate (read: expensive) ones — our entirely implausible experimental briefcase-housed ephermeral facsimile of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; great books of the past, gloriously illuminated by the greatest cartoonists and graphic artists of the day; giant, deluxe, painstakingly researched monographs on master artists like Harrison Cady and Herbert Crowley, whose brilliant work must be saved from slipping into the forgotten past.
LAAB MAGAZINE #4: This Was Your Life!
Next year we want to push even further in the direction of our more elaborate and ambitious projects. Bizarre formats, profuse box sets, paper sculptures, printed art objects, limited edition handmade artist books… Startling voices, forgotten treasures, otherworldly inventions. Books within books and wheels within wheels. Our ambition is to build paper worlds into which our readers can disappear. Refuge from the quick-and-dirty disposability of an increasingly digital and mass-manufactured world. And if you have your own ideas for any projects that push the boundaries of publishing, we always love to hear your thoughts and submissions! Drop us a line at info@beehivebooks.com, or encourage your friends to do so.
