2007 is the start of something good!
This page is a news blog about the latest happenings at Iberian Press. Check in to read the real life saga of a small press (that would be us) as it tries to break into the comic/graphic novel market. Our highs and our lows...hopefully more highs than lows. Click here for the 2006 News Blog or www.myspace.com/SamuraiElf.
November 3
We're hard at work on volume 2 of Samurai Elf, which will debut at the NY Comic Convention in April. There's still a lot of flats (Suzy) and painting/rendering (Miguel) to do, but we'll do it, damn it! Who needs sleep? We recently moved to a new apartment, still in Brooklyn. Our office is bigger which is great for the late nights and loud music. It put us off for a few weeks, but we're settling in and our workshop is in full gear.
Here's some footage of the New York's Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. Actually, it's Miguel and Suzy walking from Union Square to 6th Ave, going west on 15th Street, and ending at the parade. There are no cuts, just one long shot. It gives you a good sense of what it's like to be in NY on Halloween. People just walk around dressed in costumes like it's the most normal thing in the world. Over 2 million attended this year. Watch below or click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6o4cS2Eco
August 25
We're having a fun time with out MySpace page - http://www.myspace.com/samuraielf! What a great way to connect with other people from all over the world. It blows us away when we see so many talented artists, writers, musicians, directors, photographers, etc. Feel free to be our friends; the more the merrier. We'd love to check out your pages.
August 3
Here's a couple of press releases announcing that the Samurai Elf webcomic is available in 4 languages!
July 18
Iberian Press has launched 2 new sites! We are now available in 4 languages - English, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese (the webcomic of Samurai Elf is ready for all of our Japanese readers). Woohoo! We're very excited.
We want to especially thank all of our translators for their hard work!
- Miguel Guerra and Maria Guerra Overton for the Spanish
- Suzy Dias and her mom Madalena Dias Costa for the Portuguese
- Takashi Iwaide and Jennifer Cousins Iwaide for the Japanese
We entirely redesigned our homepage with links to each language, or you can go directly to each site:
July 7
We spent the 4th of July in the best place in the U.S. - Brooklyn! At the 92nd annual "Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest." Here's a video Suzy shot from our spot in the crowd. We had a terrible view of the contestants, but it makes you feel like you were there. Click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EcK_a_7G88 or view below:
Fun fact: Around 1870 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman began selling sausages in rolls. In 1916, an employee of Feltman's named Nathan Handwerker (a Polish immigrant) didn't invent the hotdog, but he brought them to the masses when he went into business for himself and opened Nathan's Famous. Handwerker's original store is in the same spot today, on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues, where the contest still takes place.
June 10
We're working away on book 2 and it will hit stores at year end. Here's a preview of the cover for
Samurai Elf (vol 2): Gathering Storm!
May 16
Miguel Guerra wrote, illustrated and painted, Bedbugs, a short story in the July issue of Heavy Metal Magazine! On sale now. We're all very proud of him! For a preview, click on an image below or go to
http://www.metaltv.com/
April 22
Samurai Elf (book 1): Set Apart has received a second review from Book Loons! We appreciate it very much and hope you enjoy reading it.
http://www.bookloons.com/cgi-bin/Columns.asp?name=0704&type=Between%20the%20Lines
Although some parts of the review have left us a bit confused. For example, "...Samurai Elf does use computer-generated art...." There is no computer generated art. Perhaps the reviewer thought Miguel's drawings were so 3-D looking, they had to have been made using a computer graphics program? We're not sure, but we'll take that as a compliment! In our good old Brooklyn apartment, Miguel draws every page with pencil and paper, inks them, passes them to Suzy who adds the flats in Photoshop, and then Miguel renders everything. Suzy then adds the world bubbles and dialogue in Illustrator. No mystery, just lots of hard work.
March 26
Lots of big news for us here in the last few days. We thought we'd heard it all when we found out that
Barnes & Noble purchased even more copies of Samurai Elf. Then we received confirmation that Samurai Elf will soon be in the BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY! This is HUGE! Miguel and Suzy were so excited, they roamed the streets of New York in a state of aimless bliss, but then had to get back to Brooklyn to keep working on volume 2 called, Gathering Storm.
Milestones so far in 2007:
- January: Heavy Metal Magazine accepts "Bed Bugs" from Miguel for the July issue, in stores in May
- March: Barnes & Noble orders more copies of Samurai Elf
- March: Samurai Elf accepted by the Brooklyn Public Library
March 6
It's here! The free eComic version Alric the Wild! + the teaser are now available at AlricTheWild.com. This all ages graphic novel will be available in stores by November or December of this year.
More language updates. Not only will we have book 1 of Samurai Elf: Set Apart available online in English, Spanish and Portuguese, but we will also have the first 25 pages in Japanese! A big thank you to our friends Takashi and Jennifer! We're very excited about bringing our books to a global audience.
February 27
Samurai Elf now has a new distributor - Baker & Taylor! Booksellers and libraries can purchase Samurai Elf directly from them. This is great news here at Iberian Press. Here's some background:
"Baker & Taylor, founded in 1828, is the world's leading distributor of books, video, and music products to public and academic libraries. It is also a global leader in the distribution of books and entertainment products to many of the country's leading retailers, including Internet retailers, as well as thousands of independent book, music and video stores." (Click here for more)
February 16
For those of you who really connected with Miguel's all ages character Alric the Wild, you can now watch a teaser/trialer at AlricTheWild.com. The eComic will be available on March 1st, so be sure to drop by.
BIG NEWS! A Spanish and Portuguese version of this site, including both our Samurai Elf and Alric The Wild eComics, is coming soon! We're still busy at work, but we promise it'll be here by the summer.
January 16
Check out the latest issue of Heavy Metal Magazine (March 2007), where Miguel Guerra translated the following fantastic short stories: The Inferno by Alfonso Azpiri, The Sea and Me by Raul Trevino, Sataka by Luis Royo, and Forbidden Parts by Eckart Breitschuh (artist) and Joseph Rother (writer). If you click on the link (above), you can view sample pages online.
January 10
Miguel finished drawing all 218 pages of Samuari Elf™ (vol.2 in a 7 part series). They look fantastic! He's now inking them and then Suzy will lay down the 'flats' or base colors (in our case, shades of grey since Samurai Elf is greyscale) and she'll pass the pages back to Miguel so he can add all the details, like the highlights and shading. Book 2 will be ready for the grand unveiling at the 2007 Comic-Con International in San Diego.
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