Comics, photobooks, illustrated zines and dream decoders: August’s Things has landed!

With a delicious dive into some of London’s best food establishments, an existential graphic novel, a handy illustrated guide to understanding your dreams, innovations in Risograph printing and zine-making, and a publication which grants autonomy and artistic empowerment to women speaking out about sexual harassment, August’s Things makes for a compelling and thought-provoking selection.

Aman: An Om Adventure

Aman is the latest instalment in London-based illustrator Andy Barron’s series of comics that take place in the world of Om, a vast, hostile world populated by strange, fantastical creatures seemingly bent on causing one another misery. Risograph-printed by Page Masters, the narrative comic strip plays out in high-contrast coral and deep blue tones, and exists at an interim between the nightmarish, industrial worlds of Kafka and the retro cartoon land of Tom and Jerry. Andy suggests: “For added thrills and chills, read while listening to Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King”.

Council Skies

Pete McKee’s publication offers an extensive look at the artist’s work from 2004 to the present. His cartoonesque paintings are informed by his experience of growing up on a council estate, and deliver a compelling social commentary on Britain’s often overlooked working class communities. The book compiles a selection of Peter’s sketches and over 70 colour plates of his paintings.

Ambrosia Volume six: London

With each of its editions, Ambrosia examines a different region through the cuisine that makes that place unique in food culture. Volume six focuses on our very own London, eating its way through the city from family-run businesses, street food and immigrant-run world cuisine establishments, to iconic pubs and fine dining. London’s diversity is palpable in the range of eats and treats and the publication is a celebration of this dynamic, colourful and delicious city.

Dream Decoder

What do you dream about? Dream Decoder presents a box of 60 cards that visualise and explain 60 of the most common dreams (and, indeed, nightmares). With text by Theresa Cheung and elegant, intricate illustrations by Harriet Lee-Merrion, the Dream Decoder offers the key to unlocking the secrets of your unconscious mind. As well as a fun diversion, consulting the cards is an exercise in self-awareness that teaches you to harness the knowledge held in the depths of your sleeping brain, and apply it to your waking life.

Flat Filters

Flat Filters is a collaborative graphic novel by illustrator Tal Brosh and writer Chino Moya. The pair’s debut publication together tells the story of a guy in his mid-30s who wakes up one morning to find that, where there was once a world populated by cities, trees and people, there is now only a vast yellow plain underfoot and a sunless sky overhead. What follows is an existential journey of self-discovery, tinged with absurdist, surreal humour.

The Beginning of the End, the End of the Beginning

Presented as “a fragmented message for selves everywhere,” this book by artist S153 consists of a series of black and white photographs of street paintings created across London, Melbourne and Glasgow between 2014 and 2018. Published by Archive Press and section-sewn with exposed binding, the project responds to the increasingly baleful current global situation.

Much Care Less

Daniel Kent and Sebastian Delaney have created an experimental and innovative Risographed book which aims to refer endlessly to the processes by which it was made. Masters from the black printing of the duo’s photographs were used to create hand-made monoprints, which were then scanned and reprinted on the reverse side of the press sheets in blue ink, so that a blue haze remains visible at the edges of the paper and at the centre of the folded and perforated pages which must be torn apart to reveal the pictures inside. The whole is held together by a rubber band colophon; orders of the book are accompanied by a unique poster.

Crude Intentions

With original illustrative contributions from over thirty female artists all over the world, including Tara Booth, Frances Cannon, Amber Vittoria, Kristen Liu-Wong, Sibba Hartunian and Aurélia Durand, Crude Intentions creates a much-needed space for women to speak out about their personal experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault. The publication is both a storytelling platform and a means of connecting women across the world, via the artistic interpretation of one woman’s first-person account by another woman. Crude Intentions is about compassion, community and taking ownership of one’s narrative.