It’s impossible to take a bad picture of this man. (image via Wikimedia)

The Guardian has a tight, concise story about Alan Moore‘s new cinderblock of a novel, which runs at a million words. You can click through the link to browse the insane details, though do you really need more than “savage, hallucinating Enid Blyton” “a chapter in the form of a Samuel Beckett play, because the author once visited the town to play cricket” and the shoutout to this blog’s namesake?

It should noted that Moore’s newest is only literally groundbreaking; multiple other graphic novels, previously acquired under a “kettlebell contract” in which royalties are tied to weight, are poised to be announced this week. See below for the full list, another MobyLives exclusive.

Frank Miller’s History Of The Trilby (Self-published): In this century-spanning space-opera/noir, Miller chronicles the “only hat worth a fuck” from its origin in a 19th-century du Maurier stage adaptation, through the lens of the “immortal self-fucking-made luminously scarred anti-villain” Kant Fowler. Early teases of the material, which reportedly runs at a full 2000+ pages, have been described by readers as “surprisingly nonracist, at least just the pages I read” and “terse.”

Chris Ware’s Not Holding Back Anymore (McSweeney’s): Ware’s newest, a saga set in his birth city Omaha, is being published as a shipping container that includes several crates of microfiche, individually labeled bottles of unfiltered Platte River water to be drank in any order you choose, a fold-out couch/flipbook, a hope chest that is also on fire, and punchcards for a fully functioning ENIAC computer that only runs on numbing sadness (ENIAC sold seperately).

Craig Thompson’s The Entire Mesozoic Era (Pantheon): Thompson reportedly paid the Natural History Museum an undisclosed sum to “just close up shop for a month and give me the run of the place” and is reportedly sourcing his inks and brushes/pens solely from 255-million-year-old materials. No text excerpts have been released but spreads are available for download from the Utah Data Center.

Erika Moen’s The Organic Chemistry Of Every Sex Toy (Abrams): Moen’s book-length extension of her highly enjoyable webcomic takes a turn into hardcore orgo chem, in an approach described by the author as “exhaustive at worst.” Includes geological histories of the petroleum and silica deposits from which raw sex toy materials are mined, four-color molecular mapping of every cellulose variant in KY jelly, and a 700-page section that Moen describes “will do for phthalates what Sinclair did for slaughterhouses.”

And of course, Randall Munroe’s A Single-Sided Printout of This Comic (Kinko’s).