READERSVOICE.COM: How did One Percent Press start up and can you tell a bit about it?

JOE LAMBERT: One Percent Press started with JP Coovert and Stephen Floyd. I don’t remember the details, but they were in SCAD (Savanna College of Art and Design) when it started, I think.

They distribute mini-comics and zines to a few shops around the country and attend various conventions throughout the year. And they also publish (is publish the right word?) albums by a few bands.

JP invited me to be a part of the group in 2006. He was a classmate of mine at CCS. Later they invited James Hindle and Alexis Frederick-Frost.

RV: What did you do at the last Small Press Expo at Bethesda, MD, near Washington DC?

JL: I exhibited at the One Percent Press table and the Sundays Anthology table. And I went around trading and spending way too much money.

RV: What are some of your stories about that will be published in your forthcoming book?

JL: My book published by Secret Acres will be called “I Will Bite You!” and most of the stories involve frustration and irrational reactions.

Most of the stories involve kids and siblings. And, something I didn’t realize until last year when several people brought this to my attention, most of the stories involve food.

RV: Can you recommend a few books you’ve come across over the years, whether fiction, comics, history, art books, or anything else?

JL: The Super Science Alliance by Eleanor Davis is amazing. It’s a graphic novel about a group of kids who are into science in a huge way and go about making things and solving mysteries. Very entertaining and funny and charming. Almost everything by Eleanor is awesome.

Jordan Crane’s comic book series Uptight is probably my favorite comic book currently being published. It comes out yearly (supposedly more often next year), is something like 32 pages and contains two or three short stories in each. Each issue usually contains stories that are different from one another.

The most recent issue had a story about a woman cheating on her boyfriend and another story about kids getting lost in the school cafeteria’s fridge.

The drawing style in one story was radically different than the other, but each was appropriate for the content it was illustrating.

I love and recommend everything Chris Ware does.

Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days is a sort of art book/graphic novel amalgamation by Al Columbia. It’s a collection of pages and illustrations from stories he’s scraped over the years. It’s gorgeous and terrifying and I look at it almost every day.

My Boy by Olivier Schrauwen is amazing. The publisher is Bries. It’s a graphic novel masterfully and lovingly drawn in the style of the old broadsheet Sunday newspaper comics, mostly like Windsor McKay. The book is a series of vignettes about a proud, upper-class man who has a very ugly baby son. Like the Columbia book, this is very beautiful, very funny and a little disturbing.

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