Spotlight Titles From Soaring Penguin Press - Blessed Cure, Salmonella Smorgasbord, NORD & I Do I Don't
Out now and coming soon
Soaring Penguin Press has an excellent selection of titles available now and soon. Here is a selection of what you can expect from them. Available now is Blessed Cure, Salmonella Smorgasbord and NORD with I Do I Don’t coming soon1.
Blessed Cure By Mário César
Blessed Cure is an awarded LGBTQ+ graphic novel by Brazilian author Mário César that portrays what it is like to have a life marked by homophobia and the effects of sexual reversal therapies - Conversion Therapy - that try to cure something that is not a disease.
Since he was a child, Acácio do Nascimento was a different boy from others. He rather playing with dolls to playing soccer, the hula hoop interested him more than cowboy pistols. Scared by the possibility of their son was a homosexual, Mara and Galdino submit Acácio since he was five years old to several treatments for him to become a normal boy like the others.
In 1990 the World Health Organization (WHO) stopped considering homosexuality a disease. Based on this understanding, a 1999 resolution by the Brazilian Federal Council of Psychology prohibited professionals from applying therapies to try to change sexual orientation in Brazil. Even so, the so-called “gay cure”, time and again, comes into the spotlight due to the greed of those who aim to profit from ignorance and prejudice. Conservative groups want to subject perfectly healthy people to abusive treatments and, often, homosexuals themselves subordinate themselves to medieval methods to live up to the expectations of others.
Blessed Cure narrates Acácio’s life through the decades since the 60’s. Each chapter shows the provocations of other children at school, the awakening of his sexuality as a teenager, the demands of his parents for him to fit in with the standards dictated by the majority, the beginning of his adult life, the first time he falls in love with another man, the persecution of the Brazilian military dictatorship against LGBTQ+ people, the prejudice in the workplace and the dilemma between following his most intimate instincts or going according to what society imposes and marrying a woman.
Discover if Acácio will keep on living a heteronormative life he never chose for himself or if he’s going to live his truth.
Do I Don’t: How to build a better marriage by Chandrama Anderson & Nur Jaffar Litap
They say that marriage doesn’t come with a manual. Now it does – in graphic detail.
I Do I Don’t: How to Build a Better Marriage tells the story of Ben and Grace on their journey of learning and practicing the tools and skills needed for a lifetime of intimacy. Each chapter introduces a new relationship skill, and ends with Putting It In Practice, a set of easy-tofollow exercises to help the reader develop a personal understanding of the skills needed to build and strengthen _any_ relationship.
Written by acclaimed psychotherapist Chandrama Anderson MA, LMFT, and engagingly illustrated by rising young artist Nur Jaffar Latip, I Do I Don’t will help any reader to Build a Better Marriage.
NORD by Martin Simpson
A Viking King who has lost EVERYTHING, a devious plot hatched by the trickster God Loki and a quest to defeat Death itself!
To seek these things...head NORTH!
Blurring the line between a graphic novel and a picture book, NORD is a visual tour de force that will take you on an epic journey through myth and fantasy.
Salmonella Smorgasbord: A Collection of Crimes Against Cartooning by Mark Stafford
A compilation of comics, art and graphics by the cartoonist Mark Stafford, collecting his small press books, magazine strips, anthology contributions and previously unpublished works under two covers for the first time. Salmonella Smorgasbord will also contain a hefty selection of Mark’s illustration work, as well as theatre posters, record covers, beer labels and t-shirt designs, cartoons, collaborations and other flights of fancy. From the rare and unforgettable to the obscure and inexcusable, if he rendered it it will all be here. Apart from the stuff he left out.
Coming out in the UK November 2023, the US April 2024