Top Shelf Sale!

To celebrate The Surrogates movie wrapping principal photography, surviving San Diego ComicCon, and all the cool new summer and fall releases, for the next ten days -- through Friday 12th September -- Top Shelf, a regular US retailer and publisher at major British comics festivals, is having a giant $3 graphic novel web sale.

If you haven't visited Top Shelf's site before, you're in for a treat. This US retailer carries a huge range of indie graphic novels, including the work of creators such as Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Gary Spencer Millidge (Strangehaven) and Glen Dakin and many more.

During this sale period, when you visit the site, you'll find over 125 graphic novels and comics
on sale -- with 90 titles marked down to just $3 and a slew of other key titles just slashed!

Included in the sale are several issues of the brilliant Comic Book Artist Magazine, with issues profiling the work of talents such as Will Eisner (the double-sized memorial issue), Howard Chaykin, the wonderful Alex Nino, Darwyn Cooke, and Frank Cho.

There's plenty of Eddie Campbell titles in the sale, including several of his Alec collections such as The King Canute Crowd , along with Alan Moore & Jose Villarruba's The Mirror of Love and Glen Dakin's Abe: Wrong for the Right Reasons.

Also in the sale -- although not for $3 but definitely at a good price -- are the store's last 50 copies of Top Shelf's slipcase deluxe edition of Alan Moore's Lost Girls and a hardcover edition of From Hell.

"All we ask is that you hit a $30 minimum on sale and/or non-sale items (before shipping)," says owner Chris Staros. "It's a great opportunity to load up on all those graphic novels you've wanted to try, but just never got around to picking up."

Get 'em while supplies last!. To go directly to the list of items on sale, just click here: www.topshelfcomix.com/specialdeals

• For those wondering about The Surrogates, the sci-fi tale web site IGN described as "The Best Indie Book of the year", it's a highly acclaimed five-issue comic book series written by Robert Venditti, drawn by Brett Weldele, and published by Top Shelf Productions (Here's a link to the Top Shelf collection). A sequel, The Surrogates 2.0: Flesh and Bone, is scheduled for 2009. Directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Bruce Willis The Surrogates film is scheduled to be released in the US on 20 November 2009.

The story is set in the year 2054, when life has been reduced to a data feed. The fusing of virtual reality and cybernetics has ushered in the era of the personal surrogate, android substitutes that let users interact with the world without ever leaving their homes. It's a perfect world, and it's up to Detectives Harvey Greer and Pete Ford of the Metro Police Department to keep it that way. But to do so they’ll need to stop a techno-terrorist bent on returning society to a time when people lived their lives instead of merely experiencing them.

In the tradition of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, Top Shelf describe The Surrogates as more than just an action story with sci-fi trappings. Applying familiar tropes in unfamiliar ways, The Surrogates is about progress and whether there exists a tipping point at which technological advancement will stop enhancing and start hindering our lives. It is also a commentary on identity, the Western obsession with physical appearance, and the growing trend to use science as a means of providing consumers with beauty on demand.

The Surrogates collection includes all five issues of the critically-acclaimed comic book miniseries. Packed with bonus content, inside you will find never-before-seen sketches and artwork, as well as commentary from the creative team that brought this breakout story to the page.

• Buy The Surrogates from Top Shelf