Festivals, bookstores and presses: the holy trinity of indie comics. TCAF co-founder and Beguiling owner Peter Birkemoe can now claim a hand in all three. The Beguiling, Toronto’s legendary comic book store, recently announced the launch of a publishing project mysteriously named BDP.
“I constantly see books where my reaction is, if this were in English, I could really sell this,” Birkemoe explains, saying that BDP will focus on artful and somewhat smutty work that he can’t often recommend to traditional presses. “We’ve had delightful risqué content come our way in the form of zines, but no publisher is making this a focus.”
Given this gap in translated smut, BPD’s first book is Natsuko Ishitsuyo’s Magician A, six stories of young women discovering their sexuality, translated by the award-winning translator Jocelyne Allen, who first recommended the book to Birkemoe. You can support the project and pre-order a copy here.