Drawn & Quarterly announced it has acquired the publishing rights to Craig Thompson’s Blankets, along with Leanne Shapton’s Was She Pretty?, Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less and Vanessa Davis’ Spaniel Rage.

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“In the past ten years we have seen our backlist explode via university course adoptions; consumers hungry for the medium’s history; and retailers happy to have a deep back stock of titles and not just Wednesday’s new releases,” said D&Q Executive Editor Tom Devlin. “So we sought to re-publish a handful of modern classics that like Hicksville and Berlin did not start out with D&Q.”

Craig Thompson’s Blankets, originally published by Top Shelf, won the Harvey, Eisner, and Ignatz awards for "Best Graphic Novel" in 2004.  Thompson took his next work, Habibi, to Random House’s literary imprint Pantheon, and his most recent book, the tween-targeted Space Dumpins, is due from Scholastic in August (see “Craig Thompson's 'Space Dumplins'”).  Top Shelf was recently purchased by IDW Publishing (see “IDW Acquires Top Shelf”).

D&Q plans to publish the new edition of Blankets this fall, in both paperback and hardcover.  Leanne Sharpton’s Was She Pretty?, originally published by Simon & Schuster’s Sarah Crichton Books in 2006, will be printed in paperback in Winter 2016. A new paperback version of Vanessa Davis’ Spaniel Rage, originally published by now-defunct Buenaventura Press in 2005, is scheduled for Spring 2016. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less by Sarah Glidden, published by Vertigo Comics in 2011, will be released in paperback in Fall 2016.