Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask

Ryan, a shy, caffeine-addicted university student, can turn into a fly. Cassandra, a waitress at a greasy spoon he has a crush on, can make things disappear. They were made for each other—and to battle the forces of evil! As the Superheroes for Social Justice, Flyboy and Ms. Place take on the villains that inhabit their world: cigarette barons, redneck tabloids, and the patriarchy.

First published in 1999 by HarperCollins, Munroe was troubled by the ownership of the publisher by media magnate Rupert Murdoch. He decided to put the politics in Flyboy into practice and published his subsequent books via his own indie press.

This fifth anniversary No Media Kings edition includes a preview of his forthcoming fourth novel, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil.

Acclaim for Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask

“Jim Munroe has written the first novel to harness the energy, idealism, and cartoon-inspired playfulness of the new wave of culture jammers. It’s about time we have some superheroes to save us after the post-irony meltdown — forces of corporate darkness, beware.” — Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

“It’s an excellent book — a funny, cool riff on superpowers and twentysomethingness.” — Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman

“Voluble, inventive, goofily romantic, goofily comic. . .” — The Globe and Mail

“Witty without being acid, sensitive without being goopy, this is a Gen-X novel to treasure.” — Booklist

“A debut notable for the spectacular insouciance of its dialogue and an unstoppable, fearless, herky-jerky flow of inventive humour. Munroe masterfully carries off his admittedly weird conceits, suspends our disbelief, and gives us nothing but delight in his imagination.” — Kirkus

Books In Canada First Novel Award Nominee

“Finally, a novel about post-boomers that is actually generational, not generalized. Flyboy is specked with bright particulars—the fragile, earnest creatures Munroe magnifies are made from the same twinkly light they refract.” — R.M. Vaughan

Now Magazine‘s Top 20 Toronto Books

“Jim Munroe has created a genuinely hip, young and urban tale. Forget about all the other fiction that poses as slick and cool, forget the stylish authors that promise to be a voice for the next generation and then fail to deliver anything new. Flyboy is the real thing.” — Quill & Quire

Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Long-Arm Stapler

 Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, Novels  No Responses »
Oct 202015
 

sidzine-web

My eight-year-old Sidney tabled her first zine fair on Saturday. Of her three scary stories my favourite was from a weird dream she had called The Woman With Three Boobs, but I also liked Fonster: The Fish Monster and The Ghost Who Sang a Song. The last one was actually what started it all — I’d taken her to another zine fair and she’d gotten a blank notebook with a cartoon of a ghost with a microphone on the cover. One day, fairly uncharacteristically, she holed herself up in her room and wrote a story in the notebook inspired by the cover. I suggested we could make a few stories like these and sell them at the next zine fair, and she liked that idea. So we did the whole thing — rough draft, good draft, colour copy, collation, stapling, folding — as well as discussed the cost of the table and printing etc. We made 25 of each and decided to sell them at $2 each or $5 for 3. We also had a discussion about how catchy titles and covers were important, and I broke out my first novel Flyboy as an example.

And actually, I’ll interrupt my story to continue the 15th anniversary giveaway, as my free ebook this month is Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask…

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Flyboy Lives!

 Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, Novels, Press, Writing  Comments Off on Flyboy Lives!
Apr 162004
 

In a few days the No Media Kings 5th anniversary edition of Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask will be back from the printer.

My first book has been out of print for the last few years. The idea of pumping money into an old project wasn’t nearly as exciting as realizing a new one, so even though I got the rights back from HarperCollins I held off for a while. But fans of the book and booksellers alike kept asking about how they could get a copy–and they almost always wanted one with the Canadian cover, so I couldn’t just tell them to buy the still-in-print US edition.

So thanks to everyone who enthused this book back into print. “It’d make a great movie!” is something people say flatteringly often, and so I got the idea of promoting the re-release with movie-style trailers for the book. Two groups of indie filmmakers were into the idea and they did a great job, producing very different but intriguing adaptations.
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