No. 2 The Five Pagodas | February 2013
No. 1 Shanghai Pictorial | February 2012
SPARTAN HOLIDAY; Dispatches from
the Road & Notes on Visual Culture
Written and Illustrated by D.B. Dowd
40 pages fully illustrated, $12.95 USD
To celebrate a Spartan Holiday is to wring pleasure from modest stuff. To look and listen, to get a fix on things as they are… Observe, slowly. Engage the world like a traveler, canny but agape, whether five or fifty or 5,000 miles from home… That’s what you can expect here. An eyeful. Several times a year.
inquiries: mail@spartanholiday.com
Ulcer City Publications LLC
7247 Princeton Ave, St. Louis, MO 63130
Would you like to sell Spartan Holiday in your bookstore, comic book shop, cafe or other retail establishment? We’d love to work with you. Please contact us at the email address above.
“A picture story travelogue… elegantly blend[s] drawing, type and image in the finest Pushpin Graphic tradition.”
~ Dan Nadel, The Comics Journal blog
“A juicy little number… full of intellectually and visually engaging content.” ~ Jaleen Grove, drawn.ca
“Dowd embraces the art of visual journalism …[He is] an intelligent observer of life and art, and an eloquent commentator on the places where the two intersect… Life’s small moments are transformed from the mundane to the sublime.” ~Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, Chief Curator, Norman Rockwell Museum
“At once sketchbook, travel guide, and diary, D.B. Dowd’s Spartan Holiday is as much about the terrain of the artist’s imagination as it is about looking as a kind of action, or travel as a way to reshape perception. The pictures and words here are forms of enacted reverie.” ~ Buzz Spector, Artist
and Dean of the College of Art,
Washington University in St. Louis