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Release Day: That Other Dashwood Girl

DID YOU MISS IT? The Release Day for That Other Dashwood Girl

We are excited for the release of The Other Dashwood Girl by A.R, Farina!

Sometimes, you must be totally lost to finally find yourself.

Maggie Dashwood thought her whole life was laid out for her. Her well-to-do father had a plan that she and her two older sisters would follow to ensure the family’s success. When tragedy strikes, everything she knows about the world changes, and her life is turned upside down.

Now, she, her mother and her two sisters must leave behind everything they’ve ever known while relying on the charity of others to begin again. Stranded in a new place with relative strangers, the Dashwoods try to stay a family while they work through their grief and find out if life can go on.

Will the family survive in-tact? Will Maggie discover her true self? This modern-day retelling of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is full of heart, tears, and ultimately, triumph.

You can order this book  in all formats directly from our 4HP Website and receive 10% OFF using coupon code 4HP10!

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Release Day: Comics Lit Vol. 1

We are excited for the release of Comic Lit Vol 1 by Alyson Shelton, Eric Lee, Kelly Gaines, Seth Singleton, AA McCartney, Heath Fodor, A.R. Farina, Tonya Todd, and Anthony D. Holt Jr.!

Comic books are high art.

They—and their graphic novel counterparts—harken back to classic literature and artworks. Through a series of essays, the authors will illustrate that modern pop culture characters are direct descendants of classic works of literature and their visual depiction is inspired by the works of master artists.

Join us as we peel back layers to discover gothic influences, representations of badass females, uses of the mask, and the new look of Rappaccini’s Daughter as well as discuss teaching comics in college, Black identity and power, mythological and religious tie-ins, and many more correlations hidden within the pages of action-packed heroes and villains. The essayists in this collection are, first and foremost, comic book fans with extensive backgrounds in art, film, education, literature, and writing.

Comics Lit Vol. 1 contains essays by Alyson Shelton, Eric Lee, Kelly Gaines, Seth Singleton, AA McCartney, Heath Fodor, A.R. Farina, Tonya Todd, and Anthony D. Holt Jr. Foreword by Bryan Edward Hill.

You can order this book  in all formats directly from our 4HP Website and receive 10% OFF using coupon code 4HP10!

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Welcome to Mansfield Wins FAPA President’s Book Award!

We are excited to announce A.R. Farina has won the Bronze President’s Book Award from FAPA for Welcome to Mansfield – Book 1 in The Austen Chronicles.

4 Horsemen is so excited to bring you this Jane Austen retelling. 

Sometimes you have to leave home to find where you really belong.

Junior Price wanted desperately to get out of her small town and the demands of her big family. Upon winning a scholarship to an elite private college thousands of miles away, she packed her bags and went to find her place in the world. She soon discovers that she may not be ready to be out on her own.

Mansfield College is full of the rich and the wealthy who play by a whole different set of rules than Junior understands. She tries her best to fit in and follow her heart only to discover that her small-town southern charm doesn’t work on everyone.

Will she become someone she doesn’t recognize to try to make everyone happy or will she find herself as she becomes the young woman she wants to be? This book is a modern-day, coming-of-age retelling of the classic Jane Austen story filled with heartache and friendship.

You can buy this book and the next in the series here:

You can see the complete list of winners here:

https://www.myfapa.org/copy-of-2023-year-s-medalists

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The Origin Story of Comic Lit

ARF: The idea of Comics Lit actually started over 30 years ago. I was in my first year of college (University for our friends across the pond) and I was taking an interdisciplinary class where we took a look at how the humanities in general and classic works of literature in particular intersected with our lives. As a comic nerd, I thought it would be fun to start comparing comic book characters and storylines to classic characters and stories from literature. 

I made all kinds of connections to tragic figures like Sisyphus as Spider-man or Empusa the shapeshifter as the inspiration for Mystique. I could see how much of the DC Pantheon was straight from Shakespeare. Lex Luthor is Richard III. Jimmy Olson is Horatio. Batman is Henry V. I wasn’t limited to just those plays of course. It was then that I first made the argument that Poison Ivy was inspired by Hawthorne’s short story “Rappicunni’s Daughter.” My ideas were not fully formed then, but I never really stopped thinking about them. I would try them out on my students and push them to make broad connections and while they often didn’t compare literature to comics, they found other amazing ways to connect the old with the new.

Flash forward 25 ish years to a conversation I was having off the mic during the recording of an episode of my Indie Comics Spotlight podcast on the Comics in Motion network.  I mentioned something about my Poison Ivy idea and he mentioned he always thought the same thing about Cyborg and Frankenstein’s Monster. We started brainstorming about making a collection of essays based on these two ideas.

I gathered a team of nerds and thankfully for me, and this project, one of them was Ms. Tonya Todd, whom I met for the first time in this life through a mutual podcasting friend Mike Burton. Unfortunately, because of some pandemic stuff, and other just crossed wires, the project sat in purgatory for years. Then Tonya was at a conference and she mentioned this project to Valerie Willis and…

TT: Before I even finished describing the pitch for the collection, Valerie was pining, eyes-wide,  arms-outstretched, and reaching through the screen with gimme-gimme hands. This was a live event, so I couldn’t jump onto a call with Tony to ask his permission about sharing details for what he had in mind. My plan was to gauge their interest and possibly connect 4HP with him after the conference. But when Erika joined Val’s enthusiasm, I sent up a silent prayer that Tony would forgive me for representing his project. Dear reader, he did! 

ARF: So here we are now, somehow, via her magic powers, Tonya got one of my comic book idols, Bryan Edward Hill, to do the foreword and Volume One is ready for the world. Just like the idea that Ivy was inspired by Hawthorne, the idea that Bruce Wayne and Henry V share some DNA has never left me, and so, as we gather essays for Volume 2, Tonya and I can announce that we will be writing that very essay together, in two parts. It should be epic.