Fantagraphics Blog Kim Thompson

Swarte collectors will want to buy their copy of Is That All There Is? directly from us, as every mail-order copy ordered from Fantagraphics will be accompanied by "Actually, That Wasn't All There Was," the FBI•MINI giveaway featuring a half-dozen hilarious Jurassic-era Swarte comics stories that have not been in print for over 40 years, and have never been seen in English! (Even I was totally unfamiliar with them.) I'd hate to pick favorites, but this may be the most collectible FBI•MINI of them all, showcasing Swarte's earliest, pre-Hergé-pastiche, more underground-y style. A revelation! And if you've already pre-ordered your…

(Click for larger image) The first image is from Nostalgia Press's 1978 re-colored version.The second image is from Fantagraphics Books' 1991 re-colored version.The third image is from the original Syndicate proof sheets which will eventually be used in Fantagraphics' Prince Valiant Volume 6 later this year. While I think the Danish colorists behind the 1991 version made a (heh) valiant effort at capturing the glory of Foster (the less said about the Nostalgia Press version the better), it's pretty obvious which one is the keeper here. (Also, Foster didn't make the native Americans the color of boiled lobsters.)

I don't think this needs further comment. (Click image to enlarge.)

Guess what classic… well, it seems almost wrong to call something this slickly designed and smartly edited and overall wonderful a "fanzine," but let's go with "fanzine" anyway… so guess which classic fanzine is returning after a five-year hiatus this Spring?

We are proud and pleased to be publishing our first Nicolas Mahler book (a full-color hardcover, no less) this coming April: ANGELMAN. As a special blog bonus, we will serialize the first quarter of the book with the rest of our weekly digital comics, beginning this Friday… at the end of which, you will be so absorbed in Angelman's travails that you will have no choice but to pick up the book. Enjoy! Here is the title page of the book, to further whet your appetite. Between this and Jaime Hernandez's GOD AND SCIENCE, Fantagraphics' 2012 goal will be to…

There are many ways to describe R.C. Harvey, but, as anyone who has accidentally dropped his nearly-1,000-page opus Meanwhile… A Biography of Milton Caniff on his or her toes can attest, "man of few words" is not necessarily one of them. (I say this as someone who read each and every word in Meanwhile… with delight and fascination.) So it should have come as no surprise to us when Harv, commissioned to write a set of elucidatory notes for the first Pogo volume and given no word limit (as is our jauntily laissez-faire method here at Fantagraphics), turned in a…

Impatient Adèle Blanc-Sec readers have been quizzing me about when they can expect the next Adèle volume, so I thought I'd give everyone a swift update that's not buried in the comments section on the tcj.com message board. First, just as it was necessary to release The Arctic Marauder before the second volume of Adèle Blanc-Sec in order to fully sell the gag of the former book's cast suddenly showing up in the latter's, we need to publish yet another earlier Tardi book, Adieu Brindavoine, before moving onto our third Adèle book, because Brindavoine plays a major role in it…

(a partial assortment) I always was very fond of the mini-comics format — take two to four 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, fold them once, staple, and voilà! You have an adorable little 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 comic book for mere pennies. But I could never really figure out what to do with this old-school, low-tech format. Until now! For this catalog season, we have created 21 "FBI•MINI" booklets (most in this format, although there are a few oddities), as premiums for customers who order books directly from us. They are available free with the purchase of their "matching"…

A group of us are waiting to be served in a restaurant. The waiter arrives, and the person facing me evidently ordered paper-wrapped baked owl. (What he gets looks like a little owl mummy.) I puzzle over why this seems somehow wrong and disturbing even as the diner peels off the first bit of the wrapping, releasing a gust of cooked-bird steam and exposing a naked, baked owl wing. It actually looks pretty tasty. The diner sitting next to me is Françoise Mouly, which, although tenuous at best, is enough of a connection for me to consider this a comics-related…

Okay, so Joost Swarte threw me one last curve ball with this wordplay-heavy sequence. [click for larger version] The lady is complaining that the fall has broken her just-purchased "ballen" (round Christmas tree ornaments) and her "piek" (an ornament for the top of the tree), but both words have a sexual connotation ("balls" and "dick" if you will), resulting in a Beavis and Butt-head huh-huh-huh effect. "Balls" works easily in either language, but the "piek" follow-up stumped me for days (not least because I had to ask Joost to explain it, which he did). And then I figured it out….