Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental [New Edition] by Drew Friedman & Josh Alan Friedman http://www.fantagraphics.com/anysimilarity 88-page black & white 9.25" x 12.25" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-521-1 See Previews / Order Now Finally back in print, Any Similarity… is a collection of Drew Friedman’s earliest comic strips and illustrations, featuring his most obsessively stippled black-and-white panels and his most hilarious wise-guy takes on the stars and demi-stars and never-quite-stars of that swamp we like to call showbiz. In these strips, many of them…
Daily OCD: 4/12-4/13/12
Today's (and yesterday's when it was slow) Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "The Dutch artist and designer Joost Swarte has a tremendous reputation among cartoon-art aficionados, given his tiny body of comics work. The answer to the title of his 40-year retrospective, Is That All There Is?, is: 'Pretty much, yeah.'… Plot is beside the point. Swarte is more concerned with formal purity, and with making the deep structures of cartooning visible. He pares his art to mechanical, hard-edged vectors and curves: caricature triple-distilled into symbolic visual shorthand, with every line canted just so. His geometrically precise, nearly architectural…
Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips 1916-1924 by George Herriman – Previews, Now in Stock
Now in stock in our warehouse and shipping to our mail-order customers: Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips 1916-1924 by George Herriman 600-page black & white/color 9" x 12" hardcover • $95.00 See Previews / Order Now Our final limited-edition deluxe Krazy hardcover (it's Volume 1, but the third to be published) collects the three Krazy & Ignatz softcover books which comprehensively compile the first nine years (1916 through 1924) of Krazy Kat Sunday strips, under hard covers. It's not a slipcase, it's a single hardcover book. The covers to the original three softcover books are NOT included, but…
Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924: At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True by George Herriman – Now in Stock
Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924: At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True by George Herriman 256-page black & white/color 9" x 12" softcover • $24.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-477-1 See Previews / Order Now Krazy Kat, with its eternally beguiling love triangle of kat/dog/mouse, its fantastically inventive language, and its haunting, minimalist desert décor, has consistently been rated the best comic strip ever created, and Fantagraphics’ award-winning series one of the best classic comic-strip reprint series ever published. With our 13th volume, Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924, the decades-in-the- making project of publishing every single Krazy Kat Sunday created by Herriman comes to…
Freeway by Mark Kalesniko named Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize honor book
Hot on the heels of its Eisner Award nomination for "Best Graphic Album – New," Mark Kalesniko's beautiful, ambitious and complex book Freeway has been named an honor book (i.e. runner-up) for the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize by a jury representing the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at Penn State University. From the judges' comments: "Kalesniko's vivid existentialist drama of the dog and his artistic dream reassuringly demonstrates that in comics, at least, creativity and originality continue to flourish and (with this honor award) receive their rightful recognition." – Susan Squier "With allusions to the history of the classic studio…
Daily OCD: 4/11/12
Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review/Plug: City Weekly's Scott Renshaw previews Kevin Avery's appearance at The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Friday to sign Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, saying "Avery crafts a biography of a largely self-taught thinker who immersed himself in his passions, whether that meant classic film, the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald or folk music. The author allows his subject to develop primarily through oral history, as his friends and contemporaries recall a quirky iconoclast who disappeared into obscurity and a lonely death in 2006. But…
Advancing into Spring
March/April advance shipments bring May/June books… Our shelves are starting to groan with advance copies of upcoming arrivals that have come in over the last couple of weeks. Above, the softcover edition of Stephen Dixon's short story collection What Is All This? (it's prose, folks), the softcover edition of Fredrik Strömberg's Black Images in the Comics, and (also below) Nicolas Mahler's Angelman… …our biggest trim-size book ever, the hunormous Mr. Twee Deedle – Raggedy Ann's Sprightly Cousin: The Forgotten Fantasy Masterpieces of Johnny Gruelle (big book, big title)… …the 5th volume of our beautiful, beloved, bestselling hardcover collections of Hal…
Daily OCD: 4/10/12
Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Gagne’s selections are first-rate. These stories are fiery fare. Lovers clash like storm-tossed waves on rocky shores. They battle misconceptions and social injustices…. Even stories created under the constraints of the Comics Code pack a wallop. In the skilled hands of Simon and Kirby, love is most definitely a battlefield. The book’s special features are also top-notch…. Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics belongs in the personal library of all Simon and Kirby fans and all serious students of comics art and history. It’s a prime example of what…
Daily OCD: 4/6-4/9/12
A few days of Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Salt Lake City native Kevin Avery is a fitting testimonial to a man who pioneered rock 'n' roll criticism. Those familiar and unfamiliar with the culture of the '60s will appreciate this finely written tribute…. Overall, Everything Is an Afterthought will break your heart and inspire you to be a better person. It is a wonderful story of a man who deserves his chance in the spotlight." – Shelby Scoffield, Deseret News • Excerpts: On his blog, writer…
‘I’m seeing a lot of song titles’
So said the mighty and wonderful David Gedge (leader of one of my all-time favorite bands, The Wedding Present) leafing through the copy of Michel Gagné's Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby's Romance Comics I gave him at their Seattle gig on Friday night. He opened right up to that page — I swear I didn't plan this moment! Being able to present our books to folks I admire is one of the best parts of my job. What an absolute thrill. By the way, David is not only an avid comics reader, he's published a comic book…
