Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Feature: At SF Weekly, Alan Scherstuhl provides you with "10 Reasons Why Prince Valiant Bests All 2011's Adventure Heroes" (starting with "He lances giant crocodiles"), saying "Sure, those glossy lips and that pageboy bob makes him look something like ye olde Ramona Quimby, but don't let that fool you. The star of what is arguably the twentieth century's best-drawn newspaper comic strip, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is all hero, through and through, for his age and ours. The first four volumes of Fantagraphics' collected Prince Valiant reveal young Foster's creation as both the sum…

Stephanie Escobar tweeted this photo of Johnny Ryan with the great dinosaur illustrator/creature designer William Stout at Babytattooville last week.

Head over to the PREVIEWSworld site for a 5-page preview of The Cabbie Vol. 1 by Martí, which (as we just mentioned) arrives in comic shops today!

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about them (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability. The Cabbie Vol. 1 by Martí 80-page black & white 9" x 11.75" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-450-4 "I've seen this Marti Riera graphic novel described as Dick Tracy without a moral anchor, which sounds intriguing; the introduction's by Art Spiegelman, and I suspect it's the same as the one that…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 2: Trapped on Treasure Island by Floyd Gottfredson 312-page black & white/color 10.5" x 8.75" hardcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-495-5 Order Now! “Oh, for gosh sakes!” Floyd Gottfredson’s classic 1930s Mickey Mouse is back for another round of thrills, chills, and epic quests — taking him from the depths of teeming jungles to the halls of spooky Blaggard Castle. Mickey’s classic Disney bad guys are here, too, with arch-enemy Pegleg Pete joined for this book by the mysterious “Bill Shakespeare” and hypnosis-happy Professors…

Behold, three brand new eye-popping mini (8.5" square) prints reproducing original paintings by Jim Blanchard! Super limited-edition, easily framable and insanely cheap at ten bucks a pop — buy all 3! [See our Tumblr blog for more recent Things to See.]

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Wearing its stylistic debt to Chester Gould’s classic Dick Tracy strips on its sleeve, this Spanish-produced series [The Cabbie] (which was originally printed in the ’80s) revels in a stark and sleazy noir aesthetic that drags the reader on a vicious trip through the scabrous underbelly of 'the Big City.'… An intriguing throwback to the days of heroes with worldviews defined in terms as rigidly black and white as the panels they battled their way through, this visual and thematic love letter to (and simultaneous critique of) Gould’s tropes is highly recommended for…

Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times talks to Gary Groth about The Carl Barks Library — "There is in fact an emotional truth at the center of Barks' work; he even said that this was his primary goal, though I can’t dig up the quote at the moment, perhaps I’m thinking of when he told an interviewer that in his stories he was 'telling it like it is' and 'laying it on the line.' The comics critic Don Phelps once told me that it was Barks who made Donald Duck a citizen of the nation of comics characters, which…

Via The A.V. Club and other internet sources comes news that MTV has a new website for Liquid Television, and they've posted a whole mess of classic clips from the original run of the beloved and long-departed alternative-animation anthology show (along with some newer stuff, it seems)! Watch Charles Burns and Tony Halton's entire live-action Dog Boy serial (part 1 embedded below)… Get More: MTV Shows …Richard Sala's Invisible Hands serial (part 1 below)… Get More: MTV Shows …Uncle Louie, with art by Drew Friedman (episode 1 below)… Get More: MTV Shows …and many other classics. This is fantastic news,…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: The Frank Book (New Softcover Edition) by Jim Woodring 352-page black & white/color 8.5" x 11" softcover • $34.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-500-6 See Previews / Order Now The Frank Book (New Hardcover Printing) by Jim Woodring 352-page black & white/color 8.75" x 11.25" hardcover • $45.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-513-6 See Previews / Order Now eaders who haven't discovered Jim Woodring's Frank stories will find a treat waiting for them in the pages of this book. Since publication in 1991 of the award-winning, epoch-making "Frank in the River," these lusciously hypnotic fables…