Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship: Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune: The Complete Sunday Newspaper Strips Vol. 2 (1936-1937) by Roy Crane 144-page full-color 10.5" x 14.75" hardcover • $39.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-391-0 See Previews / Order Now This second of four volumes reprints in full color the rare Captain Easy Sunday pages from the 1930s. Roy Crane’s Soldier of Fortune, Captain Easy, fights for gold in the frozen north, is mistaken for a bandit, protects a formula for artificial diamonds, is stranded on a desert island, visits the tiny Balkan country of Kleptomania, and faces a firing squad….

Wandering Son creator Shimura Takako has just begun a new series titled Awajima Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Awajima), serialized at the web manga site Pocopoco. I can't read it but it sure looks pretty! Wandering Son translator and editor of our manga line Matt Thorn introduces the series and provides some context and outspoken commentary that you won't want to miss on his blog.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Gilbert Hernandez is one of the great craftsmen of modern comics… Hernandez’s new Fritz book, Love from the Shadows, is as bracing as a slug of bottom-shelf rotgut…. Hernandez artfully approximates the broad, thrilling badness of late-night movies and their inept special effects, and uses it as an excuse to show off some of his gifts: spacious compositions built around texture as well as forms, pauses heavy with foreboding, a sense of body language and facial expressions so acute that we can recognize both the story’s characters and the 'actors' playing those characters."…

Oh my gosh! The hot new face on the webcomics scene: the great Arnold Roth, who has a new blog where he's posting new gag cartoons three times a week! It's called Humblug! That is indescribably great! (Hat tip: Tom Spurgeon, who got it from Mike Lynch.)

Gil Jordan, Private Detective: Murder by High Tide by M. Tillieux 96-page full-color 8.5" x 11.25" hardcover • $18.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-451-1 Ships in: July 2011 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Another never-before-translated classic from the Golden Age of Franco-Belgian comics, finally brought to American readers. Imagine the beautifully crisp images of Hergé (Tintin) put in service of a series of wise-cracking, fast-paced detective stories — punctuated with scenes of spectacular vehicular mayhem (including in this volume a dockside pursuit via car and bulldozer) — and you’ll see why 50 years later Gil Jordan is still considered a masterpiece in Europe….

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Four of our biggest releases of the summer all dropping at once! 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. (Diamond's PREVIEWSworld website also spotlights some of our books that are now back in print and available again.) Celluloid by Dave McKean 282-page full-color 7" x 9.25" hardcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-440-5 "It's been a while since we've heard…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Gottfredson's strips are jammed with incident and detail, energized with a loopy energy that matches the spunky determination of Mickey himself. Running pell-mell from one dangerous escapade to the next (spooky houses and runaway trains predominate), Mickey is all spit and fire as he confronts louts like Pegleg Pete and the Fox while protecting his risk-prone flapper girlfriend, Minnie: 'Give up?? Never!!' The quite visible specter of the Depression and occasional dark humor, as when Mickey tries multiple times to kill himself and fails comically, only add to the sense of heroic grit."…

In case you've been living under a rock, the 12" action doll of Daniel Clowes's The Death Ray goes on sale on Thursday. Fully posable, with ray gun accessory and snazzy packaging (natch). Manufactured by the enigmatic "Oakland Toy Corp.," distributed exclusively by our pals at Presspop, limited to 200, first come first served. All the details and more images are here.

The fine folks at Rain Taxi have posted this video clip of Jim Woodring wielding his giant pen at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last weekend. And who's that assisting Jim? Why, it's our pal Zak Sally, along with Zander Cannon to round out the "Minnesota Z-name cartoonists" contingent. More video installments are promised, so stay tuned.

This month's issue of Booklist brings a nice batch of favorable reviews for four of our recent releases, excerpted below: Approximate Continuum Comics by Lewis Trondheim: "The simple, unadorned black-and-white line drawings are agreeably loose and deceptively casual, compelling in their humorous expressiveness and economy. Trondheim’s autobiographical departure is of a piece with the rest of his sizable body of work, not only in its whimsical intelligence but also in that the characters are portrayed as anthropomorphic animals. Fans of Trondheim’s other efforts will enjoy viewing another facet of his work, and followers of graphic memoirs will appreciate seeing a…