Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Dept. of errata: Due to a production error, the September 30, 1943 strip was mistakenly printed with a repeated panel in Barnaby Vol. 1. Click here to view and download a printable PDF of the corrected page. Please accept our apologies and regrets.

Love and laundry, Mars and mothers, the mundane and the absurd — they all come together in this hefty collection of M.K. Brown's work spanning more than four decades, Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013. These comic strips and gag cartoons originally appeared in the National Lampoon, The New Yorker, Playboy, The Atlantic, Arcade, Twisted Sisters, and a plethora of other magazines and underground comics, and most have never before been collected! If you've seen some of this material before, you know it's genius; if you haven't, and you're a fan of Lisa Hanawalt, Roz Chast, Michael Kupperman, Glen Baxter, Bill…

Once readers got a taste of the romance comics by genre originators (and comics legends) Joe Simon & Jack Kirby in our 2011 volume Young Romance, the clamoring for more began immediately (and the Eisner Award nomination soon followed). We weren't sure if another volume were possible, since that book was a years-in-the-making labor of love by editor Michel Gagné, who is busy with an award-winning animation and game design career. Lo and behold, serendipity came out of the woodwork and now, coming in March, we can bring you Young Romance 2: The Early Simon & Kirby Romance Comics. In our downloadable preview you can browse the…

Take the lampshade off your head, chug some coconut water, and straighten your tie and/or stockings: 2014 is here and we're pleased to announce the return of our New Year's Hangover Sale! All this week, take 20% OFF everything on our website (including our already-discounted clearance items and gift sets) Thursday, January 2 through Thursday, January 9, 2014! Just use the coupon code HANGOVER when you check out and you'll receive 20% off everything in your order. (If you prefer to shop by phone, just mention this offer when you call — 1-800-657-1100 or 206-524-1967 outside the U.S., 9 AM to…

Inio Asano's Solanin was one of the most acclaimed manga to reach our shores in the previous decade (and a feature film back home in Japan), and anticipation is high for our English edition of Asano's Nijigahara Holograph (translated by Matt Thorn). Our advance copies arrived last week and Jen and Kristy got into a tug-of-war over who got the first one. There should be an adequate quantity of copies of this complex, gripping psychological/supernatural thriller to go around in February, but why risk it? Pre-order your copy now.

Here it is, our first preview of one of our Spring-Summer 2014 books that our supporters so generously backed on Kickstarter. Come February (we actually cranked this one out a little early!), with the release of Henry Speaks for Himself, Henry will join Barnaby and Charlie Brown in our roster of funny-looking bald-headed kids. These charming classic comics by John Liney, based on the popular comic strip created by Carl Anderson, have never been collected before, and our book, edited by David Tosh, gathers the best stories. In our downloadable excerpt, containing one complete story, Henry has a most unusual day of work and…

Those quirky comics from the heyday of the National Lampoon. Those brilliantly skewed New Yorker and Playboy cartoons. Those hilarious strips in underground mags like Wimmin's Comix and Arcade. The animated shorts that weren't The Simpsons on The Tracey Ullman Show. Perhaps you've encountered the work of M.K. Brown somewhere (lucky you) or perhaps you've never seen it before. Either way, you're in for a treat, as we've gathered these obscure gems into the first ever retrospective volume of her hilarious work, Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013, due out in February. It's what we do! Get a taste of Brown's brilliance…

"Kamen's art is deceptive in its seeming sweetness. It positioned him perfectly to go over the line into perversity, the hapless reader having no warning…. I look at him as being a seed of a style we'd later associate with David Lynch." – John Linton Roberson "All of these books are essential purchases for comics fans… These are the books that best show off how EC took genre stories seriously, striving to create comics that didn’t treat readers as naive or ignorant." – Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times "…I am not only appreciative…but also very impressed. [The books] are spectacular…

"No one could draw a rotted, walking corpse like Graham Ingels." – Donald Vaughan, (Florida) Sun-Sentinel "I love Ingels …" – George A. Romero "All of these books are essential purchases for comics fans… These are the books that best show off how EC took genre stories seriously, striving to create comics that didn’t treat readers as naive or ignorant." – Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times "…I am not only appreciative…but also very impressed. [The books] are spectacular packages of their featured artist and their stories." – Al Feldstein Sucker Bait and Other Stories (The EC Comics Library)Illustrated by Graham Ingels;…

Jacob Covey was cleaning out some files and found these great photos he took of Kim & Gary posing outside our glamorous offices and with our old warehouse van. We miss ya, Kim.