Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Easy & Tubbs are back for one last collection of colorful Sunday strips by Roy Crane in our series of oversized hardcovers cleverly designed to resemble a giant travel journal. Adventure and slapstick, fisticuffs and foolishness, cute women and ugly men, exotic settings and funny sound effects, and yes, there's tigers — Captain Easy, Soldier of Fortune Vol. 4 has it all and it's all pure fun. Our advance copies are still fresh off the delivery truck, and the main shipment should be arriving around Black Friday, so get ready to bludgeon the other shoppers to get your copy — lickety-whop! —…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 6: On the Crest of a Wave (New Printing) by Robert Crumb 156-page black & white/color 8.5" x 11" softcover • $19.99978-1-60699-683-6 See Previews / Order Now Robert Crumb enters the '70s with this, the sixth volume in Fantagraphics Books' all-inclusive reprint series. This includes a couple of genuine rarities (some of them so obscure they didn't even make the Crumb Checklist), as well as all of Crumb's work from Big Ass #1, Zap #4 (including the legendary, much-busted, X-rated "Joe Blow" teen incest strip), the remarkably…

In stock and shipping now from our mail-order department: Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations (Expanded Hardcover Ed.) by Peter Bagge 152-page full-color 8" x 10.25" hardcover • $24.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-656-0 See Previews / Order Now Fans of Peter Bagge’s generation-defining, satirical fiction may not realize this, but the cartoonist doubles as an opinionated cuss, and has been contributing provocative (but still hilarious) comic-strip opinion pieces to Reason magazine for the last several years… collected in this volume. Although a libertarian by inclination (hence the Reason gig), Bagge (who lives in the fuzzy-headed, liberal capital of the Northwest,…

Not resting on the laurels of her 2013 Eisner Hall of Fame induction, Trina Robbins has taken her epochal history of women in comics and completely revised and updated it into a new volume, Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013, scheduled to hit stores this November. Here we bring you a downloadable excerpt of Chapter 1, "The Queens of Cute," which introduces you to the creators of American icons the Kewpies (also the creator of the first known comic strip by an American woman), the Campbell Kids, and other cherubic characters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Later…

Julia Gfrörer's Black Is the Color is sure to be one of the most talked-about graphic novel debuts of the season, having already garnered raves in its serialized webcomic form. With spare storytelling, dry, dark humor, and detailed, spidery ink lines, this swoon-worthy tale of sailors and mermaids, love and death lingers in the mind long after the last page is read. Black Is the Color will be ready to join our other recent acclaimed sea-faring debuts Blacklung and Set to Sea on your bookshelves in about 2 months; an excerpt and pre-order details can be found right here.

The second and final volume of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Color Sundays by the great Floyd Gottfredson, remastered in sparkling color and loaded with unmissable bonus features, will be debuting in just a few weeks. In our downloadable preview you'll read the Table of Contents, a chapter introduction, and a sequence of strips wherein that no-good Mortimer Mouse tries to steal Minnie from Mickey by hook or by crook, and later, Mickey, Donald and Goofy do a little DIY home improvement… what could possibly go wrong? Will hilarity ensue? (Spoiler: Yes.) Don't forget, if you pre-order the two-volume Mickey Mouse Color Sundays box set…

It's the coffee-table book for people with tiny coffee tables! Paul Hornschemeier's Artists Authors Thinkers Directors collects Paul's stylistically diverse sketchbook portraits from his Daily Forlorn blog in a cute, compact hardcover, with brief writeups in the back explaining why each subject was chosen. It surely includes some of your favorite creative people. And when you're done enjoying it, you can leave it laying around your house to class up the place and show off your excellent taste. This book is due to arrive in November or early December; pre-order now so you'll have plenty of time to wrap it up for stocking-stuffing season.

Janet Hamlin has worked as a sketch artist like no other, in an American court like no other: at the Defense Department’s Military Commissions, the tribunal chambers at Guantanamo Bay. In Sketching Guantanamo, you can take a look at the young Canadian who grew into manhood behind the barbed wire of Guantanamo — beard and all — claiming his innocence, and that he was tortured, until he ultimately confessed to committing a war crime when he was 15. Then peer through double-glazed soundproof glass as Hamlin gives the world its first look at the man who boasted that he orchestrated…

Sketching Guantanamo: Court Sketches of the Military Tribunals, 2006-2013 by Janet Hamlin 172-page full-color 11.25" x 8.25" hardcover • $28.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-691-1 Ships in: October 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Camp X-Ray in the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, opened in January, 2002 in the wake of the 9-11 attacks to house alleged terrorists — off the American mainland, unaccountable to the U.S. judiciary — in "indefinite detention." Newer and more permanent prisons were later built miles away, and continue to house terrorist suspects today. The United States government does not allow photographs of the military trials at Guantanamo,…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: Treasury of Mini Comics Vol. 1by various artists; edited by Michael Dowers 848-page black & white/color 5" x 6.25" hardcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-657-7 See Previews / Order Now BARGAIN COMBO: Newave! + Treasury of Mini Comics Gift Set Price: $54.98 $43.98 Written, drawn, printed, collated, folded, and stapled the DIY way: self-published and self-distributed mini comics are the labor of an underground comics industry, a subculture that thrives and depends on the selling and trading of these handcrafted booklets. In this community, there are no barriers to entry, no profiteering, and no…