Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Online Commentary & Diversions, now with more Tonya Harding than ever: • Review: "Occasionally, there are works of art or literature that defy simple classification. The brain breaks upon them like waves and they give up different secrets with each tide but never all the secrets and never all at once. These creations challenge as much as they entertain and ask for obsession as toll on the road to understanding. The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit is just such an enigma. … Surreal, gorgeous, and both satisfying and confounding, The Squirrel Machine is a hypnotic, occasionally repulsive, always entertaining, and…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship: Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1 Edited by Blake Bell Before the Amazing Spider-Man, before the mysterious Dr. Strange, before the black-and-white world of the Ayn Rand-inspired Mr. A, the legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko was conjuring all manners of horrors at his drawing table. In his first two years in the industry (1953 and 1954), Ditko drew tales of macabre suspense that were not yet hobbled by the imminent Comics Code Authority (adopted in Oct. 1954). These stories featured graphic bloodshed, dismemberment and blood-curdling acid baths as…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship: Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days By Al Columbia This gorgeous grimoire is part alchemy, part art book, part storybook, part comic book, and part conceptual art from the pen of Al Columbia, a longtime fan favorite contributor to comics anthologies like Zero Zero, Blab!, and more recently, Mome. Collecting over a decade’s worth of ‘artifacts,’ excavations, comic strips, animation stills, storybook covers, and much more, this broken jigsaw puzzle of a book tells the story of Pim & Francie, a pair of childlike, male and female imps whose irresponsible…

Ken Meyer Jr. at ComicAttack.net, as part of his "Ink Stains" series looking back at fanzines from the '60s-'80s (previously: Gary Groth's Fantastic Fanzine), takes a look at the vintage sci fi/fantasy fanzine No Sex. Among the contributors he talks to is Jaime Hernandez, and he offers a free download of issue 14 from 1980, which contains a 4-page story by Gilbert Hernandez back when he used to sign his work "'Bert."

Your Online Commentary & Diversions-style goodies for today: • Review: "…[F]or fans of off-beat crime…, I give you Jacques Tardi’s no-shit brilliant adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s West Coast Blues. … [W]hat starts out as something straight out of a Hitchcock classic like North by Northwest soon escalates into something more savage, more profound, and utterly wonderful… It succeeds brilliantly in good old-fashioned crime thrills, for sure. The violence is brutal, the story exciting and surprising, and the characters are brilliantly rendered. But then there’s that extra little layer, those subtle themes, those strange details, the lyrical narration passages — let’s…

Paul Karasik brings The Fletcher Hanks Experience to Comix Revolution tomorrow at 6 PM!

If you like Noah Van Sciver's work in Mome and his hilarious cartoon interviews in The Comics Journal you should know that the 5th issue of his self-published comics series Blammo is out now!

Once again we're bringing you an advance sneak peek at our listings for the next issue of Previews, this time with our releases scheduled for February 2010. It's going to be a big month for us with 8 new books, including two new Love and Rockets collections (one from Gilbert & one from Jaime), a great Kim Deitch yarn, horror noir from Ho Che Anderson, Captain Easy Vol. 1 (resolicited from August), a new softcover edition of the almost-out-of-print Blazing Combat, The Best American Comics Criticism of the 21st Century, and, pictured above, the breathtaking new graphic novel from Eisner…

Charles Burns, interviewed live on stage in Philadelphia for The Sound of Young America radio show/podcast. Audio embedded below; link to download here. The Sound of Young America