Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

In a must-read interview at Comic Book Resources, Kiel Phegley talks to the entire editorial staff of The Comics Journal (Mike Dean, Kristy Valenti and el jefe Gary Groth) about the future print and online iterations of the magazine as outlined in our announcement earlier this week. It's quite the scoop, and juicy details and revelations abound!

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship: Like a Dog By Zak Sally One man’s heartfelt and irreverent record of his time on this rock, Zak Sally’s unflinchingly veracious book, Like a Dog, is both direct and oblique, which we find rather miraculous considering the messy and murky waters of human experience it manages to navigate. Like a Dog is among the few comic book testimonials burdened by the yen to understand and articulate the mundane and the magnificent. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself laughing and crying as you claw your way through each hard fought…

We are pleased to debut a brand new weekly strip in this week's webcomics update: The House of No by Mome contributor Derek Van Gieson! These are Derek's rejected New Yorker cartoons, and we'll be adding a new one every week. We'll leave it up to you to guess why they were turned down — for our money, they're pretty damn funny. And in our veteran strips: All-y all-y in-come-free! It's this week's Blecky Yuckerella strip by Johnny Ryan…. …and the Zip-a-Toned adventures of Barack H. Obama continue in this week's strip from Steven Weissman!

Happy day-before-Halloween — lots of treats in today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Bookmark: And I thought I was thorough! Hats off to Love and Rockets fan blog Love & Maggie, your one stop for comprehensive L&R/Hernandez Bros. link gathering, commentary and more (hat tip to Mike Sterling) • Profile: Newcity's Beatrice Smigasiewicz talks to Paul Hornschemeier about the conclusion of his Mome serial "Life with Mr. Dangerous" and other topics: “People are routinely surprised to find that in person I joke around all the time and am obsessed with comedy: they think that I must walk around in a…

In light of our announcement about the newly revamped, semi-annual version of The Comics Journal debuting next year, we have new subscription options available for 6-issue (3 year) and 3-issue (18 month) subscriptions. Also, we are ceasing to offer online-only subscriptions. If you are a current subscriber, details about the transition from your old subscription to your new one have been sent to you in the mail. We've made sure that, in every case, current subscribers will come out ahead on the deal. Going forward, all new subscriptions will begin with the first issue of our new expanded semi-annual edition,…

We recently received the following email: "Hello, my name is Daniel Maw and I am a graduate art student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Recently, I worked with some of my fellow graduate colleagues (we range in age from 23 to 31) to curate a show highlighting contemporary print media in all its facets. I recommended we show the work of Chris Ware, including Jimmy Corrigan. In order to showcase the epic nature of this comic we elected to purchase two copies, cut the bindings off each, collate the pages, and display all [390] pages in a grid on…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • List: At Robot 6, Sean T. Collins's top 6 "deeply creepy 'alt-horror' cartoonists" includes Renee French ("her frequently deformed (more like unformed) characters and hazy, dreamlike, soft-focus pencils recall [David] Lynch's unnerving debut Eraserhead with its dust-mote cinematography and mewling infant thing"), Hans Rickheit ("It just so happens that his 'normal' is grotesque and harrowing to the rest of us"), Al Columbia ("It's as though a team of expert [animation] craftsmen became trapped in their office sometime during the Depression and were forgotten about for decades, reduced to inbreeding, feeding on their own dead,…

Blurbs, "Babe" and big bucks in this episode of Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book features two full-length stories, 'The Leaking Cello Case' and 'John Wesley Harding.' Both stories start off in the every day then morph into oddball mysteries that never go quite where you expect them to. As odd as some of the capers and misadventures get they are always conveyed with a kind of casual, deadpan poker face that manages to make them all the more believable. … The art is a curious mix of cartoonish realism, and the city of…

Here after a slight delay is our preview video/photo slideshow preview of Popeye Vol. 4: "Plunder Island". I went slightly overboard with this one but holy smokes is there a lot of great stuff in this book! Click here if the embedded player is not visible above, and/or to view it larger in a new window (recommended). And don't forget our exclusive 15-page PDF excerpt (6.4 MB) with 5 pages of Sundays and 10 pages of dailies is still available for FREE download!