Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Congrats to Ray Fenwick, whose Hall of Best Knowledge is a finalist for the 2009 Pigskin Peters Award for "avant-garde comics and other non-traditional works," part of the Doug Wright Awards, Canada's top comics honors. Winners will be announced at TCAF on May 9.

Now available for preview and pre-order: Blazing Combat, the first-ever complete collection of the legendary 1965-1966 war comic written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by such luminaries as Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, John Severin, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Russ Heath, Reed Crandall, and Gene Colan. This book is scheduled to be in stock in late March/early April and in stores approximately 4 weeks later. View a photo & video slideshow preview embedded here. Click here if it is not visible, and/or to view it larger in a new window (recommended). And visit the product details page for a downloadable, 19-page…

This is a meaty one: • Review: For The Savage Critics, Sean T. Collins says The Last Lonely Saturday by Jordan Crane is "pretty much the best love story in comics form I've ever come across… It's an intelligent, moving, beautiful, terrific little comic." • Review: Rob Clough says that Beasts! Book 2 "mingles myths, warnings, fairy tales, correctives, and genuinely unexplained phenomena and allows its artists to run with them. The end result is a consistently beautiful, lovingly assembled book that forms a kind of metacommentary on the entire notion of the fantastic." • Review: For the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,…

Our own Nico Vassilakis has a new packet of visual poetry ephemera titled staReduction out from Bookthug of Canada consisting of deconstructed alphabet sketches and an accompanying essay booklet. Do check it out if you like interesting things. Only 8 bucks (not sure if that's CDN or US).

Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 By various artists; edited by Greg Sadowski The enduring cultural phenomenon of comic book heroes was invented in the late 1930s by a talented and hungry group of artists and writers barely out of their teens, flying by the seat of their pants to create something new, exciting, and above all profitable. The iconography and mythology they created flourishes to this day in comic books, video, movies, fine art, advertising, and practically all other media. Supermen! collects the best and the brightest of this first generation, including Jack Cole, Will Eisner,…

Mother, Come Home (New Hardcover Edition) By Paul Hornschemeier Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeier’s piercing graphic-novel debut, long out of print and now available for the first time in hardcover. It secured the cartoonist’s place as one of his generation’s most skillful and ambitious practitioners, and proved a harbinger of the subject matter that the artist would go on to explore most consistently in later work: the nuclear family. Mother, Come Home quietly studies the inner lives of recently widowed David and his 7-year-old son, Thomas; both are unable to deal with their grief directly. Thomas, protected by a…

Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti By Ivan Brunetti Hoping to further increase his irrelevance to the esteemed world of graphic novels and thus cement his status as “former cartoonist,” the saturnine Ivan Brunetti (author of the acclaimed Misery Loves Comedy and editor of Yale Press’s two essential Anthologies of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories) has compiled HO!, which collects the vast majority of his morally questionable, aesthetically confused — and absolutely gut-busting — “gag” cartoons. Culled mostly from out-of-print work (Hee! and Haw!) and other anthologies, the contents are discreetly presented in an uninviting, funereal package…

Boody. The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers Edited by Craig Yoe Bizarre, wacky, weird, wild and sexy — these are just a few of the adjectives that describe the cartooning of Boody Rogers. Before there were underground comics, Boody Rogers dug deep into breaking the rules; before their was low-brow art, Boody created art that hit hard below the brow. Rogers’s pen and ink outré raucousness was wrapped into great stories, beautifully drawn art, and hilarious gags. Fans of Boody Rogers’s Golden age comic book stories span generations of cartoonists, from Robert Williams to Art Spiegelman to Johnny Ryan. Spiegelman…