Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Hotwire Comics Vol. 2Various artists; edited by Glenn Head The cartoon anthology that puts the kicks back in comics strikes again. Climb on board the Hotwire express for another electrifying joyride — from the sublime to the ridiculous, and all parts in between. Hotwire Vol. 2 includes some of the strongest narrative comics around. Tim Lane's epic autobiographical strip, "Spirit," portrays the grittiness, desperation, and terror that accompanied him as he went on the bum, riding the rails. "Niacin" by Mary Fleener is the sordid but hilarious story of a hallucinatory date with a drug dealer. Mack White brilliantly deconstructs…

The latest "Daniel Clowes is working on a movie" story involves Clowes writing the screenplay for an animated film directed by Michel Gondry based on a story and artwork by Gondry's son Paul. More here and here.

Beto-esque image found on Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin.

Presenting: a chance to win prizes! A way to familiarize yourself with the new Fantagraphics.com website! A fun time-waster! Everyone who's registered on Fantagraphics.com (do it here) has a chance to earn a 20%-off coupon good toward any online order by correctly answering ten Fantagraphics-related trivia questions (all of the answers can be found on Fantagraphics.com), and one randomly-chosen winner will receive a coupon for a whopping 50% off! Contest ends February 15, 2008. For the list of questions and complete rules, make sure you're logged in and then click here (or click "My Account" and select "Win 20% Off!"…

Our pal Craig Yoe has some vintage Dennis the Menace audio up on his Arflovers blog (courtesy of DJ David B.). Makes a great companion to the Terr'ble Thompson Musical!

Escape from "Special" artist Miss Lasko-Gross takes part in an informal group interview at Occasional Superheroine.

Check out our Flickr photoset of the "Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution" exhibit up now at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery!

As several folks have already noticed and taken advantage of, you can now leave comments on FLOG. You must be logged in to leave comments, so if you're not registered yet, why not do it right now? The commenting process itself is fairly self-explanatory. If there's a particularly hot discussion that you want to follow, or if you want to know if anyone responds to your trenchant observation, the comment thread of each and every FLOG post has its very own RSS feed — the link is right at the top of the Comments section. At this point we don't…

It's up for the reading.

Our own Kristy Valenti has written a great profile of comic strip historian/archivist Bill Blackbeard (contributor to many of our classic strip reprint books, not the least of which is Krazy & Ignatz), part one of which can be read at the Comixology website.