Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

We're coming at you right over the plate around mid-Summer with a collection of baseball cartoons by the 20th century's greatest sports cartoonist (that's what his peers called him), Willard Mullin's Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934-1972. Mullin's cartoons were read by millions of sports fans and earned him a name-drop by Charles M. Schulz in a Peanuts strip, so popular were they. Whether you remember them fondly from their appearances in the papers, you're a new generation of sports fan discovering them for the first time, or you just like masterful, dynamic cartooning and illustration, this is a book…

Some views of The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove, collecting Oscar-winning animator Gene Deitch's jazz cartoons and illustrations from The Record Changer magazine from 1945-1951 with the artist's commentary. This new softcover edition will be out in April. Click the images for bigger versions and see more in our Flickr set.

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  Julio's Dayby Gilbert Hernandez 104-page black & white 7.5" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-606-5 See Previews / Order Now   It begins in the year 1900, with the scream of a newborn. It ends, 100 pages later, in the year 2000, with the death rattle of a 100-year-old man. The infant and the old man are both Julio, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Julio’s Day (originally serialized in Love and Rockets Vol. II but never completed until now) is his latest graphic novel, a masterpiece of elliptical, emotional storytelling that traces one life…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  The Complete Peanuts 1987-1988 (Vol. 19) by Charles M. Schulz 344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $28.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-634-8 See Previews / Order Now So what do we have for Peanuts fans this time around? An ill-considered attempt at flirting sends Charlie Brown to the school doctor… Linus's ongoing romance with the too-young "Lydia" of the many names continues… Snoopy is joined in the trenches by his brother Spike… Sally engages in a career as a playwright by penning the school Christmas play but mixes up Gabriel and Geronimo… A…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 2: Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle (New Softcover Ed.) by Robert Crumb 144-page black & white/color 8.5" x 11" softcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-0-93019-362-1 See Previews / Order Now Another fascinating collection of early work from one of America's most original, trenchant, and uncompromising artists. "Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle" features several key stories from Crumb’s pre-underground, homemade comics of the early 1960s (such as Farb and Arcade), with stories featuring early Crumb characters Fritz the Cat, Jim, Mabel, and Little Billy Bean….

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  Big Baby (New Printing) by Charles Burns 96-page black & white 9" x 12" softcover • $16.95ISBN: 978-1-56097-800-8 See Previews / Order Now From the creator of the 2005 hit graphic novel Black Hole and the recent trilogy X'ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull comes this new softcover edition of his other masterpiece of modern horror. Big Baby is a particularly impressionable young boy named Tony Delmonte, who lives in a seemingly typical American suburb until he sneaks out of his room one night and becomes entangled in a horrific plot involving…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  The Adventures of Jodelle by Guy Peellaert & Pierre Bartier 164-page full-color 10.25" x 13.25" hardcover • $45.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-530-3 See Previews / Order Now Ensconced in the avant-garde of the extraordinary social and cultural upheavals that were drawing 1960s Europe into the building wave of postmodernism, a Belgian advertising dropout, fed up with the corporate world, conceived the first "adult comic book" virtually off the top of his head. By creating The Adventures of Jodelle, a deluxe comics album that wore its revolutionary Pop sensibility on its sleeve, Guy Peellaert obliterated the conventions…

The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove (Softcover Ed.) by Gene Deitch 168-page full-color 11.75" x 9.25" softcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-617-1 Ships in: April 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in "cool cat"), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for…

  If you didn't get a chance to watch our slideshow of photos of Castle Waiting Vol. 2: Definitive Edition by Linda Medley, here's a sampling of images — click them for bigger versions to see the art in all of its glorious detail. And dig that classy bound-in ribbon bookmark! We're expecting the book to be available next month; hopefully this is the next best thing to flipping through a copy yourself.

Whoa! Did you see that? Click here to see it again if you missed it!  We're pleased to unveil the final cover art for the eagerly anticipated Hernandez Bros. art book Love and Rockets: The Covers, off to the printer now! The black art on the cover will be printed on a transparent acetate overlay. Devilishly clever designer Jacob Covey explains: "It's essentially identical to how these old covers were proofed — with a hand-colored background and a black line art overlay. The case will be printed with a reproduction of the color art from a 1994 proof we had at the office….