Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking by Charles M. Schulz 56-page three-color 5.75" x 5.75" hardcover • $9.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-624-9 Ships in: October 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now During his fifty-year career, ninety-nine percent of Charles Schulz's creative energies went into the daily Peanuts comic strip. But once in a while he would create a special something else on the side, and this adorable little package collects two of his best "extras" from the 1960s: two Christmas-themed stories written and drawn for national magazines. Created in 1963 (two years before the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special) as a supplement for Good…

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 4: House of the Seven Haunts by Floyd Gottfredson 280-page black & white/color 10.5" x 8.75" hardcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-575-4 Ships in: October 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Who says dead men tell no tales? When grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize, they’ll find fearless Mickey all ready to rumble — as soon as he’s done fighting gangsters, bandits, and international men of mystery, that is! From Africa to Eastern Europe, our favorite big cheese is in for terrifying thrills — and he’s bringing Goofy, Donald Duck, and that big palooka Pegleg…

Get ready for a second helping of silliness and Sluggo in Nancy Likes Christmas: Complete Dailies 1946-1948 by Ernie Bushmiller, coming this November! It's another three years of goofy gags and graphic genius packaged with pop-art panache, and featuring an intro by Zippy creator and Nancy aficionado Bill Griffith. Our advance copies have arrived here at HQ (obviously) which means we'll be bringing you more previews and sneak peeks in the days to come; in the meantime you can get your pre-order in here, and find a money-saving deal on a combo of this and the previous volume here.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here, with more advance copies of holiday-themed books arriving at our door. Hitting shelves in November, it's the third book in our smash hit Carl Barks Library series, Walt Disney's Donald Duck: A Christmas for Shacktown! Another snappy hardcover collection of some of the greatest comics ever made, presented with our usual commitment to quality… need we say more? How about a 24-page excerpt with the Table of Contents and a big chunk of the featured title story? See that, and pre-order copies for under the tree and on your shelves,…

Blacklung by Chris Wright 128-page black & white 9.25" x 12.25" hardcover • $24.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-587-7 Ships in: October 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Chris Wright’s Blacklung is unquestionably one of the most impressive graphic novel debuts in recent years, a sweeping, magisterially conceived, visually startling tale of violence, amorality, fortitude, and redemption, one part Melville, one part Peckinpah. Blacklung is a story that lives up to the term graphic novel, that could only exist in sequential pictures — densely textured, highly stylized, delicately and boldly rendered drawings that is, taken together, wholly original. In a night of piratical…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: Barack Hussein Obama by Steven Weissman 112-page full-color 7.25" x 9.25" hardcover • $22.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-623-2 See Previews / Order Now What does it mean to live in America today? If you know there’s no right answer to that question, you’ll want to read Barack Hussein Obama — a book about you; about your country, your family, your president. Barack Hussein Obama is not a graphic novel. It’s neither a biography nor an experiment, but a whole, fully-realized parallel America, a dada-esque, surrealistic satirical vision that is no more cockeyed than the…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: Naked Cartoonists: Drawers Drawing Themselves Without Drawers by various artists; edited by Gary Groth 156-page full-color 6.25" x 8.25" hardcover • $22.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-538-9 See Previews / Order Now At last! Cartoonists — Naked! In an irreverent twist to the fine art tradition of The Nude, this unique and original collection presents a “stripped” down version of the infamous “Gallery of Rogues” exhibit of cartoonist self-portraits at Ohio State University. Here you’ll find a cornucopia of cartoonists’ nude self-portraits from the collection of Mark J. Cohen and Rose Marie McDaniel. The cartoonists…

Good news for anyone mourning the demise of Michael Kupperman's weekly Up All Night strip (or any Kupperman fan, or anyone who likes funny things): he's now back on the beat doing a regular strip for The Huffington Post. Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington!

We just gave you your first glimpse of our big, deluxe collection of Basil Wolverton's Spacehawk; now here's a look at a much smaller Spacehawk package which you can pick up for FREE on Halloween exclusively at participating comic shops: our Spacehawk Halloween ComicFest 2012 mini-comic! Featuring a complete space-faring, monster-jammed Spacehawk story and some fun Spacehawk surprises cooked up by our own Jen Vaughn, this all-ages treat was produced especially for Halloween ComicFest 2012. It's our second 2012 Halloween freebie along with Jack Davis's Tales from the Crypt!

Spaaaaaaaacehaaaaaaawwk! We just got our advance copies of a book that Basil Wolverton fans have been clamoring for for years and anyone who likes weird, wonderful comics will definitely want to check out: a complete collection of Wolverton's amazing Spacehawk sci-fi/Axis-busting adventure comics from 1940-1942. Painstakingly restored in glorious, saturated full color in an oversized (seriously, it's a big book) Flexibound softcover, this magnificent package will have your eyeballs blasting out of their sockets and into deep space. It'll be available in about 2 months; you can pre-order a copy and read a honking 26-page excerpt now, and we'll have…