Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Awards: Congratulations to Lorenzo Mattotti for the much-deserved Max and Moritz Prize Lifetime Achievement Award and to Joe Sacco for being awarded Best International Comic Book, as announced over the weekend at the Internationaler Comic Salon at Erlanger and reported by Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, Torsten Adair at The Beat and Joe Gordon at Forbidden Planet International • Review: At Boing Boing, as part of their "Mind Blowing Movies" series of guest posts, Amy Crehore examines the Ghost World film: "I knew it was going to be good, but I had no…

God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls by Jaime Hernandez 136-page black & white/color 8.75" x 11.25" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-539-6 Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Order this or any other Love and Rockets book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown at left as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last. Originally serialized in Love and Rockets: New Stories, “Ti-Girls Adventures” managed to be both a rollickingly creative super-hero joyride (featuring three separate super-teams and over two dozen characters) that ranged from the other side of the universe…

The latest Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Beyond the quality of the artwork, which remains amazingly detailed and perfectly perfect in its storytelling, Dungeon Quest is really funny, the humor sometimes seeming dissonant — but pleasingly so — given the seriousness with which Daly approaches, say, drawing a rock-strewn valley or depicting a slow, tiring march through a forest (It’s almost Tolkeinesque in his commitment to describing walking!) or choreographing a thrilling action scene." – J. Caleb Mozzocco, Robot 6 • Review (Audio): The guys at Washington, D.C.'s Big Planet Comics discuss Angelman by Nicolas Mahler on this week's…

Olivier Schrauwen is self-publishing a 3-volume comic about his grandfather, Arsène Schrauwen, and the first volume is available now through Olivier's blog. Get yours so you can be super cool and brag that you got the super-rare limited-edition version when the collected edition eventually comes out! And also because Olivier is great.

Comedy Bang! Bang! premieres on the IFC cable network tonight (check your local listings) with an animated title sequence and incidental artwork by the great Paul Hornschemeier (with an inking assist from our own Eric Reynolds, among others) and Paul is sharing a bunch of behind-the-scenes production art and sketches at his blog here and here. My DVR is set!

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Awards: Congratulations to the great Joost Swarte, awarded the 2012 Marten Toonder Prize and its concomitant fat cash prize by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, as reported by Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter • Review: "One of the first comprehensive comic strip reprint projects of the current era, and arguably the most important, has achieved completion with the publication of the thirteenth and final volume in Fantagraphics’ series collecting George Herriman’s Krazy Kat Sunday pages in their entirety…. I expect I will be reading from this library for years…

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about them (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability. For a change of pace let's kick things off with… "CONFLICT OF INTEREST RESERVOIR: Nicolas Mahler parodies the superhero comics industry in his characteristic style with Angelman, a 96-page color hardcover; $18.99. A new softcover edition of Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics (I’ve read and enjoyed the 2003…

Dungeon Quest Book 3 by Joe Daly 288-page black & white 6" x 8.25" softcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-544-0 Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Order this book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown at left as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last. In 2011’s Dungeon Quest Book Two, we left our heroes, Millennium Boy, Steve, Lash and Nerdgirl, in the Temple of Bromedes as they began their initiation into the mysteries of Atlantis under the tutelage of the androgynous forest mystic, Bromedes. In this third book, our heroes…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "The sad, forgotten beauty of the in-between moments of daily life: playing a board game at a kitchen table just cleared from a family dinner; listening to music having just slipped off your shoes; daydreaming while doing the dishes. What would it be like if a series of graphic novellas tried to capture these moments? What if it also featured an omnipresent, invisible rabbit that could change sizes and a dark, cloud-shaped creature ('the Big Blind') living in the basement of an apartment building that fed on the memories, dreams, and nightmares of…

1-2-3-4, Johnny Ryan declares a penis war! Johnny's frenemy-bromance with French cartoonist Frédéric Fleury has blossomed into a book, War + Penis: The Great Online Comics Insult War, out now from Italy's The Milan Review. Johnny and Fred spent months dumping on each other's Facebook walls with dozens and dozens of disgusting and hilarious insult cartoons, and now here they are collected between two alternate covers, a "France wins" version and an "America wins" version. You can order the latter direct from Johnny. Get a room you guys!