Fantagraphics Blog Mike Baehr

In this short video, Jim Woodring reveals the 27-foot mural he painted in Facebook’s Seattle offices a couple of weeks ago (with assistance from his son Max). No, he was not paid in stock.

Harold and Maude FINALLY on Criterion AND with cover art by Jordan Crane? Somebody pinch me! (And then gimme 30 bucks so I can run out and buy it when it's released next month.)

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "In Athos in America , the ideas behind the first three stories are so clever and punchy that they carry the rest of the anthology. Furthermore, the stories are constructed such that, due to their structure alone, any further padding would be impossible. In many ways, Athos In America feels like the artist looking back at his body of work to date… Despite his style, Jason is quite effective in modulating emotion from story to story, going from gags to violence to tragedy, sometimes all in the same story. Jason is in total control…

Congrats to Ellen Forney, shortlisted for The 2012 Stranger Genius Award for Literature! Ellen's worked with us (and The Stranger) for years and even though we're not putting out her next book, the graphic memoir Marbles, we're all looking forward to it eagerly! You may recall Jim Woodring won this prize a couple of years ago — kudos to The Stranger's critics for continuing to recognize comics with their Literature award. (Photo for The Stranger by Kelly O.)

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "This series of short comic book tales is sure to offend the weak at heart and easily excitable. As with some of the best horror, The Furry Trap curb-stomps all expectations, zigs when zags are expected, and taps into areas some are just too uncomfortable to talk about…. There’s some sick shit happening in this hardcover and if you’re brave enough, you’ll crack The Furry Trap open and enjoy the stories free of restraint and convention, yet teeming with unbridled creativity and absolute insanity." – Mark L. Miller, Ain't It Cool News •…

Starting to catch up on Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "The frighteningly hilarious world of Rickheit’s graphic novel is a deranged cabinet of curiosities, full of biomechanical tanks, writhing organic matter, amorphous monsters birthing adorable kittens, men and women in animal masks, and countless tubes, gas masks, sex toys, and pseudo-Victorian apocalyptic landscapes. It would all be too oppressive if Rickheit’s sense of humor weren’t so addictive…. This juxtaposition of dry humor undercuts the richly drawn horror of Folly, simultaneously adding to its strangeness and making it bearable for a casual read… The result is a narrative mosaic that…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • List: George Herriman on The New York Times Best Sellers list! Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924 debuts at #2 on the list for Paperback Graphic Books • Review: "The white rabbit who serves as our guide suggests Alice in Wonderland, but despite fantastical touches, Interiorae is much more concerned with the world as it presents itself. Intertwining the lives of the people who live in an apartment complex, it’s in some sense a book-length meditation on a rather beautiful idea, that the day-to-day lives of all the little people aren’t just worth paying attention to,…

Good golly, it seems like it was just the other day we were announcing the start of the 3rd volume of the Hernandez Brothers' Love and Rockets in its annual New Stories format and here we are already up to the 5th issue, which will make its debut in July at Comic-Con in San Diego and land in stores a couple months later, as usual. Jaime's cover above reveals the return of Vivian and that can only spell one thing for everyone around her: T-R-O-U-B-L-E. The back cover Table of Contents below should spark your imagination as to the issue's…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: Mysterious Traveler: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 3 by Steve Ditko; edited by Blake Bell 240-page full-color 7.25" x 10" hardcover • $39.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-498-6 See Previews / Order Now Five years before his breakthrough as the co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and other classic super-heroes for Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, Steve Ditko, inspired by the freedom he found at the laissez-faire Charlton Comics, was turning out some of the best work of his career. Mysterious Traveler, which collects stories from (among others) Tales of the…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: Interiorae by Gabriella Giandelli 144-page full-color 7.75" x 10.25" softcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-559-4 See Previews / Order Now A high-rise apartment building in an unnamed European city. Its inhabitants come and go, meet each other, talk, dream, regret, hope… in short, live. A ghostly, shape-shifting anthropomorphic white rabbit roams from apartment to apartment, surveying and keeping track of all this humanity… and at the end of every night, he floats down to the basement where he delivers his report to the "great dark one." Lushly delineated in…