Fantagraphics Blog Sonia Lei

Our fantastic designers have done it again! Here is the cover art for the fifth volume of our acclaimed series on the inimitable Steve Ditko. Titled Dripping with Fear, this volume features another 200-plus pages of meticulously restored, full-color, early Ditko work, including the beginning of Ditko's collaborations with renowned fetish artist Eric Stanton and an introduction by editor Blake Bell. We expect Dripping with Fear to be released by March 2015, and the book is already available for pre-order! More previews forthcoming.

Our first look of 2015 is off to a great start with stacks of advance copies of Hurricane Isle and Other Adventures: The Best of Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs. Smelling of fresh inks and new paper, this collection of Roy Crane's adventure comic strip is a delight to open on this grey, rainy Monday morning. Hurricane Isle is due out in February, and you can pre-order your copy right here, right now!

Inner City Romanceby Guy Colwell 200-page black & white 8” x 10” softcover$24.99 | 978-1-60699-813-7 Due to arrive in 2-4 weeks. Click on thumbnails for larger versions; get more info, see more previews, and pre-order your copy here: http://www.fantagraphics.com/innercityromance

Today's book of the day: Ben Catmull's gorgeous hardcover coffee-table art book of ghost stories, Ghosts and Ruins! Catmull's images are evocative, haunting masterpieces that never tread in graphic imagery, choosing instead to suggest horrors far more frightening than what they explicitly depict. With just the right touch of humor to balance the terror, Ghosts and Ruins is sure to please fans of Edward Gorey or Tim Burton, and makes a perfect gift book for the ghost story fan in your house. Ghosts and Ruins is available all day today at 30% off! Previews and photosets are available on our order page.

Next up in our January Book-A-Day sale is Jesse Reklaw's first long-form work, the tragicomic graphic memoir Couch Tag. Presented as a series of comic novellas that together comprise a thoughtful, sometimes dark and often hilarious memoir about childhood, family, death, mental illness, sex and drug use, the entire book is told through cleverly inviting conceits like cat histories and card games. The graphic novel is told in five parts: In "Thirteen Cats" (featured in The Best American Comics), Reklaw discovers coping mechanisms that mimic his family pets; "Toys I Love" relates the author's pre-pubescent brushes with deviant sexual activity, and the…

Up for grabs today at 40% off is Mark Newgarden's collection of syndicated comics, We All Die Alone. Newgarden's syndicated strip in such publications as L.A. Weekly and The New York Press encouraged a fervent following and exerted a fresh influence on the medium. Today they remain as vital and entertaining as when they first appeared. In addition to compiling his comics, this book is a full picture of the artist, his influences, and his many other careers. And for today only, we're marking this book at 40% off! Grab your copy now, while we still have stock at our warehouse!

Anders Nilsen's The End is a collection of short strips about loss, death, paralysis, and transformation. It is a concept album in different styles, a meditation on paying attention, an abstracted autobiography and a travelogue, reflecting the progress of his struggle to reconcile the great upheaval of a death, and finding a new life on the other side. For today only, The End is on sale at 20% off until 11:59 PST.     Tomorrow, January 2nd, we'll be highlighting Lou Reed and Lorenzo Mattotti's The Raven! Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem of the same name, this book visualizes an extraordinary…

It may be the end of 2014, but we're raring to go on January 1st with YARAS (Yet Another Ridiculously Awesome Sale!). For the entire month of January, we'll be highlighting a book a day with discounts galore and all kinds of extra tidbits and special deals. We don't even know what they'll all be yet! So don't let the post-holiday doldrums bog you down. Books will draw on a loose theme each week, and tomorrow we start with… The End! Both literally and figuratively, tomorrow will see the book The End, by Anders Nilsen, on sale all day at 20% off….

Portraits shot at the right moment are like the fermata on a pitch perfect note. Les McCann, jazz musician and photographer, was able to capture such moments of intimacy from legendary jazz singers and musicians. Feast your eyes on the first look of our finished cover art to McCann's retrospective, Invitation to Openness, curated and introduced by Pat Thomas (Listen Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975). Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, Donald Dean, and Nina Simone (as well as comedian Redd Foxx) grace the cover, a tiny sampling of the vast array of photographs that McCann took throughout his…

Hold on to yer hats and make way for the grand, thrilling adventures of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy! In this 20-page, 4.2 MB downloadable excerpt, we've got the full introduction by Rick Norwood, "A History of Lickety Whop" by Ron Coulart, and 11 full pages of comics. Enjoy reading the beginning of Wash Tubb's search for Blackbeard's famed buried treasure on a little island in the Indies called Hurricane Isle, then head over to pre-order your copy of Roy Crane's Hurricane Isle and Other Adventures: The Best of Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs!