Fantagraphics Blog Jen Vaughn

The 2013 Harvey Award Nominations list more than a few Fantagraphics' titles! Here's a peak at their covers and click on any to find out more information if for some reason they aren't already on your bookshelves! Final ballots are due to the Harvey Awards by Monday, August 19, 2013. Full submission instructions can be found on the final ballot. Voting is open to anyone professionally involved in a creative capacity within the comics field. Final ballots are available at www.harveyawards.org. Those who prefer paper ballots may e-mail harveys@baltimorecomiccon.com.   Jaime Hernandez is up for BEST CARTOONIST for his work in Love and Rockets:…

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.   No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (Softcover Ed.) by various artists; edited by Justin Hall 328-page black & white/color 7.5" x 10" softcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-718-5  "From Stonewall and the AIDS crisis to the terrifying specter of domesticity, this clear-eyed, unsentimental collection demonstrates the extent to which, for LGBT…

  We're mixing things up today and giving you the Joe Daly experience is issued form! Previously only available in graphic novel longform, in this first issue of Daly's popular 'Dungeon Quest' Millennium Boy decided to grab his hobo stick, his bandanna, and his Swiss Army knife, bid his mom goodbye, and head off on a quest. Joined by his best friend Steve (weapon: baseball bat; clothing: wife beater, cargo pants and sandals), the two sort out a few of the details their adventure.   Not for the faint of heart, this story is action-packed like the Dungeons and Dragons…

The latest, largest kaiju monsters of Online Commentaries and Criticism:       • Review: New School in The A.V. Club. "Like Anders Nilsen, Dash Shaw has spent his career looking for a creatively profitable middle ground between high art and straightforward comics storytelling.…Shaw riffs on the popular culture of the ’90s and the politics of the ’00s, suggesting that the children of one decade grew up too cut off from reality to understand the part they played in fostering the global conflict of the next. The social commentary in New School provides a sharp accent to a formally daring, at times alarming…

Congratulations are in order for two Fantagraphics cartoonists, Gene Deitch and Ellen Forney! At San Diego Comic Con they were each awarded the Inkpot Award which are given to "individuals for their contributions to the worlds of comics, science fiction/fantasy, film, television, animation, and fandom services."     At San Diego in July, we released two books for by Gene Deitch. Nudnik Revealed! includes of Deitch's animation artwork for the mid-1960s shorts starring bumbling everyman Nudnik (cross between Candide and Godot), one of his most creatively personal and commercially successful creations in a long career of innovative and successful work are showcased in this process…

Co-editor of The Last Vispo, Nico Vassilakis, addresses the fact the women of visual poetry have been ignored in previous vispo collections on The Volta. "It's true, the genre of visual poetry has primarily been a sausage fest. The concrete poetry anthologies of the 1960s, it seems, ignored women completely even though one of its renowned editors, Mary Solt, was female. Much has changed since then, but clearly not enough to promote the idea that visual poets can be either male or female. For decades, it's been a global boys club in need of being cracked open and invaded by women. Enter…

  Grab your pencils, paper and prepare to be rapped on the knuckles! Dash Shaw will be at SAW, The Sequential Artists Workshop, in Gainesville, Florida guiding and teaching YOU on February 24-28th of 2014.  If learning from a master of comics and animation sounds like fun to you then sign up now for the workshop! And wonder of wonders, Mome veteran Gabrielle Bell is teaching the week after—you might need to take some serious time off of work. Check out New School while you wait, it might be required reading! More info to come soon, keep your eyes on the SAW website.

Fantagraphics and comiXology introduce a new cartoonist to the digital comics realm: South African Joe Daly! If mystery and comedy are what you crave, you'll want to download The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book by Joe Daly. Set in sun-drenched Cape Town, South Africa, this book features two full-length stories, "The Leaking Cello Case" and "John Wesley Harding," rife with mystery, suspense, action, adventure, conspiracy theories, cool cars and excellent weed. Daly brings a refreshingly original — and utterly hilarious — voice to the comics medium, a dry, deadpan wit anchored in everyday reality combined with unnervingly deranged plots, rendered…

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.    Ghosts and Ruins by Ben Catmull 84-page black & white 10.25" x 8.5" hardcover • $22.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-678-2 "an 84-page landscape-format hardcover wedding new illustrations of haunted houses to creepy blisters of background and trivia" -Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal   Willard Mullin's Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934-1972 by Willard Mullin; edited…

All board, Richmond, Virginia! Dash Shaw is coming your way August 8th with his animation presentation. Bring your well-loved copies of Bottomless Belly Button and buy a brand-spankin' new copy of New School for Dash to sign. Velocity Comics is the place to be! The boat to the mysterious island in New School is leaving the dock soon so make sure you're on time Thursday, August 8th. Velocity Comics is located at 819A W Broad St Richmond, VA 23220.