Explainers by Jules Feiffer – Introduction by Gary Groth

{product_snapshot:id=532,true,false,true,left} {mosimage}{mosimage} In 1956, Jules Feiffer was a 27-year-old aspiring cartoonist with lofty goals and a hunger to see his work in print. He had previously apprenticed with Will Eisner for six years (1946-1952), eventually writing Eisner’s “Spirit” strip — and, even, in 1949, securing a gig writing and drawing a one-page kid strip, “Clifford,” that ran in the same comics supplement that featured “The Spirit.” Aside from this one pro bono slot (Eisner did not consider it worth paying for), he went unpublished until 1956, discovering in the interim that book publishers were not receptive to the kind of…

Willie & Joe: The WWII Years by Bill Mauldin

PRESENTING THE COMPLETE WWII CARTOONS OF THE GREATEST CARTOONIST OF THE GREATEST GENERATION – COMING IN MARCH 2008 ABOUT WILLIE & JOE “The real war,” said Walt Whitman, “will never get in the books.” During World War II, the closest most Americans ever came to the “real war” was through the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the most beloved enlisted man in the U.S. Army. Here, for the first time, Fantagraphics Books brings together Mauldin’s complete works from 1940 through the end of the war. This collection of over 600 cartoons, most never before reprinted, is more than the record of…

Artist Bio – Chris Ware

{mosimage}Chris Ware was born in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was first inspired by reading Peanuts paperbacks in his grandmother’s basement, unlimited access to 1970s television, and a local neighborhood cartoonist who had also worked under his grandfather’s managing editorship at the newspaper the Omaha World-Herald. Ware got his start in published comics, however, while attending the University of Texas in Austin. He drew comics every week, and sometimes on a daily basis, for The Daily Texan, still the country’s largest university newspaper. It was here that Ware began developing such characters as Quimby the Mouse and an early…

Artist Bio – Spain Rodriguez

{mosimage}Known for the most part simply as “Spain,” Spain Rodriguez was an active participant in the revolutionary underground comix movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Born in 1940, Spain grew up in a Buffalo, New York and later lived in New York City. He attended the Silvermine Guild School, an art and design school in Connecticut. After living in New York with fellow artists Kim Deitch and Trina Robbins, Spain moved to San Francisco where he became involved in the thriving underground comix movement. Spain’s comics were in the groundbreaking Zap comix along with R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Gilbert Shelton…

Artist Bio – Sophie Crumb

{mosimage}Sophie Crumb was born in 1981 to Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb in Winters, California. As a child, her father read classic comics to her such as Little Lulu and Popeye. When she was 8 years old, her family moved to France. While attending high school there, her sketchbook was chosen to represent Enid Coleslaw’s art in the popular film Ghost World. Post-graduation, she went to circus school in Paris. Crumb returned to the U. S., briefly residing in Berkeley, California while working at Comic Relief, before moving to Brooklyn, New York to apprentice as a tattoo artist with Adam…

Artist Bio – Richard Sala

{mosimage}Richard Sala’s paintings and prints have been exhibited internationally and his animated serial, “Invisible Hands” appeared on MTV’s Liquid Television. He has done illustrations for many magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, Newsweek, Playboy, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He provided the artwork for a story by Lemony Snicket in one of the series of Little Lit children’s books and did over sixty drawings for Jack Kerouac’s recently discovered Dr. Sax screenplay. A new adaptation of Dracula by horror writer Steve Niles, published in Fall 2005, contains twenty-two new color paintings by Sala. His comic strip work officially…

Artist Bio – Stan Sakai

{mosimage}Stan Sakai was born in Kyoto, Japan, grew up in Hawaii, and now lives in California with his wife, Sharon, and children, Hannah and Matthew. He received a Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii, and did further studies at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. His creation, Usagi Yojimbo, is the story of a samurai rabbit living in a feudal Japan populated by anthropomorphic animals. It first appeared in Albedo Comics in 1984. Since then, Usagi has been on television as a guest of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and as toys, on clothing, in…

Artist Bio – Joe Sacco

{mosimage}Joe Sacco is a Maltese citizen currently residing in Portland, OR where he makes his living as a cartoonist and journalist. Sacco received his bachelor of arts degree in journalism at the University of Oregon in 1981. Two years later he returned to his native Malta, where his first professional cartooning work (a series of romance comics) was published. After relocating back to Portland, he co-edited and co-published the monthly comics newspaper Portland Permanent Press from 1985 to 1986; PPP lasted 15 issues, and included early work by such cartoonists as John Callahan and J.R. Williams. In 1986, Sacco moved…

Artist Bio – Gary Panter

{mosimage}Texas-born illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician, Gary Panter is a child of the ’50s who blossomed in the full glare of the psychedelic ’60s and, after surviving underground during the ’70s, finally made his mark in the ’80s as head set designer for the successful kid/adult TV show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a job which brought his jagged art and surreal cartoon ideas into the homes of America and bagged him two Emmy Awards. With Pee Wee, Panter created another world, a fantasy extension of his natural studio habitat which was constructed out of a collection of garbage and buried…

Artist Bio – Tony Millionaire

{mosimage}Tony Millionaire was born in 1956 and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He grew up surrounded by a family of artists. His mother teaches art to Junior High School students, while his father is an advertiser and designer. Two of Millionaire’s grandparents were artists (one of his grandfathers was friends with the cartoonist Roy Crane). Millionaire’s mentor/grandfather was also an illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post and various adventure books and magazines. Millionaire also picked up his predilection for drawing ships and ocean scenes from his grandfather. Millionaire attended the Massachusetts College of Art in 1974 for four years. Until the…