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Friday, April 4th • Philadelphia, PA: It's the opening reception for Freak Scene, a group art show at Space 1026 featuring Johnny Ryan, our own Jason T. Miles, Mome-contributor Jim Rugg, and a whole host of fellow freaks. (more info) Saturday, April 5th • New York City, NY: Stop by Tables #A20-A23 at the 2014 MoCCA Arts Festival! Click here for all our signings, debuts, and programming. (more info) • Gainesville, FL: The great Carol Tyler will present a talk on "Graphic Emotion: Weighted Words and Moving Marks" at the 11th annual University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic…

Next weekend, April 5th and 6th at the regal 69th Regiment Armory Fantagraphics will be participating and doing a little dance for the MoCCA Arts Fest. Gary Groth will be presiding on his court with Frank Santoro at the Fantagraphics tables for MoCCA fest on April 5-6th. We'll be on the slight right just as you enter the convention at tables A20-A23!     Debuts: • The Amateurs by Conor Stechschulte Two butchers arrive at work to find their shop empty of meat and their minds empty of how to do their job. As customers arrive, events become increasingly disastrous….

I came in to work to find Twelve Gems on my desk this morning. No, not actual precious jewels, but something almost as valuable: an advance copy of Lane Milburn's glorious, hilarious sci-fi comedy epic! Three mercenaries hired by an enigmatic scientist traverse the galaxy in search of a dozen legendary stones with mysterious powers. Fast spaceships, exotic worlds, grody aliens, cosmic mysteries, and blazing action blend with sly satire and all-out laughs, zapping your eyeballs with Milburn's dense, detailed, rough-hewn artwork, printed in midnight blue on white. We're ahead of schedule with this book and it's not scheduled to…

An unsung cartooning master, Floyd Gottfredson produced the newspaper-strip adventures of Disney's flagship character in near-anonymity for decades, and our series finally gives him the spotlight he deserves. The newest volume, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 5: Outwits the Phantom Blot, finds our intrepid rodent hero getting into and out of dangerous scrapes on the open seas, in the urban underworld, on a remote tropical island (or is it?), and in his own back yard. Our downloadable excerpt includes 8 weeks of the "Mighty Whale Hunter" continuity, wherein Mickey's thirst for adventure leads him and Goofy into hot water and…

For their 11th annual University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, the Graduate Comics Organization will look at "Traumics: Comics Narratives of Trauma." And presenting one of their keynote speakers is noneother than our very own Carol Tyler, and on Saturday, April 5th, she will present a talk on "Graphic Emotion: Weighted Words and Moving Marks" at 7:00 PM, with a reception to follow at 8:30 PM with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Surely, anyone who has read Tyler's series, You'll Never Know, her graphic memoir focusing on the artist's father and his experiences in World War II, knows…

Cosplayers by Dash Shaw 32-page full-color comic book • $5.00 Ships on: April 16, 2014 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now   Annie and Verti are two teen cosplayers with too much time on their hands. Annie wants to act, and Verti wants to be a photographer/filmmaker. Together, they embark on making a film starring themselves and featuring an unsuspecting cast of extras they record via hidden camera. What could possibly go wrong? A one-shot dose of humor and melancholy from the creator of New School, BodyWorld, and Bottomless Belly Button.

Call it a Love Hate relationship: Visitors to the Fantagraphics booth #207 at this weekend's sold-out Emerald City Comicon in Seattle will be the first in the country to get copies of Buddy Buys a Dump. The third volume of Peter Bagge's Buddy Bradley stories includes the Hate Annual adventures with a new 20-page conclusion. Come see. Ellen Forney and David Lasky will sign at our booth today at 4:30 following their informative panel discussion on health care in the comix community. Don't miss the panel on Fantagraphics' future on Saturday at 1:00 PM in room TCC 301 with panelists…

We're so excited to have the legendary Dutch cartoonist, illustrator and designer Joost Swarte joining us in New York City in April! And in conjunction with his appearance at the 2014 MoCCA Fest, the Society of Illustrators presents Joost Swarte: Urban and Urbane, an exhibition of original artwork, sketches, prints and documentation that survey multiple facets of Swarte’s career — from RAW to The New Yorker to his architectural projects — with a special emphasis on his images of urban life, real and imagined. The exhibit will be on view through April 26th in the MoCCA Second Floor Gallery at…

The Complete Peanuts 1991-1992 (Vol. 21)by Charles M. Schulz 344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-726-0 Ships in: May 2014 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Peanuts enters its final decade, and The Complete Peanuts enters its homestretch, with material that is perhaps the most overlooked of Schulz’s career and soon to be reconsidered by scholars with this volume. Schulz’s cartooning has never looked more confident, and his sense of humor never more unrestrained. This is the 21st volume (of 25) of the perennial, bestselling series that collects every single one of the 18,000-plus Peanuts strips…

At last we can reveal the slipcase artwork for our two-volume complete collection of witzend, coming this Summer. Occupying the fertile but seldom-trod ground between the undergrounds and the "overground" mainstream (sometimes called "groundlevel comics"), witzend was created in 1966 by Wallace Wood and ran for 13 issues over nearly two decades, providing a forum for unfettered expression by creators used to toiling under commercial restrictions — in other words, a place for Wood and his friends to let their freak flags fly. And oh, what a list of friends he had. We'll get into that later… in the meantime, see…