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Last weekend, it was a sexytime, indeed, at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery as we launched our latest exhibit for Sexytime: The Post-Porn Rise of the Pornoisseur! Editor Jacques Boyreau joined us from Portland to sign this impressive collection of vintage porn posters from the '70s! Reprints of those posters adorn our gallery wall, including such titles as New Wave Hookers and Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle! Our musical guest for the night was Olympia, WA-based artist Poppet, aka Molly Rainey, whose orchestrated electro-loop-pop had everyone dancing… … including Poppet herself! Georgetown's Little Black Devil Burlesque babes dropped by to deliver kisses…

Why looky what we have here, it's advance copies of the next two books in our EC Comics Library series!  50 Girls 50 and Other Stories collects Al Williamson's complete Weird Science & Weird Fantasy science fiction tales, with 3 written by Ray Bradbury, plus work by Frazetta, Krenkel, Torres, and more, backed up by expert EC essayists. Chock full of rocketships, weird aliens, time travel, bizarre planets, dinosaurs, and trademark EC twist endings, it's the classic, fan-fave stuff! Check out the table of contents and read 3 complete stories in our 22-page excerpt available here, where you can also pre-order your copy. Good…

The lovely Penny Century demanded to be available digitally along with Maggie, Hopie, Ray and Luba. Fantagraphics and comiXology present the fourth Locas volume in Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets series.    First… wrestling! Penny Century starts off with a blast with “Whoa, Nellie!,” a unique graphic novelette in which Maggie, who has settled in with her pro-wrestler aunt for a while, experiences that wild and woolly world first-hand. Then it’s back to chills and spills with the old cast of Hopey, Ray Dominguez, and Izzy Ortiz — including Maggie’s romantic dream fantasia “The Race” and the definitive Ray story, “Everybody…

Candy hearts? Flowers? Bleh. Let's face it, nothing says "I love you" like a Jim Blanchard t-shirt, and lucky for us, he's just launched a new design on Redbubble.com! Available in a multitude of colors and sizes, and on hoodies, girlie tees, baseball jerseys, and more.  So, this Valentine's Day, show someone you care with a psychedelic skull.

The most evolved finch of Online Commentaries & Diversions: • Review: Tom Kaczynski's Best Testing the Apocalypse is reviewed on  Bookslut. Martyn Pedler states, "Science fiction is notoriously unreliable when it comes to predicting Saturn dreams, laser beams, and 21st century sex machines. It’s fantastic, however, at taking our present reality and making it strange again. Beta Testing The Apocalypse makes us Martians to better let us see what’s happening all around us. Read it and witness the disquieting Gernsback of Now."   • Review: Beta Testing The Apocalypse is reviewed by Comics Metropolis. "…a book with an elegant and…

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. The Comics Journal #302 edited by Mike Dean & Kristy Valenti; Gary Groth, Executive Editor 672-page black & white/color 7" x 8.5" softcoverISBN: 978-1-60699-603-4 "Business as usual for a publication that was treating the cultural significance of comics as a known fact decades before graphic novels were making the bestseller list."–Noel Murray,…

This month's issue of Booklist reviewed three recent releases by Fantagraphics creators, excerpted below:   Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 2 by Michael Kupperman Imaginations come no wonkier, no dafter than Kupperman’s. His idea of a crime-fighting, daring, dynamic duo à la Bruce and Dick (Batman and Robin) is Twain and Einstein (Mark and Albert)-that is, when it's not a snake and a strip of bacon. When he thinks Odd Couple, it's Oscar and Felix Dracula…Kupperman draws all this strangeness in a manner that derives about equally from Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), 1950s romance comics, visualpun cartoonist Glen Baxter, and…

Yesterday, Publisher Gary Groth's interview with the team from Tell Me Something I Don't Know went live on Boing Boing. Jason Lex, Jim Rugg, and Ed Piskor asked for some of Gary's Fantagraphics recommendations. Here are the quick descriptions and links to the books Gary mentioned. Good Dog by Graham Chaffee is a beautiful black and white graphic novel that chronicles the tales of stray dog, Ivan, on his search for a home, friends and more. Ivan is a good dog – if only someone would notice. Chaffee combines illustrative gravitas with cartooning verve for a richly textured, dog's-eye view…

Brooklyn, prepare to be thrizzled by the divine Michael Kupperman at the Greenlight Bookstore on Thursday, February 21st! He'll be climbing aboard the "Steamboat," their monthly literary humor event, to present his brand new collection Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 2!  His fellow castaways include Saturday Night Live's Rachel Dratch and Dawn Fraser, and your host will be author and comedian Bob Powers. This free wine-addled event launches at 7:00 PM. Greenlight Bookstore is located at 686 Fulton St (at South Portland) in Brooklyn. 

Held over! We want to make sure no one who's eligible misses out on this special offer, so we are extending it through the end of February 2013. The original announcement (with updated dates) is copied below:  Like you, we recently learned that CBG is no more. We're sure that many of you are unhappy with the substitution of Antique Trader for the remaining balance of your CBG subscription, so we'd like to offer you a one-time-only money-saving alternative. At Fantagraphics, we specialize in high-quality collections of classic comics by the best writers and artists in comics history. Exquisite collections…