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THIS IS NOT A TEST: Tom Kaczynski presents the launch of his brave and brilliant collection Beta Testing the Apocalypse on Thursday, January 24th at Big Brain Comics in Minneapolis. He will be joined by fellow Fantagraphics alumni Zak Sally and Derek Van Gieson, as well as Vincent Stall, Dan Wieken, and Peter Wartman. Join them from 5:00 to 7:00 PM for this special celebration! Tom says a commemorative red ink will be used in authorizing your books.  Big Brain Comics is located at 1027 Washington Avenue South. After the event, there will be mandatory fun at the Downtown Grumpy's.

Get ready for a truly Super Sunday as we welcome Portland artist Aron Nels Steinke to the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery on Sunday, February 3rd! From 1:00 to 3:00 PM, he'll be signing copies of his brand-new collection Big Plans, a collection of his awesome autobiographical mini-comics series, now compiled in a fine 360-page volume by Portland's Bridge City Comics! Laugh-out-loud funny, chilling, and meditative, Big Plans collects Aron Nels Steinke's most intimate and relatable stories. With a unique sense of timing, these are incredibly readable comics that are hard to put down. So, start making your big plans to…

… nothing to see here! Just a few hundred Barnaby clippings to scan for our second volume. Bless you, Jon Barli .   

The amazing Esther Pearl Watson will be among the hundreds of artists exhibiting at the L.A. Art Book Fair, opening Thursday, January 31st at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA! Non-profit organization Printed Matter presents this unique event for artists' books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. There will be art installations, and even a "Zine World," a super-sized subsection of the L.A. Art Book Fair, featuring zinesters from home and abroad, together with three zine exhibitions. Here's a sneak peek at some of the zines that Esther will be bringing:   (That Garbage zine is a collaboration with her also-awesome husband,…

Dash Shaw's animated music video for Sigur Ros entitled SERAPH is showing at Sundance this week. As part of the Film Festival Shorts, SERAPH is also promoted on the YouTube Screen Room Channel. Check out Shaw's animation and enjoy others like Catnip and What Do We Have in Our Pockets? Keep your eyes on the sky for a new Shaw animation coming soon along with his two new comics, New School and 3 New Stories.

 The chest rackiest cough of Online Commentaries & Diversions: • Review: Andy Shaw reviews Chris Wright's Blacklung on Grovel. "The characters have enormous depth, and the book explores interesting themes on the nature of violence. It’s particularly strong on class structure, exploring the different levels of what’s acceptable to different people in different walks of life…While extremely dark this is definitely one of the most sophisticated horror books I’ve read in some time." • Review: Blacklung by Chris Wright makes another best of list on Comic Book Resources. Greg Burgas writes "Wright’s pirate comic is a strange animal – it’s…

Coming back into print in a new softcover edition after being sold out for a few years, it's The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove, the super-snazzy collection of the great Gene Deitch's super-jazzy cartoons & illustrations for Record Changer magazine 1945-1951. All spiffed up from its original release 10 years ago and sporting a ginchy new cover design, this oversized art book is off to the printer for release later this Spring. If you dig mid-century art & design, this book is a must for your Noguchi coffee table! Why not pre-order your copy now?

Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano; translated by Matt Thorn February 2014 $26.99 Hardcover • 200 pages Black-and-white • 7" x 9.25" ISBN: 978-1-60699-583-9 Fantagraphics continues its line of acclaimed literary manga with new classic Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano. As society slowly spirals into darkness an unexplained explosion in the butterfly population is just the first of many curiosities in the town where rumors of a creature in a tunnel under the school spread like wildfire. A curse haunts the town as the story follows the scapegoat, Arié, who is plunged into the tunnel's horrors and offered up to the creature. Many…

* Other People's Publications** Yeah, You Know Me. If you're "friends" with Johnny Ryan on Facebook, chances are you've seen quite a few of these drawings before: in 2012, he waged a six-month-long artistic-battle against Frédéric Fleury (founder of Frederic Magazine), with each gentleman retaliating with drawings even more obscene than the one before it! Italian publisher The Milan Review has collected their illustrated insults into this fine 140-page book (140 pages?! Wow, guys…), which we now have in stock at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery! Is this the most penises ever drawn in one comic book? I'm inclined to…

Messages in a Bottle: Comic Book Stories by B. Krigstein edited by Greg Sadowski 272-page full-color 8" x 10.5" softcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-580-8  Ships in: February 2013 (subject to change) – Pre-Order Now  Working in comic books for just over a decade in the 1940s and '50s, Bernard Krigstein applied all the craft, intelligence, and ambition of a burgeoning "serious" artist, achieving results that remain stunning to this day. While his legend rests mostly on his landmark narratives created for EC Comics, dozens of stories for lesser publishers equally showcase his singular draftsmanship and radical reinterpretation of the comics page. Harvey and…