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Fantagraphics won't be at this weekend's Heroes Con ourselves, but some of our artists sure will be! If you're in the Charlotte, NC-area, head out to the Charlotte Convention Center and meet 'em in the "Indie Island"! • Jeffrey Brown | AA-417• Dave Cooper | AA-515• Colleen Coover | AA-113• Jaime Hernandez | AA-415 • Roger Langridge | AA-220• Jim Rugg | AA-537• Rich Tommaso | AA-422• Drew Weing | AA-444 You can even catch our artists in some panels, if you're so inclined! Saturday, June 23rd • 12:30 PM // Approaches to Humor, Room 203A: Sure the Convention is…

Here are your first glimpses of a couple books we have coming out in the August/September timeframe. They're both big, beautiful and unabashed! Up top we have Captain Easy Vol. 3 by Roy Crane, continuing the globe-trotting adventures of Easy and his pal Wash Tubbs from the Sunday pages of 1938-1940. And below that is Sexytime from Portable Grindhouse mastermind Jacques Boyreau, collecting eye-popping vintage skin-flick posters in an oversized coffee-table art book. Hit their respective links for additional sneak peeks and to pre-order your copies, and stay tuned for more previews!

From our fine colleagues at Éditions Cornélius comes this gorgeous and excellently-titled hardcover collection La Crème de Crumb, of interest to Fantagraphics loyalists because a) duh, it's Crumb and b) it includes the 1988 interview with Crumb from The Comics Journal #121 by our fearless leader Gary Groth, translated into French (as are all the comics, natch). Francophone Seattleites take note, we'll have a couple of copies for sale at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery next week.

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. New York Mon Amour by Jacques Tardi, Benjamin Legrand & Dominique Grange 84-page black & white/duotone 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-524-2 "Four short stories by the French Tardi set in New York City. The biggest thing about Tardi is his range, even within the confines of a single…

Tales Designed to Thrizzle #8 by Michael Kupperman 32-page full-color 6.75" x 9.5" comic book • $4.95 Ships in: July 2012 — This item will be available for order concurrently with its release to comic shops in a couple of weeks. Break out your crayons as Red Warren, "America's Grandpa," brings you his highly educational "Train & Bus Coloring Book." The guests at a sophisticated weekend party sure get nervous when a certain mystery writer shows up on her goat. Learn the story of French national hero Bertrand de Copillon, a.k.a. "The Scythe." And originally serialized in the Washington City…

It's actually really lovely at the Elysian Brewing Company, but tomorrow night Thursday, June 21st, they bring us "Wasteland," the latest from our 12 Beers of the Apocalypse collaboration!  "Wasteland" is an Elderflower Saison, available on draft, and in exclusive 22 oz. bottles with labels featuring the artwork of the great Charles Burns from his weirdly apocalyptic Black Hole series.  The official tapping begins at 5:00 PM, followed by a survival demo by Bryan & co. at 6:30 PM, with cavepainting til 8:00 PM. As always, themed attire is welcome, so grab your spelunking helmet! Come by and collect the…

This month's issue of Booklist reviewed two recent releases by Fantagraphics creators, excerpted below: Folly: The Consequences of Indiscretion by Hans Rickheit: "Here are early stories by the graphic novelist whose work… comes closer than any other’s (except Nate Powell’s) to the prose stories of Zoran Živkovi, Andrew Crumey, Kelly Link, Ray Vukcevich, Theodora Goss, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and other practitioners of what’s been called slipstream fiction. They feature people, animals, and flesh-and-machine hybrids in all stages of development and dissolution, from fetus and pupa to suppurating near-corpse to skeleton . . . Among their protagonists, a bear-headed man in a…

(Click for larger image.) Early readers of the third volume of THE DITKO ARCHIVES, Mysterious Traveler, have already noticed two unfortunate glitches. The story "The Forbidden Room" is missing its ninth and final page (above), and "The Menace of the Maple Leaves" is also missing a page (below). Editor Blake Bell has been busy tearing his hair out ever since we learned this. The fix, fortunately, is very simple: We'll just reprint both stories (in full, at full size), in the next volume of THE DITKO ARCHIVES, coming in the Spring, so collectors will have the full stories. For those…

We're coming down the home stretch on the second volume of Walt Kelly's Complete Pogo, and the good news is that we've got literally 99% of the never-beforere-reprinted, full-color Sundays from the two years covered in this collection. The bad news is that we're missing a half dozen panels still. How can we be missing panels and not strips, you ask? Simple: the Pogo Sunday was put together in an odd configuration in which of the three possible formats — full page, half page, and third page — only one, the third page, contained the complete strip. The third page…

Graphic artist Dale Yarger was at the center of activity in Seattle throughout the 1980s and '90s as our city prepared to engage popular culture on a global scale. Yarger's tenure at The Rocket magazine in the 1980s included designing Bruce Pavitt's monthly Sub Pop column, where he refined the look and the ubiquitous logo of the future record label. He moved from there to the position of head art director at Fantagraphics Books during the formative period of alternative comix. He later left to become art director of The Stranger and helped guide that magazine to regional prominence and…