Thank you to everyone who came out to the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery for the opening reception of our new exhibit, “Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics” with our special guest, Michel Gagné (seen above), editor of our brand new collection of the same title! Gagné's interpretive exhibit features enlarged examples of Simon and Kirby’s romance comics, which he spent five years restoring for this gorgeous new collection. Michel gave a great presentation on his delicate restoration process, which you can watch below (YouTube link)! WARNING: I have to apologize — I'm not the best filmographer,…
Master Cartooning with Gahan Wilson at MoCCA!
Photo by Christina Foxley, courtesy The Strand Bookstore NYC Learn cartooning from the master himself! The legendary Gahan Wilson will be teaching a special Master Class this Tuesday, April 17th in New York City! Join Gahan at MoCCA from 7:00 to 9:00 PM as he shows and tells you how to make your own humorous cartoons. Using his own life and career as reference points, Gahan will give you pointers and advice about the art and business of cartooning that only this master of the medium can provide. Classes are held at MoCCA, located at 594 Broadway, Suite 401 (between…
Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental by Drew & Josh Alan Friedman
Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental [New Edition] by Drew Friedman & Josh Alan Friedman http://www.fantagraphics.com/anysimilarity 88-page black & white 9.25" x 12.25" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-521-1 See Previews / Order Now Finally back in print, Any Similarity… is a collection of Drew Friedman’s earliest comic strips and illustrations, featuring his most obsessively stippled black-and-white panels and his most hilarious wise-guy takes on the stars and demi-stars and never-quite-stars of that swamp we like to call showbiz. In these strips, many of them…
Daily OCD: 4/12-4/13/12
Today's (and yesterday's when it was slow) Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "The Dutch artist and designer Joost Swarte has a tremendous reputation among cartoon-art aficionados, given his tiny body of comics work. The answer to the title of his 40-year retrospective, Is That All There Is?, is: 'Pretty much, yeah.'… Plot is beside the point. Swarte is more concerned with formal purity, and with making the deep structures of cartooning visible. He pares his art to mechanical, hard-edged vectors and curves: caricature triple-distilled into symbolic visual shorthand, with every line canted just so. His geometrically precise, nearly architectural…
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Benefit Fashion Show!
Not only does the Threadless t-shirt company keep us lookin' good, but now they're also helping defend our first amendment rights with a benefit for the mighty Comic Book Legal Defense Fund! Tonight, Friday, April 13th, they'll be hosting the CBLDF/THREADLESS C2E2 Fashion Show Welcome Party, launching a colossal new "Comics-On-Tees" collection featuring artwork by Jeffrey Brown, Anders Nilsen, Paul Hornschemeier, and Jeff Lemire, based on a story from Jeffrey! Raffle prizes will include a plethora of awesome Threadless swag, including original retail art, and great CBLDF items, including classic signed comics, exclusive prints, and more! Giant games of Mario…
Comics: Philosophy & Practice at the University of Chicago!
Hey Chicago! Stop whatever you're doing (yes, that means reading the FLOG) and go register for this NOW! Space is limited, and you do NOT want to miss out. It's the Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference at the University of Chicago, held May 18th-20th. And the line-up will make any comics-fan's head spin: it features Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Carol Tyler, and Chris Ware, as well as Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Françoise Mouly, Seth, and Art Spiegelman… WOW. Oh, and did I mention it's…
Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips 1916-1924 by George Herriman – Previews, Now in Stock
Now in stock in our warehouse and shipping to our mail-order customers: Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Sunday Strips 1916-1924 by George Herriman 600-page black & white/color 9" x 12" hardcover • $95.00 See Previews / Order Now Our final limited-edition deluxe Krazy hardcover (it's Volume 1, but the third to be published) collects the three Krazy & Ignatz softcover books which comprehensively compile the first nine years (1916 through 1924) of Krazy Kat Sunday strips, under hard covers. It's not a slipcase, it's a single hardcover book. The covers to the original three softcover books are NOT included, but…
Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924: At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True by George Herriman – Now in Stock
Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924: At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True by George Herriman 256-page black & white/color 9" x 12" softcover • $24.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-477-1 See Previews / Order Now Krazy Kat, with its eternally beguiling love triangle of kat/dog/mouse, its fantastically inventive language, and its haunting, minimalist desert décor, has consistently been rated the best comic strip ever created, and Fantagraphics’ award-winning series one of the best classic comic-strip reprint series ever published. With our 13th volume, Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924, the decades-in-the- making project of publishing every single Krazy Kat Sunday created by Herriman comes to…
Freeway by Mark Kalesniko named Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize honor book
Hot on the heels of its Eisner Award nomination for "Best Graphic Album – New," Mark Kalesniko's beautiful, ambitious and complex book Freeway has been named an honor book (i.e. runner-up) for the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize by a jury representing the Pennsylvania Center for the Book at Penn State University. From the judges' comments: "Kalesniko's vivid existentialist drama of the dog and his artistic dream reassuringly demonstrates that in comics, at least, creativity and originality continue to flourish and (with this honor award) receive their rightful recognition." – Susan Squier "With allusions to the history of the classic studio…
Daily OCD: 4/11/12
Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review/Plug: City Weekly's Scott Renshaw previews Kevin Avery's appearance at The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on Friday to sign Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, saying "Avery crafts a biography of a largely self-taught thinker who immersed himself in his passions, whether that meant classic film, the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald or folk music. The author allows his subject to develop primarily through oral history, as his friends and contemporaries recall a quirky iconoclast who disappeared into obscurity and a lonely death in 2006. But…
