Fantagraphics Blog FantaBlog

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • List: Moto Hagio's The Heart of Thomas tops Deb Aoki's list of the Most-Anticipated New Manga of 2012 at About.com Manga: "This 3-volume story from 1974 has been on many manga connoisseur's wish lists for years, so it's a real joy to see that Fantagraphics will be publishing the entire saga in English in one volume." • List/Review: Manga Worth Reading's Johanna Draper Carlson ranks Wandering Son the #2 Best New Manga of 2011 and recommends Volume 2 in her review: "Shimura Takako’s young figures are adorable. They look unspoiled, with their future ahead of…

These books have been out for a while and some low-res images have been floating around but I've been waiting, waiting, waiting for designer Paul Buckley to post them on his Flickr page in all their high-res glory and at last my patience is rewarded! Behold Ivan Brunetti's and Jordan Crane's amazing cover illustrations for the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions of the Roald Dahl classics Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, now available at bookstores near you. But this isn't even the half of it! There's back covers, spines and flaps too — see…

This weekend in San Francisco, get a hint of what's to come in our upcoming anthology No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, edited by Justin Hall! Justin recently taught the Engage: Queer Comics Project class at the California College of the Arts, and now his students are curating an art show opening this Saturday, December 17th at the S.F. Cartoon Art Museum. The show will feature art from LGBTQ comics over the last four decades made by local creators, as well as a film composed of interviews of major figures in queer cartooning conducted by the students, and…

Back in 1973, this ad in Billboard magazine quoted renowned Rolling Stone journalist Paul Nelson in promotion for an album by musician Elliott Murphy, a singer-songwriter who Nelson helped discover. "Since Elliott Murphy and his work will be with us as long we have rock & roll, I suggest we play it now…" — Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone And Elliott Murphy will be playing that music tonight at BookCourt in Brooklyn, alongside author/editor Kevin Avery, who will be doing a signing and discussion for Everything is an Afterthought: The Life & Writings of Paul Nelson. This is a very special…

So apparently every year there's "The Black List" of the most buzzed-about unproduced Hollywood screenplays and this year's new list (published at Nikki Finke's Deadline) has Ben Schwartz, editor of The Best American Comics Criticism, and his script Home by Christmas on it. The script, which tells the story of a young Larry Gelbart (who went on to bring M*A*S*H to television) going on the USO tour with Bob Hope during the Korean War, was inspired by interviews Schwartz did for The Lost Laugh, a book of comedy history which Ben is writing for us (release TBD). Anyone want to…

We'll be helping to distribute Rich Tommaso's forthcoming self-published graphic novel The Cavalier Mr. Thompson (as in Jim, not Kim), but before that can happen he's got a Kickstarter campaign going to help pay for the printing costs and help him finish it in time for its European publication deadlines. We've published a few of Rich's comics in the past and most recently you can see his stellar coloring work in our Carl Barks Library series! Kick in some bucks and you could get a signed copy of the book along with bonuses like prints, buttons, original art or even…

Yup, Tony Millionaire's 500 Portraits gets the nod from TV's Andy Richter. Sweet, sweet nepotism!

As you may know, next spring we are publishing Significant Objects, a collection of writing and images from the project of the same name wherein various writers created narratives inspired by various seemingly valueless objects which were then auctioned on eBay with their respective stories as the item description, to see if the accompaniment of the story would lead to an increase in the objects' value as measured by the bids. So, news comes via the Significant Objects blog that the students in an 11th-grade English class at Wm. E. Hay High School in Stettler, Alberta, Canada are embarking on…

Rolling Stone magazine has named Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Kevin Avery one of 2011's Best Rock Books. Nelson, of course, famously worked for and then quit RS, so one can only wonder what he would think of this. At any rate, it's very rewarding that this remarkable book, one of our occasional forays into non-comics publishing, is receiving the accolades it deserves, having already been named one of Library Journal's Best Books 2011 and tied for "Music book of the year" at Springfield, Massachussett's The Republican.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • List: At the Forbidden Planet International blog, comics creator Nick Abadzis names Jaime Hernandez's "The Love Bunglers" from Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 as one of his three favorite comics of the year: "Hernandez just keeps delivering stories of the highest calibre. There are no pyrotechnics or fancy-ass page layouts, just a slow burn of emotion and expression, presented in calmly immaculate style. The moments of his characters’ lives that Hernandez chooses to show in the telling of his tales are picked and deployed with such precision it betrays a wisdom and clarity…