Fantagraphics Blog FantaBlog

Scheduled to arrive in comics shops this week from our Eros Comix imprint: The Tijuana Bibles Hardcover Vol. 1, containing 500+ pages of explicitly smutty vintage tomfoolery. Hit that link for more info and previews and then hit your local shop tomorrow (as always, call ahead to confirm availability).

• Review: For Robot 6, Chris Mautner waxes rhapsodic about Humbug: "It's very easy with a book of this nature to engage in wild hyperbole… And yet, how else to talk about a project of this nature, a large collection of work featuring some of the most stellar cartoonists of their day, originally edited by one of the most important and influential humorists (and I really don't think this is hyperbole here – I'd put him up there with Richard Pryor in terms of significance) of the 20th century?… Something should be said about the packaging and restoration work, which…

Congrats to Ray Fenwick, whose Hall of Best Knowledge is a finalist for the 2009 Pigskin Peters Award for "avant-garde comics and other non-traditional works," part of the Doug Wright Awards, Canada's top comics honors. Winners will be announced at TCAF on May 9.

Now available for preview and pre-order: Blazing Combat, the first-ever complete collection of the legendary 1965-1966 war comic written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by such luminaries as Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, John Severin, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Russ Heath, Reed Crandall, and Gene Colan. This book is scheduled to be in stock in late March/early April and in stores approximately 4 weeks later. View a photo & video slideshow preview embedded here. Click here if it is not visible, and/or to view it larger in a new window (recommended). And visit the product details page for a downloadable, 19-page…

Fantagraphics Warehouse strongman, Ajax salutes the Comic-Con and my camera. This was the second year Ajax worked Comic-Con and our second year without the riffraff crowd lingering around our booth and shoplifting our shit. Coincidence?   The Sultan of Shit, Johnny Ryan at the Buenaventura booth. I just read New Character Parade #2 and laffed alot. You should buy it so you can laff alot too. Strange & Stranger scribe, Blake Bell mugs for the camera. The AMAZING Kim Deitch personalizes a copy of Shadowland for a fan. There's not much more I can write about Deitch. He's the greatest!…

This is a meaty one: • Review: For The Savage Critics, Sean T. Collins says The Last Lonely Saturday by Jordan Crane is "pretty much the best love story in comics form I've ever come across… It's an intelligent, moving, beautiful, terrific little comic." • Review: Rob Clough says that Beasts! Book 2 "mingles myths, warnings, fairy tales, correctives, and genuinely unexplained phenomena and allows its artists to run with them. The end result is a consistently beautiful, lovingly assembled book that forms a kind of metacommentary on the entire notion of the fantastic." • Review: For the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,…

The new issue of STOP SMILING magazine features a cover interview with R. Crumb. As one might expect from a major Crumb interview, it's a must read.

Our own Nico Vassilakis has a new packet of visual poetry ephemera titled staReduction out from Bookthug of Canada consisting of deconstructed alphabet sketches and an accompanying essay booklet. Do check it out if you like interesting things. Only 8 bucks (not sure if that's CDN or US).

You know how a band or artist can cover a song somewhat faithfully and still royally fuck it up? That's my review of Watchmen the movie. It's Madonna doing "American Pie".

Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 By various artists; edited by Greg Sadowski The enduring cultural phenomenon of comic book heroes was invented in the late 1930s by a talented and hungry group of artists and writers barely out of their teens, flying by the seat of their pants to create something new, exciting, and above all profitable. The iconography and mythology they created flourishes to this day in comic books, video, movies, fine art, advertising, and practically all other media. Supermen! collects the best and the brightest of this first generation, including Jack Cole, Will Eisner,…