Fantagraphics Blog FantaBlog

If you're reading this, you know about FLOG! The Fantagraphics Blog. Here in its new incarnation, we have some new ways to navigate and find the things you want to read about. In the right column you'll see links to the five most recent FLOG posts and links to monthly FLOG archives. If you want to read all posts by a particular FLOG writer, simply click their name whenever it appears as a by-line link. FLOG posts are also grouped by subject using tags, so if you’re reading a FLOG post about, for instance, Joe Sacco, and you want to…

After a longer time in the making than I care to think about, we are extremely pleased to bring you the debut of the new Fantagraphics.com website! Settle in and have a look around. You'll notice lots of new features, which we will be introducing you to here on Flog day by day with a feature handily titled "New Website Feature of the Day." You can follow these posts via the "meta" tag (Flog tags will be the subject of a future installment). We'll start with a two-fer. The first thing you're going to want to do is register —…

Mr. Alex Chun, the Fantagraphics Pin-Up King, was contacted a while back to be an expert for Couture King Louis Vuitton. Apparently Vuitton was looking to I.D. some old men's magazine art for use on the company's unfathomably high-priced handbags. One of those artists was Bill Wenzel, subject of Alex's fourth of eight books of classic pin-up art to date. Of course, being that this is the haute Art world, the bags aren't credited as a Vuitton collaboration with cartoonist Bill Wenzel but a Vuitton and Richard Prince collaboration. Richard Prince being an Artiste who is cited as opening up…

Our FLOG! podcast feature, Flogcast, will be launching soon — stay tuned! This feature will bring you exclusive audio interviews (both new and from the archives) as well as other sounds of Fantagraphics. Can’t wait? No problem — we have some audio features ready for your listening and downloading pleasure right now: an interview with Joe Sacco and the Terr'ble Thompson musical.

The new issue of the Believer features not only another typically great cover by regular cover artist Charles Burns, but also features Burns himself as the cover feature! Very sweet. The issue includes a lengthy interview with Burns, but you can read an excerpt via the first link.

This has little to do with comics, but I was crestfallen to read on Pitchfork this morning that Dave “Day” Havlicek, the amazing electric banjo wizard for The Monks, passed away yesterday. The Monks were one of the most badass bands who ever lived; if you don’t believe it, check this shit out (or any other clip on YouTube). A group of misfit GIs stationed in Germany during the mid-60s found each other, shaved their heads, and became the first proto-psychobilly/punk rock punk rock band, and they wrote killer songs. Anyway, Dave had long since settled just outside Seattle and…

Johnny Ryan was interviewed this morning by Howard Stern's '100 news' (his SIRIUS Satellite 'news' channel) and we're told the interview will run this afternoon at about 2:00PM Pacific Time. Johnny was interviewed about this drawing he did of the Stern show cast of characters.

Inkstuds has a new interview with one of my favorite cartoonists (and graphic designers), Jonathan Bennett. Jonathan says at the end that he thinks it went terrible, but he's wrong, I enjoyed it.

I suspect this is more true than any of us here care to admit. (Though I'm not sure it's an either/or thing.)

Google news just alerted me to this parallel universe called "Utah" where there's a real estate agent named Eric Reynolds selling homes in the town of Herriman.