This month's issue of Booklist reviewed three recent releases by Fantagraphics creators, excerpted below:
Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 2 by Michael Kupperman
Imaginations come no wonkier, no dafter than Kupperman’s. His idea of a crime-fighting, daring, dynamic duo à la Bruce and Dick (Batman and Robin) is Twain and Einstein (Mark and Albert)-that is, when it's not a snake and a strip of bacon. When he thinks Odd Couple, it's Oscar and Felix Dracula…Kupperman draws all this strangeness in a manner that derives about equally from Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), 1950s romance comics, visualpun cartoonist Glen Baxter, and art deco. –Ray Olson
Delphine by Richard Sala
Sala’s high-class horror sensibility is equal parts sinister and gleeful: a wild cackle of frights steeped in the grand gothic tradition of Edward Gorey… Sala’s quavery lines dish out plenty of unsettling images, and he ratchets up the eeriness with stylized, hand-drawn lettering. Though he sacrifices some narrative sense in favor of creepy atmospherics and downright baffling transitions, Sala does a fine job of keeping everything just slightly out of balance and off-kilter. –Ian Chipman
Jack Jackson's American History: Los Tejanos and Lost Cause by Jack Jackson
Jackson is one of the founders of the 1960s underground comics movement (his 1964 God Nose predates Zap Comix by four years), but he's best known for…relating the unvarnished history of his native Texas… This hardcover volume gathers two of his later works: 1989's Los Tejanos, the story of Juan Seguin, a hero of the Texas revolution…later labeled a traitor…; and Lost Cause, a 1997 post-Civil War account of unreconstructed Texans who had supported the Confederacy… Jackson spins these sprawling, complex yarns with a skilled hand, imparting them with a rugged authenticity that makes them all the more compelling, never shying away from the violence and racism endemic to the period. His rough-hewn, craggy illustrations are an ideal vehicle for these tales of the rugged men who carved out the Lone Star State. –Gordon Flagg