Fantagraphics Blog

{mosimage}Best known for his comic series Minimum Wage (Fantagraphics Books), as well as the graphic novel White Like She (also Fantagraphics), Fingerman’s contributions to the world of comics have been many and varied. In 1984, while still in attendance at New York’s School of Visual Arts, he produced work for the legendary Harvey Kurtzman (creator of Mad magazine and Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny” as well as the recently collected Humbug) on the short-lived young readers anthology NUTS! At the same time Fingerman produced a series of parodies exclusively for the European market, which ran in such periodicals as France’s L’Echo…

{mosimage}Renaissance woman Dame Darcy won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art institute at the age of 17 in 1989. There she majored in film and animation, studying under George Kuchar and Larry Jordan. During this time, she self-published Meat Cake Comix; joined the band Caroliner with Lisa Carver, where she performed, released albums and toured; and illustrated Lisa’s magazine Rollerderby, as well as other Bay Area magazines and papers. Darcy moved to New York in 1992. Her Meat Cake comic-book series began publication with Fantagraphics Books Inc., who publishes Meat Cake and its compilations, which are distributed internationally, to…

{mosimage}For four decades, Robert Crumb has shocked, entertained, titillated and challenged the imaginations (and the inhibitions) of comics fans the world over. In truth, alternative comics as we know them today might never have come about without R. Crumb’s influence — the acknowledged “Father” of the underground comics could also be considered the “Grandfather” of alternative comics. Crumb’s earliest cartoons were inspired more by the work of Carl Barks and Walt Kelly than the superhero comics enjoying their first wave of popularity at the time of Crumb’s childhood in the late ’40s. The man who once admitted to being “sexually…

{mosimage}Daniel Clowes was born in Chicago, Il. on April 14, 1961. He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY from which he graduated with a BFA degree in 1984. He began his career as an “alternative” or “underground” cartoonist in 1985 with the short-lived comic book series Lloyd Llewellyn, a feature loosely based around the adventures of a private detective which, in its gleeful embrace of the detritus of post-war pop culture (1950s science fiction, bad detective fiction, Russ Meyer movies, EC comics, etc) predated many of the popular art trends of subsequent decades. He ended the series in 1987,…

{mosimage}When Barry Windsor-Smith began his career as a comics artist in the late-60s, working on Marvel’s new Conan the Barbarian series, the young artist immediately made a name for himself as one of the most exciting stylists ever to arrive upon the scene. Infusing a Pre-Raphaelite influence into comics had never been done before, and Windsor-Smith created many of the most elegant and beloved comics of the 1970s with stints on Conan the Barbarian, The Uncanny X-Men, The Avengers and more. Then, after he had taken the comics form to new heights in his momentous two-year run on Conan, Windsor-Smith…

{mosimage}Ivan Brunetti was born in a small town in Italy on October 3, 1967. His misspent childhood consisted entirely of self-absorption, spontaneously generated hallucinations, bad drawing, and disappointments to his family. He was named after Ivan The Terrible, but as part of some apparent cosmic drollery, he turned out to be an overly sensitive, severely introverted, sad little sissy-boy. At the tender age of 8, he moved from his grandparents’ farm in Italy to the industrial South Side of Chicago; he has lived in this fair city for about 5000 years, rarely venturing outside of its bittersweet confines. He has…

{mosimage}Born in 1941 in Utica, New York as WWII broke out, Vaughn Bodé had a traumatic childhood. He first created a stir with his art in several college newspapers at Syracuse University. Professional and hardworking, Bodé blazed through the world of comics in less than a decade. His cartooning career took off in the late ’60s, as he art-directed, created animated commercials, made comic books, won a Hugo Award, and contributed to magazines such as EVO, The East Village Other, National Lampoon, Creepy, and Eerie. His series Deadbone (or Deadbone Erotica) ran in the men’s magazine Cavalier for over 200…