Fantagraphics Blog

I have a feeling I forgot until now to link to this interview with MOME great Tom Kaczynski. If I'm wrong about that, read it again. It's that good.

Here's a sneak peek at Thomas Ott's forthcoming, much-anticipated graphic novel The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8. The book is nearly complete and currently scheduled for release in Spring 2008. Clicking the image above will take you to Flickr, where you can view larger sizes and soak in all the amazing scratchboard detail.

You fellow PEANUTS lovers out there have to check out Chris Butcher's photos of the totally awesome-looking Peanuts store in Tokyo (not to mention the equally cool Moomin and Tintin stuff).

On Ebay now, including the first-ever diploma, featuring Ivan Brunetti art.

It's a busy weekend in Seattle for a change. Saturday is not only the anniversary of our storefront operation but a big day for two Nonprofit Fanta Friends. 826 Seattle is also celebrating a birthday and Eric Reynolds highly endorses the Salon of Shame, which will be happening from 3-4 pm. And The Vera Project presents their annual craft bazaar and the Bring It, Screen It event.

… one copyright infringement at a time. A friend just sent me this cellphone pic, and writes, "We had a meeting today going over 401K stuff, and the slideshow from Principal Financial Group included the attached slide. I asked the guy if he knew who put this together but he didn't know." Talk about random. What does this picture signify? Is the guy in the photo supposed to be Chris Ware? (He isn't.) If so, are we to think that Chris Ware likes to bring giant xeroxes of his work to his financial advisor's office and participate in photo shoots?…

Via Spurge come some record-breaking auction results: Charles Schulz's original art for the Sunday, April 10, 1955 Peanuts strip recently sold for $113,525, and Robert Crumb's original cover of Mr. Natural #1 sold in the same auction for $101,575, the first time either artist has cleared 6 figures. For about 0.025% of its sale price, that same Schulz strip can be had, along with 730 others, in The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956. Just saying.

Newsarama has a very informative interview with Ellen Forney about her upcoming book Lust, with discussions of pegging (dirty) and kerning (not dirty), among other things.

Your list of Official Selections at the 2008 Festival International de la Bande Desinée d'Angoulême includes: Peter Bagge's En Route Pour Le New Jersey, the French edition of Buddy Does Jersey… Jason's Le Dernier Mousquetaire, our English edition of which (The Last Musketeer) is coming soon… …and Linda Medley's Château l'Attente, known here in l'Amerique as Castle Waiting. Félicitations à tous les artistes.