Fantagraphics Blog

{mosimage} It was early 1955. The New York record producer, Arthur Shimkin, for whom I’d done a couple of animated musical shorts when I was directing the UPA/New York animation studio, heard of my developing newspaper strip and asked me to come up with a script for a musical production of it for a Simon & Shuster “Little Golden Record,” one of those little 6-inch yellow plastic discs made for kiddie record players. Not a big deal, yet Shimkin brought in truly top talent for the date. He got the pop American composer Alec Wilder, and Broadway lyricist Marshall Barer…

{mosimage}Jim Woodring’s cartoons chart a course through some of the most surreal imagery ever seen in any artistic medium, drawing visions from the realms of the subconscious to create a graphic world of dreams. But while his work may speak in the language of dreams, Woodring’s life has often led him into nightmare territory. As a child, Woodring was plagued by both schoolmates and by waking nightmares accompanied by “voices” — a condition which would haunt him through childhood and much of his adult life. After enduring drug and alcohol abuse and homelessness, he worked as an animator for several…

In the late 20th and 21st century diverse forms of commonplace and popular art appeared to be coalescing into a formidable faction of new painted realism. The phenomenon owed its genesis to a number of factors. The new school of imagery was a product of art that didn’t fit comfortable into the accepted definition of fine art. It embraced some of the figurative graphics that formal art academia tended to reject: comic books, movie posters, trading cards, surfer art, hot rod illustration, to mention a few. This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America’s most…

{mosimage}Lewis Trondheim was born in 1964 and spent his childhood in the french town of Fontainebleau. In 1987 he met Jean-Christophe Menu, an aspiring cartoonist who turned him on to the world of comics. In 1990, together with four other cartoonists, Menu and Trondheim co-founded L’Association, a publishing company which would go on to publish some of the most revolutionary alternative European comics of the decade. Trondheim has appropriated the classic funny-animal tradition of cartoonists like Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, and Stan Sakai and given it a fresh contemporary spin with his “McConey” stories. The dialogue is consistently witty, and…

{mosimage}Born in 1962, London, Carol Swain was brought up in Wales, the population of the village being an uneasy mix of mean Baptist hysteric (© Hunter S Thompson) and drop-out hippie. A place deemed so evil by travelling evangelist missionaries, they condemned it as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. She left Sodom and Gomorrah to go to art school where she studied painting. In 1989 she began self-publishing her comic Way Out Strips, which was later picked up by Fantagraphics Books. Since then she has completed two graphic novels and has contributed numerous comics stories to anthologies worldwide. She lives…