Fantagraphics Blog

Author at large, Kipp Friedman will be appearing at TWO of our favorite literary hotspots in New York next month. Whether shooting pool with the mobster Crazy Joey Gallo, attending a dinner party hosted by an aged but remarkably spry Groucho Marx, or simply playing doctor with a classmate in the former estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kipp Friedman led a colorful childhood. The youngest son of celebrated writer and satirist Bruce Jay Friedman, Kipp looks back fondly on the amusing and sometimes confusing events and encounters that helped shape his early life in this moving tribute to growing up…

There's so much incredible stuff to show you in our two-volume complete hardcover collection of witzend, our downloadable preview runs to a ridiculous 87 pages (and 45 MB), with a smattering of pages and the cover art from each issue, the Tables of Contents, and a bit more. In rough order of appearance: Wallace Wood, Al Williamson, Jack Gaughan, Gray Morrow, Harvey Kurtzman, Warren Sattler, Reed Crandall, Don Martin, Steve Ditko, Art Spiegelman, Richard Bassford, Roger Brand, Frank Frazetta, Grass Green, Vaughn Bodé, James Frankfort, Steranko, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, John Benson, Sorrel Garika, Ed Paschke, Bernie Wrightson, Alphonse Mucha, Bill…

Ulli Lust just won the 2014 LA Times Book Award for Graphic Novels & Comics for her excellent Today is the Last Day of the End of Your Life. This prestigious award joins her 2011 Angouleme Prize for the original language printing and her Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel from last fall. Pick up a copy at your local bookstore, our website or the upcoming festivals we're attending: Linework NW, TCAF and CAKE! This graphic novel has had a little Fantagraphics story tacked onto it from Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds first seeing it at a festival in Europe to…

Remember, use your inky powers for good, like Mickey Mouse cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson, not for evil, like the Phantom Blot, the marquee villain in Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 5. (Then again, Gottfredson's ink brought the Blot to life, so perhaps there was some wickedness in his well…) After a detour into color Sunday strips, we're back to the black & white dailies in our Eisner Award-winning series. Disney's big-eared silver-screen star graces the silvery cover and tumbles through adventure after adventure in the crisply-reproduced pages. Advance copies in house means the book's about 2 months away from release; more…

You may have seen this image floating around the internet for a little while, but let's make it official: it's the cover art for the second volume of Ed Piskor's New York Times best selling series Hip Hop Family Tree! Afrika Bambaataa… in… spaaaaaaace! Remember how fast the first printing of Vol. 1 sold out? And then how fast the second printing sold out? Yeah, we're bumping up the print run for this volume, but you'll still want to reserve your copy today to ensure you're not left empty-handed when they hit shelves come July.

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: The EC Comics Slipcase Vol. 1by Harvey Kurtzman, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, Al Williamson, Al Feldstein et al. 832-page four-volume hardcover 7.5" x 10.5" x 4" slipcased box set • $94.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-728-4 See Previews / Order Now   The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library Volumes 1-4: • EC Comics — the most acclaimed and most vilified publisher of all time.• Superb art by the greatest talents in comics history.• A special collector's set at a special collector's price. 4 Multiple Award-Winning Artists — All 1st Printings — Over 800 Pages — Special Features — Special Price Harvey Kurtzman: The agony of war!Wallace Wood: Shock and…

Mankind's long history of armed conflict has inspired some of the greatest creative work in every art form. Case in point: the inspired and justly revered war stories published by EC Comics. Some of the finest of that material came from the typewriter of Harvey Kurtzman, the pencil of John Severin, and (often) the pen and brush of Will Elder — comics legends all, and a dream team of creators if there ever was one. Bomb Run and Other Stories collects all of this work, gathered in a single volume for the first time, under the cover you see above,…

The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952 (Vol. 1) – Paperback Ed.by Charles M. Schulz 298-page black & white 8.25" x 6.5" softcover • $22.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-763-5 Ships in: May 2014 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now The bestselling, award-winning, critically acclaimed series that sparked a renaissance for fans of classic comic strips upon its debut in 2004 is now in softcover! This first volume, covering the first two and a quarter years of the strip, features hundreds of strips rarely reprinted before this series. Three major cast members — Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus — initially show up as infants and only “grow” into…

Headin' to the Asbury Park Comicon this coming Saturday, April 12th and Sunday, April 13th? As we mentioned back in March, our own Peter Bagge, Bob Fingerman, Charles Forsman, and Miss Lasko-Gross will be special guests this year! And we're also happy to share that Miss will be part of a special edition of R. Sikoryak's celebrated Carousel series! Get ready for laughs on Saturday, April 12th at 5:00 PM. Miss will be reading alongside Dean Haspiel, Danny Hellman, Seth Kushner & Christa Cassano, Kriota Willberg, and, of course, host R. Sikoryak! Carousel will be held in the Berkeley Oceanfront…

Our friend and private investigator Sam Hill has returned in The Mysterious Case. This comic by Rich Tommaso follows Sam Hill on a whole new mystery in the city! The year is 1939, where Hill is living in Los Angeles and working as an investigator for the D.A.'s office. On the very cusp of the noir genre in film, Sam finds himself in the middle of a double murder case involving oil industry magnates, con men, crooked cops and a budding movie starlet. Tommaso's gentleweaving of the darkest parts of the human mind is not his only talent, he's also…