Fantagraphics Blog

This month, Portland celebrates a former resident of theirs: Jesse Reklaw!  Join Pony Club Gallery tonight from 6:00 to 10:00 PM for the opening reception of The Art of Couch Tag, an exhibit of original pages from his outstanding tragicomic graphic memoir, Couch Tag. I dearly hope there will be pages from the piece "Thirteen Cats" (featured in The Best American Comics). Pony Club Gallery is located at 625 NW Everett Street in Portland.  The exhibit runs through January 31st.

Take the lampshade off your head, chug some coconut water, and straighten your tie and/or stockings: 2014 is here and we're pleased to announce the return of our New Year's Hangover Sale! All this week, take 20% OFF everything on our website (including our already-discounted clearance items and gift sets) Thursday, January 2 through Thursday, January 9, 2014! Just use the coupon code HANGOVER when you check out and you'll receive 20% off everything in your order. (If you prefer to shop by phone, just mention this offer when you call — 1-800-657-1100 or 206-524-1967 outside the U.S., 9 AM to…

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about them (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability. Celebrated Summer *  by Charles Forsman 68-page 7.75" x 10.25" black & white flexibound softcover • $16.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-685-0 "With an art style that combines the animated simplicity of Charles M. Schulz and the detailed linework of Chester Brown, Forsman establishes himself as one of the most promising alternative-comic creators." -Oliver Sava, The A. V….

Inio Asano's Solanin was one of the most acclaimed manga to reach our shores in the previous decade (and a feature film back home in Japan), and anticipation is high for our English edition of Asano's Nijigahara Holograph (translated by Matt Thorn). Our advance copies arrived last week and Jen and Kristy got into a tug-of-war over who got the first one. There should be an adequate quantity of copies of this complex, gripping psychological/supernatural thriller to go around in February, but why risk it? Pre-order your copy now.

Here it is, our first preview of one of our Spring-Summer 2014 books that our supporters so generously backed on Kickstarter. Come February (we actually cranked this one out a little early!), with the release of Henry Speaks for Himself, Henry will join Barnaby and Charlie Brown in our roster of funny-looking bald-headed kids. These charming classic comics by John Liney, based on the popular comic strip created by Carl Anderson, have never been collected before, and our book, edited by David Tosh, gathers the best stories. In our downloadable excerpt, containing one complete story, Henry has a most unusual day of work and…

Those quirky comics from the heyday of the National Lampoon. Those brilliantly skewed New Yorker and Playboy cartoons. Those hilarious strips in underground mags like Wimmin's Comix and Arcade. The animated shorts that weren't The Simpsons on The Tracey Ullman Show. Perhaps you've encountered the work of M.K. Brown somewhere (lucky you) or perhaps you've never seen it before. Either way, you're in for a treat, as we've gathered these obscure gems into the first ever retrospective volume of her hilarious work, Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013, due out in February. It's what we do! Get a taste of Brown's brilliance…

Please join us in Georgetown at Fantagraphics Bookstore on Saturday, December 28 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM as we host a reception and book signing with Janet Hamlin. Her fascinating book, Sketching Guantanamo, captures the conditions faced by detainees in the makeshift island internment compound. Journalists at Guantanamo were subject to draconian security measures. Courtroom photography was banned. As a result, Hamlin's deft imagery provides the only visual record of these unparalleled proceedings. According to The New York Times, "When future historians search back in time to 'Camp Justice' and the rigidly controlled, tightly censored terrorist trials in Guantánamo, Cuba, they will…

"Kamen's art is deceptive in its seeming sweetness. It positioned him perfectly to go over the line into perversity, the hapless reader having no warning…. I look at him as being a seed of a style we'd later associate with David Lynch." – John Linton Roberson "All of these books are essential purchases for comics fans… These are the books that best show off how EC took genre stories seriously, striving to create comics that didn’t treat readers as naive or ignorant." – Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times "…I am not only appreciative…but also very impressed. [The books] are spectacular…

"No one could draw a rotted, walking corpse like Graham Ingels." – Donald Vaughan, (Florida) Sun-Sentinel "I love Ingels …" – George A. Romero "All of these books are essential purchases for comics fans… These are the books that best show off how EC took genre stories seriously, striving to create comics that didn’t treat readers as naive or ignorant." – Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times "…I am not only appreciative…but also very impressed. [The books] are spectacular packages of their featured artist and their stories." – Al Feldstein Sucker Bait and Other Stories (The EC Comics Library)Illustrated by Graham Ingels;…