Fantagraphics Blog

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.   No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (Softcover Ed.) by various artists; edited by Justin Hall 328-page black & white/color 7.5" x 10" softcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-718-5  "From Stonewall and the AIDS crisis to the terrifying specter of domesticity, this clear-eyed, unsentimental collection demonstrates the extent to which, for LGBT…

  We're mixing things up today and giving you the Joe Daly experience is issued form! Previously only available in graphic novel longform, in this first issue of Daly's popular 'Dungeon Quest' Millennium Boy decided to grab his hobo stick, his bandanna, and his Swiss Army knife, bid his mom goodbye, and head off on a quest. Joined by his best friend Steve (weapon: baseball bat; clothing: wife beater, cargo pants and sandals), the two sort out a few of the details their adventure.   Not for the faint of heart, this story is action-packed like the Dungeons and Dragons…

Prince Valiant Vol. 7: 1949-1950 by Hal Foster 120-page full color 10.25" x 14" hardcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-645-4 Ships in: August 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now You might think that birth of Prince Valiant's son Arn at the end of the previous volume would have slowed down Val's adventuring, but you would be wrong. After the baby has been christened, Valiant and Gawain are dispatched to investigate reports of black magic in Wales, ending up in pitched battle at the aptly-named Castle Illwynde. Then it's off to Scotland to battle the Picts, and then home yet again for Val to…

Our other EC Comics Library volume due out later this month, Fall Guy for Murder and Other Stories, is another auteur turn, featuring Johnny Craig's writing and artwork (for the most part; Al Feldstein scripted a couple). Crime, suspense and horror were Craig's forté, as these 23 delightfully fiendish tales attest, and Craig was responsible for some of EC's most shocking and notorious images. This is the first of four projected volumes to showcase, for the first time, the full chronological run of Craig's EC stories from Crime SuspenStories, Vault of Horror, and elsewhere, with our trademark bonus features and…

One of two new volumes in our New York Times best-selling EC Comics Library series coming later this month, Child of Tomorrow and Other Stories finds prolific EC scripter (and longtime MAD editor) Al Feldstein behind both the typewriter and the drawing board for 16 tales of spine-tingling sci-fi suspense, plus 7 more stories drawn by other EC short-timers and stalwarts. The influence of Feldstein's writing and brushwork can be seen in the work of contemporary cartoonists like Charles Burns, Dan Clowes, and Gilbert Hernandez, who provides an intro ot this volume. Our usual historical features are joined by a new interview with Feldstein. Another indispensible entry in…

One of 2009's most visionary graphic novels, The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit, is coming back into print in paperback in just a few weeks. Hailed by critics and adored by fans, it's a surreal, visually sumptuous collision of body horror, steampunk fantasy and dream logic that would make Sigmund Freud's head spin. If you like gorgeously discomfiting comics, this is the book for you. Read most of the first chapter (also downloadable), and pre-order your copy right here.

While I was working on The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years (and Counting) I noticed this contribution to the Love and Rockets #11 (April 1985) letters page signed “Christy Marx.” Dear Bros. Hernandez, Hmmm . . . how to tell you how great this comic is without sounding like a raving fan. Fuck it! You guys deserve raves. “Mechanics” is the best, closely followed by “Heartbreak Soup” in all its incarnations. “Errata Stigmata” I can do without, frankly. I read the first seven issues all at once, having come in late, drawn by growing word-of-mouth, plus the look of them began…

In just a few weeks Gene Deitch's Nudnik Revealed! will hit shelves and animation fans will not want to miss it. Deitch, a living legend in the animation field, created a series of theatrical shorts in the mid-1960s starring a prototypical lovable-loser type, Nudnik. The series lasted one "season" of 12 episodes and garnered an Oscar nomination. Now, for the first time, Deitch has delved into his archives and gathered all of the artwork he produced for the cartoons into this oversized coffee-table art book, along with his own entertaining commentary. We were thrilled to have Gene himself on hand to debut the…

The latest, largest kaiju monsters of Online Commentaries and Criticism:       • Review: New School in The A.V. Club. "Like Anders Nilsen, Dash Shaw has spent his career looking for a creatively profitable middle ground between high art and straightforward comics storytelling.…Shaw riffs on the popular culture of the ’90s and the politics of the ’00s, suggesting that the children of one decade grew up too cut off from reality to understand the part they played in fostering the global conflict of the next. The social commentary in New School provides a sharp accent to a formally daring, at times alarming…

The landmark 20th volume of The Complete Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz is charging up on us like Snoopy going after Linus's blanket, and we have the advance copies to prove it! You got Chuck there on the cover (designed, as always, by Seth), and who better to introduce the series of unfortunate events that tends to befall the gang than mysterious author Lemony Snicket? Each volume collects a full two years of strips, daily and Sunday, in crisp black & white with a handy and entertaining Index and a brief bio of Schulz in the back. This will also be available in a box…