Fantagraphics Blog

Bringing you the absolute best in alternative comics, Fantagraphics and comiXology have released Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s for your digital reading delight. Edited by Michael Dowers, Newave! is a gigantic collection of the best small press cartoonists to emerge after the first generation of underground cartoonists (such as R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Art Spiegelman) paved the way. These cartoonists, inspired by the freewheeling creative energy of the underground comix movement, began drawing and printing their own comix seen here. This gigantor collection has 856 pages of comics by your favorite artists of today and yesterday…

It's been twenty years since comics legend Jaime Hernandez visited London, and we are making up for it in a big way! Not only will Jaime be a guest of honor at COMICA: The London International Comics Festival, but he kicks off his UK visit on Wednesday, May 29th with a special appearance at Gosh! Comics! This signing and the COMICA talk are Jaime’s only two engagements in London, so catch him at one, or both, or miss out entirely! Jaime will be signing from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, and our friends at Gosh! state:  As yet we do not…

Here's your first sneak peek of an advance copy of The Love and Rockets Companion, edited by Marc Sobel & Kristy Valenti and coming in July. This book fits nicely on your shelf with the Love and Rockets Library volumes and serves as your guide to the L&R universe, with 3 major interviews with the Hernandez brothers, character guides, previously unpublished artwork, Locas and Palomar timelines, a complete bibliography, and letter column excerpts. All this wrapped in a fold-out jacket with a poster on one side and character family trees on the other! We'll show you that in action along with more views of the book…

Advance copies are in and here's a quick peek at The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations. True to the title, it's got the whole Ghost World graphic novel in it, plus a bunch more stories, interviews with Clowes, and a bunch of smart people writing a bunch of smart stuff about the stories, all wrangled and partly written by Ken Parille and packaged up in this smart-looking compact flexi-bound softcover designed by Alvin Buenaventura. It's a must for every Clowes fan and for any serious reader of comics, which means…

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.   Wandering Son (放浪息子 / Hourou Musuko) Vol. 4 by Shimura Takako; edited and translated by Matt Thorn 224-page black & white 7" x 9.5" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-605-8 "Wandering Son is not the kind of manga in which a happy ending is guaranteed… You'll thus be grateful for the moments of realistic, untempered…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  Good Dog by Graham Chaffee 96-page black & white 8.25" x 10.25" hardcover • $16.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-653-9 See Previews / Order Now Order this book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown here as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last. Good Dog marks the welcome return of alternative cartoonist Graham Chaffee, who, after his successful 2003 collection of short stories, The Most Important Thing and Other Stories, took a detour to devote himself to the art of tattooing, before charging back with his new, beautifully conceived…

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:  The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove (Softcover Ed.) by Gene Deitch 168-page full-color 11.75" x 9.25" softcover • $35.00ISBN: 978-1-60699-617-1 See Previews / Order Now On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in "cool cat"), so Gene Deitch…

A century ago in sleepy Lumberton, the moving pictures, with their daring heroines, were the most exciting thing to happen to young Katherine Whaley. When a movie production came to town, her life took a most unexpected turn. Decades later, Whaley recounted her wild, weird years in the company of the mysterious eccentric Charles Varnay and his uncannily intelligent dog Rousseau. Varnay aimed to produce a movie serial, with Katherine as its destined star, propounding a message about the future of the human race — a message he claimed was recorded on ancient artifacts in the voice of Jesus Christ…

Oh, what a treat! We couldn't be happier that the great Gahan Wilson did this all-new illustration for the cover of our upcoming collection of Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics, his 1974-1976 funny-pages feature. Yep, it's another great but short-lived comic strip by one of cartooning's best, fished from the deep waters of obscurity and given the loving Fantagraphics treatment! These darkly delightful, subversively satirical strips have been carefully spiffed up and will be presented in a "widescreen" hardcover format hitting shelves in July. More sneak peeks are on the way, and you can pre-order now.

The genius Dash Shaw has been touring across the country in support of his latest graphic novel, New School, as well as the one-shot comic book, 3 New Stories.  On Tuesday, May 21st, he brings at all back home to Brooklyn with an animation screening at Light Industry in the lovely Greenpoint neighborhood.    Dash will screen his animation works, from cinematic permutations of his own comics, as well as adaptations of game shows and reality tv that marry their source materials' original audio tracks with a series of static illustrations to uncanny effect — Wheel of Fortune never seemed…