Fantagraphics Blog

Come one, come all and bring your ale mugs! Thursday, May 16 is the OFFICIAL ODDLAND RELEASE – BEER AND ART TOUR Join Fantagraphics and Elysian Brewing in celebrating Oddland Peppercorn Saison – the first beer release in our Oddland Series – a creative venture from the warped minds of Elysian Brewing and Seattle artist, Jim Woodring. Start with an Elysian brewery tour and continue to CoCA Georgetown Gallery for beer, bites and art, including handpicked works from Jim Woodring, who will also be in attendance.  4-5PM – Brewery tours at Elysian Airport Way: 5510 Airport Way S., 981085:30-9PM –…

“Bill Griffith has helped to redefine the [comics] medium for an entire generation. Zippy has traditionally held a strong appeal for free thinkers and life’s improvisers, and attracts discerning readers of all stripes.” – Sequential Highway Zippy: The Dingburg Diaries by Bill Griffith 232-page black & white/color 8” x 10” softcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-641-6 Due to arrive in about 4-6 weeks. Click the thumbnails for larger versions; get more info, see more previews and pre-order your copy here: http://www.fantagraphics.com/dingburgdiaries

We're excited to show off this advance copy of our handsome hardcover presentation of Bread & Wine by Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff, coming in about 2 months. Here's what some people had to say about the original, long out of print 1999 edition: "Samuel R. Delany is one of the finest living American writers. In this revealing autobiographical love story, told in collaboration with fine artist Mia Wolff, Delany's brilliance shines." – Neil Gaiman "Wildly eccentric artwork, a storyline that'd make Capote blush… Bread & Wine is smoking-gun proof that comics can go anywhere – and do anything." – Frank Miller "Told simply…

Toronto is rolling out the rainbow carpet for Justin Hall, our wonderful editor/artist behind the stellar anthology, No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics!  On Friday, May 10th, the Glad Day Bookshop (the world's oldest LGBTQ bookshop) will be hosting a special evening with Justin, starting at 7:00 PM.  Beat the (non-straight) lines at his TCAF table, and come out (no pun intended) and get your books signed! The Glad Day Bookshop is located at 598 Yonge Street, located on the West side, just north of Wellesley Street.

Yeah, dudes, we love fan art. We all know that's why Tumblr exists. But we wanted to highlight a great drawing by Zach Worton (Klondike, D&Q) of Richard Sala's The Chuckling Whatsit: scary and somber, the quiet before the storm. This art is part of a 'super-villains' fundraising auction, with proceeds going to the towards the Doug Wright Awards. SPEAKING of up for sale, Johnny Ryan has some super cheap work up including an homage to the Simpsons.    So buy some fan art today and fill that empty space on your wall with some nice original artwork!  

[The Umpteen Millionaire Club is our series which puts forth book club discussion questions for Fantagraphics titles. The Comics Journal interns Brooke Chin, Tom Graham and Toby Liebowitz put together this set of questions. As this is intended for those who have read the book and contains spoilers, questions can be found behind the jump. – Ed.]

Julio’s Day is a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez that spans the hundred-year life of one man. It opens with his birth; it follows Julio and his family and friends in a small farming village as successive generations are born and die. Packed within the pages is a range of human experience: a soldier goes to war and is changed; evil in the family goes unaddressed; and there’s the blue worm. We follow Julio to the end, which is much as the beginning, or, to quote Samuel Beckett, "the same day, the same second."

Zippy: The Dingburg Diaries by Bill Griffith 232-page black & white/color 8" x 10" softcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-641-6 Ships in: June 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Comprising a full two and a half years' worth of dailies and full-color Sundays, The Dingburg Diaries is the third Zippy book featuring tales of "Dingburg, the City Inhabited Entirely by Pinheads" — Zippy’s home town. There’s even a long series of "Historical Dingburg" strips, chronicling the pinhead population through the years, from 1840, when Dingburg’s "Town Fool" accidentally invented disco, to 1958 when Dingburg Beatniks flourished in the town’s Bohemian neighborhood. Like, Yowl,…

Our own Gary Groth and Mike Catron will be pillaging and plundering at VikingCon 2013 in Bellingham, WA, on Saturday, May 11th!  VikingCon describe themselves as, "a cultural convention that serves as a place for individuals involved in the comic world across all levels of experience to come together and engage in meaningful conversations and explorations." And with that in mind, go engage in meaningful conversations with Gary and Mike in the following panels! 11:00 – 12:00 PM // The Age of Modern Comic: The Modern Age of Comics is a period in the history of American comic-books that began…

Here's the second thing you see in the intro/title sequence to Marc Maron's new show, Maron, (premiering tonight at 10 pm on IFC) as the camera pans across his garage: Here's the second thing you see when you open Tony Millionaire's new book Green Eggs and Maakies (coming soon): Here's Tony's interview on the July 5, 2012 episode of Marc's WTF podcast, a portion of which is transcribed on the page facing the portrait in the book. Here's Tony's book 500 Portraits featuring many more comedians, actors, authors, historical figures, composers, fetuses, etc. Here's another IFC show featuring artwork by a Fantagraphics artist in the opening credits (and…