Fantagraphics Blog

Make hotel reservations now for the alternative music event of the decade. Sub Pop celebrates 25 years of rockin' the world with a free concert featuring 15 bands right outside our Georgetown bookstore on July 13. The official line-up as announced by Tad Doyle, Kim Thayil, Mark Arm, and Jack Endino will be complemented by some amazing guests. (We'll leave it to your imagination, but read Tad's lips at the end of the video for a clue.)  While serving as director of Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art in 1989, I somehow coerced Sub Pop moguls Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman…

At the printer now for release in July, The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations shines a whole new light on one of the greatest, most beloved graphic novels of all time along with several other classic Eightball stories and Clowes rarities. Editor Ken Parille has brought together a stable of great minds, including Clowes himself, for a plethora of fascinating and highly readable essays and other material, with topics like "Enid's Bookshelf," "Enid's Record Player," "The Rise of the Zine," "Against Groovy," and "Urban Romanticism, Mad Magazine, and the…

  The Peppercorn Saison is the first of many beers in the newest collaboration between a Fantagraphics cartoonist, Jim Woodring this time, and Elysian Brewing Company, who created the 12 Beers of the Apocalypse based on Charles Burns' Black Hole art last year. The Oddland series will feature gorgeous full-color labels with a hint of bright, shimmering foil and artwork based on the ingredients. From the Elysian press release: "Head Brewer Dick Cantwell and his brainstormy gang get an idea; they run it by Woodring, who sketches his two cents' worth and sends it on back; then the recipe is…

Good Dog by Graham Chaffee 96-page black & white 8.25” x 10.25” hardcover • $16.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-653-9 Here are a few pretty pictures of the book, which should be unleashed (GET IT?) and on shelves in about 4 weeks; click the thumbnails for larger versions. Get more info, see more previews and pre-order your copy here: http://www.fantagraphics.com/gooddog

Soar on drunken wings of joy! The new Maakies book is almost here! Green Eggs and Maakies is on the menu for June with another two years of strips by comics' biggest rapscallion, Tony Millionaire, presented once again in widescreen hardcover format. Drinky Crow, Uncle Gabby and the whole gang are back for more shipboard ultraviolence, more drunk driving calamities, more unnatural fornication, more vomit, more poetry, more dubious remedies, more putting things in their mouths that don't belong there, and more laughs, all in Tony's beautiful, peerless penwork. Name a better comic strip this century. You can't do it! Dig into…

Our exhibit of Dash Shaw's artwork launched at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery this past weekend, and boy, is it a beauty!  If you live in Seattle, you should definitely drop by and see his original artwork in person. I'm especially in love with the piece drawn on polka-dot fabric! If you live too far away, you can also check out photos on the Fantagraphics Flickr. And don't forget: Dash Shaw will appear in person on Saturday, May 4 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. He’ll be discussing his work with a screening of his animated shorts, followed by a book signing…

The book that has been sold-out twice in a row comes to you, dear reader, in digital form. Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s.  The finest non-EC horror covers and stories of the pre-code era by artist perennials Jack Cole, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Jack Katz, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wallace Wood, collected in a robust and affordable volume. And by volume, we mean four. This book is SO BIG, SO HUGE that we had to break it up into four parts: CMYK for the printing colors Cyan (blue), Magenta, Yellow and Black or…

Kim Deitch's first full-length all-original graphic novel in all of his hardworking, prolific, and heralded career is a big, widescreen book with a big, widescreen title! The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley is a winding tale featuring a rich eccentric, a too-smart dog, silent movies, strange religious artifacts, and the daring young woman who experienced it all, told in the "picto-fiction" format of illustrated text interwoven with comics which Kim began experimenting with in Deitch's Pictorama. The book's at the printer now and should arrive on our shores in July. Read the Prologue and Chapter 1 for free right…

It was announced last week by Penn State University Libraries and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book that Chris Ware won the Lynd Ward Prize for Best Graphic Novel 2013, Lilli Carré with Heads or Tails was one of the two Honorable Mentions (along with Theo Ellsworth's The Understanding Monster) "Each story is exquisitely crafted, demonstrating both a compelling literary style and a rich, engaging design sense that can seem deceptively naïve or childlike on first glance but in context reveals striking sophistication and complexity." You're damn right, it was and is! Lilli Carré's book, Heads or Tails is available…

Finally, the sold-out first volme of the Ditko Archives is here in digital reading glory via comiXology, Strange Suspense. Before the Amazing Spider-Man and mysterious Dr. Strange, the legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko was conjuring all manners of horrors at his drawing table. In his first two years in the industry (1953 and1954), Ditko drew tales of macabre suspense that were not yet hobbled by the Comics Code Authority. These stories featured graphic bloodshed, dismemberment and blood-curdling acid baths as the ugly end to the lives of the dark and twisted inhabitants of Steve Ditko's imagination. Strange Suspense: The…