Fantagraphics Blog

Monday, July 30th • Portland, OR: Northwesterners should not miss the chance to see Tim Kreider while he's on our side of the coast! Tim will be doing a reading at 7:30 PM at the infamous Powell's Books! (more info) Wednesday, August 1st • Bothell, WA: And then, Tim Kreider will be doing a reading at 7:00 PM at Third Place Books! (more info) • Snoqualmie, WA: And our own Jim Blanchard is launching his art show Primitiva at The Black Dog. Ten or so of his acrylic paintings will be adorning their walls through September 15th. Check it out…

  Love and Rockets by the Hernandez Brothers is filled from indicia to back cover with a love of music, creating jams, going to concerts and odes to punk songs. Robert Boyd recently compiled a nice list of songs in Jaime and Gilbert's comics. Then LA-based comic store, Secret Headquarters, went ahead and built a playlist around said list of music. Listen away on Spotify, whether you are drawing, walking around town, hanging with friends or generally being a badass. Playlists Locas by Jaime and Palomar by Gilbert.

The newest, brightest bulb Online Commentaries & Diversions: •Review: Sarah Hansen of Autostraddle looks at No Straight Lines. "I like my queer comic anthologies like I like my women. Handy AND beautiful. . .What No Straight Lines really achieves is putting all of these influential comics in one place. Together, they contextualize each other and the LGBTQ scene at the same time." •Review: Paste's 'breeder' journalist Sean Edgar cracks open No Straight Lines and has a baller time. "The work in this book illustrates a sweeping chronology of our generation’s greatest civil conflict with all of the tears and smiles that follow. It’s…

The Complete Peanuts 1985-1986 (Vol. 18) by Charles M. Schulz 344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $28.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-572-3 Ships in: August 2012 — Available to order upon its arrival in our mail-order warehouse. Peanuts reaches the middle of the go-go 1980s in this book, which covers 1985 and 1986: a time of hanging out at the mall, “punkers” (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Snoopy with a Mohawk), killer bees, airbags, and Halley’s Comet. And in a surprisingly sharp satirical sequence, Schulz pokes fun at runaway licensing with the introduction of the insufferably merchandisable “Tapioca Pudding.” Also…

The west coast party for No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics continues to Berkeley! Join our wonderful editor Justin Hall for a signing and reading at Pegasus Books tomorrow, Saturday, July 27th. He'll be joined by Jon Macy, Paige Braddock, Lee Marrs, Andy Hartzel, and Christine Smith for a series of comic book readings to celebrate the release of this important anthology. Pegasus Books is located at 2349 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. It's gonna be another awesome event!

Sexytime: The Post-Porn Rise of the Pornoisseur edited by Jacques Boyreau & Peter Van Horne 96-page full-color 10.75" x 14.25" hardcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-553-2 Ships in: August 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Sexytime is the book that pornoisseurs all over the world have anxiously been waiting for. Not that grade drooler, the porn addict, mind you, but the porn aesthete, the porn classicist who knows his stag film history and lives by the credo, Veni ergo sum. An oversized coffee table book celebrating the art of the 1970s porn movie poster, Sexytime collects over a hundred of the…

While reading a particularly engrossing book or graphic novel, it is not abhorrent to combine the experience with a fine drink. We are not above such fun. In the weekly article from iFanboy, Comic Shots picks one tasty drink and pairs it with a delicious read: Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Man. Josh Christie waxed on quite a bit about Carl Barks' stories. "I was, perhaps, predestined to love these new editions of Barks’ classics. Nevertheless, these stories tap into something deeper – they are, at their core, good stories. Barks’ characters are funny and charming, and…

Shipments of advance copies of more of our September books have been pouring into the office over the last couple of weeks and I've plunked them down on my desk here in our glamorous offices and taken a few snapshots for you: Barack Hussein Obama, Steven Weissman's acclaimed webcomic now collected in this lavish hardcover! Part absurdist satire, part old-fashioned gag strip, part Lovecraftian horror, part thinly-veiled autobiography, all amazing! Naked Cartoonists: Drawers Drawing Themselves Without Drawers — a hilarious and revealing collection of self-portraits of over 70 world-famous cartoonists in the buff, from the collection of Mark J. Cohen…

While we were at Comic-Con and then I was on vacation a gazillion of our books came out in comic shops because of course they did! Read on to see what comics-blog commentators are saying these latest releases about  (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability. The Adventures of Venus by Gilbert Hernandez 96-page 7.75" x 7.75" black & white hardcover • $9.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-540-2 "I think children's comics benefit from stand-alone collection more than most because it enables you to get on the wavelength being…

It's the launch so sexy, editor Jacques Boyreau took it to a whole 'nother country… Hey London! Get ready for a sexy time with the launch of Sexytime: The Post-Porn Rise of the Pornoisseur! Join Jacques at The Horse Hospital in London for the official book release party on Friday, August 24th at 7:30 PM. Be one of the first to get your hands on this anthology of over a hundred of the most outrageously over-the-top porn movie posters of the era! It's also the kick-off for an exhibit of pristinely re-mastered movie posters from the golden age of American…