Fantagraphics Blog

Ain't no party like a Fantagraphics party 'cause a Fantagraphics party don't stop, and WE DON'T EVER STOP. We are now taking this party across the border for the 2012 Toronto Comic Arts Festival in Canada! Join us this weekend, Saturday, May 5th and Sunday, May 6th, at the Toronto Reference Library. I love selling books in a library. Here are the debuts we'll be bringing that you will NOT find on the reshelving cart! (Unless we have to borrow it from Ab again.)    • Interiorae by Gabriella Giandelli • Dungeon Quest 3 by Joe Daly• The Furry Trap by…

Mysterious Traveler: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 3 by Steve Ditko; edited by Blake Bell 240-page full-color 7.25" x 10" hardcover • $39.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-498-6 Ships in: May 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Five years before his breakthrough as the co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and other classic super-heroes for Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, Steve Ditko, inspired by the freedom he found at the laissez-faire Charlton Comics, was turning out some of the best work of his career. Mysterious Traveler, which collects stories from (among others) Tales of the Mysterious Traveler and This Magazine Is Haunted, reprints…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Austrian cartoonist Nicholas Mahler cheerfully spoofs superheroes and modern comic-book publishing with Angelman… These kinds of jokes about the venality of superhero industry have been made many times before, but Mahler’s little squiggly characters are adorable, and his gags are genuinely funny, especially as poor little Angelman gets more and more loaded down with quirks and complications. Angelman is a satire, yes, but it also revels to some extent in the goofiness of revamps, retcons, and all the other gimmicks that keep mainstream comics afloat." – Noel Murray, The A.V. Club • Review:…

We had a swell time at the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland this past weekend and the big news for us there was that Jaime Hernandez received the Stumptown Comic Arts Award for Best Cartoonist! Festival special guest and our longtime pal Stan Sakai picked up the award for Best Letterer, and our newest hire, Jen Vaughn, shares the award for Best Anthology as co-editor of Lies Grown-ups Told Me. Congrats to all!

We were extremely pleased to learn over the weekend that Moto Hagio (creator of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories and the forthcoming The Heart of Thomas, among many other works) has been awarded the Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor by the government of Japan for her contributions to the arts. "Hagio is the 14th manga creator and the first female manga-ka to receive this award," reports Deb Aoki at About.com Manga, who has the complete story and background courtesy our own manga editor/translator, Matt Thorn (pictured below with Hagio-sensei at the Japan Cartoonist Association award ceremony last June).

Attn: Flog Faithful… posting might lessen a bit this week as we continue to navigate the brutal, nine-day convention gauntlet that is Stumptown, MoCCA and TCAF. To ease your cravings, we bring you an exclusive Flog! report from our Tobacco Road Correspondent Rob Clough. — Ed.   Joe Sacco  gave a lecture and Q&A to an audience of about a hundred at Duke University on 4/24/2012. He said that this was probably the last time he was going to give this particular lecture on Comics Journalism. If you haven't seen it, Sacco gives an account of his working method by talking…

Three things I've read recently that you haven't: (1) The first 42 pages of Jacques Tardi's next graphic novel, which looks like it's going to be one of his absolute masterpieces. (2) All of Carol Tyler's astonishing, heartbreaking final installment of You'll Never Know. (3) All of Jaime Hernandez's contribution to Love and Rockets: New Stories #5 (a.k.a. "What on Earth He Does for an Encore"). Sometimes it is good to be the publisher of the world's greatest cartoonists. Everyone have a great weekend envying me!

Interns Anna and Madisen model the latest in temporary tat fashion, courtesy of the desk drawer.

Interiorae by Gabriella Giandelli 144-page full-color 7.75" x 10.25" softcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-559-4 Ships in: May 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now A high-rise apartment building in an unnamed European city. Its inhabitants come and go, meet each other, talk, dream, regret, hope… in short, live. A ghostly, shape-shifting anthropomorphic white rabbit roams from apartment to apartment, surveying and keeping track of all this humanity… and at the end of every night, he floats down to the basement where he delivers his report to the "great dark one." Lushly delineated in penciled halftones, this moody graphic novel was orig-…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Profile: Esteemed underground comix historian Patrick Rosenkranz at The Comics Journal: "Spain Rodriguez acknowledges that age hasn’t necessarily brought wisdom, but it does help him appreciate his youthful adventures more, especially the unique experience of growing up in Buffalo, New York in the 1950s, which he portrays in his latest book, Cruisin' with the Hound…. This new volume from Fantagraphics Books tells more about his childhood, the guys and girls in his neighborhood, early encounters with sex, religion, and science fiction, and the birth of rock and roll." Sample quote from Spain: "Each moment…