Forget about Black Friday. It's time to get in line for Black Monday, when Lou Reed descends upon Brooklyn on December 12th! Join Lou at BookCourt [ 163 Court Street ] at 7:00 PM. He will be signing and discussing The Raven, his collaboration with legendary Italian illustrator and cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. The last time Lou signed The Raven, The New Yorker was there to report: "Mattotti's illustrations, which were projected in a slide show, saturated the room with a kind of terror and despair. There was also something about the sound…
New Comics Day 11/23/11: Donald, Pogo, Estonia, Oil and Water
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. "It’s certainly Fantagraphics’ week, with the release of two amazing reprint volumes." – Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes by Carl Barks 240-page full-color 7.5" x 10.25" hardcover • $24.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-474-0 "Fantagraphics' reprinting of the complete Carl Barks duck comics, wisely, starts…
Things to See: The Real Buddy Bradley Experience
By luck I just happened to blunder across this recent commission by Peter Bagge featuring all yer favorite classic Hate characters rockin' out! See a real big version here. [Follow our Tumblr blog for lots more Things to See every day.]
The 2012 Ultimate Catalog is out!
If you're like Spencer Rothbell here, who tweeted this photo over the weekend, you've already received your 2012 Fantagraphics Ultimate Catalog of Comics in the mail. It's jam-packed with our 2011 releases, a few upcoming 2012 releases, and a bunch of backlist stuff. It also details our exciting FBI•MINI mail-order bonus program, which we announced yesterday. And, of course, there's a handy order form for ordering everything! If you're not already on our mailing list, contact us to request your free copy, and if you just can't wait and/or want to have it on your computer or mobile device, we've…
The Unexpurgated “Swamp Talk” Annotations from Pogo Vol. 1
The edited version of these annotations by R.C. Harvey appears in Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Vol. 1 – Through the Wild Blue Wonder by Walt Kelly. – Ed. Swamp TalkSearching for the Obscure amid the Obvious and Vice VersaBy R.C. Harvey alt Kelly is admired — and revered in some quarters (this one, for instance) — for his deft blending of the verbal and visual resources of the comic strip medium for the purposes of vaudevillian slapstick and other irreverences, chiefly political satire. And for much of the quarter-century run of Pogo under Kelly's hand, the strip commented…
Daily OCD: 11/22/11
Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard’s Drawing Power is a provocative visual examination of the wonderful world of cartoon advertising…. Marschall and Bernard have mixed an unusual batch of artistic and economic history. After reading this book, you’ll never look at comic strips and capitalism the same way again." – Michael Taube, The Washington Post • Review: "It's a little silly for me to do the full-disclosure tap dance… I'm quoted ten times in Kevin Avery's Paul Nelson biography-collection-tribute, Everything Is an Afterthought, and thanked prominently in the acknowledgments…. [The book is] better than…
Tardi futures!
Impatient Adèle Blanc-Sec readers have been quizzing me about when they can expect the next Adèle volume, so I thought I'd give everyone a swift update that's not buried in the comments section on the tcj.com message board. First, just as it was necessary to release The Arctic Marauder before the second volume of Adèle Blanc-Sec in order to fully sell the gag of the former book's cast suddenly showing up in the latter's, we need to publish yet another earlier Tardi book, Adieu Brindavoine, before moving onto our third Adèle book, because Brindavoine plays a major role in it…
Fantagraphics launches massive mail-order ‘FBI•MINI’ promo
(a partial assortment) I always was very fond of the mini-comics format — take two to four 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, fold them once, staple, and voilà! You have an adorable little 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 comic book for mere pennies. But I could never really figure out what to do with this old-school, low-tech format. Until now! For this catalog season, we have created 21 "FBI•MINI" booklets (most in this format, although there are a few oddities), as premiums for customers who order books directly from us. They are available free with the purchase of their "matching"…
Daily OCD: 11/21/11
Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Barks, the artist, is a master cartoonist, drawing lively, expressive characters with a graceful sense of movement. His beautiful, detailed backgrounds plant the ducks in a fully realized world that adds weight to his storytelling…. But besides the entertaining plots, Barks’ appeal is in his characters. He gives his ducks many human frailties and while they usually try to do the right thing, they make mistakes, get angry, frustrated, and even fail. Fantagraphics Books… does its usual high quality work here as well. The design and layout of the book is a handy…
Coming in 2012: The Last Vispo Anthology
Over on the Abstract Comics blog, Andrei Molotiu has leaked word about The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998 – 2008, edited by Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis and to be published by us in Fall of next year. Above, "Emma," a piece by Nico which accompanied the news. Fantagraphics loyalists may also know Nico as our longtime warehouse/shipping manager, and we've long been proud to boast one of the foremost practitioners of visual poetry, a.k.a. vispo, on our staff, so this book is near and dear to our hearts. Vispo and abstract comics are related disciplines, so readers of…
