Fantagraphics Blog

UPDATE 11/9: Unfortunately, Jordan Crane has to cancel his Toronto appearance, but will hopefully reschedule soon… Stay tuned! We're excited to announce that long-time comics icon Jordan Crane will be making his first-ever appearance in Toronto on Thursday, December 1st! This is not to be missed! The awesome crew at The Beguiling bookstore will be hosting Jordan at Clinton's Tavern [ 693 Bloor Street ] for a presentation and discussion of his long history in comics and design.  The event kicks off at 8 PM, with Jordan being interviewed on stage, and a Q&A and signing will follow. If you…

Bryan Connolly, co-author of Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film, co-directed (with Tommy Swenson) this super-fun music video for "Down with Netflix" by the Charles Edward Cheese Band. Support your local video store!

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Graphic novelist Richard Sala cures the zombie apocalypse malaise with a new book that takes the basic set-up of those tales and turns it into an artsy, comical, downright weird exercise in terror that brings together several slices of the horror genre… into something modern and surprising. Equally, Sala’s art style helps the story ride high — his dark cartoons manage to suck you into the narrative while still highlighting the meta quality of the story. This is a story about horror as much as it is a horror story, examining the themes…

It's gonna be a SCAD, MAD, MAD, MAD Weekend this November 11th-13th at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia! And you can catch what sounds like an amazing panel with Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, and the "Usual Gang of Idiots" on November 12th at 5:00 PM at the Trustees Theater [ 216 E. Broughton St., Savannah, Georgia ]. It's free, open to the public, and you'd be MAD to miss it!

A group of us are waiting to be served in a restaurant. The waiter arrives, and the person facing me evidently ordered paper-wrapped baked owl. (What he gets looks like a little owl mummy.) I puzzle over why this seems somehow wrong and disturbing even as the diner peels off the first bit of the wrapping, releasing a gust of cooked-bird steam and exposing a naked, baked owl wing. It actually looks pretty tasty. The diner sitting next to me is Françoise Mouly, which, although tenuous at best, is enough of a connection for me to consider this a comics-related…

Tony Millionaire drew these portraits of Occupy Wall Street protester Manissa Maharawal and ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for Frank Rich's column at New York magazine. Tony's 500 Portraits is coming soon. (The numbers here are bullshit, since we cut a few dozen images from the book and there have probably been more in the intervening time, but it made for a great headline, didn't it?) [Follow our Tumblr blog for lots of new Things to See every day.]

You can add one more posthumous laurel to Hal Foster's already-impressive pile of achievements: New York Times Best Selling Author. Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 shows up at #8 on this week's Hardcover Graphic Books top 10 list. It comes as no surprise to us: we've been selling out multiple printings of the series as fans old and new have been snapping the books up. What else would you expect from one of the greatest comics of the last (or any) century? UPDATE: Well shut my mouth, it was #1 last week!

I'm not sure where webcomic creator Mark Stokes dug up this close-up image of Charles M. Schulz art for a 1951 Peanuts strip (as collected in this lovely hardcover volume) but it's pretty great to see how Schulz tried out some alternate poses for Patty and Charlie Brown in the pencil stage. (Via The Daily Cartoonist.) [Follow our Tumblr blog for lots of new Things to See every day.]

Now that this title has been released to comic book shops, we are pleased to also make it available to our mail-order customers: Ganges #4 by Kevin Huizenga 32-page two-color 8.5" x 11" comic book, with jacket • $7.95Part of the Ignatz Series See Previews / Order Now Can you make an exciting comic out of insomnia? Kevin Huizenga rises to the challenge as he depicts his alter ego Glenn Ganges wrestling with sleeplessness, trying to trick it by reading a particularly abstruse book, obsessively breaking his past, present and future life down to ever more hallucinatory, complex grids, and…

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship for our mail-order customers: Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Kevin AveryForeword by Nick ToschesCover illustration by Jeff Wong 512-page 6" x 9" hardcover • $29.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-475-7 See Previews / Order Now What happened to Paul Nelson? In the '60s, he pioneered rock & roll criticism with a first-person style of writing that would later be popularized by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer as "New Journalism." As co-founding editor of The Little Sandy Review and managing editor of Sing Out!, he'd already…