Fantagraphics Blog

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers: The Cabbie Vol. 1 by Martí 80-page black & white 9" x 11.75" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-450-4 See Previews / Order Now Sergio Leone’s retooling of classic westerns for his “spaghetti westerns”… Stieg Larsson’s striking take on the serial killer/mystery thriller in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo… And for that matter ABBA’s fiendishly catchy appropriation of American pop music. Sometimes it takes Europeans to make gold of tuckered-out American tropes. Add to those instances of inspired global cross-pollination the Spanish cartoonist Martí’s eye-popping The Cabbie, which…

Another day, another celebrity supporter plugging Michael Kupperman's new book Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010 on Twitter — this time it's hilarious and wonderful British writer/actor/director Peter Serafinowicz! (Pardon the censored link… directing Flog readers to a certain online mega-retailer is verboten…)

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "This is hugely imaginative, exultantly silly, gag-a-minute writing that manages to comment on the popular culture of the last century while willfully wallowing in it — Python with a wry dose of Pynchon…. Were you, dear reader, to ask me if the brevity of [Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010]'s chronologically arranged but narratively stand-alone chapters made it an ideal book for bathroom reading, I would call you a coarse, disgusting pig-person, demand that you leave my office, and wipe down the chair you'd been sitting in. … But, yes." – Glen Weldon, NPR Monkey…

We've got a gorilla-sized weekend coming up at APE: the Alternative Press Expo in beautiful San Francisco, CA! Come see us on Saturday, October 1st and Sunday, October 2nd at the Concourse Exhibition Center, and be among the first to get your mitts on these hot numbers:     • Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes by Carl Barks• Pogo, Vol. 1 of the Complete Syndicated Comic Strips: "Through the Wild Blue Wonder" by Walt Kelly• Oil & Water written by Steve Duin; art by Shannon Wheeler [ WE TOLD YOU SO!!! ]    • Nuts by Gahan Wilson•…

We've got our eye set on this majestic event: Leslie Stein will be signing this Friday, September 30th at The Escapist in Berkeley, CA! We're teaming up with our friends at PictureBox to present this pre-party for APE: the Alternative Press Expo. Leslie will be signing copies of her latest Eye of the Majestic Creature, and she'll be joined by Matthew Thurber, signing the collected 1-800-MICE! Meet them both, starting at 7:00 PM at The Escapist Comic Bookstore [ 3090 Claremont Ave. in Berkeley ], and say hi to our old intern, Sophie!

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new title. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about it (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the link, and contact your local shop to confirm availability. Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 by the Hernandez Brothers 104-page black & white 7.5" x 9.25" softcover • $14.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-490-0 "I have now had multiple friends contact me to tell me that they'd just finished the conclusion of Jaime Hernandez's story 'The Love Bunglers' in this issue and had…

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Interview: Brian Heater's conversation with Drew Friedman at The Daily Cross Hatch continues: "Another reason I want to quit these books is that there’s always younger comedians coming up, and I just can’t keep up. Howard Stern’s gonna be an old guy in a couple of years…. I’m not crazy about some of them, and I just don’t want to think about drawing Adam Sandler when he’s an old man, or Ben Stiller, or even Jerry Seinfeld. It just doesn’t appeal to me." • Commentary: Divine Decision reports on our Moto Hagio The Heart…

For over thirty years Nell Brinkley's beautiful girls pirouetted, waltzed, vamped and shimmied their way through the pages of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, captivating the American public with their innocent sexuality. Accomplished cartoonist and women's comix "herstorian" Trina Robbins examines the work of this unjustly forgotten artist in The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley's Cartoons from 1913 – 1940. Robbins will present the work of this remarkable illustrator with an exhibition, slide talk and book signing at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery on Saturday, October 8 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. A brash Nell Brinkley arrived in New York…

Here's your first gander at the final cover for our mammoth upcoming collection of Zippy creator Bill Griffith's comic book work, Lost and Found. The especially observant among you will note that the artwork is the same as the preliminary version; we just have a new title treatment. The book's running a bit behind schedule because it has expanded quite a bit from when we first announced it — the original subtitle was "Comics 1970-1994" — but it's off to the printer now for a late December release!