Fantagraphics Blog

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "In Joyce Farmer’s powerful Special Exits the people are more people-like than I have encountered in comics in a long time…. It is moving without being sentimental. Real without being pedantic; a solid graphic novel that reads, well, like a novel! …Special Exits is packed with details that can only come from observation and experience. Farmer is a close observer…. Special Exits is one of the most engrossingly human comics and, ultimately, one of the most moving… Joyce Famer has brilliantly conveyed what it is to be human. To live, to die. To ripe,…

Setting the Standard: Comics by Alex Toth 1952-1954 edited by Greg Sadowski 432-page full color 7.5" x 10.5" softcover • $39.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-408-5 Ships in: July 2011 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now Alex Toth’s influence on the art of comic books is incalculable. As his generation was the first to grow up with the new 10-cent full-color pamphlets, he came to the medium with a fresh eye, and enough talent and discipline to graphically strip it down its to its bare essentials. His efforts reached fruition at Standard Comics, creating an entire school of imitators and establishing Toth as the…

Hats off to Seattle's Phinney Neighborhood Association for their clever appropriation of Jacob Covey's Taking Punk to the Masses design for their annual Summer Beer Taste.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "…[F]eisty art-comics publisher Fantagraphics, for its new multivolume hardcover series devoted to Gottfredson’s rarely seen comic-strip work [Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse ], has gone back to the beginning, lavishing upon the cartoonist’s marvelously fluid, thrillingly kinetic serial adventures the same loving attention the company has brought to its benchmark Complete Peanuts library. Given that Fantagraphics is an adult-oriented press, production and restoration values are superlative, as are the more than 60 pages of historical essays and archival features that accompany these peerless black-and-white strips…. Anyone who ventures into this gorgeous 288-page tome will…

Tim Lane's illustration for the cover story in this week's issue of the Seattle Weekly is another true-crime masterpiece.

(Click for larger version) Chris Ware just turned in his 13th and final cover for our 13th and final (3rd in the chronology of the strip) collection of George Herriman's Krazy Kat Sundays, Krazy & Ignatz 1922-1924: At Last My Drim of Love Has Come True, coming in November. A lovely and appropriate image as we put the series to bed. Yes, there will be a big hardcover collection of 1916-1924 released at the same time! Chris is finishing up the covers for that. And yes, we will be collecting the dailies next!

Thanks to Fabiano Teles for sending us a link to this loving video tribute to the work of Johnny Ryan he produced for Cultura da Açao, a weekly alt-culture TV program out of Rio de Janeiro. Johnny tells us that Fabiano also plays in a Brazilian death metal band and is currently penning a Prison Pit ballad. Awesome! How does "Cannibal Fuckface" translate into Portuguese, anyway?

Newly-rechristened Vancouver-based culture website The Snipe (formerly Guttersnipe) is celebrating their new name by giving away a copy of Dave McKean's new graphic novel Celluloid to one lucky reader! See here for contest rules and more info.

Publishers Weekly presents an exclusive 7-page excerpt from The Armed Garden and Other Stories by David B., in which the creator of the acclaimed Epileptic gives full rein to his fascination with history, magic and gods, not to mention grand battles, in a literate, witty, and absorbing collection of stories.