Fantagraphics Blog

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "…[T]he fifth [Popeye] collection, "Wha's a Jeep?", is just as vital and zippy as any of [the] earlier books, particularly in the daily strips…. This is great stuff — as I've said before, Segar's Popeye is not just one of the great American comics, it's one of the great comedy/adventure works of all time, full of brawling, joking, inexhaustible life." – Andrew Wheeler, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent. • Review: The Comics Journal's R. Fiore on David B.'s The Littlest Pirate King, in its entirety: "Speaking of comics that would make…

(final cover may vary) Ten words I got to use in my translation of the upcoming second Adèle Blanc-Sec book (trying valiantly for an SPX premiere!): bollix, bolster (as a noun), deucedly, dingus, harridan, insensate, pied-à-terre, pithecanthropus, plinth, and thoroughfare.

Comic-Con has announced their programming for Thursday July 21, the first full day of the convention, and here are the panels to circle in your program or plug into your smartphone app or scribble on the back of your hand (we will, of course, give a complete run-down along with our signing schedule and more info in the near future): 12:30-1:30 Spotlight on Bill Schelly— Comic-Con special guest Bill Schelly (The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, The DC Archives) is a leading fandom and comics historian. Moderator Gary Brown interviews Bill about his work, with special emphasis on his latest…

(not final cover) News has broken over the last few days via The Guardian and now The A.V. Club about our impending publication of Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons, collecting the author's seldom-seen visual work from her student days. The Guardian's Peter Wild writes: "Cut from linoleum with oil-based ink applied to the ridges, the drawings are rudimentary but charming, a stripped down version of what Marjane Satrapi did in Persepolis. What's clear, though, is the perspective of the outsider, which O'Connor refined in her debut novel Wise Blood and stories such as 'A Good Man is Hard to Find.' ……

In 1946 Al Capp held the now infamous contest to see who could conjure the true image of the world's ugliest woman, Lena Hyena from Lower Slobbovia. Amongst the 500,000 + submissions was this ghastly beaut by Carl Barks. The, ahem, judges for this contest were three of the worlds ugliest men: Salvador Dali, Boris Karloff and Frank Sinatra and as you may know, they aptly awarded Basil Wolverton's warped rendering "The Champ." Here we have Lena by Basil Wolverton as colored by Jim Woodring from Wolvertoons. I think it's worth noting and more than a coincidence that Carl Barks, Basil Wolverton…

On Saturday, July 9th, the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery debuts our exhibit The Quiet Rrriot: Visual Artists from the Riot Grrrl Movement.  We're celebrating the long-awaited reissue of Megan Kelso's incredible collection Queen of the Black Black, and we're also featuring two of her contemporaries from the '90s Olympia-scene, Nikki McClure and Stella Marrs. Yesterday, we took a closer look at Stella's art, and today, we're gonna talk about Nikki! Nikki and Megan were in the same year at the infamous Evergreen State College, and you can see the Olympia-influence in both of their work.  Nikki's artwork graced the covers…

Jim Woodring's Congress of the Animals by gavlees For those who couldn't make it to Jim Woodring's slideshow talk about his new graphic novel Congress of the Animals at Elliott Bay Book Company last week, here's video of the whole presentation, shot by our own Ian Burns and hosted by our good pal Gavin Lees. (Pardon the brief commercial message.) Gavin provides some thoughtful comments on the talk over at his Graphic Eye blog. The insight Jim provides into his work is fascinating, there are some previously-unseen preparatory sketches included in the slideshow, and Jim left us all wanting more…

From the ol' mailbag.