Fantagraphics Blog

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Like Saturday morning cartoons, Yeah! was about a kind of science fiction that embraced weirdo aliens rather than science fact. From alt-comix came characters that were outcasts, lived on the margins of society, or had outsider personalities. Instead of being offensive and edgy, this unusual comic book series was imaginative and inventive. …[I]t was an all-ages gem, and I’m glad that it's back…" – Leroy Douresseaux, I Reads You • Review: "How does Peter Bagge stay so good after all these years? Hate Annual #9 was as good as any of the previous…

Wilfred Santiago (left) & GWAR's Oderus Urungus (right) at New York Comicon, 1992. Photo posted by Wilfred on Flickr.

We've featured these here before, but now there's context! Johnny Ryan did this poster for his friend's Calvin Lee Reeder's film The Oregonian and interviewed Reeder for Vice. Johnny has the trailer on his blog. Johnny did this one for the band Tribes and you can buy one in Johnny's online shop.

The opening reception for the Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition on May 14 was a stellar affair – a reunion of misfits and miscreants from Seattle's grunge era together with a new generation of counterculture mavens. The show documents Seattle's grunge scene in its formative period from 1983 – 1985. I often equate Seattle's youth culture in the mid-80s to San Francisco's hippie movement in the mid-60s. Both had a singular music style, provocative graphics, and an anti-fashion sensibility. Beyond that, these movements benefited from a community of gifted cartoonists that disseminated unfiltered observations. Fitting, then, that Peter Bagge was the special guest…

(cover design subject to change) At his blog, The Steve Ditko Archives editor Blake Bell spills the beans on the upcoming third volume, Mysterious Traveler, due in January 2012! "What makes this volume so special," says Blake, "is that meteoric improvement in Ditko’s work as he toils in obscurity for a company that treated their comic books like toilet paper for their more profitable magazine and song books. Such is the irony of one of the great living artists of the 20th century – working with stories churned out for an audience of children, Ditko produced the highest quality material…

Oh snap, Johnny Ryan dropped a bomb on Facebook last night — this brand new cover art for Prison Pit: Book 3, coming this September! (You may remember the previous version of the cover with the horned demon-looking dude.) Word is he's finished the book and it's even more insane than the first two volumes so gird yourselves!

Wandering Son Vol. 1 by Shimura Takako 208-page black & white/color 7" x 9.5" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-416-0 Ships in: June 2011 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now The fifth grade. The threshold to puberty, and the beginning of the end of childhood innocence. Shuichi Nitori and his new friend Yoshino Takatsuki have happy homes, loving families, and are well-liked by their classmates. But they share a secret that further complicates a time of life that is awkward for anyone: Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a…

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators 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. Approximate Continuum Comics by Lewis Trondheim 160-page black & white 6.75" x 10.25" softcover • $18.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-410-8 "An earlier stab than Little Nothings at comics-as-diary from the prolific cartoonist (and constantly hilarious comics-diarist) Lewis Trondheim, who draws himself as a slightly ruffled bird." – Douglas Wolk, Comics Alliance "Lewis Trondheim’s Approximate Continuum Comics were…

  Meanwhile, attendees of Lollapallooza 2008 are still looking for the comic book signing.  Via Showbiz Imagery & Chicanery , thanks for the tip to Grottu.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "It's a smart-looking book, and the choice to go color-free really allows Gilbert Hernandez's cartooning to shine. But make no mistake: this is vintage Bagge. Sure, we're minus the delicious Buddy Bradley angst, and the goofiness is rated PG, but the increasingly ridiculous situations that the girls of Yeah!… get themselves into [are] very much in Bagge's wheelhouse…. Yeah! also has in spades something that HATE! rarely, if ever, did: cuteness. Some of the hijinx and situations that the band finds itself in are, well, adorable. Hernandez's pen is as much to credit for…