Fantagraphics Blog

Seattle's Experience Music Project is hosting festivities all weekend to launch their ambitious Nirvana exhibition  and companion book Taking Punk to the Masses, published by Fantagraphics in association with EMP. The celebration begins with a private reception, followed by a members preview, this Friday evening with celebrity DJs including Fantagraphics friends Steve Fisk, Mark Pickerel, and Charles Peterson. Activities continue all weekend, including a panel on the origins of grunge at 2:30 on Saturday, with panelists including Peterson and former Fantagraphics frontman Tom Price, moderated by curator and the book's author Jacob McMurray. The EMP exhibition focuses on Nirvana, while the book takes…

Get ready to rock! This Saturday, April 16 marks the annual Record Store Day promotion. Our neighbors at Georgetown Records are celebrating with free vinyl, CD samplers and swag from labels like Sub Pop, Epitaph, Decca, and WEA, among many others. To sweeten the deal, Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is adding a free comic book for every customer of Georgetown Records. Get out and support your local independent record store this Saturday and throughout the year.

Here's your first look at the final cover design for Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising edited by Rick Marschall & Warren Bernard, which is heading to the printer soon for a July release date. The book represents a couple of firsts for us: it's the first release from our Marschall Books imprint, and it's the first design job under salary from the newest member of our Art Department, Tony Ong, formerly at Dark Horse. (As a freelancer, Tony designed the cover for the second printing of Four Color Fear.) That's Tony's beautiful hand-lettering, too.

The video quality’s a little bad, but you can still see Al Columbia’s backdrops in this clip from David Cross’s HBO standup special from about 10 years ago (shot here in Seattle at the Showbox). Kim Thompson recently caught the show popping up in reruns on Comedy Central, which prompted him to dig up this clip on YouTube.

21: The Story of Roberto Clemente is reviewed by Alex Belth on page 16 of the April 18 issue of Sports Illustrated: "…Wilfred Santiago captures the physical grace of baseball and creates a story of visceral and emotional force… Santiago… has produced a rich and surprising work. The compositions and framing are intricate and varied… Santiago captures Clemente's relentless vitality as a player, frames the story around the historical and religious traditions of Puerto Rico, and handles Clemente's tragic death with restraint, all with a gimlet eye and the sensitivity of a true artist. It is a classic story given…

Jason Polan surreptitiously sketched Stephen DeStefano, Mark Newgarden, Kim Deitch, and Paul Hornschemeier at at our MoCCA Festival table last weekend for his Every Person in New York project.

; Tony Millionaire: "The Invisible Death Throes of Zyk and Kadab at the Garden of Gethsemane." From Encyclopaedia of Hell, forthcoming from Feral House in summer 2011.  

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship: Love from the Shadows by Gilbert Hernandez 120-page black & white 5.75" x 8.5" hardcover • $19.99ISBN: 978-1-60699-406-1 Previews & Ordering Info The third in Gilbert Hernandez’s line of original hardcovers featuring Love and Rockets’ “Fritz” in her guise as a Z-movie actress (the first two were Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers) is a trippy thriller that stars Fritz in no fewer than three roles. A beautiful waitress (Fritz, of course) and her hospital nurse brother (also Fritz) visit their estranged father, a once successful but now retired writer (amazingly…

Houstonians, get ready for a double whammy with an amazing double bill: Jim Woodring and Marc Bell come together for Walpurgis Afternoon, a joint art show at Houston's Lawndale Art Center which opens on Friday, April 22, 2011. As part of the opening reception, Jim will give a demonstration of the mighty giant dip pen, only its second public performance and the first outside of Seattle. And the following day, Saturday, April 23, Jim and Marc appear at Domy Books in Houston for a comics signing from 6-8 PM. Unmissable!

We have obtained the last remaining available copies of the new self-published issue of Sammy Harkham's great comic book series Crickets and are once again offering them for mailorder! Crickets #3 by Sammy Harkham 48-page duotone 8.5" x 11" comic book • $8.00 Order Now! Crickets #3 dedicates the bulk of its oversized pages to the first part of a new story, "Blood of the Virgin," which tracks the upside down world of exploitation movie making in Los Angeles in the early seventies through the eyes of an ambitious young film editor who catches a big break. Rounding at the…