Fantagraphics Blog

We've received a few questions about our announcement last week that Alec Baldwin will contribute an Introduction to an upcoming volume of The Complete Peanuts. The idea was inspired by this Vanity Fair "Proust Questionnaire" with Baldwin from earlier this year, wherein Baldwin names Charlie Brown his "hero of fiction." So there you go. Confidential to Gary Groth: here's a suggestion for another 30 Rock star to write a Peanuts intro sometime in the future (found while researching this post):

In addition to our previously posted official news-type announcement of the "hard launch" of the new Comics Journal website at TCJ.com, TCJ Executive Editor Gary Groth has composed an introductory hail-fellow-well-met-cum-statement of purpose titled "Welcome to TCJ.com and Oh, By the Way, A Brief History of Comics Criticism While I'm At It" which is well worth your attention. It's downright inspirational, I tells you.

The under-construction tarp wasn’t even off and The Comics Journal’s new website started sending ripples through the blogosphere. It’s still growing with new features being added almost daily, but check out the site’s hard launch today, Monday Dec. 14, and experience what everybody’s talking about. See top-tier critics R. Fiore and R. C. Harvey duke it out over 9 Chickweed Lane; Anne Ishii and Roland Kelts on the industry and aesthetics of manga; blogging by Shaenon Garrity; reviews of The Wolverton Bible and Junko Mizuno’s latest; a critical dissection of Gilbert Hernandez’s erotic Birdland; and essays and columns by Jeet Heer,…

Ectopia, Hans Rickheit's in-progress graphic novel following The Squirrel Machine, is well underway, and he is presenting it as a serialized webcomic, posting a new page each week at its own dedicated website. Learn more about the book-to-be here, and start reading page 1 here.

Oh man these Online Commentary & Diversions links really pile up: • List: The Daily Cross Hatch presents The Best Damned Comics of 2009 Chosen by the Artists, this year's edition of their essential annual survey of comics pros' top 5 comics. I won't quote all the lists' commentary here since that would steal some of their thunder (not to mention take me all night), but Pim & Francie by Al Columbia merits 5 mentions; You'll Never Know, Book 1 by C. Tyler is on 3 lists; The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit, Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 1 by Michael…

First, so as not to bury the lede: Tony Millionaire is on Twitter. This is major. So far he is on a roll; among his postings is this sneak peek at the long-awaited sequel to the Eisner-winning Billy Hazelnuts, Billy Hazelnuts and the Crazy Bird, due this Summer.

I can barely keep up with Dash Shaw today! "The Haunted High School," a 5-page story he did for the Vice fiction issue, is now online.

On his blog, Dash Shaw provides more information about and some preliminary artwork from Slobs and Nags, the film that he has been selected to attend the January Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab to develop (first announcement here; additional coverage from /Film): the film will be produced by Howard Gertler and John Cameron Mitchell, and the project reunites Dash with the creative team behind The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. with the addition of Frank Santoro. To quote Dash: "Yay!"

Hot on the heels of IFC.com's debut of The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. and our imminent release of the companion book, the Sundance Institute has announced that creator Dash Shaw is one of twelve aspiring filmmakers to be selected for the Institute's annual January Screenwriters Lab. Dash is developing a feature-length animated film titled Slobs and Nags: "Told with hand-drawn animation, a disconnected family is thrown into chaos when the scientist father loses the test subject of his experiment with appearance-altering technology." Congrats Dash! For more info, the only direct link to the announcement is to a…