Fantagraphics Blog

If you've got pictures of Fantagraphics at SPX, let us know! Here's a few that we've found on our own or have been sent to us. Con reports abound on the web: Rob Clough has a good one to start with, and Sean T. Collins has audio from the Critics Roundtable panel featuring our own Gary Groth. Let's lead off with a video of Gahan Wilson at the Ignatz Awards, courtesy of Tom Neely: Gahan Wilson & Gary Groth by Flickr user mgrhode1 Carol Tyler by Flickr user mgrhode1 From Rafer Roberts, the Gahan Wilson/Carol Tyler panel Another view, from…

Here comes your Online Commentary & Diversions for today: • Interview: We Love You So, the blog of Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are movie, talks to newly-minted Ignatz winner Jordan Crane, saying "Presenting melancholy tales of workaday worries and broken relationships right alongside whimsical, child-friendly fare, Uptight provides a fascinating peek inside Crane’s constantly shifting thoughts, and never fails to entertain." From Jordan: "When I’m writing something I usually have a particular person in mind that I’m writing it for. Not a general thing like 'I’m writing for someone between the ages of 25 and 50' but rather…

Scheduled to arrive in comics shops across the country this week (though by some reports I think some shops may have received it last week): Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit Book 1! Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter says "This is an awesome book, and you need to own it eventually so why not buy it today?" Indeed! But first, why not check out the previews & reviews here and contact your local shop to make sure they get it?

The publisher of Jacques Tardi's most recent World War I book, the two-part PUTAIN DE GUERRE (my best translation: FUCKING WAR!), has released this nifty trailer on YouTube. It's all in French but there's lots of cool Tardi images between the vintage photos.     PUTAIN DE GUERRE Volume II will be released in November in France. There are no plans just yet to release a U.S. edition (there are several other Tardi books we want to work our way through, including IT WAS THE WAR OF THE TRENCHES this coming Spring), which is good because it will give me…

Mome Vol. 16 – Fall 2009 By various artists; edited by Gary Groth & Eric Reynolds This issue features several of our favorite alternative comic artists of the last 15 years, bringing us great joy. Archer Prewitt is the first, with an all-new “Funny Bunny” strip created in between his active musical career. “The Moolah Tree” is the new Fuzz & Pluck graphic novel from Ted Stearn, following Fuzz & Pluck and Fuzz & Pluck: Splitsville, beginning serialization here. We are equally proud to debut new work from Renée French, whose work is also featured on the front and back…

You Are There By Jacques Tardi & Jean-Claude Forest THE SATIRICAL MASTERPIECE THAT USHERED IN THE GRAPHIC NOVEL ERA TO EUROPEAN COMICS… FINALLY AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH One of the earliest full-length, standalone graphic novels to be published in Europe, and certainly one of the best and most original, Ici Même was serialized in the adult French comics monthly (A suivre) in the early 1980s and then released in book form. A quarter of a century later, this dark, funny, consistently surprising masterpiece has finally been translated into English. An unexpected yet smoothly confident collaboration between the darkly cynical Jacques Tardi…

Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "[The Squirrel Machine is a] darkly disturbing, brilliantly drawn story… B&W pen and ink drawings elucidate complex machines and Victorian-era architecture in baroque detail, while surrealist imaginings take turns for the truly repugnant. Sexual perversion, putrefaction and serial-killer style artworks are all ornately portrayed, as are the buildings, shops, horse-drawn carriages and crumbling mansions of a 19th-century small town. The story, while told primarily in pictures, includes a stilted and formal dialogue that only adds to the perversity. … Though not for the faint of heart, this obscure tale will offer rich rewards to…

Lilli Carré has updated and redesigned her website, home to her comics, illustrations, films, and bewitching "moving drawings." Much lovely strangeness awaits.