Fantagraphics Blog

The Comics Journal #293 Edited by Mike Dean and Kristy Valenti; Gary Groth, Executive Editor The Journal's Bob Levin interviews Zap artist S. Clay Wilson, best known for his panoramas of sex and violence involving lesbian bikers, zombie pirates and a Checkered Demon. Alex Robinson, the Harvey-and-Eisner-winning cartoonist, will discuss his graphic novels Box Office Poison, Tricked and Too Cool to Be Forgotten. Our reviews section tackles Ware, Hergé, Huizenga, Spiegelman, Hernandez and more. Plus a cartoon chat with Joe Matt and a special back-to-school section featuring a gallery of undiscovered potential comics masterpieces by the 2008 graduating class of…

Adam Grano is upset with me being too blanket-statement-y in my post on scanners. I'm like that. I just wanted people to be aware of what to look at in their scans. Adam has a better idea of what to look for in a scanner brand. Here's his scholarly response: "I don't deny that some cheap scanners are shitty. I was just arguing that the pinup scans look more affected by jpeg compression than JUST a shitty scanner. I'd wager that if he upped the resolution a bit and sent you an LZW compressed tiff, it'd look a lot better….

Would you gladly pay us Tuesday for an action-packed advance look at Popeye Vol. 3: "Let's You and Him Fight!" today? Well here you go… on the house (cheese extra). Click here if the slideshow doesn't appear above.

Congratulations to all of the Ignatz Award winners, and especially to new Fanta draft picks Laura Park (Outstanding Artist), whose work can be seen in the next issue of Mome, and Lilli Carré (Outstanding Story for her self-published The Thing About Madeleine), whose debut Fantagraphics graphic novel The Lagoon is coming this Fall. Further congratulations to Laura for winning "The Warmest Drawings in Comics" and Miss Lasko-Gross for winning the "Third Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence" at the unofficial "Nerdlinger Awards" at the Atomic Books anniversary party on Friday night (via The Beat).

Mike Baehr pointed out Tim Hensley using ComicLife in the links roundup a couple of weeks ago but he failed to mention how Fantagraphics' Righthand Man, Eric Reynolds, has even stopped drawing and now makes all his comics in the Macintosh program. Such a convert, he even got his mom into it. Seriously. I've seen her comics but I won't post those. It wouldn't be right– and you probably don't even know who Mr. Blackwell is anyway. Well, in spite of his flaws, I recommend all fans of comicdom check out Eric's massive Flickr archive of His Life in the…

Concerning my earlier post about Scanner Quality: Here is a photograph scanned with a $100 home scanner I bought because it sat up vertically on the desktop, taking up less space. It is worthless. Above is a 1.5 inch section of photograph I scanned at 300 dpi and saved uncompressed, showing all the same jagginess and lack of nuance that I talked about below. Somebody at Fantagraphics doubted that cheap scanners had anything to do with this binary phenomenon but, yes, they do. They are the devil's work. As I said.

In case you're wondering "Hey, last month's sale is over and there isn't a new one yet — what gives?" and/or "Where's the informative Fantagraphics email newsletter that usually arrives in my inbox at the beginning of every month?" please rest assured that both are in the works and will be coming your way soon. In fact, this month's sale items are already marked down and you can enjoy the savings right now. Stay tuned for the real announcement, and thanks for your patience.

Time for a new installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 32-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures. In this week's episode: Steven challenges you to find the continuity error that will be fixed for the book! (Remember, you must be registered and logged in to read.)

People on the Internet share their thoughts about our books: • A Girl Who Wears Glasses covets Ghost World: Special Edition, plans to go as Enid for Halloween; Emily Martin also says nice things about the book • This Irish blogger named Conor recommends I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason • Dans ta bulle, a French-Canadian internet radio show about comics, discusses Jules Feiffer's Tantrum and Tim Lane's Abandoned Cars • Comic Book Resources and ComicMix both examine Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 by the Hernandez Brothers • Finnish blog Bundologi takes note of The Portable Frank by Jim Woodring…