We can’t tell you what the future holds, but we can tell you what you’ll be reading: our amazing new releases! We have so many incredible titles coming out later this year and we’re offering you a sneak peek now–see the full list here!
See You At San Diego: An Oral History of Comic-Con, Fandom, and the Triumph of Geek Culture by Mathew Klickstein
A comprehensive chronicle of Comic-Con International and modern geekdom itself as told through countless intimate, hilarious, and often-thought provoking stories by nearly fifty of the most integral members of today’s convention and fandom community.
See You At San Diego is the comprehensive chronicle of Comic-Con International and modern geekdom itself as told through countless stories by nearly fifty of the most integral members of the Comic-Con and fandom scene. This full-fledged oral history, bursting with intimate reflections, hilarious observations, and at times, heartbreaking, often thought-provoking stories, is about how the geek at last inherited the earth and the story of the transformation of mainstream American pop culture into comic book culture over the past century.
Join some of the biggest names in fandom as they launch off at ludicrous speed into the spiraling galaxy of geek culture through the kaleidoscopic lens of the planet’s biggest pop culture gathering worldwide (clocked twice by Guinness!): the San Diego Comic-Con. With such special guests as: Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Kevin Smith, Bruce Campbell, Felicia Day, Scott Aukerman, Stan Sakai, Sergio Aragonés, Trina Robbins, the Russo Bros., Lloyd Kaufman, Tim Seeley, Kevin Eastman, and many others — along with 400+ photos and art — the book also features forewords by Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo) and by Jeff Smith (Bone), plus an afterword by Wu-Tang Clan’s own uber-nerd mastermind RZA.
Francis Rothbart!: The Tale of a Fastidious Feral by Thomas Woodruff
A stunning, head-turning, “graphic opera” masterpiece from an acclaimed painter and illustrator.
Francis Rothbart! follows a feral child who is raised by magpies and other creatures and is repeatedly struck by lightning. Because of the phenomena, the child develops eccentric talents, which he then abuses, leading to his ultimate destruction by the same natural world that once nurtured him.
Written mostly in rhymed verse, Francis’s picaresque saga unfolds in an allegorical environment, much like the topographical constructions behind renaissance religious paintings. Referencing both the Venetian landscapes of Bellini, Pierro di Cosimo and Carpaccio, mixed with the unlikely animated backdrops of Jay Ward and Chuck Jones, Woodruff’s images recall the fictive gardens of a paradise lost that lingers somewhere deep in all our souls, moist and dark like the caves of the pious saints.
Combining both paintings and drawings, each scene is a visual and verbal feast that transports us to a place in which trees anthropomorphize into figures bending from the weight of stalactite crowns, an iris becomes the gown for an oneiric sprite, and the sky rains down tears, as if mimicking the melancholy of a weeping willow. In a muted palette, Woodruff’s carbon and white charcoal pencil drawings bring us ever closer to this mythical ecology. The artist lovingly focuses on every detail: ethereal, fragile blossoms, petals, roots, and leaves; impressively observed wildlife creatures; and each curve of the hand lettered text is rendered by the delicate hand of an illustrative obsessionist with a penchant for the poignant. Woodruff’s images are multi-sourced amalgamations that echo with familiarity, portraying a world that is not only our own but also exists in the place of our half-remembered dreams.
Thomas Woodruff’s first graphic novel is a self-described “graphic opera” unlike anything ever created, a tour de force of words and images in harmony that will be one of the most talked-about books of the decade.
Slash Them All by Antoine Maillard
A tranquil seaside town is upended by the arrival of a serial killer.
Two high school students are found dead, stoking fears amongst the student body and surrounding community of a serial killer on the loose. Yet summer is approaching, and the future is fraught with uncertainty—if only things could go back to normal for just a while longer. Instead, the heightened police presence prevents Pola from dealing at school while her best friend, the typically discreet Daniel, resists increasingly morbid impulses. News crews speculate about the Bloody Batter, triggering PTSD and fueling paranoia. Meanwhile, evil has its own plans.
Slash Them All is cartoonist Antoine Maillard’s tribute to 1980s American horror cinema, skillfully absorbing the traditions and tropes of the genre, yet drawn in a gorgeous, grayscale pencil style that evokes 1950s film noir more than Jason or Freddy Kreuger. This singular work of graphic fiction is a story about adolescents thrust unexpectedly, unwillingly, and unpreparedly into adulthood, told with a graphic acuity and emotional depth that transcends its simple slasher inspirations. A 2022 nominee for Best Crime Graphic Novel at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.
Love and Rockets: The First Fifty: The Classic 40th Anniversary Collection by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Fantagraphics’ flagship series, this prestigious box set presents bound facsimiles of the original fifty issues of the Love and Rockets comics magazines.
Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez are now recognized as two of the greatest cartoonists in the history of the medium — award-winning, world-renowned, critically acclaimed. But in 1982 when the first issue of Love and Rockets came out, they (occasionally working with their brother, Mario) were two young, struggling, unknown cartoonists who were bucking the dominant comic book trend of costumed characters and adolescent content with intimate, complex, humane, novelistic stories told in comics form. Love and Rockets has appeared in a variety of formats over the years and continues to this day, but the original 50-issue run represents a milestone in comics history. Fantagraphics is celebrating and honoring the 40th anniversary of Love and Rockets and the debut of the Hernandez’s’ first published comics with a gigantic eight-volume slipcase reprinting each issue in a facsimile edition.
Their organic body of work is available in a series of scrupulously and logically organized graphic novels, but here Fantagraphics honors the original quarterly format by presenting the comics as they appeared between 1982 and 1996, recreating not only the reading experience of tens of thousands of fans, but of a particularly fecund period in comics history when a new generation of cartoonists was exploding the idea of what comics could be. Painstakingly recreated in issue-by-issue facsimile, this boxed set includes every cover, comics page, and letter column (even advertising!) in seven hardcover volumes. An eighth volume is anchored by Love and Rockets scholar Marc Sobel’s historic and critical overview of each of the 50 issues, plus numerous other essays, reviews, and profiles that appeared in the popular (and unpopular) press between 1982 and 1996, a virtual history of the growth of Love and Rockets and the simultaneous rise of the literary comics movement of which they were exemplars and trailblazers.
Sun Ra: Art on Saturn: The Album Cover Art of Sun Ra’s Saturn Label by Sun Ra
Drawn from private collections around the world, this is the first comprehensive collection of the Saturn label’s printed record covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels decorated by Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra.
Considered the foremost exponent of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra mastered a wide array of styles that spanned jazz, R&B, exotica, Afro-hybrids, electronic, big band, solo piano, orchestral, experimental, and chamber works. In his 45-year recording career, he issued an epic number of albums and he was one of the first Black musicians to own an independent label, which he named Saturn, after the planet on which he claimed to have been born. The covers of Saturn LPs, issued from 1957 to 1988, are iconic—some rolled off commercial printing presses but many were hand-crafted. These records were sold at concerts, club dates, and by mail order. As collectibles, original handmade Saturn covers sell for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. More than just packaging for a slab of vinyl, they are works of art in their own right.
Sun Ra: Art on Saturn is the first comprehensive collection of all Saturn printed covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels, decorated by Ra himself and members of his Arkestra. Essays by Sun Ra catalog preservationist Irwin Chusid, noted Ra scholar John Corbett, and Glenn Jones, who in the 1970s signed Ra to a distribution deal that put countless homemade covers into circulation, add unique insights into the interplanetary life and work of Sun Ra and his Saturn partner Alton Abraham.
Historians have written extensively about Sun Ra and his music. This book is a tribute to the covers and to the uncredited visual artists and their rich imaginations. From the simple to the baroque to the absurd, the covers that sheathed Ra’s discs reflect the tenaciousness of a genius who refused to compromise or relinquish control of his destiny.
Who Will Make the Pancakes: Five Stories by Megan Kelso
A suite of five brilliant comics stories united by themes of motherhood, family, and love.
Who Will Make the Pancakes collects five deeply social stories by the acclaimed cartoonist Megan Kelso, exploring the connective tissue that binds us together despite our individual, interior experience. These stories, created over the past 15 years — roughly contemporaneously with the author’s own journey as a mother— wrestle with the concept of motherhood and the way the experience informs and impacts concepts of identity, racism, class, love, and even abuse. The book opens with “Watergate Sue,” originally serialized in The New York Times Magazine over six months in 2007. Spanning two generations of mothers/daughters, Eve’s obsession with Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal throughout 1973 heightens her self-doubt about whether she wants to raise more children (resonantly mirroring the anxiety many of us had while doom scrolling our way through the Trump administration). Some 30 years later, her daughter, Sue, is now grown and beginning her own family and attempting to reconcile her mother’s experience with her own.
“Cats in Service” is a contemporary fable about how a death in the family leads a young couple to adopt several cats who have been expertly trained to tend to their every need. “The Egg Room” profiles middle-aged Florence, caught between dreams of how her life might have unfolded and the shrunken reality. “The Golden Lasso” turns the focus to adolescence, using rock climbing as a set piece for a story about innocence lost, while “Korin Voss” chronicles a few months in the life of a single mother in the late 1940s.
Taken collectively, Who Will Make the Pancakes showcases Kelso’s unique voice in graphic fiction (one more in tune with writers such as Alice Munro, Sarah Waters, or Ann Patchett than most graphic novelists) and a stylistic command that tailors her approachable and warm cartooning style for each story’s needs.
Maverix & Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix by Drew Friedman
Perverted, Insane, Degenerate, Brilliant. Artist Drew Friedman pays tribute to the great underground comix creators from Z (Zap) to A (Arcade).
With the publication of R. Crumb’s debut issue of ZAP in 1968, the Underground Comix revolution exploded, creating a major paradigm shift and blowing the lid off the traditional comic book. Maverix & Lunatix features 101 full page portraits (and more) by a cartooning icon in his own right, Drew Friedman, spotlighting the essential artists, writers, and editors who defined one of the great art and countercultural movements of the 20th century. Featuring R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, Melinda Gebbie, Art Spiegelman, Vaughn Bode, Trina Robbins, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, Sharon Rudahl, Larry Gonick, Rick Veitch, Joyce Farmer, Justin Green, “Grass” Green, George DiCaprio, Diane Noomin, Harvey Pekar, Robert Williams, Howard Cruse, Dan O’Neill, Spain Rodriguez, Shary Flenniken, Richard Corben, and so many others… all of whom helped to reinvent an entire artistic medium and became icons of underground comix.
Featuring a foreword by Marc Maron (WTF with Marc Maron) and an introduction by historian Patrick Rosenkranz (Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975), each portrait in Maverix & Lunatix is also accompanied by a short biography of its subject by Friedman, making the book both a gorgeous art book and a valuable historical resource.
Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish
Tommi Parrish’s sophomore graphic novel establishes them as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature.
Eliza is a thirtysomething struggling single mother and poet. Sasha, a twentysomething yearning for direction in life, just moved back in with her parents and dabbles as a sex worker. The two strike up an unlikely friendship that, as it veers toward something more, becomes a deeply resonant exploration of how far people are willing to go to find intimacy in a society that is increasingly not conducive to it.
In Sasha and Eliza, Parrish has created two of the most fully realized characters in recent contemporary fiction. Parrish’s gorgeously painted pages showcase a graceful understanding of body language and ear for dialogue, brilliantly using the medium of comics to depict the dissonance between the characters’ interior and exterior experiences. Men I Trust is about not-always-healthy people attempting to make healthy connections in a disconnected world, and is one of the most moving and insightful works of literary fiction in any medium this year.
Upside Dawn by Jason
In this absolutely bonkers comics collection, Norwegian cartoonist Jason follows his most oddball impulses, presenting to readers an intergalactic assortment of his weirdest, wildest short stories yet.
A dinner date devolves into a Dadaist farce. Death decides his victim’s fate over a high-stakes game of chess. Kafka is ensnared in a confounding bureaucracy of his own imagination. Spock beams down to 1920s Paris to live a double life as an avant-garde painter. Hitchcockian thrillers, literary adaptations, and homages to classic EC comics abound. Dinosaurs! David Bowie! Vampires! Elvis! Welcome to the cosmic gumbo of Upside Dawn.
Godhead 2 by Ho Che Anderson
The concluding volume and resolution to the futuristic corporate thriller.
In the second and concluding volume of Godhead, GH2 picks up from where GH1 ended, with Racer Calhoun and the rest of Cadre Zeus finally learning why they’ve been assembled: to destroy Oceanus, the scientific facility traveling through the Pacific housing the God machine introduced in volume one. They undertake what they hope will be a routine intelligence gathering mission on Oceanus that turns into a desperate fight for survival through the city from which Racer had fled, and leads to a reunion with Carys, the great love of his life.
Finally the cadre are ready to confront Oceanus and put an end to the God machine once and for all. The story’s finale upends the usual narrative expectations and concludes with a somber private epiphany that results in the triumph of human reason over a technocratic/supernatural savior.
Part Boy’s Own adventure genre, part men-on-a-mission yarn, part formal playground through which the author can exercise his restless obsessions, Godhead 2 is the action-based resolution to the psychological drama of the first volume.