Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life
by Ulli Lust (translated by Kim Thompson)

464-page two-color 6.75" x 9" softcover • $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-60699-557-0

Ships in: May 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now

Back in 1984, a rebellious, 17-year-old, punked-out Ulli Lust set out for a wild hitchhiking trip across Italy, from Naples through Verona and Rome and ending up in Sicily. Twenty-five years later, this talented Austrian cartoonist has looked back at that tumultuous summer and delivered a long, dense, sensitive, and minutely observed autobiographical masterpiece.

Miraculously combining a perfect memory for both emotional and physical detail with the sometimes painful lucidity two and half decades’ distance have brought to her understanding of the events, Lust meticulously shows the who, where, when, and how (specifically, how an often penniless young girl can survive for months on the road) of a sometimes dangerous and sometimes exhilarating journey. Particularly haunting is her portrait of her fellow traveler, the gangly, promiscuous devil-may-care Edi who veers from being her spunky, funny best friend in the world to an out-of-control lunatic with no consideration for anything but her own whims and desires.

Universally considered one of the very finest examples of the new breed of graphic novels coming from Europe, Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life won the 2011 Angoulême “Revelation” prize, and Fantagraphics is proud to bring it to English speaking readers.

30-page excerpt (download 5.5 MB PDF):

Video & Photo Slideshow Preview (view in new window):

Make hotel reservations now for the alternative music event of the decade. Sub Pop celebrates 25 years of rockin' the world with a free concert featuring 15 bands right outside our Georgetown bookstore on July 13. The official line-up as announced by Tad Doyle, Kim Thayil, Mark Arm, and Jack Endino will be complemented by some amazing guests. (We'll leave it to your imagination, but read Tad's lips at the end of the video for a clue.) 

While serving as director of Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art in 1989, I somehow coerced Sub Pop moguls Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman into programming a weekend of music at our downtown space. The show featured Nirvana, Mudhoney, Gwar, TAD, Dwarves, Dickless, Supersuckers, and other awesome acts. CoCA intern Owen Connell created this memorable poster and wheat pasted them all over town. These shows seemed cathartic somehow. Maybe you had to be there. If you weren't, you're in luck...

I'm reviving this concept for an exhibit at Fantagraphics Bookstore coinciding with Sub Pop's Silver Jubilee on July 13. Focusing on the formative years of Sub Pop, the show examines the intersection of comix and music in Seattle beginning with the birth of Sub Pop in 1980. It includes art and artifacts by Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Peter Bagge, Art Spiegelman, Charles Peterson, Daniel Clowes, and many more. Danny Bland will read from his new novel In Case We Die set in Seattle's grunge era. This'll rock hard! More details will be revealed later, but schedule your summer vacation accordingly.

You don't have to wait until summer to enjoy Sub Pop's contribution to modern music. This Saturday is Record Store Day and our retail partners Georgetown Records will have the special Sub Pop 1000 vinyl LP, as well as exclusive Record Store Day offerings from local label Light in the Attic including Roky Erickson, PiL, and Mercury Rev. Please come by, and wherever you are -- support your local record store!

At the printer now for release in July, The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations shines a whole new light on one of the greatest, most beloved graphic novels of all time along with several other classic Eightball stories and Clowes rarities. Editor Ken Parille has brought together a stable of great minds, including Clowes himself, for a plethora of fascinating and highly readable essays and other material, with topics like "Enid's Bookshelf," "Enid's Record Player," "The Rise of the Zine," "Against Groovy," and "Urban Romanticism, Mad Magazine, and the Aesthetics of Ugly."

Browse the Table of Contents and read the Introduction, 12 pages of Ghost World and more in our generous 31-page excerpt, and pre-order your copy right here.

Good Dog 
by Graham Chaffee

96-page black & white 8.25” x 10.25” hardcover • $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-653-9

Here are a few pretty pictures of the book, which should be unleashed (GET IT?) and on shelves in about 4 weeks; click the thumbnails for larger versions. Get more info, see more previews and pre-order your copy here:

http://www.fantagraphics.com/gooddog

Soar on drunken wings of joy! The new Maakies book is almost here! Green Eggs and Maakies is on the menu for June with another two years of strips by comics' biggest rapscallion, Tony Millionaire, presented once again in widescreen hardcover format. Drinky Crow, Uncle Gabby and the whole gang are back for more shipboard ultraviolence, more drunk driving calamities, more unnatural fornication, more vomit, more poetry, more dubious remedies, more putting things in their mouths that don't belong there, and more laughs, all in Tony's beautiful, peerless penwork.

Name a better comic strip this century. You can't do it! Dig into a steaming 12-page excerpt, and pre-order your copy right here.

Our exhibit of Dash Shaw's artwork launched at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery this past weekend, and boy, is it a beauty! 

If you live in Seattle, you should definitely drop by and see his original artwork in person. I'm especially in love with the piece drawn on polka-dot fabric! If you live too far away, you can also check out photos on the Fantagraphics Flickr.

And don't forget: Dash Shaw will appear in person on Saturday, May 4 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. He’ll be discussing his work with a screening of his animated shorts, followed by a book signing featuring the debut of his latest graphic novel New School. May 4th also marks Free Comic Book Day, so drop by the store for a free mini-comic created by local cartoonists exclusively for us!

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is located at 1201 S. Vale Street in the heart of Seattle’s historic Georgetown arts community, only minutes south of downtown. Open daily 11:30 to 8:00 PM, Sundays until 5:00 PM. Phone 206.658.0110.

The book that has been sold-out twice in a row comes to you, dear reader, in digital form. Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s.  The finest non-EC horror covers and stories of the pre-code era by artist perennials Jack Cole, Reed Crandall, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Jack Katz, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wallace Wood, collected in a robust and affordable volume. And by volume, we mean four. This book is SO BIG, SO HUGE that we had to break it up into four parts: CMYK for the printing colors Cyan (blue), Magenta, Yellow and Black or parts one, two, three, four.

Editors John Benson and Greg Sadowski have sifted through hundreds of rare books to cherry-pick the most compelling scripts and art, and they provide extensive background notes on the artists, writers, and companies involved in their creation. Digital restoration has been performed with subtlety and restraint, mainly to correct registration and printing errors, with every effort made to retain the flavor of the original comics, and to provide the reader the experience of finding a most delightful read in their dusty, creaky attic. Each part is only 6.99 for 80-something pages bound to terrify and keep you up all night long, glowing from your tablets thanks to comiXology.

"[Its] a wonderfully creepy hurtle through the exuberant, cheerfully gross and icky horror comics that prevailed in the golden, pre-Comics-Code era. ...[T]he art is brilliant: indistinct piles of slimy viscera, purple-green zombies, skull-faced vampires and demons, Satan in a dozen guises, witches and occult symbols, creatures from the eleven hells of the darkest mythos of the human spirit." – Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

Kim Deitch's first full-length all-original graphic novel in all of his hardworking, prolific, and heralded career is a big, widescreen book with a big, widescreen title! The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley is a winding tale featuring a rich eccentric, a too-smart dog, silent movies, strange religious artifacts, and the daring young woman who experienced it all, told in the "picto-fiction" format of illustrated text interwoven with comics which Kim began experimenting with in Deitch's Pictorama.

The book's at the printer now and should arrive on our shores in July. Read the Prologue and Chapter 1 for free right now, and pre-order your copy right here.

It was announced last week by Penn State University Libraries and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book that Chris Ware won the Lynd Ward Prize for Best Graphic Novel 2013, Lilli Carré with Heads or Tails was one of the two Honorable Mentions (along with Theo Ellsworth's The Understanding Monster)

"Each story is exquisitely crafted, demonstrating both a compelling literary style and a rich, engaging design sense that can seem deceptively naïve or childlike on first glance but in context reveals striking sophistication and complexity." You're damn right, it was and is! Lilli Carré's book, Heads or Tails is available in its beautiful simplicity and accumulating complexity at our online store or a bookstore near you.