We sometimes lose track of things in our mail-order warehouse, and then someone notices them and says "hey, what's the deal with these?" When the item in question is a bunch of bookplates signed by Robert Crumb, it's kind of a big deal.

These bookplates were originally made for our exclusive signed hardcover editions of The Complete Crumb Comics and the R. Crumb Sketchbook series. The hardcovers are mostly long sold out and out of print, but we don't want these leftovers to go to waste, so we are now offering them with the softcovers as well, for an additional $30 a pop. We have them for nearly every in-print volume of both series, and for all of the volumes that are out of print. You can buy them separately, but in that case it's limit one of each per customer, so we're limiting it to phone orders for separate sales. If ordering from our website, just choose the desired option when adding each book to your shopping cart.

As you can see, the plate for each book is a unique design (not all plates are shown here). Some are numbered, but some are not; we can't guarantee a number on yours. They are limited in edition and quantity, so don't miss out.

Santa recently delivered a big bag of barely bent books by our favorite artists to Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery. They'll be featured at 50% off all day Friday and Saturday, December 14 and 15. Dozens of books by Barks, Bagge, Burns, Clowes, Carre, Crumb, Forney, Friedman, Hernandez, Kurtzman, Millionaire, Panter, Sacco, Swarte, Woodring and more. Classics like Peanuts, Pogo, Popeye, and Prince Valiant, along with some long unavailable titles - all at half off!

While visiting Georgetown, head up the street to see Santa at Masquerade on Friday and Saturday from 2:00 to 6:00 PM, or get your picture taken with Santa's sexy helpers from Little Black Devil Burlesque from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. Make a day of it and shop local at the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall and Full Throttle Bottles, then drink and dine at one of Georgetown's lively cafes or nightclubs. 

Fantagraphics Bookstore is open daily 11:30 to 8:00 PM, Sundays until 5:00 PM. We'll be open until 4:00 PM on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. (Closed on Christmas and New Years Day.) 

Classic adventures await you on the first Saturday in May, a.k.a. one of the funnest days of the year! We are pleased to present Hal Foster's Prince Valiant for Free Comic Book Day on May 4, 2013.

This full-color comic collects two Prince Valiant stories from Hal Foster's 1950 peak: "Home Again," in which Val, Aleta, and newborn baby Prince Arn enjoy an eventful ocean journey back to Thule; and “The Challenge,” in which another knight's unwelcome advances on Aleta result in a classic duel with Valiant!

We're in the midst of assembling our Fall 2013-Winter 2014 season, and while there's still lots of stuff we're keeping under our collective hat for now (we've barely just revealed our Spring-Summer 2013 season, for pete's sake), some other stuff has been leaking out here and there... like this forthcoming book from Paul Hornschemeier, Artists Authors Thinkers Directors, collecting his sketchbook portraits from his Daily Forlorn blog. Pictures of smart people for smart people! Did excitement for this book cause yesterday's catastrophic Tumblr outage? We may never know.

Seattle skies may be grey, but tomorrow things will take on a purplish hue, as our own Ron Regé, Jr. rolls into town with his rock combo, Lavender Diamond! 

You can catch them Thursday, December 13th at the Sunset Tavern [ 5433 Ballard Avenue Northwest ] with local lass Shelby Earl opening the show. Alas, the concert is 21+, so you young'ins will want to try to stalk him outside the venue to get a book signed.

And Fantagraphics will be on site with copies of Ron's latest masterpiece, The Cartoon Utopia, for sale! Now is your chance to get your books signed by Ron himself, or perhaps get a special holiday wish inscribed in one for a festive gift!

Live outside of the Seattle area?  Lavender Diamond will be LIVE on KEXP at 3:00 PM PST, and you can stream their set worldwide at KEXP.ORG. You live in Portland? Visit Ron this Friday evening at Floating World Comics before their show at the Doug Fir Lounge!

The Grammar of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics
by Alexander Theroux

352-page 6.25" x 9.25" hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-616-4

Ships in: January 2013 (subject to change) – Pre-Order Now

National Book Award nominee, critic and one of America’s least compromising satirists, Alexander Theroux takes a comprehensive look at the colorful language of pop lyrics and the realm of rock music in general in The Grammar of Rock: silly song titles; maddening instrumentals; shrieking divas; clunker lines; the worst (and best) songs ever written; geniuses of the art; movie stars who should never have raised their voice in song but who were too shameless to refuse a mic; and the excesses of awful Christmas recordings. Praising (and critiquing) the gems of lyricists both highbrow and low, Theroux does due reverence to classic word-masters like Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, lyricists as diverse as Hank Williams, Buck Ram, the Moody Blues, and Randy Newman, Dylan and the Beatles, of course, and more outré ones like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Patti Smith, the Fall (even Ghostface Killah), but he considers stupid rhymes, as well — nonsense lyrics, chop logic, the uses and abuses of irony, country music macho, verbal howlers, how voices sound alike and why, and much more.

In a way that no one else has ever done, with his usual encyclopedic insights into the state of the modern lyric, Theroux focuses on the state of language — the power of words and the nature of syntax — in The Grammar of Rock. He analyzes its assaults on listeners’ impulses by investigating singers’ styles, pondering illogical lunacies in lyrics, and deconstructing the nature of diction and presentation in the language. This is that rare book of discernment and probing wit (and not exclusively one that is a critical defense of quality) that positively evaluates the very nature of a pop song, and why one over another has an effect on the listener.

20-page excerpt (download 614 KB PDF):

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

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: 

Weird Horrors & Daring Adventures: The Joe Kubert Archives Vol. 1
by Joe Kubert; edited by Bill Schelly

240-page full-color 7.5" x 10.75" hardcover • $39.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-581-5

See Previews / Order Now

Joe Kubert sealed his reputation as one of the greatest American comicbook cartoonists of all time with the four-color adventures of Sgt. Rock of Easy Company, Enemy Ace, and Tarzan, all done for DC Comics during the 1960s and 1970s (themselves already the subject of archival editions)... but he had been working in comics since the 1940s. In fact, young Kubert produced an exciting, significant body of work as a freelance artist for a variety of comic book publishers in the postwar era, in a glorious variety of non-super hero genres: horror, crime, science fiction, western, romance, humor, and more.

For the first time, 33 of the best of these stories have been collected in one full-color volume, with a special emphasis on horror and crime. The Kubert work in this book is that of a burgeoning talent attacking the work with tremendous panache, and in the process, developing a style that became one of the most distinctive in the medium.

Since these stories were written and drawn in the pre-Comics Code era, they are more thrilling, violent and sexy (by contemporary standards) than much of his later, Code-constrained work. And just the titles of the comic books from which these stories are taken are wonderfully evocative of a bygone era of four-color fun: Cowpuncher, Abbott and Costello Comics, Three Stooges, Eerie, Planet Comics, Meet Miss Pepper, Strange Terrors, Green Hornet Comics, Whack, Jesse James, Out of This World, Crime Does Not Pay, Weird Thrillers, Police Lineup, and Hollywood Confessions.

As with Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Steve Ditko and Bill Everett Archives series, Weird Horrors and Daring Adventures boasts state-of-the-art restoration and retouching, and an extensive set of historical notes and an essay by the book’s editor Bill Schelly, author of the Art of Joe Kubert art book and Man of Rock Kubert biography.

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department: 

Delphine
by Richard Sala

128-page two-color (with some full color) 7.25" x 10" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-590-7

See Previews / Order Now

A mysterious traveler gets off the train in a small village surrounded by a thick sinister forest. He is searching for Delphine, who vanished with only a scrawled-out address on a scrap of paper as a trace.

Richard Sala takes the tale of Snow White and stands it on its head, retelling it from Prince Charming's perspective (the unnamed traveler) in a contemporary setting. This twisted tale includes all the elements of terror from the original fairy tale, with none of the insipid saccharine coating of the Disney animated adaptation: Yes, there will be blood.

Originally serialized as part of the acclaimed international "Ignatz" series, Delphine is executed in a rich and ominous duotone that shows off Sala's virtuosity — punctuated with stunning full-color chapter breaks.

Following the releases of Heartbreak Soup and Human Diastrophism (Books 1 and 2 of the Palomar series from Love and Rockets) by Gilbert Hernandez, we're releasing the third book via comiXology called Beyond Palomar.

Beyond Palomar collects two of Gilbert's groundbreaking works about the Central American hamlet of Palomar in one affordable book."Poison River" is a dizzying period piece often hailed as one of Hernandez's masterpieces. It traces the pre-Palomar childhood of Luba, her teenage marriage to gangster Peter Rio, the secrets behind her mysterious mother, all the way up to her subsequent escape and arrival in Palomar.

Meanwhile, "Love and Rockets X," set in the early 1990s (in the waning years of Bush I's post-Reagan hangover, with Gulf War I in the background), takes us from plush Beverly Hills to the dangerous east side and introduces us to a dizzyingly diverse cast of characters, including a lowlife rock 'n' roll band, a "posse" of black youths, a ditzy Hollywood mom and her spoiled son, a gay activist filmmaker and his rebellious, half-Iraqi daughter, and a group of racist thugs whose violent attack on an older woman sets the plot in motion. These fantastic stories are now a swipe of the finger away on comiXology, 260 pages of fantastic comics at $14.99. A steal of a deal.

"In a real world, not the screwed-up world we have now, [Gilbert Hernandez] would be considered one of the greatest American storytellers. It's so hard to do funny, tragic, local and epic, and he does all simultaneously, and with great aplomb." – Junot Diaz

"In Gilbert's Palomar stories, there's a rawness that dominates the proceedings: raw anger, raw sexuality, raw passion for life, death and art." – Rob Clough, High-Low

It's been even more extra-heartbreaking to write this FLOG post in the wake of yesterday's tragedy at the Clackamas Town Center mall near Portland, Oregon. Earlier this year, Seattle had its own tragic shooting at beloved local hang-out Café Racer.  

This Thursday, December 13th, Café Racer and Brown Paper Tickets are hosting a very special benefit for the victims' families and the lone survivor of the shootings that took place on May 30, 2012, claiming five victims and impacting everyone involved in the Seattle artistic community.

Brown Paper Tickets will be debuting their Artist Ticket Program, where a limited edition of event tickets are imprinted with original artwork for an extra fee, with proceeds donated to charity. For this inaugural event, Brown Paper Tickets chose our own Ellen Forney and Jim Woodring, two artists who were very much a part of Café Racer community. Ellen and Jim will perform readings, and will also be available to personally sign your Artist Ticket.

The evening will also feature musicians and performance artists who had a direct connection to those that were lost as a result of this tragedy, including The Bad Things, Baby Gramps, Lonesome Shack, and performance artist Queen Shmooquan. The MC for the evening will be Seattle's effervescent hostess Sylvia O'Stayformore.

Doors are at 6:00 PM, with the event kicking off at 7:00 PM. Cover is "pay-what-you-can" and advanced tickets are highly recommended as space is limited. There will be some tickets available at the door the day of the event but are first-come, first-served. Café Racer is located at 5828 Roosevelt Way NE. 

If you can't make the event but want to donate to the Victims of the Café Racer Shooting Memorial Fund, click here to visit the donation page.