FLOG! Entries

Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics - 16-Page Excerpt

mike

In terms of pure fun, Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics is hard to beat. Our wide-format volume, coming late next month, collects the full run of Wilson's little-seen mid-1970s weekly newspaper strip. Each installment contains 5 or so gags in signature Gahanian style — droopy, lumpy and slightly twisted.

Find out what you're in for with our excerpt containing the first 15 strips. View the preview in the embedded reader here (full-screen viewing recommended) or get the PDF directly, and pre-order the book here.

Goddamn This War! by Jacques Tardi & Jean-Pierre Verney - Video/Photo Slideshow

mike

Goddamn This War!
by Jacques Tardi & Jean-Pierre Verney

140-page full-color 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-582-2

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

Created 15 years after the completion of his Eisner Award-winning World War I masterwork It Was the War of the Trenches, Tardi's Goddamn This War! is no mere sequel or extension, but a brand new, wholly individual graphic novel that serves as a companion piece to Trenches but can be read entirely on its own.

Vastly different sequentially (eschewing Trenches' splintered narrative, Goddamn is split into six chronological chapters, one for each year of the war), graphically (Tardi deploys his more recent pen-ink-and-watercolor technique, with the bold colors of the early chapters fading into a grimy near-monochrome in the later ones as the war drags on), and narratively (all of Goddamn is told, with insight, dark wit and despair, as a first-person reminiscence/narration by an unnamed soldier), Goddamn This War! shares with Trenches its sustained sense of outrage, pitch-black gallows humor, and impeccably scrupulous historical exactitude.

In fact, Goddamn This War! includes an extensive year-by-year historical text section written by Tardi's frequent World War I research helpmate, the historian and collector Jean-Pierre Verney, including dozens of stunning rare photographs and visual documents from his personal collection.

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

Happy Birthday, Linda Medley

TheJenVaughn

Enjoy your birthday and we hope you got everything you wished for! Linda Medley is the cartoonist of the Castle Waiting series with a new softcover edition of Volume 1 and the new Definitive Edition of Volume 2.

First Look & Excerpt: Lost Cat by Jason

mike

As you can see, Jason's new graphic novel Lost Cat (coming in July) is presented in the same handsome hardcover format as his story collections Low Moon and Athos in America and the reprint volumes What I Did and Almost Silent. His longest, and dare we say one of his best, works to date deserves no less.

A detective story with multiple mysteries, romantic longing, and a head-spinning finale all delivered in trademark understated Jason style, it's a thrilling, heart-tugging, satisfying read. And there's a cute kitty cat. See for yourself with our free 15-page excerpt, and pre-order yours right here.

Jaime Hernandez at COMICA: The London International Comics Festival!

janice

As we mentioned yesterday on FLOG, comics legend Jaime Hernandez is returning to London after nearly twenty years, and he'll be the guest-of-honor at a special Comica Conversation, hosted by Comica: The London International Comics Festival, on Thursday, May 30th!

Jaime will discuss the lives and loves of his crazy ‘locas’ -- Maggie and Hopey -- and other much-loved characters from the independent phenomenon Love and Rockets.

Doors open at 6:00 PM, and the event starts at 6:30 PM sharp! The discussion runs through 8:00 PM, followed by a signing.

Tickets are selling FAST, and they've already moved the event to a larger venue to accomodate all you Love and Rockets fans! Do not sleep on this: get your tickets today either online, or by calling the box office at 020 7871 3515.

Don't let the name fool you: the Ciné Lumière Cinema at the Institut Francais is located in London at 17 Queensberry Place. The nearest tube station is at South Kensington on the Piccadilly, Circle & District lines.

Ad�le Blanc-Sec movie coming out on US DVD/Blu-Ray

mike

At last, the announcement we've been waiting for since 2010: Luc Besson's film adaptation of Jacques Tardi's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is finally getting released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the United States! It comes out from Shout! Factory on August 13 and you'll be able to watch it dubbed into English or with subtitles. Here's a trailer:

Read the books!

(Hat tip to the Carlsons.)

Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s on comiXology

TheJenVaughn

Bringing you the absolute best in alternative comics, Fantagraphics and comiXology have released Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s for your digital reading delight. Edited by Michael Dowers, Newave! is a gigantic collection of the best small press cartoonists to emerge after the first generation of underground cartoonists (such as R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Art Spiegelman) paved the way. These cartoonists, inspired by the freewheeling creative energy of the underground comix movement, began drawing and printing their own comix seen here.

This gigantor collection has 856 pages of comics by your favorite artists of today and yesterday for only $19.99. Get Newave! on comiXology and settle in for the night, hell, make it the whole weekend!

"...[A] fascinating treasure trove of an anthology... In addition to work by greats like Artie Romero, Rick Geary, and Mary Fleener, and 50 or so others, [Newave!] serves as the history of a movement." -- Publishers Weekly

"Back in the days of Factsheet Five, I used to order tons of minicomix. Most were mediocre, but a few were terrifically good and that made it worth the risk to send in the fifty cents or so that they cost. ... Fantagraphics just released a massively thick (900 pages!) anthology of minicomix called Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s, and it's a treat." – Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing

Jaime Hernandez Signing at Gosh! Comics London!

janice

It's been twenty years since comics legend Jaime Hernandez visited London, and we are making up for it in a big way!

Not only will Jaime be a guest of honor at COMICA: The London International Comics Festival, but he kicks off his UK visit on Wednesday, May 29th with a special appearance at Gosh! Comics! This signing and the COMICA talk are Jaime’s only two engagements in London, so catch him at one, or both, or miss out entirely!

Jaime will be signing from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, and our friends at Gosh! state:

As yet we do not have a limit of how many things can be signed other than the usual ‘Please be polite to your fellow fans and do not bring a suitcase full of stuff’. We’ll have a look at the line on the day and see if we need to put a limit on – if we do it will probably be something like three items. Also! Because we’ve only got Jaime for a couple of hours, we will not be able to take signed requests for this one, sorry. If you can’t make it just bribe your friend with beer or chocolate (those new Malteaser bars are pretty good) or owe them a dinner. If Jaime’s got a spare ten minutes before he’s whisked away to his own dinner we will ask him to sign some stock for us, and if that happens we will announce it. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Gosh! Comics is located at 1 Berwick Street in London. Miss this, and risk waiting another twenty years to meet him!

First Look: The Love and Rockets Companion

mike

Here's your first sneak peek of an advance copy of The Love and Rockets Companion, edited by Marc Sobel & Kristy Valenti and coming in July. This book fits nicely on your shelf with the Love and Rockets Library volumes and serves as your guide to the L&R universe, with 3 major interviews with the Hernandez brothers, character guides, previously unpublished artwork, Locas and Palomar timelines, a complete bibliography, and letter column excerpts. All this wrapped in a fold-out jacket with a poster on one side and character family trees on the other! We'll show you that in action along with more views of the book soon.

Our free 32-page preview assembles short excerpts from each of the major sections; read it here, where you can also place your pre-order. And you can pre-order a set of the Companion, Covers, and Reader books at a nice discount here.

First Look: The Daniel Clowes Reader

mike

Advance copies are in and here's a quick peek at The Daniel Clowes Reader: A Critical Edition of Ghost World and Other Stories, with Essays, Interviews, and Annotations. True to the title, it's got the whole Ghost World graphic novel in it, plus a bunch more stories, interviews with Clowes, and a bunch of smart people writing a bunch of smart stuff about the stories, all wrangled and partly written by Ken Parille and packaged up in this smart-looking compact flexi-bound softcover designed by Alvin Buenaventura. It's a must for every Clowes fan and for any serious reader of comics, which means you!

The book's due out in July; you can pre-order and sample the contents with a free 31-page excerpt right here.

New Comics Day 5.15.13

TheJenVaughn

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about them (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability.

Wandering Son (放浪息子 / Hourou Musuko) Vol. 4
by Shimura Takako; edited and translated by Matt Thorn

224-page black & white 7" x 9.5" hardcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-605-8

"Wandering Son is not the kind of manga in which a happy ending is guaranteed… You'll thus be grateful for the moments of realistic, untempered joy Shimura allows her two protagonists here, as you wait with nervous anticipations for the travails that lie ahead for them…" –Glen Weldon, NPR

Praise for the Series:

One of ALA/YALSA's Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens 2012

Named to the ALA GLBT Round Table's 2012 Rainbow List of recommended books for young readers

One of MTV Geek's Best Manga Series of 2011

Good Dog by Graham Chaffee - Now in Stock

mike

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

Good Dog
by Graham Chaffee

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

See Previews / Order Now

Order this book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown here as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last.

Good Dog marks the welcome return of alternative cartoonist Graham Chaffee, who, after his successful 2003 collection of short stories, The Most Important Thing and Other Stories, took a detour to devote himself to the art of tattooing, before charging back with his new, beautifully conceived graphic novel.

Ivan, who is plagued by terrible nightmares about chickens and rabbits, is a good dog — if only someone would notice. Readers accompany the stray as he navigates dog society, weathers pack politics, and surveys canine-human interactions.

Good Dog's story and pen-and-ink art are deceptively simple, but Chaffee uses the approachability of the subject matter as a device to explore topics such as independence, security, assimilation, loyalty, and violence. Preteen-and-up dog fanciers, especially, will warm to the well-meaning Ivan and his exploits with a motley assortment of Scotties, Bulldogs, and mutts. Chaffee combines illustrative gravitas with cartooning verve and creates a richly textured, dog’s-eye view of the world. The story is a rousing Jack London-esque adventure as well as a moral parable.

Advance Praise:

"Graham Chaffee has been one of my favorite cartoonists since I fell in love with his 1997 debut graphic novel, Big Wheels. Combining tremendous empathy towards his characters, concise storytelling and exquisite detail, Chaffee's comics are sublime. I am eagerly awaiting Good Dog. I'll plan my week around reading it." – James Sturm (Market Day)

"Good Dog is a book as seemingly lost in time as its canine hero Ivan. Graham Chaffee has a real talent for charming anthropomorphic cartooning and his clean, appealing storytelling and expressive brushwork evoke the work of an alternative golden age of comics; an age perhaps in which superheroes never existed and the medium told more straightforward, poignant stories." – James Romberger

"Getting into the mind of a dog — that's a real trick. I know, I've tried. Getting into the whole heart and soul of a dog is another whole feat. Graham Chaffee not only does it with aplomb (he draws GREAT dogs), he gets into the whole dog's life — and so should you." – Nick Abadzis (Laika)

"I got choked up a couple of times which is the one of the best things a comic can do to me. Compliments to Mr. Graham Chaffee. Really solid storytelling and excellent art. Reminiscent the best way of Jack London's The Call of the Wild." – Farel Dalrymple (Pop Gun War)

The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove by Gene Deitch - Now in Stock

mike

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

The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove (Softcover Ed.)
by Gene Deitch

168-page full-color 11.75" x 9.25" softcover • $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-60699-617-1

See Previews / Order Now

On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in "cool cat"), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled "The Cat," which quickly became a fixture of the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with "The Cat." Deitch's stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of jazz and became a visual paean to the joy of collecting and appreciating jazz.

Fantagraphics Books is proud to collect all of Deitch's Record Changer covers and "Cat" cartoons in one coffee-table, landscape-format art book, reproducing his covers in the same gorgeous colors in which they first appeared as well as the black-and-white Cat cartoons, with commentary and reminiscences by Deitch himself. Originally published in 2003 in hardcover and out of print for years, this redesigned, first-ever paperback edition will delight a new generation of fans.

1st Look: The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley by Kim Deitch

mike

A century ago in sleepy Lumberton, the moving pictures, with their daring heroines, were the most exciting thing to happen to young Katherine Whaley. When a movie production came to town, her life took a most unexpected turn.

Decades later, Whaley recounted her wild, weird years in the company of the mysterious eccentric Charles Varnay and his uncannily intelligent dog Rousseau. Varnay aimed to produce a movie serial, with Katherine as its destined star, propounding a message about the future of the human race — a message he claimed was recorded on ancient artifacts in the voice of Jesus Christ himself!

The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley is an intriguing new entry in Kim Deitch's series of graphic-novel alternate histories of early 20th century showbiz. We got our advance copies yesterday and we'll have mail-order copies available in a couple of months -- pre-order and read a 17-page excerpt right here.

Cover Uncovered: Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics

mike

Oh, what a treat! We couldn't be happier that the great Gahan Wilson did this all-new illustration for the cover of our upcoming collection of Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics, his 1974-1976 funny-pages feature. Yep, it's another great but short-lived comic strip by one of cartooning's best, fished from the deep waters of obscurity and given the loving Fantagraphics treatment! These darkly delightful, subversively satirical strips have been carefully spiffed up and will be presented in a "widescreen" hardcover format hitting shelves in July. More sneak peeks are on the way, and you can pre-order now.

Dash Shaw Animation Screening at Light Industry Brooklyn!

janice

The genius Dash Shaw has been touring across the country in support of his latest graphic novel, New School, as well as the one-shot comic book, 3 New Stories. On Tuesday, May 21st, he brings at all back home to Brooklyn with an animation screening at Light Industry in the lovely Greenpoint neighborhood. Dash will screen his animation works, from cinematic permutations of his own comics, as well as adaptations of game shows and reality tv that marry their source materials' original audio tracks with a series of static illustrations to uncanny effect — Wheel of Fortune never seemed so heartbreaking, or so strange. Rounding out the lineup is a film chosen by Shaw that he finds resonant with the concerns of his particular hand-drawn animation techniques: Bobby’s Girl, an '80s anime rarity about a teenage biker, his pen pal, and his death drive.
I have to tell you: having seen Dash's presentation at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery earlier this month, I cannot encourage you more to go! The entire audience was hanging on his every word, and his explanations on his process were absolutely fascinating. You don't want to miss this, Brooklynites.
Please note: seating is limited, and first-come, first-served, so get there early! Box office opens at 7:00 PM. Tickets are $7.00, and are available at door. Light Industry is located at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a ground-floor space shared with Triple Canopy and The Public School New York.

Johnny Ryan in VICE Illustration Art Show in London!

janice

We've mentioned before how our own Johnny Ryan is a frequent contributor to VICE Magazine. Why, he can sometimes be found drawing chipmunks blasting Ted Nugent with semen, for example!

This Friday, May 17th, at the appropriately named Pure Evil Gallery, VICE will be holding an exhibition of work from some of their favorite illustrators, including Johnny -- "just so we can stick all their drawings up on a wall and show everybody else how great they are," they say.

The exhibition is going to include a selection of new prints, work that's been featured in VICE and original drawings especially for the show, which are designed to give an insight into how the people who do drawings for them go about doing their drawings.

The Pure Evil Gallery is located at 108 Leonard Street in London. The show runs through Sunday, June 2nd.

Glimpses of the new Love and Rockets, Daniel Clowes and Kim Deitch books

mike

The FedEx man made us very happy this morning, bringing advance copies of The Love and Rockets Companion, The Daniel Clowes Reader, and Kim Deitch's The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley. We'll have more to show & tell you soon!

Hateball Tour 20th anniversary memories

mike

Holy smokes, has it really been 20 years since the "Hateball" tour with Peter Bagge & Dan Clowes? Our old pal Devlin Thompson of Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens, GA shares memories and photos of their stop there.

Caravan of Comics Heads from Australia to Seattle!

janice

A metaphorical Winnebago (one that drives on water) containing 7 Australian comics creators has embarked upon a three-week North American tour, and this Saturday, May 18th, they'll stop at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery!

Come meet Scarlette Baccini, Mirranda Burton, Marijka Gooding, Patrick Alexander, Gregory Mackay, Dan Hayward and Bruce Mutard from 1:00 to 8:00 PM! They'll be giving a short presentation, discussing their work, and screening the feature-length documentary Graphic Novels! Melbourne!, which illuminates how Melbourne's strange water produces so many good comics.

Join us for the International Comics Celebration this weekend, and let's help welcome them to Seattle!

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is located at 1201 S. Vale Street in Seattle's Georgetown district. Open daily 11:30 to 8:00 PM, Sundays until 5:00 PM. Phone: (206) 658-0110.