You'll be able to pick up your FREE copy of this special comic exclusively at participating comic shops on Saturday, May 4, 2013. Lots of shops have sales on FCBD so it'll be a great time to pick up available volumes in our Prince Valiant series!
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund continues to bless objects with Jaime Hernandez's artwork. They have taken his Libby image from the Membership Card seen below (and shirts and hoodies) to make gorgeous limited edition prints. Utilizing the press at Aardvark Letterpress and help from CBLDF Member Store The Secret Headquarters in LA this 11 x 14 inch print is available to people pledging at the DEFENDER Level ($250) and higher.
Here Jaime is approving the design by cartoonist Malachi Ward to accompany his own artwork. Deputy Director Alex Cox states, "Mr. Hernandez was involved in the design process, and as you can see, an enormous amount of love and care went into to getting these prints just right." Visit their site to see how the prints turned out, here's a hint: GOOOOOOOOOLLLLLDDD.
Are you ready to get Groove-y? Our new, redesigned, remastered paperback edition of the great Gene Deitch's The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove is just a couple months away and we have advance copies in house to show off. Collecting Deitch's jazz illustrations and cartoons from The Record Changer magazine 1945-1951 in an oversized coffee table book, it's a jazz fiend's, vinyl collector's, midcentury illustration lover's, retro-phile's dream! Right now you can groove on an 18-page excerpt and pre-order a copy (at 30% off through March 18 as part of our Art & Illustration sale!) right here.
We've just uploaded a 16-page excerpt (comprising the entire first chapter) of Goddamn This War! by Jacques Tardi & Jean-Pierre Verney for your perusal. This section of Tardi's second WWI masterwork covers 1914, the first year of the war, told from the somewhat jaundiced (though not completely despairing yet) point of view of a French infantry soldier, illustrated in Tardi's loose-yet-precise pen and striking watercolors. View the preview in the embedded reader here or get the PDF directly. We've just approved the printer's proofs which means the book should be hitting shelves in June or so — you can get it a little sooner if you pre-order direct from us.
We're having a sale on books in our Art & Illustration category! Save at least 30% on art books, illustration collections, exhibit catalogs, sketchbooks, pin-ups and more. Featuring artists such as Nell Brinkley, Jack Cole, Al Columbia, Dave Cooper, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Jim Flora, Drew Friedman, Paul Hornschemeier, Lorenzo Mattotti, Malcolm McNeill, Tony Millionaire, Robert Williams, Gahan Wilson, Barry Windsor-Smith, Basil Wolverton, Jim Woodring and many more; anthologies like Arf, Beasts!, Blab! and more; and much much more spanning vintage classics and cutting-edge contemporary work — save on dozens of our best and most beautiful books! It runs 4 days only — March 15-18, 2013 — so don't miss out!
Ed Piskor: Brain Rot presents original pen and ink drawings by Piskor which comprised many of his latest comics publications. These original drawings will be up at the Columbus Museum of Art from March 15, 2013 until June 2, 2013. The exhibition includes more than thirty original pages from Hip Hop Family Tree due out from Fantagraphics October 2013. Hip Hop Family Tree tracks the evolution of hip hop from its beginnings in the 1970s as a niche local subculture into the global phenomenon it quickly became.
On March 24th, 2013 at 2pm Piskor will speak about his creative process with interviewer, comics writer, and blogger Jared Gardner, a professor of English and Film Studies at OSU. This talk will be free with museum admission.
Following these events, Ed Piskor will be doing a 3 week residency at the Thurber House in Columbus, OH where he'll be provided the opportunity to develop a work-in-progress. More info here.
Thank you so much to everyone who came out this past weekend for our signing with the wonderful Geneviève Castrée, whose debut graphic novel Susceptible is out now from our friends at Drawn & Quarterly!
She gave a wonderful and spirited slideshow presentation, and at one point she had to don her husband's glasses in order to see the slides herself! I learned so much from her talk that even though I was halfway through reading the book, when I got home, I started over again with all this new, fascinating information in mind!
And huge kudos to our manager/curator Larry Reid for going the extra mile in making the accompanying exhibition happen... no, literally. He drove many, many miles to Geneviève's home in Anacortes, WA, to pick up these original drawings from the book! Can you believe? These are in scale! Seeing the stunning artwork and the meticulous lettering in person, and at size (and in French!), was truly a special treat!
As she signed copies of the book for attendees, her good friend Ashley Eriksson (of K Records band LAKE) performed music.
Her opening track, she explained, was about working from home, which she said always made her think of Geneviève! There was a very sweet vibe watching these two artists at their craft, smiling at each from across the room in equal admiration of each other's talents. Yes, aww! It was a very wonderful evening -- thank you to everyone who came out for it, and thank you especially to Geneviève, Ashley, and all Anacortesians for making the trek!
Our exhibit of original artwork from Susceptible will be on display through Saturday, April 6th at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, 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. Live far away? You can check out more photos from our opening reception in the Fantagraphics Flickr!
In the wake of 9-11, alleged terrorists were housed on a U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba. While there, these terrorist suspects were confined in "indefinite detention," off the American mainland, unaccountable to the U.S. judicial system, nameless and faceless to the world. At the military trials of Guantanamo, which started in 2006, no photographs were permitted in the courtroom. Only one person was allowed to cover the trials, not with a camera but with her pencils and pastels. Janet Hamlin has been the only sketch artist covering the trials from 2006 to the present, granting the suspects humanity and dignity while allowing the world to see the process through an unapologetic lens.
Sketching Guantanamo is both a collection of her most potent and revealing sketches drawn during this period, as well a chronicle of her experience at Guantanamo.
Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth states, "Janet's courtroom sketches and commentary comprises a significant moral document, of interest to every citizen who cares about what the United States government is doing in his and her name. Sketching Guantanamo helps bring out of the shadows and into the light of public scrutiny these extra-judicial trials."
Before entering the viewing booth at the back of court, Hamlin is subjected to daily thorough searches, wanding, and metal detecting in three separate checkpoints. All a reader needs to do is open the book to be transported to the infamous base. Hamlin's drawings and accompanying text provide a rare insight into the military courts of Guantanamo; they've appeared on ABC News and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, and were recently featured in The Colbert Report's story on censorship of the trials. With nearly 150 drawings, the book will also include photographs of the surrounding facilities to enhance Hamlin's illustrations and commentary. It also includes a foreward by Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award winner Carol Rosenberg, a member of a reporting team that won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Janet Hamlin graduated with honors from Art Center College of Design and lives in New York. Her clients include Time Warner, Universal Studios, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, IBM, HarperCollins and Associated Press to name a few.
176-page full-color 11" x 8.5" hardcover Cover price: $28.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-691-1 Published by Fantagraphics Books
Callin' out to Percy Gloom fans! While we all eagerly await Cathy Malkasian's follow-up Wake Up, Percy Gloom (due out next month), we can dial up this great Percy iPhone cover from RedBubble.com. Wake Up, indeed -- it's for you!
In a couple of months we have a new reprint of The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 5: Happy Hippy Comix coming your way, and we got an advance sample copy to show off to you. As you might surmise from the title, this volume has some of Crumb's most transgressive and drug-influenced stuff, with Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Angelfood McSpade all taking star turns, among other kooky characters, in material from Zap, Snatch and elsewhere. Plus Janis Joplin! It's wild, man! The original edition brought in a 1991 Harvey Award for Best Domestic Reprint Project and Booklist had this to say:
"Fantagraphics' Crumb project advances into wilder, woolier, scarier, more fantastic, and lewder and still lewder territory in [Volume 5]... This is definitely X-rated material — make that triple-X! — but it's brilliant, scabrously hilarious, absolutely basic to understanding the 1960s American counterculture, and authentically mind-blowing."
In other words, don't miss it! We'll have a bunch more preview snapshots for you soon; in the meantime, hop on the early pre-order train right here.
