Tuesday, April 10th

• San Francisco, CA: Author Monte Schulz is bringing The Big Town to the big town of San Francisco, signing at the Modern Times Bookstore Collective! (more info)

• San Francisco, CA: And uncannily, editor Pat Thomas is also in the Bay Area that day, doing a signing and discussion of Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 at Booksmith! (more info)

• Seattle, WA: This is your last day to check out the wonderful Real Comet Press retrospective at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, featuring original artwork by Lynda Barry, Michael Dougan, Art Chantry, and Ruth Hayes, among others. (more info)

Wednesday, April 11th

• Santa Rosa, CA:  Monte Schulz will be reading and signing The Big Town at Copperfields! (more info)

Thursday, April 12th

• Chicago, IL:  Our own Ivan Brunetti will be part of a panel at the Art Insitute of Chicago titled "Comic Art and Fine Art"! More info is coming to the FLOG later today!

• Corte Madera, CA:  And author Monte Schulz wraps up his California book tour dates for The Big Town with a stop at BookPassage. (more info)

Friday, April 13th

• Salt Lake City, UT: Join author/editor Kevin Avery at The King's English Bookshop for a discussion and signing for Everything is an Afterthought: The Life & Writings of Paul Nelson! (more info)

 Saturday, April 14th

• Seattle, WA:  Join us at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery for the opening reception of “Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics.” The interpretive exhibition opens with a discussion by Michel Gagné, author of a recent collection of the same title from Fantagraphics Books! (more info)

• Oakland, CA: It's opening night for the exhibition Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes at the Oakland Museum of Art! Lots more details are coming to the FLOG later this week!

• Park City, UT:  And author/editor Kevin Avery concludes his mini-tour of Utah with a signing and discussion at Dolly’s Bookstore for Everything is an Afterthought: The Life & Writings of Paul Nelson. (more info)

Sunday, April 15th

 • New York City, NY:  It's your final day to check out the exhibit Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women at the Yeshiva University Museum in the Center for Jewish History. The exhibit features the work of Miss Lasko-Gross, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Diane Noomin, alongside a ton of other amazing female artists. I'm heading to New York this week and am hoping to see it myself before the exhibit closes! (more info)

So said the mighty and wonderful David Gedge (leader of one of my all-time favorite bands, The Wedding Present) leafing through the copy of Michel Gagné's Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby's Romance Comics I gave him at their Seattle gig on Friday night. He opened right up to that page — I swear I didn't plan this moment! Being able to present our books to folks I admire is one of the best parts of my job. What an absolute thrill.

By the way, David is not only an avid comics reader, he's published a comic book of tour stories, Tales of the Wedding Present, and his songs have inspired an anthology of comics short stories titled Snapshots.

Editor Pat Thomas is bringin' it all back home with a signing and discussion at Booksmith in San Francisco this Tuesday, April 10th!  

Pat was living in the Oakland area nearby when he began researching this project, and he discovered rare recordings of speeches, interviews, and music by noted activists Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, and others that form the framework of Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975.

Their friends from down the street, Amoeba Music, will be on hand to sell copies of the companion soundtrack album on Light in the Attic Records!

Booksmith is located at 1644 Haight Street in San Francisco.

Take a master class from a man of class this summer: our editor extraordinaire Paul Karasik is teaching at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont!

During the week-long on-campus workshop, students will participate in lectures, collaborative exercises, book discussion sessions, events, and group critiques, with the goal of producing the first draft of a longer comics project.

During the next 8 weeks, students will develop and refine their work through online collaboration with faculty and peers, and complete comprehensive final drafts of their projects.

The Master Class in Comics Narrative is taught by Eisner-winning cartoonist and experienced comics educator Paul Karasik, in conjunction with CCS instructors. In the words of Art Spiegelman, “Paul has a kind of intelligence combined with earnestness that comes from someplace deep, not a recipe book. He is very, very, very intelligent.”

You will leave this class a stronger cartoonist than when you entered.

Now in stock in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers:

Cinema Panopticum (Softcover Ed.)
by Thomas Ott

104-page black & white 6.5" x 9.25" softcover • $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-485-6

See Previews / Order Now

T. Ott plunges into the darkness with five graphic horror novelettes: "The Hotel," "The Champion," "The Experiment," "The Prophet," and the story which frames it all, "The Girl," each executed in his hallucinatory and hyper-detailed scratchboard style.

The first story in the book introduces the other four: A little girl visits an amusement park. She looks fascinated, but finds everything too expensive. Finally, behind the rollercoaster she eyeballs a small booth with "CINEMA PANOPTICUM" written on it. Inside there are boxes with screens. Every box contains a movie; the title of each appears on each screen. Each costs only one coin, so the price is right for the little girl. She puts her money in the first box: "The Hotel" begins. In the film, a traveler goes to sleep in what seems to be an otherwise empty hotel. His awakening is the stuff of nightmares.

"The Champion," the second film, introduces a Mexican wrestler who fights against death himself. In a typical Ott twist, he wins and loses at the same time. In the third film, "The Experiment," a short-sighted man initially goes blind from some pills his doctor gave him, but soon the blindness wears off and he finds they accord quite a view. In the final story, "The Prophet," a vagrant foresees the end of the world and tries to warn people, but nobody believes him. They will soon enough...

Ott’s O. Henry-esque plot twists will delight fans of classic horror like The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Crypt, or modern efforts like M. Night Shyamalan’s films (well, the good ones); his artwork will haunt you long after you’ve put the book down.

I gotta say, Drew Friedman can do no wrong in my book, but there's something about this portrait of blues legend Muddy Waters that is especially electrifying. The expression, the black and muted green pallette, the evocative landscape... well done, Drew. And you can own it in the form of a limited-edition archival print.

[Follow our Tumblr blog for lots more Things to See every day.]

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "The Complete Crumb Comics Volume One: The Early Years of Bitter Struggle, a 1987 book now republished in an expanded edition, gathers together the earliest surviving examples of the great cartoonist’s juvenilia taking him from age 14 or 15 to 18 years old. The high school scribbler that we meet in these pages is a very callow Crumb indeed: Crumb before he had sex, Crumb before he dropped acid, Crumb before he was adopted as a hero of the counterculture, Crumb before he honed his satirical stance on modern life, Crumb before he became the most radical, polarizing and influential cartoonist of the late 20th century. Yet in the lanky and awkward body of the teenage Crumb we can see the outlines of the substantial artist he would become.... There are very few cartoonists whose entire body of work demands to be read and Crumb belongs near the very top of that short list." – Jeet Heer, The Comics Journal

• Review: "Has Jason become more embittered and misanthropic as he’s aged, or do those tendencies just become more evident as one reads more of his work? Athos in America is up to his usual standards, full of stories that build slowly, with plenty of subtle detail in its stone-faced panels.... Mostly, we wait for things to end badly, which they almost always do, although never with much overt expression of drama.... The execution, as it always is with both Jason and Fantagraphics, is stellar." – Hillary Brown, Paste

• Review: "Fantagraphics Books is doing a good job of preserving and publishing important cartoons. A good example is Willie and Joe: The WWII Years.... These cartoons about World War II provide the reader with a glimpse of what army life was like. Willie and Joe: The WWII Years is more than a book of cartoons by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, it is a significant history book." – Glenn Perrett, Simcoe.com

• Review: "Fantagraphics Books continues to make available Charles M. Schulz's wonderful Peanuts cartoons in attractive books that make nice keepsakes. The latest volume covers the years 1983 and 1984. Lots of fun things are happening with the Peanuts gang including Snoopy's brother Spike requiring help from attacks by coyotes in the desert (they're attacking him with rubber bands), Lucy is still pursuing Schroeder, Charlie Brown is still in a "love triangle" with Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown joins Peppermint Patty's baseball team...as a mascot. This volume includes a Foreword by Leonard Maltin. As with other Peanuts books, The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984 would make a nice gift for those who enjoy Peanuts and the work of Charles M. Schulz." – Glenn Perrett, Simcoe.com

• Profile: "For seven years, Rob Walker, a contributing writer to the magazine, wrote a column called Consumed, in which he explored the cultural, social, economic and or merely bizarre significance of consumable objects. You might think that Rob would be tired of thinking about things, having written about hundreds of objects as diverse as Victoria’s Secret’s 'Pink' brand, Rick Warren’s 'The Purpose-Driven Life' and carrots packaged like junk food. But he is not. He is just exploring them in new ways. His latest project, a book called Significant Objects, comes out in June." – Vera Titunik, The New York Times Magazine

• Interview: Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times has a Q&A with Daniel Clowes about looking back on his career: "One thing that really shocked me was to go through some of the fan mail I used to get in the pre-Internet days. Lots of people — like a truly surprising number of complete strangers — would write me 10- or 15-page letters, telling me all about the most mundane details of their twitterless existence. Pretty much inconceivable nowadays."

• Opinion: Newsarama's Graeme McMillan counts down "The 10 Most Glaring Eisner Nomination Omissions," placing Dave McKean at #9 ("With 2011 seeing the release of Celluloid, the erotic graphic novel that not only marked the return of the much-loved multimedia creator... to comics but also his first full-length graphic novel ever, you would've been forgiven for thinking he would've been given some kind of nomination nod...") and Jaime Herandez at #1 ("A heartbreaking story that not only showed Jaime on top form after a 20+ year career in comics -- and definitely in a class of his own as modern-day storyteller -- 'Love Bunglers' topped many year-end lists for 2011 and was the rare comic that, it seemed, was loved and appreciated by everyone that read it.")

The Emerald City Pinball Party at Shorty's on Saturday was a blast! Celebrity guests galore and great fun for everyone. We held a pinball competition for awesome prizes from hostJim Woodring, including a backglass from the Frank pinball machine currently in development. In an effort to level the playing field - (so to speak) - the lowest scores determined the winners! Worst prize went to cartoonist Anthony Leano.

Here's Jim with artist Camille Rose Garcia, who stopped by following a fabulous signing at neighboring Roq la Rue gallery. While chatting with Fantagraphics associate publisher Eric Reynolds, they discovered that they grew up a few blocks from each other in Huntington Beach and graduated a year apart from the same high school!

Fantagraphics office manager Stephanie Hayes, cartoonist Kelly Froh, and ace publicist Jacq Cohen add some glamour to the bash.

The great Shannon Wheeler dropped in for libations and a game of pinball. (He was far too good to win any prizes.)

The Listen, Whitey! West Coast Tour continues with a weekend stop at Warbler Records & Goods in Santa Barbara, California!

Join editor Pat Thomas this Saturday, April 7th for a discussion on Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power, 1965-1975. He'll also be playing tracks from the companion soundtrack album on Light in the Attic Records!

This event starts at 3:00 PM. Warbler Records & Goods is located at 131 E De La Guerra St in Santa Barbara. 

The list of nominees for the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards was announced yesterday and we are pleased to report that our artists and publications received a total of 10 nominations in 8 categories:

Ganges #4 by Kevin Huizenga:

• Best Single Issue

Freeway by Mark Kalesniko:

• Best Graphic Album – New

Prince Valiant Vol. 3: 1941-1942 and Vol. 4: 1943-1944 by Hal Foster, edited by Kim Thompson:

• Best Archival Collection/Project – Strips

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 1: Race to Death Valley & Vol. 2: Trapped on Treasure Island (also available in the Vols. 1-2 Box Set) by Floyd Gottfredson, edited by David Gerstein & Gary Groth:

• Best Archival Collection/Project – Strips

Isle of 100,000 Graves by Jason & Fabien Vehlmann:

• Best U.S. Edition of International Material

Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot by Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette:

• Best U.S. Edition of International Material

Wandering Son Vol. 1 by Shimura Takako:

• Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Asia

Congress of the Animals by Jim Woodring:

• Best Writer/Artist — Jim Woodring (Jim is also nominated for Best Short Story for "Harvest of Fear" in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror #17 from Bongo)

The Comics Journal, edited by Gary Groth, and The Comics Journal website, www.tcj.com, edited by Timothy Hodler and Dan Nadel:

• Best Comics-Related Journalism

Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising 1870s-1940s, edited by Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard:

• Best Comics-Related Book

As announced in January, Bill Blackbeard (responsible for the Krazy & Ignatz series and so much more), Mort Meskin, Trina Robbins (underground legend and, for us, editor of The Brinkley Girls), and Gilbert Shelton (underground legend and contributor to Mome) are among the nominees for induction into the Eisner Hall of Fame.

An additional shout-out to Fantagraphics contributors, alumni and friends who received nominations for work with other publishers, including Stan Sakai, Ed Brubaker, Émile Bravo, Geoffrey Hayes, Roger Langridge, Anders Nilsen, Daniel Clowes, Al Jaffee, Rick Geary, Tom Orzechowski (who lettered Oil and Water), Ivan Brunetti, Eric Skillman (designer of The Comics Journal #301), and anyone I may have overlooked. Congratulations to all the nominees!

Winners will be announced at a ceremony on Friday, July 13, 2012 at Comic-Con International in San Diego. Browse and order all of our 2012 nominated titles here, and see here for links to past years' award honorees.