"La Semaine de la Bande Dessinée - A Week Celebrating the French Graphic Novel" got off to a great start last night at the Alliance Française of Seattle, as a standing-room-only crowd gathered to see our own Kim Thompson present his slide lecture "Vingt sur 20: French Comics from Goscinny to Satrapi," an informative and entertaining overview of 20 artists who transformed la bande desinée from a children's medium into "the ninth art." We are working on presenting this slideshow in interactive format, with audio, here on the Fantagrahpics website in the near future, so stay tuned! And don't forget that this week-long event continues tonight with screenings of Tintin et Moi at Northwest Film Forum and David B.'s "My Story, My Stories" exhibit opening and book signing at our bookstore tomorrow!

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery proudly presents the return of Daniel Clowes on August 29. His appearance marks the premiere of Ghost World: The Special Edition. The reception will feature an exhibition of Clowes’ meticulously rendered original graphics related to the book, as well as a brief discussion of the artist's cinematic approach to cartooning moderated by Fantagraphics Books co-publisher Gary Groth. Admission is free, as always. Please join us on August 29, from 6:00 to 9:00 PM to welcome this extraordinary artist. Click here for more details and the full media release!

(NOTE: The exclusive limited-edition silkscreen print shown above will be available ONLY at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery. Out-of-towners, now is the time to call in favors to your Seattle-area friends.)

A quick note to those of you who are on The YouTube: we've just uploaded over a dozen of our recent video previews that have heretofore been hosted only on Flickr. We like the video quality on Flickr better, but we know there's lots of you on YouTube, too, so please, watch and enjoy.

By the way, we'd like to encourage those of you with your own blogs and websites to use our Flickr preview images and embed our videos, if you so desire. It's all kosher, so don't be shy.

The ongoing Yoda theme sketchbook rolled over into a second volume at Comic-Con. I continue to be flabbergasted by the amazing generosity and talent of all the contributing artists. Below, from the Fantagraphics family: Mary Woodring, Jordan Crane (2nd contribution), Jon Vermilyea, Mario Hernandez, Tim Hensley, John Pham, Jim Woodring and Zak Sally. Click the thumbnails for better views with commentary and more info on Flickr:

Also, I'm pleased to welcome our Top Shelf compatriot Leigh Walton to the theme sketchbook brotherhood with his brand-new Tintin characters book. I look forward to following its progress.

Jim Woodring originals now for sale at Comic Art Collective. Surely not to last long.

In an effort to bring Love and Rockets fans together (and, of course, to turn up the burner on the simmering saucepan o'hype for Love and Rockets: New Stories #1), we've created two new social networking destinations:

• The Love and Rockets - The Hernandez Brothers Flickr Group - where Flickr members can share their L&R-related photos and scans and participate in message board discussions, and non-members can browse and enjoy all the images

• The Love and Rockets - The Hernandez Brothers Facebook Page - where Facebook users can declare themselves Fans, upload fan photos and videos, leave messages, receive special updates, etc.

This, of course, is in addition to our Fantagraphics Flickr Group and Fantagraphics Facebook Page. Swing on by, browse, participate, and enjoy!

Our latest batch of daily video and photo teasers of upcoming releases wraps up with a bang today, with the Hernandez Brothers' all-new extravaganza Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, 100 pages of brand new stuff from brothers Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez. Watch the video above (or click here if it doesn't show up), and take a closer look in our photo gallery.

If you subscribe to the FLOG RSS feed using Google Reader (or perhaps other readers as well), you've noticed that you're receiving every FLOG post twice. We're aware of this problem and it's been on our list of things to fix for a while, but other technical projects have been taking priority. We'll hopefully be able to get it fixed soon. (The cause of the problem: the posts are coming from both our non-secure "http" server and our secure "https" server.) We apologize for the annoyance!

Confidential to the tipster who contacted us about this recently: we tried to write to you directly, but could not get through to your sbcglobal.net address (see here for more about that).

Happy triple-8 day. Let's head into the weekend with a whole mess of review links:

• This week's barrel of reviews and articles related to Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell include entries from the Barnes & Noble Review (see the second-from-right column), Minneapolis City Pages, this Italian site (Nova100?), the Montreal Mirror, Johnny Bacardi, and Comic Book Bin (which gives it an A+). Also, Comic Book Resources recaps "The World of Steve Ditko" panel (featuring Blake Bell, Kim Deitch and Gary Groth among others) held at Comic-Con last month.

• SF Weekly calls Tim Lane's Abandoned Cars a "Graphic Novel To Look Out For," and Print calls it "the real comic book event of the summer"

• Toque de Queda reviews Thomas Ott's The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 (en Español)

• Sean T. Collins gets in the first word on Love and Rockets: New Stories #1

• Sean furthermore provides the Review Quote of the Month with this, from his take on Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4 by Michael Kupperman: "If God didn't hate us all, we'd live in a world where there'd be some way for Michael Kupperman, Johnny Ryan, and Matt Furie to do a world tour in every way the humor comics equivalent of that Guns n' Roses/Metallica/Faith No More tour my parents wouldn't let me go to back in '91--selling out stadiums, inspiring bootleg T-shirts sold in parking lots filled with drunk drivers, and causing riots when Ryan gets in a fistfight with Stephanie Seymour and blows off a show in Toronto out of frustration. But here we are, and the best we can do is get a new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle and laugh ourselves stupid."

• The Comics Reporter also takes on Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4

• Book By Its Cover looks at the brand new Mome Vol. 12, as does the amazingly-named Portugese-language blog Fucking With Jazz Metal (which also has an excellent header graphic)

• Cartoon Brew takes a peek at the upcoming 292nd issue of The Comics Journal

• Comic Book Bin on Meanwhile... A Biography of Milton Caniff by R.C. Harvey

...and some other items of note:

• Via Gary Groth: This analysis of There Will Be Blood quotes Gil Kane from the conversation he had with Robert Crumb in the late '80s that Gary moderated (as heard on The Comics Journal Library Interview CD Sampler)

• Speaking of Gary, Idolator mentions a little tidbit about his pre-Fantagraphics publishing career

• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer talks to Zak Sally and Nate Denver about their appearance at our store last weekend

• My Fantagraphics colleagues and myself recommend graphic novels for teen boys at Guys Lit Wire

• Editor & Publisher blurbs our next volume of The Complete Peanuts (due later this month)

• The Albany Times Union notes the 40th anniversary of the introduction of Franklin to the Peanuts gang

• DMFDP spazzes out over our upcoming Daniel Clowes exhibit

• Rediscovered: a video made by Brian Biggs in 2002 for his book Frederick & Eloise (via Letters from the Inquisition)

• Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw: on Hollywood's nightstand!

• At Blog Flume, Jonathan Bennett reports coming across a sidewalk art vendor in New York whose wares included direct copies of Ivan Brunetti Schizo panels

• Kaz was captured on film in the front row of a 1977 Ramones gig at CBGB, thereby proving conclusively that he is cooler than any of us, according to this scoop on The Comics Reporter