This is a can't miss show if you have the ways & means — Right Thing the Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books comes to Fourth Wall Project in Boston in October, featuring Megan Kelso, Jordan Crane, Kurt Wolfgang and other alumni of Tom Devlin's fabled and influential imprint before he joined D&Q. Opening reception's October 1st, 6-9 PM. Old skool. Poster image above by Marc Bell. Someone wanna pick me up the exhibition catalog?

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "There's lots to love in the latest gleeful offering from the pen of BUST's genius cartoonist-in-residence Esther Pearl Watson. ...[T]he sturdily bound, sparkly cover encloses lavish, whole-page panels that allow for lingering close-up absorption of Watson's creation, which lovingly combines gross-out comic-book camp with bittersweet teenage nostalgia. [...] Bursting with late-80s pop-cultural references and buoyed by the exuberance of Watson's flamboyant heroine, Unlovable, Vol. 2 is an irresistibly hilarious, tenderly drawn treat for your inner teen." – Renate Robertson, BUST

• Coming Attractions: Robot 6's Michael May looks ahead to November: "The Littlest Pirate King – ...I really need to find out how you tell a kids’ story about cursed pirates with a death wish and the malevolent God who prevents them from achieving their goal."

• Roundtable: The Comics Journal's roundtable on The Best American Comics Criticism wraps up with responses from Noah Berlatsky and the book's editor, Ben Schwartz

The Seattle Art Museum's popular Remix series at the sculpture park continues this Friday, August 27. The event features the public debut of the Bureau of Drawers, Seattle's new cartooning salon, which includes Fantagraphics friends David Lasky, Marc Palm, Jen Ralston, Tom Dougherty and many other fine cartoonists. (This provides a preview for the big "Counterculture Comix" exhibition at Bumbershoot when Bureau of Drawers will join Friends of the Nib in cartooning demonstrations over Labor Day weekend.)

Also on the bill at Remix is a major new work and gallery talk by Houston artist Trenton Doyle Hancock whose amazing narrative book Me a Mound was published by Picturebox.

You'll Never Know, Book 2: Collateral Damage
by C. Tyler

104-page full-color 12" x 10.25" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-418-4

Ships in: September 2010 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now

This book is available with a signed bookplate as a FREE premium! The bookplate has been uniquely designed for this book, and each bookplate is printed on acid-free cardstock and hand-signed by the author. (Click here for more books available with signed bookplates.) Please select your preference above before adding the item to your shopping cart. Note: Signature plates are VERY limited in quantity and available only WHILE SUPPLIES LAST.

The first volume of You’ll Never Know showed Carol’s initial, sometimes difficult attempts at grappling with her father Chuck’s traumatic World War II experiences by bringing them to light. As Book 2 begins, she is startled to discover that Chuck’s decision to suddenly, after 60 years, open up to her on the subject has motivations that go far beyond his desire to reveal his past — putting even more pressure on an already explosive relationship. In any event, Carol finally begins to delve into, and re-tell, Chuck’s horrific wartime experiences in Italy (which are worse than even she had imagined).

But back in the present, the cycle of family dysfunction continues as Carol’s own daughter runs into her own trouble, leading Carol into further exploration of her family’s buried traumas and sorrows — with an expanded reprinting of the out-of-print “The Hannah Story,” Tyler’s superb chronicle of the short life and accidental death of her older sister, a heart-rending story (named one of the “100 Best Comics of the 20th Century” in a Comics Journal survey) that in turn sheds light on her parents’ subsequent lives and patterns of behavior. Everything is connected, and the past is never just the past...

Download an EXCLUSIVE 12-page PDF excerpt (6.7 MB).

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

Bonus Savings: Order You'll Never Know, Books 1 & 2 together and save 20% off the combined cover price!

We love seeing photos of people reading our books and we need more Fantagraphics representation (and more dude representation) on Hot Nerds Reading Comics (via Read Comics in Public). We know you're out there.

Oh wait, here's a dude... not reading one of our books but it's Bob Fingerman for crying out loud:

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "What to say about Catalog 439? It's a crazy-arse thing, full of richly illustrated intricate drawings of smartly dressed men torturing each other with ridiculous devices. [...] What you get with this book then is not just a fascinating glimpse into a little known corner of American social history, but the template for many of the ad pages from the silver and bronze age comics that so many of us comic collectors love. I really enjoyed it and, although it isn't about comics, I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of comic book advertising." – Dom Sutton, London Loves Comics

• Review: "At this point, I don’t know what else there is to say about Jamie Hernandez or Love and Rockets. I suspect that one day he’s going to make a truly terrible comic, if only because he must feel at least a little bit bad about showing nearly every other creator up so often. ...Penny Century is yet another masterpiece from a guy who turns them out seemingly like clockwork. If you haven’t read it, you need to. ...Jamie Hernandez’s exploration of life continues as an unimpeachable standard for comic book mastery." – Michael C. Lorah, Newsarama

• Review: "[Artichoke Tales] is far and away the best comic I've ever read from Megan Kelso, succeeding on almost every level. Her clear-line style gives an airy ease to her often detail-heavy drawings of nature and the people who inhabit it; similarly, her complex exercise in fantasy worldbuilding — and I don't mean detailed maps with funny names, I mean real worldbuilding, constructing cultural and religious and economic structures rooted in environment and history and exerting macro and micro influence across the lives of all the characters involved — is subsumed into an absorbing, briskly moving house-divided family soap opera. [...] I dug this book to a degree that surprised me and look forward to returning to it. It's a rich vein of alt-fantasy being tapped here." – Sean T. Collins, Attentiondeficitdisorderly

• Review: "Kelso's simple line and rounded forms belie the seriousness of the story. [...] Ultimately, Artichoke Tales is not so much a story about conflict as a story about the people reacting to the conflict, doing their best to live lives of integrity in a land of constant unrest. Although good intentions are often thwarted, it ends on a note of hope." – Brigid Alverson, Graphic Novel Reporter

• Plug: "I picked [A Drunken Dream and Other Stories] up at San Diego and it's one of those 'seminal' manga works that actually lives up to its hype. If you like Tatsumi, this is a good bet." Lydia Park, Ask Yavin IV (Funny, we don't remember seeing her at San Diego... That's a joke because she's a cartoon character.)

• Plug: "This is amazing news — one of my favourite cartoonists finally receives his due. I was starting to think that he had slipped through the cracks of cartoon history. ...[Rand Holmes] was a fantastic draftsman, surprisingly old-school, and his meticulous inking something that I could only ever hope to dream to aspire to." – Rod Filbrandt

• Plug: "...[T]he second volume of [Johnny Ryan's] battle epic Prison Pit... is amazing, nasty, and Lovecraftian." – Ryan Sands, Same Hat!

• Interview: "Newsarama: Billy Hazlenuts is like a children’s fable gone wrong, reminiscent in way of the old, dark Grimm Brothers tales with a modern, high-octane approach.  Is that what you’re going for? Tony Millionaire: Take a closer look at those Grimm's Fairy tales, or even better, Hans Christian Anderson, and you'll tell me my stories are chocolate milk sopped on toast compared to that stuff."

• Roundtable: The participants in The Comics Journal's roundtable on The Best American Comics Criticism file their first response posts: Here’s Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong and Jeet Heer

• Commentary: Robot 6's "Quote of the Day" comes from our very own Gary Groth

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories
by Moto Hagio

288-page black & white/color 7.25" x 9.75" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-377-4

Ordering Info & Previews

This book is available with a signed bookplate as a FREE premium! The bookplate has been uniquely designed for this book, and each bookplate is printed on acid-free cardstock and hand-signed by the author. (Click here for more books available with signed bookplates.) Please select your preference when adding the item to your shopping cart. Signature plates are VERY limited in quantity and available only WHILE SUPPLIES LAST.

Forty years ago, the legendary manga artist Moto Hagio reinvented the shōjo (girls' comics) genre with an ongoing series of whip-smart, psychologically complex, and tenderly poetic stories. Here, now, in English for the very first time, as the debut release in Fantagraphics Books' ambitious manga line of graphic novels, are ten of the very best of these tales.

The work in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories spans Hagio's entire career, from 1970's "Bianca" to 2007's "The Willow Tree," and includes the mind-bending, full-color title story; the famously heartbreaking "Iguana Girl"; and the haunting "The Child Who Comes Home" — as well as "Autumn Journey," "Girl on Porch With Puppy," the eerie conjoined-twins shocker "Hanshin: Half-God," "Angel Mimic," and one of the saddest of all romance stories, "Marié, Ten Years Later."

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories is supplemented with a feature-length interview with Hagio, where she discusses her art, her career, and her life with the same combination of wit, candor and warmth that radiates from every panel of her comics.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 31-page PDF excerpt (4.8 MB).

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1978 Slipcase
by Charles M. Schulz
designed by Seth

8.75" x 7.125" x 3" slipcase • $4.99

Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Even if you purchased the fifth pair of volumes of The Complete Peanuts (1975-1976 and 1977-1978) separately rather than in the two-volume set, you can still have this handsome, durable two-volume slipcase designed by Complete Peanuts series designer Seth. This item is exclusively available directly from Fantagraphics. (Books not included.)

PEANUTS ® & © United Feature Syndicate. All rights reserved.

What Is All This? Uncollected Stories
by Stephen Dixon

528-page 6.25" x 9.25 hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-350-7

Ships in: September 2010 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now

Stephen Dixon is one of the most acclaimed authors of short stories in the history of American letters. His work, characterized by mordant humor and a frank attention to human sexuality, has earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Fantagraphics Books is proud to present this incredible volume of short stories, a massive collection of vintage Dixon. Dixon’s finely chiseled sentences cut to the quick of people’s lives. None of these stories have been collected in any book; they have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals over almost 40 years and Dixon has entirely rewritten all of them. Dixon admirers will be cheered to learn that these stories comprise a wholly original work.

Centrally concerning himself with the American condition, Dixon explores in What Is All This? obsessions of body image, the increasingly polarized political landscape, sex — in all its incarnations — and the gloriously pointless minutiae of modern life, from bus rides to tying shoelaces. Using the canvas of his native New York he astutely captures the edgy madness that infects the city through the neuroses of his narrators with a style that owes as much to Neo-Realist cinema as it does to modern literature. What Is All This? is published in hardcover, designed by Fantagraphics’ award-winning Art Director Jacob Covey.

Stephen Dixon was born in 1936 in New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1958 and is a former faculty member of Johns Hopkins University. He is also a two time National Book Award nominee — for his novels Frog and Interstate. He still hammers out his fiction on a vintage typewriter.

Download the 80-page promotional galley sampler (2.4 MB) containing 7 complete stories in PDF format.

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

Praise for Stephen Dixon:

"Stephen Dixon is one of the great secret masters — too secret. I return again and again to his stories for writerly inspiration, moral support and comic relief at moments of personal misery, and, several times, in a spirit of outright plagiaristic necessity: borrowing a jumpstart from a few lines of Dixon has been a real problem-solver in my own short fiction. Please read him, you." – Jonathan Lethem

“Dixon is one of the few writers whose new work I will put everything aside to read, which is to say he is in the company of Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, and Lydia Davis…. Put aside whatever you’re reading, and read him.” — J. Robert Lennon

“Startling candor, humor, and concern; every utterance promptly qualified; rigorous narrative economy combined with near-manic obsessiveness. Eembrace [Dixon] and you will be held by a princely storyteller.“ — John Barth

“There is no better chronicler of our antic and anxious age than Stephen Dixon.” —Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket)

“Dixon’s stories, strengthened by their unity, almost have a novel’s ability to develop character, to suggest a life outside the confines of the plot.” — Boston Globe

“Mr. Dixon wields a stubbornly plain-spoken style; he loves all sorts of tricky narrative effects. And he loves even more the tribulations of the fantasizing mind, ticklish in their comedy, alarming in their immediacy.” — The New York Times

“Some writers are able, in a mere 200 pages or so, to rewire your circuitry in a way that makes you unfit for your own life. Stephen Dixon is such a writer, and he can do it in a short story as well.” — Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators are saying about our releases this week, and contact your local shop to confirm availability.

The Complete Peanuts 1977-1978 (Vol. 14)
by Charles M. Schulz
introduction by Alec Baldwin

344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-375-0

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1978 Box Set
by Charles M. Schulz
designed by Seth

two 344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcovers in a custom slipcase • $49.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-376-7

"Continuing Fantagraphics’... presentation of Charles Schulz’s original iteration of eventually finite childhood, in spite of it all. Alec Baldwin greets you at the front. There’s also a two-volume ’75-’78 box set due." – Joe McCulloch, Comics Comics

"I always forget what a smart strip Peanuts was. I just opened this volume to a random page to remind myself of what the vibe of this period of Peanuts was like, and there was a joke about Christo. What comic strips were making Christo jokes in 1978?" – Douglas Wolk, Comics Alliance

"I thought the latest volume was really strong, full of odd Peppermint Patty stories and a lot more bold and confident than I remember the strip at the time. Plus the Alec Baldwin intro was pretty good, too." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter

"Covering the years 1977-78, and featuring an introduction by Alec Baldwin (of all things), this latest book features some great sequences, like the one where Charlie Brown bites the kite-eating tree and ends up going on the lam to hide from the EPA. Those who feel Schulz’s best work was in the late 50s and 60s really need to re-evaluate these strips." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

Note to NYC shoppers: Jim Hanley's Universe is offering 25% off all Complete Peanuts volumes for one week 8/25-8/31/10 — click here for details!

Norman Pettingill: Backwoods Humorist
by Norman Pettingill; Introduction by Robert Crumb

144-page full-color 12" x 9" hardcover (with wood cover) • $39.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-319-4

"The strangest and perhaps greatest book I saw at last month's Comic-Con International. It's like it was art designed by a tree full of elves that don't quite get human publications." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter

"An apparently first-ever print retrospective of postcard illustrator Pettingill, a Wisconsin native whose self-printed drawings documented both calm natural settings and teeming, wrinkled, riotously parodic rural living. With an introduction by Robert Crumb (who published some of the artist’s work in Weirdo), an appreciation by Johnny Ryan, and a biographical essay by Gary Groth (online here)." – Joe McCulloch, Comics Comics