Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "Early reviews of The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective are heralding it as a much-deserved tribute to a forgotten genius... Around these parts, Holmes, who passed away in 2002, has been a revered figure for decades. [...] Through excerpts from the artist’s own journals and interviews with those who knew him, Patrick Rosenkranz presents his subject as a man of contradictions, both prodigiously gifted and painfully insecure. [...] Holmes’s art was always marked by sharp visual wit and a sometimes astonishing attention to detail. He was indeed a genius, and thanks to Fantagraphics, he won’t be a forgotten one." – John Lucas, The Georgia Straight

• Review: "...High Soft Lisp remains another Gilbert Hernandez winner. Frank and trippy, sexy and creepy, nobody working in comics creates worlds as deep or intriguing as Gilbert Hernandez’s." – Michael C. Lorah, Newsarama

• List: io9 names Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit: Book 2 as one of "30+ comics that we're craving this fall"

• Interview: At the KEXP blog, Chris Estey talks to Peter Bagge about his band Can You Imagine?: " The main reason I took up the guitar and abandoned the drums was so I could have more control over what type of music my band plays and how. Pop rock from the 60s is obviously my favorite kind of music, but I also loved punk and new wave from the late 70s, since those bands broke free from the self important and self indulgent style of music that was ruining rock. I also loved that the self deprecating humor they all exhibited (or that the best bands did, anyway)."

• Roundtable: The Comics Journal's Best American Comics Criticism roundtable continues, with contributions from Caroline Small, Brian Doherty and Jeet Heer

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

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

Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Norman Pettingill is a true underground cartoonist, known and admired by a small coterie of cartooning connoisseurs, but completely unknown in the wider world.

Norman Pettingill was an avid trapper and fisherman from Northern Wisconsin, and a self-taught artist. In 1947, at the age of 51, he created hundreds of pen-and-ink drawings and marketed many of them as postcards, printing and distributing them himself. His cartoon drawings were relatively huge and his postcards, therefore, had to be uniquely over-sized at 7” x 10”. He combined a gift for the fine detail and verisimilitude of illustration with the visual exaggeration and outrageous wit of cartooning.

By merging his fascination with nature and backwoods culture with his wild sense of humor, he depicted an out-of-control hillbilly wonderland of talking grizzlies, dancing morons, nightclubs, giant mosquitoes, tumble-down shacks, pipe smoking grannies, flying skunk fur, google-eyed drunks, hilarious hunting mishaps and moonshine soaked fishermen! Pettingill’s world is reminiscent of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, but Pettingill’s hillbilly heaven is made grittier and more tangible by his obsessive penwork and the attention he gives to each teetering outhouse, every overflowing spittoon and each wiry hair growing out of a mountain man’s warty face. He reveled in exposing the commercialization of outdoor activities, debunking the romance of a woodsman’s life, and demythologizing the expertise of the outdoors-man. His landscapes and drawings of wild animals could be breathtakingly wondrous, and even his most grotesque depictions of hillbillies were fused with a love and respect for the rituals of a primitive life in the boondocks.

This book is the first published retrospective of Pettingill’s work, containing over a hundred of the artist’s best and rarely seen drawings, printed in an oversized format under a unique cover printed on plywood.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 10-page PDF excerpt (13.4 MB).

We just updated the announcement of Dave Cooper's Fall 2010 West Coast tour with the finalized cover for his new upcoming collection Bent, and we thought we'd pop it up here at the top of Flog too. (The one we showed you before was a temporary preliminary version.)

Make The Sanctuary blog your destination for previews and bonus material, like this exclusive story, from Nate Neal's forthcoming graphic novel of the same name.

Too Soon? Famous/Infamous Faces 1995-2010
by Drew Friedman

204-page full-color 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $29.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-357-6

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

"Too Soon?" you ask?

It's a collection of the last 15 years' worth of Drew Friedman's illustrations, caricatures and portraits lampooning the rich, the famous, the infamous, and the never-will-be-famous.

And — promise! — no "Friends."

Too Soon? gathers Friedman's best, most strident and scathing work from some of the most popular publications including Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Blab! and more — yes, even Field & Stream.

Too Soon? casts its net over the entirety of the forced-smiling-celebrity/politico congregation, political animals on one side of the aisle, showbiz beasts on the other... and the sad, innocent victims of their crimes that languish in the middle.

Too Soon? is naturally replete with liver spots, wrinkles, burst capillaries, blood, sweat and tears. No one is spared, no matter which side of the aisle he or she inhabits.

Too Soon? is Friedman's first book of artwork produced in HI-DEF, so be prepared. Drew Friedman's work is always brutally honest, WARTS & ALL.

Too Soon? is in fact not TOO SOON — it's about time.

Praise for Drew Friedman:

"I'm grateful to Drew Friedman for every new piece of his vast, riveting panorama of the jacked-up, hellbent American spectacle: comic and horrific, loving and appalled, obsessive and devil-may-care, brilliant and vulgar, familiar and uncanny. He's our William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson and George Grosz all wrapped into one." – Kurt Andersen, host of NPR's "Studio 360"

"I would like Drew Friedman to draw me, but I’m scared of what he’d uncover, what he’d reveal about my inner nature that I’d rather not see. Because that’s what he does—he’s not a mere caricaturist, he’s a ridiculously talented artist who’s practically an x-ray machine. One that makes you laugh your balls off.” – Chip Kidd, author of The Cheese Monkeys

"Friedman's liver-spots-'n'-wrinkles style of cartoon realism is completely mesmerizing..." – Entertainment Weekly

"The Thomas Nast of our time." – Slate

"Friedman distorts the images we've grown comfortable with, skewering the way we've let addicts and half-wits become our national idols..." – The Onion

"Friedman remains the finest, most excruciatingly mordant, somehow most humane caricaturist going". – Booklist

"Of low artistic quality." – Rush Limbaugh, big fat idiot.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 15-page PDF excerpt (4.1 MB).

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

Bonus Savings: To celebrate the release of this latest collection, we're offering Drew Friedman's previous books, including Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental, Warts and All, Old Jewish Comedians, More Old Jewish Comedians and The Fun Never Stops!, for at least 20% OFF for a limited time!

Periodic clips & strips — click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• A long-awaited new installment of "Chapter Two: Unraveling" from Jordan Crane at What Things Do

• From Jason, a hand-painted cigar case & matchbox, circa late 1990s, and an unpublished page from 1985

• Some sketches by Émile Bravo 

• Drew Weing's Set to Sea page 129

• Tim Lane presents his updated introduction to Belligerent Piano as it appeared in Smoke Signal

• Speaking of Smoke Signal, here's a panel from Jon Vermilyea's story for an upcoming issue

• Debbie Drechsler catches a couple of hungry squirrels hiding behind a rock

• Another devastatingly sad strip about Lewis from Laura Park 

• Soaring Quackers and Fearless Explorers from Josh Simmons 

• From Renee French: "zombbaby," burnt match squid thing, OMG BABY BUNNY PHOTO

• Hans Rickheit's Ectopiary page 37; also the rare color version of the cover of Chrome Fetus #5

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "Meat Cake is a tour de force showcasing the most primal of passions! It is an issue of Creepy edited by Edward Gorey! It is a Gothic soap opera as written by Victorian lolitas! It is a celebration of love and hubris, beauty and decay! There is no other comic in the world that offers a titillating parade of mermaids, ghosts, sailors, sirens, faeries, witches and wolfmen in intriguing and compromising situations! You will be dazzled, you will be entertained, but above all, you will be enchanted!" – STORM (guest columnist), Robot 6

• Review: "Werewolves of Montpellier is a sad and even somewhat funny novel about the fact that loneliness is not hiding under the mask. Is this novel better or worse than other works of Jason? Probably not. Despite repeated methods in his books, [his] novels are utterly worth reading. If you have a werewolf friend, buy him this book. If you don’t, buy two." – Ray Garraty, Endless Falls Up

• List: The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon names Ici Même (You Are There) as one of "25 Emblematic Comics of the '70s": "This grand effort by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest may seem like an extravagant oddity now, but it gets credit from some for igniting a wave of alternative voices in a French-language comics industry whose mainstream had the added appeal of actually making its creators popular and wealthy successes. Even if you don't like the tune — and while it's a song I could personally listen to every day, I know many people couldn't — at the time I have to imagine that many comics readers weren't even aware that the medium could play some of these notes."

• Roundtable: The Comics Journal presents a critical roundtable on The Best American Comics Criticism, with Ng Suat Tong, the book's editor Ben Schwartz, and Noah Berlatsky weighing in

• Profile: "Just like Peter Parker, the most celebrated co-creation of the subject of his first book, Toronto writer Blake Bell was bitten by a strange bug as a youngster. And just like Peter Parker, he was transformed beyond all recognition — into the Amazing Comic Book Historian Guy." – Canadish

At Comics Alliance, David Brothers presents a sampling of 6 pages from A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, saying "Moto Hagio is one of the greatest Japanese manga creators you've never heard of. ...Hagio helped take the genre to new heights, incorporating science-fiction, boys' love, and mature themes of sexuality and gender. She not only blazed trails as one of the earliest female manga creators, but also proved to be particularly successful and critically-acclaimed over the course of her career in Japan. [...] Fantagraphics' release of A Drunken Dream is only the first step of educating American manga fans and neophytes alike about this influential pioneer."

Prison Pit: Book 2
by Johnny Ryan

116-page black & white 6.5" x 8.5" softcover • $12.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-383-5

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

2009's Prison Pit was an unadulterated smash hit upon its release at the 2009 Comic-Con International, and the balls-to-the-wall series returns with more action and mayhem like only Johnny Ryan can deliver — again starring CF, the shirtless outer space barbarian antihero who remains damned to the Prison Pit (a vast wasteland beneath the crust of a barren planet, populated by the worst of the worst, where violence is the only law and evil creatures roam free). In this second volume, CF tries to get revenge against the evil behemoth that took his arm, and then winds up playing an unwilling participant in an elaborate escape attempt from the Pit.

Prison Pit blends Ryan’s fascination with WWE wrestling, grindhouse cinema, first person action video games, Gary Panter’s “Jimbo” comics, and Kentaro Miura’s “Berserk” Manga into a brutal and often hilarious showcase of violence like no other comic book ever created.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 12-page PDF excerpt (1 MB).

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

Bonus Savings: Get Book 1 and Book 2 together and save 20% off the combined cover prices!

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS PRESENTS...

DAVE COOPER
GETS BENT

THE 2010 WEST COAST TOUR

Featuring the premiere of Dave Cooper's new book of paintings, BENT, from Fantagraphics Books.   

THURSDAY, SEPT. 30, 7-9PM
La Luz de Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90232

OCTOBER 1-3
Babytattooville
Riverside, CA

TUESDAY, OCT. 5, 7-9PM
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

THURSDAY, OCT. 7, 6-9PM
Lucky's Comics
3972 Main Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada

SATURDAY, OCT. 9, 6-9PM
Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery
1201 S. Vale St.
Seattle, WA 98108

SUNDAY, OCT. 10, 5-7PM
Cosmic Monkey Comics
5335 Northeast Sandy Boulevard
Portland, OR 97213