Twentieth Century Eightball collects the very best humor strips from Eightball, written and drawn between 1988 and 1996. Included within are such seminal strips/rants as "I Hate You Deeply," "Sexual Frustration," "Ugly Girls," "Why I Hate Christians," "Message to the People of the Future," "Paranoid," "My Suicide," "Chicago," and over three dozen more. Other favorites include "Art School Confidential," one of Clowes' most popular strips of all time, which was adapted into a major motion picture that re-teamed Clowes with Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff. Also included is Clowes' hilariously Freudian deconstruction of professional athletes, "On Sports," which caused a stir in San Antonio when reprinted in the city's most popular weekly paper, prompting an advertising boycott and demands for the paper to be destroyed by local sports fans. Also on display is Clowes' absurdist sense of humor, from strips like "Zubrick and Pogeybait" and "Hippypants and Peace-Bear" to "Grip Glutz," "The Sensual Santa," and "Feldman."
Noted comics historian Roger Sabin, author of Phaidon's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, calls Eightball a "corrosively satirical vision of an America cracking apart, and confirms Clowes as a worthy successor to the underground greats of the 1960s." While Clowes' legion of admirers continues to grow along with the author's maturity as an artist, many longtime fans frequently cite Clowes' bitterly humorous work to be amongst his very best. With over 40 pages in color and many of these strips having been out-of-print for years, Twentieth Century Eightball has proven to be one of Clowes' most popular books of the twenty-first century.
2003 Harvey Award Winner, Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work
During the 1950s, Abe Goodman — brother of Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman — was the largest buyer of cartoons in the world. Publishing out of New York City under the Humorama banner, Goodman churned out scores of cheap digest-sized magazines boasting inventive titles like Romp, Stare and Joker that featured hackneyed jokes, cheesecake photos and the publications’ bread and butter, single panel pin-up cartoons.
These magazines were an unlikely proving ground for neophyte gag cartoonists as well as a welcomed alternative to the daily grind of comic book sweatshops. In the 1950s and 1960s, these digests featured the likes of Playboy’s Jack Cole, Archie’s Dan DeCarlo and glamour girl legend Bill Ward. In addition to these three pin-up cartooning luminaries, other notables who contributed included longtime illustrator Jefferson Machamer, Basil Wolverton, MAD’s Dave Berg (“The Lighter Side”), and future syndicated cartoonists George Crenshaw (Belvedere), Bill Hoest (The Lockhorns) and Brad Anderson (Marmaduke). Drawing from private collections of original art and thousands of Humorama digests, editor Alex Chun has once again selected the best of these long out-of-print images and designer Jacob Covey has lovingly "remastered" them in a period-accurate two-color format that duplicates the original experience of these innocently raunchy classics. You'll also find a Foreword and bonus pinup by noted purveyor of comics raunch Howard Chaykin.
Exclusive Savings: For a limited time, order this volume and get any previous single volume in the Humorama digest series (Dan DeCarlo Vol. 1 or 2, Bill Ward, or Bill Wenzel) for just $10.00 - that's nearly 1/2 off the cover price! Make your selection when placing your order.
Esperanza, the fifth volume of “Locas” stories by Jaime Hernandez, collects the remainder of the stories from the acclaimed Love and Rockets Volume II, picking up where 2010’s Penny Century collection left off.
Taking its title from Hopey Glass's birth name, Esperanza follows the somewhat settled-down ex-punkette in her new life as a schoolteacher's assistant — which doesn't mean that her romantic travails have gotten any simpler. Speaking of romantic travails, Maggie's former squeeze Ray Dominguez meets, and becomes obsessed with, the unhinged but fiendishly sexy "Frogmouth," even as he becomes peripherally involved in a brutal murder. But the longest story in the collection focuses on an older and wiser Maggie, facing down her demons in a cataclysmically eventful return to Hoppers.
Esperanza is also available as part of Love and Rockets Library: The Locas Collection — 5 volumes at a savings of nearly $20! This new set contains every story from the "Locas" saga from Love and Rockets Volumes 1 and 2 and Jaime's solo series. The ultimate Jaime collection, and a great gift idea! Click for details and to order.
• List: To the surprise of few, The Hooded Utilitarian's International Best Comics Poll tops out with Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts in the #1 spot. HU editor Noah Berlatsky writes, "If you like charming, Peanuts is charming, and if you like dark, it’s dark, but it isn’t just charming, or just dark, or even just charming and dark. There are countless ways to like Peanuts, which is no doubt why it — deservedly, inevitably — tops this poll."
• Review: "The squeaky-voiced character from the animated shorts was especially bold in his daily newspaper comic strip [Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse]. Its memorable continuities were largely the responsibility of one man: Floyd Gottfredson. ...Gottfredson and his collaborators crafted two-fisted tales that remain entertaining, thrilling and funny up to 80 years on.... This inaugural issue in a planned Gottfredson library is a handsome hardback, prepared with the same care as Fantagraphics's archive of Charles Schulz's Peanuts." – Owen Heittman, The Australian
• Review: "Sibyl-Anne vs. Ratticus is a wonderful time and read!... The writing and art are grade A for this, and I cannot recommend it enough. It does have a feeling much like Peyo’s Smurfs, but I prefer Macherot’s Sibyl-Anne over it. His story telling is a bit more better put together, and action scenes are more exciting (if one has to compare to something, that is). Plus Sibyl-Anne is just cute.... Sibyl-Anne vs. Ratticus has something every comic lover can enjoy." – Drew McCabe, ComicAttack.net
• Review: "Knowing me, if I wait until I’ve finished all 624 pages of [The Comics Journal #301], I’ll never get around to reviewing it, so I figured I’d just do it in parts. After a solid Introduction by Editor-in-Chief Gary Groth, in which he extols Crumb’s virtues as a cartoonist, and explains the reason Genesis deserved TCJ’s lengthiest critical symposium ever (the reason is that Groth thinks the book deserves it), we get a long and surprisingly warm and easygoing chat between Groth and Crumb. Neither has ever come off this…normal." – Christopher Allen, Trouble with Comics
• Profile: At SF Signal, Galen Dara explores "the odd cognitive dissonance" of divergent forms of comics by contrasting the work of Joyce Farmer with that of mainstream comics illustrator Jo Chen
Ian Burns has his fortune told by Dame Darcy, July 10, 2010
Ian Burns is the second-most recent staff acquisition here at Fantagraphics (designer Tony Ong holds current "new guy" status) — you may know him as one of the voices who answers our phone and takes your orders, or as the friendly bearded fellow at our Emerald City Comicon booth this year, or perhaps you've read his "Diaflogue" interviews with Leslie Stein and Kim Deitch. If the latter, you know that Ian is a pretty thoughtful guy about comics, and I'm happy to learn that he's been contributing essays to Graphic Eye, the recently-launched comics reviews-and-interviews site headed up by our erstwhile intern, steadfast supporter and good pal Gavin Lees (which in itself is great news). Here's Ian's discussion of "Merlock Jones," the shape-shifting detective in E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre (as seen in Popeye Vol. 3), and here's his analysis of Jim Blanchard's portrait of Osama bin Laden which appeared on the cover of The Stranger earlier this year. Not only that, Ian's also been contributing to The Comics Journal website, including this well-traveled recent interview with Brandon Graham. (And if you ever meet Ian in person, ask to see his theme sketchbook of Animal from The Muppet Show — it's giving my Yoda sketchbook a run for its money, I tell you what.)
Australian fan Phillip Marsden tweeted this picture to us, and... what the...??!! Yup, it's real. Somebody owes the Hernandez Bros. a cut of the profits, if you ask us.
We learned of this so last minute I don't even have time to write anything clever, so I'm just copy & pasting this info from the Gage Academy website:
Steele Gallery: Think Ink
August 5 – September 5 Opening Reception: Friday, Friday, August 5, 6:00pm-8:00pm
Local artists, cartoonists and graphic illustrators exhibit pen and ink artworks that display exceptional technical skill and creative, narrative story lines. Working with the constraints and possibilities of the fluid nib and inkwell, artists David Chelsea, David Lasky, Bob Rini, Jim Woodring and more dazzle the viewer with complex compositions and unexpected shifts in perspective.
With this volume, The Complete Peanuts ventures into the lesser-known 1980s, and Peanuts fans are sure to find plenty of surprises.
In Snoopy-family news, Spike is drafted into the Infantry (don’t worry, it’s only Snoopy’s imaginary World War I army), and a brand new brother, “Marbles” (with the spotty ears) takes his bow. We also see two major baseball-oriented stories, one in which Charlie Brown joins Peppermint Patty’s team, and another in which Charlie Brown and his team lose their baseball field.
In other stories, Peppermint Patty witnesses the “butterfly miracle,” Linus protests that he is not Sally’s “Sweet Babboo,” Sally (in an unrelated sequence) gets fat, the Van Pelts get into farming, and two of the most eccentric characters from later Peanuts years, the hyperaggressive Molly Volley and the whiny “Crybaby” Boobie, make a return engagement.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts world will never grow old, and Fantagraphics’ complete reprinting of this masterpiece, now in its eighth year — still lovingly designed by world-class cartoonist Seth — has firmly established itself as one of the very finest archival comic-strip projects ever done.
Download an EXCLUSIVE 15-page PDF excerpt (602 KB) containing all the strips from January, 1981!
A boxed set of the fifteenth and sixteenth volumes of The Complete Peanuts, designed by the award-winning graphic novelist, Seth. Shipping shrinkwrapped, with volumes 1979-1980 and 1981-1982 packed in a sturdy custom box designed especially for this set, it's the perfect gift book item. (For more information on the contents of each volume, see the individual product listings linked above.)
NOTE: BECAUSE OF OUR CONTRACT WITH THE LICENSOR THESE BOOKS CANNOT BE SOLD OUTSIDE OF NORTH AMERICA. IF YOU RESIDE ANYWHERE OTHER THAN THE U.S., CANADA OR MEXICO PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO ORDER THEM FROM OUR WEBSITE; YOUR ORDER WILL NOT BE PROCESSED.
Posting the Donald Duck cover reminded me, we've had this up on the site for a few days but we never gave it a proper fanfare: the final cover art for Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 2: Trapped on Treasure Island by Floyd Gottfredson. Series design by Jacob Covey. Again, click the image for a better look. The slipcase for the Vol. 1 & 2 Box Set is looking pretty snazzy too — we should have an image of that to share soon!
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