Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-66) [First Edition - Imperfect Copies]
By Jules Feiffer

Our final few copies of the First Edition all bear minor damage incurred in shipping and handling. We are offering them at a discounted price. (The Second Edition is due in January 2009.) Other sellers are currently offering this book at inflated collector prices -- get yours right now for a steal!

In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing a strip to the only alternative weekly published in the US, a small radical newspaper called The Village Voice. His strip tackled just about every issue, private and public, that affected the sentient American: relationships, sexuality, love, family, parents, children, psychoanalysis, neuroses, presidents, politicians, media, race, class, labor, religiion, foreign policy, war, and one or two other existential questions. It was the first time that the American public had been subjected to a weekly dose of comics that so uncompromisingly and wittily confronted individuals' private fears and society's public transgressions. Explainers is the first of four volumes collecting Feiffer's entire run of weekly strips from The Village Voice. This edition contains approximately 500 strips originally published between 1956 and 1966 in a brick-like landscape hardcover format.

568-page black & white 9.25" x 5.25" hardcover • regularly $28.99, sale price $19.95
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Yes you can! Yours truly recorded videos of every song played by Peter Bagge's new band Can You Imagine? at our gala Beasts! print show opening and 2nd Anniversary party at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery last Saturday and plunked 'em on our YouTube page, where you can enjoy the strains of their original (correction) the Herman's Hermits hit "A Must to Avoid," embedded above, and a dozen more swingin' numbers!

Of course we have photos of the exhibit and the party crowd, too, including our special guests (not to mention Peter Bagge & Steve Fisk's erotic birthday cake). Check them out in this slideshow; to see all the annotations and credits, browse through manually. (By the way, if you missed the opening, don't despair, good prints are still available — hustle on down to Georgetown on your little Bobby Orr legs.)

Back in stock: signed bookplates for Big Baby, El Borbah and Skin Deep by Charles Burns; Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian; and Billy Hazelnuts by Tony Millionaire. How do you acquire these delightful hand-signed-by-the-artist little extras, you might ask? We give 'em away for FREE when you buy their respective books from us (while supplies last)!

Some conditions apply; click here for more details and the complete list of books available with this FREE premium!

(Received via our Flickr page.)

C-SPAN2's BookTV program presents a 45-minute profile of American political cartooning great David Levine, premiering this weekend. Here are the airtimes:

Saturday, December 20, 8 am EST

Sunday, December 21, 8 pm EST

Sunday, December 28, 11 am EST

On the interview blog Top Drawer, artist Hans Rickheit breaks some publishing news: our forthcoming publication of his graphic novel The Squirrel Machine, currently projected for a 2010 release. The interview includes some samples of Rickheit's pages, including some "deleted scenes" from The Squirrel Machine, such as above. (Link via Sean T. Collins.)

• The Boston Globe "Out of Line" blog thinks that Willie & Joe: The WWII Years by Bill Mauldin belongs on more end-of-year Best-of lists

• Sean T. Collins on the unhinged beauty of I Shall Destroy All the Civlized Planets! by Fletcher Hanks

• Johnny Bacardi puts Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 on his Top 10 of 2008 list

• Little Nemo's Kat examines The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger (en Español; Google translation)

• Spurious writes an ode to Ivan Brunetti

• Austin English puts 20 questions to Zak Sally

• Those Fabuleous 50's presents a run of Sunday strips omitted from our collection of Jack Cole's Betsy and Me

• "They'd make great Christmas presents," says The Stranger of the Beasts! books

• ...nurgh... looks back at the Golden Age with the help of Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes

• The Philadelphia Inquirer recommends The Complete Peanuts 1967-1970 box set for holiday gift giving

• Seattlest suggests hitting the adults-only section of our Georgetown store for your holiday shopping

• CuatroTipos looks at the reality-based comics of Joe Sacco (en Español; Google translation)

• Post-It pugilism by Steven Weissman, animated by Chris Diaz

If you want your order shipped within the U.S. to arrive before Christmas via USPS Priority Mail, tomorrow (Tuesday, December 16) is the deadline to get your order in! Orders placed with the Standard shipping option right now will most likely arrive after the holiday. After tomorrow, you'll have until Friday for orders shipped by 2nd Day UPS. We'll post a reminder for that deadline as well.

Don't forget to check out our handy Holiday Gift Guide for lots of gift ideas for every interest and budget!

...by animator Nick Cross in this music video (I forget where I first spotted this):

Danko Jones - King Of Magazines from Bad Taste Records on Vimeo.

Speaking of the Beasts! print show opening tomorrow, Jacob Covey has been previewing some of the prints that will be on display and for sale there on the Beasts! blog (including Tom Neely's "Skinwalker," above).

This show is going to be incredible.