Here's something to keep an eye on: John Orlow has a series of video interviews with the likes of Tim Hensley, John Pham & Sammy Harkham, Lisa Hanawalt, and Paul Hornschemeier (above), who tipped us off to their existence via his blog. They're posted on the Royal Jelly blog and in high res on Orlow's Vimeo page. Stay tuned for future installments to see if he gets out of the H's.

Look what we just found a stash of in our warehouse — published in 1997 and thought to be out of stock for years:

Busy Girls! A Kinky Coloring Book
by Jeremy Eaton

32-page black & white magazine-size comic book • $3.95
Order now!

A unique, oversized coloring book just like Mom used to buy you — only dirtier. Beloved alternative cartoonist Jeremy Eaton puts a modern, interactive, and empowering spin on the old-fashioned girlie pin-up. Join Kinky Spectrum and her colorful girlfriends as they take on the chores of the world: repairing telephone lines, taking spacewalks, fighting fires, pole vaulting, hunting, painting portraits, delivering milk, walking dogs, and so on... all forgetting just one thing — their clothes! A fun and dare we say feminist frolic — crayons not included.

See pages from this comic and read more about it on Jeremy Eaton's blog!

Heading into comic shops today (snow, truck crashes, and other factors permitting):

Almost Silent
by Jason

304-page black & white/duotone 6.5" x 8.75" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-315-6

Douglas Wolk recommends it at Comics Alliance: "A $25 collection of four early books by the dry-witted Norwegian cartoonist Jason, involving animal-faced people, Frankenstein, true love, and Earth being overtaken by zombies..." Newsarama says "This should look fine sitting next to Low Moon on a bookshelf." (Yes it does.) Jog says it contains Jason's "secret masterpiece, You Can't Get There from Here, a beautifully paced, quietly experimental slash of emotional agony by way of vintage Frankenstein imagery, and my choice for best comic of 2004" and calls it "A good overall sampler of an excellent stylist in the mature form..." Robot 6's Chris Mautner says "as the title suggests these are mostly wordless stories, apart from the occasional word balloon. They're also all very good and if you haven't had a chance to encounter Jason's work yet this is a fine place to do so," which is so nice we can forgive them for using the preliminary cover art.

Don't just take their word for it — check out our previews, and check the sitch with your local shop.

UPDATE: I shoulda checked Twitter before posting this! Meltdown Comics made it a pick of the week, Atomic Books didn't get theirs yet, and UGO blurbed it: "Pretty decent week for books, folks, and I say that just because I'm psyched for the Jason collection from Fantagraphics... he works magic."

The Hammer Museum's website has posted a video of Gary Panter's Jan. 21 lecture on "the relationship between comic art and fine art painting in the 20th century."

For me, Gary pushes all the right buttons as a painter. If you haven't yet picked up that art book that Picturebox put out (and it's a god damn hell of a deal right now), you're missing out.

UPDATED with embedded video.

Adult Swim is pitting a bunch of pilots against each other in an elimination tournament. Up right now: Snake 'n' Bacon by Tales Designed to Thrizzle creator Michael Kupperman vs. something with T-Pain and throwing babies through plate glass windows. At stake: the "most popular one gets on TV" — does that mean the pilot gets aired or the series gets picked up? I would assume the latter, meaning S'n'B gets a second chance. Go, vote!

Holy cats!

• "Purreth"?! Steven Weissman , you genius you

• Lilli Carré presents a teaser from her comic in the February issue of The Believer (above, a teaser of the teaser)

• Speaking of teasers, Michael Kupperman tweeted this panel from Tales Designed to Thrizzle #6 5 minutes after the issue's completion

• At Covered, Noah Van Sciver interprets his brother Ethan

• Speaking of Covered, Laura Park does X-Men #150 for the Covered Art Show

• Another "page from the vaults" on Gabrielle Bell's Lucky blog

• Meathaus spotlights the work of Ignatz-er Marco Corona

Meaty Online Commentary & Diversions today:

• List: The Browser's Roland Chambers talks to comics scholar and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows Hillary Chute about her top five graphic narratives, including Aline Kominsky-Crumb's Love That Bunch: "To me, Aline is one of the most important figures in comics, which isn’t to say that she’s one of the most well-known. She’s not. But her comics have inspired a legion of cartoonists working in comics autobiography: specifically women cartoonists, because Aline published the first ever autobiographical comic from a woman’s point of view."

• Review: "King has long been a figure so ubiquitous in American culture that little of his true self remains in his frequently invoked image and words. Anderson does the man a favor by taking a spiky, fractured approach to his subject and refusing to plant a halo on his troubled head. ... Though all the great moments of his civil rights battle are here (from the March on Washington to his less-successful housing campaign in Chicago), Anderson doesn't resort to the cheap cinematic trick of success and fadeout. There is more disappointment here than celebration, suffused with the sorrowful sense of a long, long battle just barely begun. A crowning achievement, like the man it portrays." – Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

• Review: "...Columbia's most disturbing material yet. ... he remains one of the finest horrorists (if such a word exists and I may be allowed to use it) working in comics today, far exceeding what is generally held to be the standard of excellence in the genre, via his ability to convey a terrible sense of dread and foreboding. ... As disjointed and narratively frustrating as Pim and Francie can be at times, it remains a stunning and haunting work that preys on your mind long after you've finished it. The successive wave upon wave of unsettling imagery builds upon subsequent page to suggest a world of constant pain and surreal terror, where hiding places are few and far between. ... The sheer level of craftsmanship and imagination on display makes this a book well worth reading for those who can bear its mordant message." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

• Interview: The Sidebar comics podcast chats with Ho Che Anderson about his new books King: The Special Edition and Sand & Fury as well as his transition into filmmaking, among other topics

It Was the War of the Trenches
by Jacques Tardi

120-page black & white 7.75" x 10.5" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-353-8

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

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi’s. (His very first — rejected — comics story dealt with the subject, as does his most recent work, the two-volume Putain de Guerre.) But It Was the War of the trenches is Tardi’s defining, masterful statement on the subject, a graphic novel that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. Like Remarque, he focuses on the day to day of the grunts in the trenches, and, with icy, controlled fury and disgust, with sardonic yet deeply sympathetic narration, he brings that existence alive as no one has before or since. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. And in a final, heartbreaking coda, Tardi grimly itemizes the ghastly human cost of the war, and lays out the future 20th century conflicts, all of which seem to spring from this global burst of insanity.

Trenches features some of Tardi’s most stunning artwork. Rendered in an inhabitually lush illustrative style, inspired both by abundant photographic documentation and classic American war comics, augmented by a sophisticated, gorgeous use of Craftint tones, Trenches is somehow simultaneously atypical and a perfect encapsulation of Tardi’s mature style. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi’s oeuvre.

It Was the War of the Trenches has been an object of fascination for North American publishers: RAW published a chapter in the early 1980s, and Drawn and Quarterly magazine serialized a few more in the 1990s. But only a small fraction of Trenches has ever been made available to the English speaking public (in now out of print publications); the Fantagraphics edition, the third in an ongoing collection of the works of this great master, finally remedies this situation.

“‘The war to end all wars’ has become a magisterial comic book to end all comic books. I seldom give blurbs, but this book is an essential classic. Among all of Jacques Tardi's towering achievements as a comics artist, nothing looms larger than this devastating crater of a work. It’s a compulsively readable wail of Existential despair, a kaleidoscope of war’s dehumanizing brutality and of Everyman’s suffering, as well as a deadpan masterpiece of the darkest black humor. The richly composed and obsessively researched drawings — perfectly poised between cartoon and illustration — march to the relentless beats of Tardi’s three horizontal panels per page to dig a hole deep inside your brain. This is one Hell of a book.” —Art Spiegelman

"Tardi’s depiction of the First World War is so impassioned and visceral that it can be compared to the work of the artists who actually served in the trenches." – Joe Sacco

Download an EXCLUSIVE 10-page PDF excerpt (3.3 MB). Also, read Tardi's Foreword and Special Thanks, and the editor's About This Book essay, here on the website.

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

Let's start out with a little showin' off!

• Mr. Gahan Wilson was kind enough to contribute this astonishing page to my Yoda theme sketchbook. (Mr. Wilson having been one of my favorite cartoonists since I was about 8 — 3 decades — this was an unparalleled thrill.) I just scanned and uploaded about 50 previously unseen Yodas — of particular interest to Fantagraphics fans may be (chronologically) T. Edward Bak, Bob Fingerman, Derek Van Gieson, Kurt Wolfgang, From Wonderland with Love contributors Christoffer Zieler & T. Thorhauge, Sara Edward-Corbett, Gary Panter, Trina Robbins, Lewis Trondheim, Roger Langridge, Frank Santoro, R. Sikoryak, and Anders Nilsen... and that ain't even the half of it!

• Speaking of Gahan, Golden Age Comic Book Stories presents a selection of his mid-1970s newspaper feature Gahan Wilson Sunday Comics

• The latest Amazing Facts and Beyond with Leon Beyond by Kevin Huizenga

• Speaking of Kevin H., here's some manner of Wild Kingdom "remix"

• A happy flower (1943) and an odd creature (1993, not shown here) by Jim Flora

• John Pham is readying some artwork for an upcoming solo show at GR2 (stay tuned for an announcement — image yoinked from Facebook)

• Drinky Crow, by Mother Nature (ganked from Tony Millionaire's Facebook) — somebody call the Vatican

• Hans Rickheit's Ectopiary, page 11 , plus layouts for the cover of The Comics Interpreter #1

• For The Nation, Steve Brodner on that shitty recent Supreme Court decision

Presidents Day does not stop the Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "In Hernandez’s hands, [The Troublemakers] unspools on the page like a Russ Meyer production, from the in-your-face nudity, right down to the cartoony violence played for laughs. ...[I]t sure is fun." — Rod Lott, Bookgasm

• Review: "Even if I finally accepted that [Sublife Vol. 2] did not answer any of my questions from the first volume... I still admired the growth in Pham’s work on display between the two volumes. Volume 2 shows a terrific range, beginning a Clowes-like opening series of strips about a murderous blogger with an under-read blog that shows a biting wit not on display in the first volume. The tour de force of the volume is the second piece, which picks up (for those paying incredibly scrupulous attention) on a deep space adventure from the inside covers of Volume 1. Here Pham lets his instincts for architectural design sense take off in a trippy sequence that is pure pleasure to look at. ... In some ways — in many ways actually — the first two volumes of Sublife evoke memories of the early volumes of Acme Novelty Warehouse [sic]. And that could be a very good thing." – Jared Gardner, The Comics Journal

• Review: "...I am delighted to report that The Great Anti-War Cartoons offers an impressive showcase of political cartooning. Many of its contributors have never had their work reprinted with as much care. Even the most well-informed reader will stumble across pieces they have never seen or names they have never heard of." – Kent Worcester, The Comics Journal

• Review: "[There are] ...a number of strong stories to be found here [in Mome Vol. 17], and a number of rewards to be gained by those who were following serials like Paul Hornschemeier’s 'Life With Mr. Dangerous' or the second chapters of the stories done by Renee French and Ted Stearn." – Rob Clough, The Comics Journal

• Plug: Robot 6's Chris Mautner describes his experience so far reading The Comics Journal Library Vol. 5: Classic Comics Illustrators

• Interview: Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s editor Michael Dowers talks to Robot 6's Tim O'Shea: "I want people to see that if you believe in something hard enough and never give up that you can get somewhere in life. Here is a group of creative types who couldn’t take no for an answer and made their own world of comics."

• Interview: David-Wasting-Paper subjects Drew Friedman to a rigorous Q&A about process, influences and more

• Feature: The Seattle Times talks to Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery curator and unofficial Georgetown spokesmodel Larry Reid about the emerging neighborhood

• Industry: Our own Eric Reynolds weighs in on the annual book-trade-vs.-direct-market sales-analysis kerfuffle in an essay for The Comics Reporter

• Events: The lineup for the Covered art show opening March 6 at Secret Headquarters was just announced and looks pretty great

• Events: Bring some of your old Bob Fingerman comics down to Rocketship this Friday so he has something to sign besides his new TPB

• Satire: Oh Spurge, you crack us up