For Valentine's Day we've teamed up with ComicsAlliance to give you a chance to win copies of two of our recent books about lovin' in its various forms: Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby's Romance Comics and Dave McKean's erotic opus Celluloid. Contest details and your chance to enter are all over at the ComicsAlliance blog. Good luck!

Wednesday, February 15th

• Los Angeles, CA: It's your last chance to see the Year of the Dragon group art exhibit at Giant Robot, featuring work from Fantagraphics artists Andrice Arp, Renee French, and Steven Weissman, among many others!  (more info)

Joe Sacco at the Fantagraphics office, 04/09/07 // photo credit: Jacob Covey

Saturday, February 18th

• Portland, OR: Come hear Joe Sacco speak at the Portland Central Library from 2:00 to 4:00 PM. Tickets for this event are free, and will be available 30 minutes prior to the program. Space at programs is limited, and seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. (more info)

75 years ago today Hal Foster's Prince Valiant debuted in newspapers with the strip above (click to see it bigger) and quickly one of the most beloved comic strips of all time. To celebrate this milestone anniversary we are offering all of our Prince Valiant books at a 30% discount today only! This includes our new series of hardcover volumes (including pre-orders on Volume 5), which critics and fans agree are the definitive collections of Foster's masterpiece; it also includes our recent editions of the Prince Valiant Companion and the handful of our previous softcover editions we have left in our warehouse.

And stay tuned for more Prince Valiant anniversary celebrations at Comic-Con in San Diego!

If you want your Cannibal Fuckface collectible vinyl dolly to resemble the interior pages of the Prison Pit comics it springs from, good news: it's now available for pre-order in a black & white colorway from toy purveyors Monster Worship.

Meanwhile, at VICE, Johnny has a new comic which reveals the horrifying truth about the iPad.

UPDATE: Oh snap, Monster Worship is also taking pre-orders for a t-shirt!

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "...[T]hese comics are among the best in their genre without a doubt. ...[This] period was certainly the period of Jack Kirby’s greatest commercial success, and also the period of work which posterity has most neglected. For that this book [Young Romance ] is to be cheered, though there is much else to be happy about in it. There is the excellence of Gagné’s restoration work. It’s of a kind of cleanness which in the past, in archival projects by others, has often resulted in garishness. ...[I]t appears that Fantagraphics, perhaps by accident more than planning, is the only publisher to give us any coverage of the long neglected and just about forgotten 1950s genre of romance comics." – Eddie Campbell, The Comics Journal

• Plug: "Activist/musician/writer Pat Thomas has been busy the past five years compiling music, speeches and photos from the height of the Black Power movement, spending much of that time in Oakland, California, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. The result is Thomas’ forthcoming book, Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 (out March 5 through Fantagraphics Books), which entrenches us in one of the most politically and culturally explosive times in America..." – Mark Lore, The Days of Lore

• Interview: Casey Burchby presents a brief excerpt of an interview with Daniel Clowes conducted last Fall in which Clowes discusses how his collection of Ernie Bushmiller Nancy comic strips became the backbone of Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945: "I found it baffling that I had the best collection of Nancy strips. I bought a bunch of them off eBay in like 1998. It didn’t take any special effort. I just found some dealer that had a whole bunch of them, and I bought all of them I could get my hands on. And when it came time to do the book, they were looking all over and they couldn’t find them anywhere. And I had almost all of them."

Kupperman's back! Plus a new Mahler page and links to strips from around the web:

---

Angelman by Nicolas Mahler (view at original size):

Up All Night by Michael Kupperman (view at original size):

And elsewhere:

The All-New Cartoon Boy Adventure Hour by John Kerschbaum at ACT-I-VATE:

Belligerent Piano by Tim Lane:

Humblug by Arnold Roth (two new updates):

Lucky by Gabrielle Bell :

Maakies by Tony Millionaire:

The Pain — When Will It End? (plus answers to last week's "Ghandi or Batman?") by Tim Kreider:

Les Petits Riens by Lewis Trondheim:

Truth Serum by Jon Adams:

What's in the Backpack by Victor Kerlow:

This week's issue of OC Weekly features this Jaime Hernandez depiction of inequitably distributed afterglow — plus more sexy comics by others inside. (Hat tip: Entrecomics.)

[Follow our Tumblr blog for lots more Things to See every day.]

Cartoonists will want to arrive early to Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery on Saturday evening to preview the "Funny Valentines" ahow and experience visiting artist Frank Santoro's comic book layout workshop at 5:00 PM. Santoro is a columnist for The Comics Journal and teamed with Dash Shaw in the latest Kramer's Ergot anthology.  

When wandering around Saturday's Georgetown Art Attack, don't forget to contribute to the Georgetown Music Store recovery fund. This neighborhood institution was the recent victim of a brazen burglary. Thieves literally tore the gates from the storefront and made off with valuable guitars and gear. Georgetown merchants are taking collective action to support our friends and neighbors at the music store. Fantagraphics Bookstore and Georgetown Records are offering cool Art Attack buttons in exchange for contributions.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Feature: Jill Russell of KOMO TV's Seattle Pulp blog spotlights Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 and talks to author Pat Thomas: "The main lesson Thomas takes away from this project is that young people are a forced to be reckoned with. The average age of a Black Panther was just 22. 'How many young people do you know are leading national movements?' he asked. 'When people have been stripped of their pride or ostracized too much, they will eventually fight back.'"

• Review: "For fans of comics from the dawn of the comic book era, this book [Amazing Mysteries: The Bill Everett Archives Vol. 1] is an indispensable gift from Blake Bell and Fantagraphics. For those who love to read great stories from the Golden Age, however, this volume isn't as great as the ones that will follow. Kudos to Fantagraphics for re-presenting these stories after all these years, but this book does prove the truism that when reading archival reprints, the first volume will often be the hardest to get through. I give this book three and a half stars for the fact that it exists, for the exhaustive research by Bell and his friends, and because some people will find this material fascinating. As for the comics themselves in this book, well, your mileage may vary." – Jason Sacks, Comics Bulletin

• Plug: Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby's Romance Comics leads off the L.A. Times Hero Complex Valentine's Day gift guide: "The creators of Captain America also helped create a softer comics genre: romance comics. In the late ’40s and ’50s, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby captivated girls and women with their 'Young Romance' tales of star-crossed lovers. This 208-page hardbound volume includes 21 of those stories."

Check out some of the tasty tributes to Jack Davis you'll find this Saturday at the "Funny Valentines" exhibition at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery.

Two original drawings by Jim Woodring. Castaway, indeed. 

Original paintings by celebrated Southern California artist SHAG.

A multimedia homage by Seattle artist (and frequent Fantagraphics printmaker) Art Garcia. 

Plus awesome works by graphic design legend Art Chantry, ceramicist Charles Krafft, and cartoonists Tom Neely, Johnny Ryan, Roberta Gregory, Pat Moriarity, Peter Bagge (from the pages of MAD), and a dozen others, including the master himself, Jack Davis. Arrive at 6:30 to experience a virtual visit with Davis via Skype, hosted by Gary Groth.