Georgetown Records and Fantagraphics Bookstore Host a Party for COVER STORY: Odd, Obscure and Outrageous Album Art on Saturday, August 14.

Spend a hot August night with cool music and art at Georgetown Records and Fantagraphics Bookstore in Seattle. The party celebrates the publication of COVER STORY Volume Two: Odd, Obscure and Outrageous Album Art on Saturday August 14 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. Contributors Aja West and Cheeba preside over the festivities with a show of album art from the book, a book signing, and a rare combined DJ appearance.

COVER STORY Volume Two: Odd, Obscure and Outrageous Album Art continues a graphic narration of the vibrant subculture of record collecting through the art of the album cover. This edition examines strange and bizarre record covers from across the country and around the globe, illuminating the imaginative past of twelve-inch masterpieces - sadly absent in this era of digital downloads. Published by Wax Poetics in association with powerHouse Books, this colorful 228 page volume celebrates an eccentric era when artistic visions were often so absurd and grandiose they frequently extended beyond the boundaries of the recording and onto the album covers themselves.

The artwork for the COVER STORY series is selected by the staff of Wax Poetics magazine, including Seattle siblings Aja West and Cheeba. Both brothers have colorful backgrounds, recording music together and separately, collaborating with an amazing assortment of players along the way. Both also associated with celebrities early in their careers: Aja as the music assistant to comedian Conan O'Brien and Cheeba with the illustrious Dust Brothers production duo. Their first recording together was a remix for the Fight Club film that appeared in the Japanese and European version of the soundtrack. They now play in each other's projects: Aja's The Mackrosoft and Cheeba's Cheebacabra.

First published in December 2001, Brooklyn-born Wax Poetics was originally created for a concentrated market of music aficionados. It has since expanded to make musical anthropologists out of average music listeners — illuminating the dark corners of our sonic past while also striving to give new and innovative artists broad exposure.

Georgetown Records and Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery share retail space at 1201 S. Vale St. (at Airport Way S.). Phone 206.658.0110. This event coincides with the lively Georgetown Art Attack featuring free visual and performing arts presentations at several locations throughout the historic industrial arts district.

Barry Windsor-Smith fans, we are pleased to share the following announcement with you:

Windsor-Smith Studio is pleased to announce the publication of

POETRY

A stunningly colored work printed by the giclée process, making the reproduction as beautiful as the original painting.

This signed and numbered limited edition of 375, in a deluxe, foil stamped presentation folder, features a 20" x 12 3/8" image on 22" x 15" UltraSmooth heavy 100% cotton rag, acid free & pH buffered paper.

The price is $135, including insured shipping.

POETRY is available from Glimmer Graphics, at their web site:
http://www.glimmergraphicsprints.com/Poetry.html

Jamie Coville of TheComicBooks.com has posted audio of several panels at Comic-Con 2010, including: the Spotlight on Moto Hagio (MP3); the Spotlight on Peter Bagge (MP3); the Comics Criticism panel with R.C. Harvey, Gary Groth and others, moderated by Ben Schwartz (MP3); the Comics Reprints Revolution panel with Gary Groth and others (MP3); and the Bill Everett panel with Blake Bell & Wendy Everett (MP3). Thanks to Blake Bell for the tip-off! Illustration swiped from Johnny Ryan's Facebook page.

We packed three powerhouses of alternative comics behind one table and the result was one of our busiest signings in a week full of busy signings!

Peter Bagge was kept busy by a long line of fans requesting sketches of Bizarro, Buddy Bradley and so on:

He also used the occiasion to debut his band's new CD!

Dame Darcy brought along her usual assortment of lovely couture dolls and other merch:

Poor Tony Millionaire got lost in the convention hall for a while but quickly settled in for a brisk round of signatures and Drinky Crow sketches:

Tony was joined by a camera crew from our pals at Bright Red Rocket, shooting footage for an in-progress documentary about Tony.

Our Saturday morning kicked off, appropriately enough, with Mitch Schauer & Mike Vosburg, co-creators of our new all-ages graphic novel RIP M.D.

Next up, Blake Bell, Andrei Molotiu (seen here talking with Douglas Wolk I believe) and Ben Schwartz & son joined us:

Here's Ben meeting actor James Urbaniak, whom you may remember from his portrayal of Crumb in American Splendor and whose voice you may recognize as that of Dr. Thaddeus Venture:

Tim Hensley met eager fans, hawked copies of his Victor Banana CDs, and signed copies of Wally Gropius:

Carol Tyler brought some amazing collectibles to sell, including copies of You'll Never Know Book 1 signed by her dad (the "Good and Decent Man" himself) and a copy of the Twisted Sisters compilation signed by every contributor:

To be continued...

Twitter user Jesse Mack posted this glimpse of Michael Kupperman's artwork from The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex by Kristen Schaal & Rich Blomquist (who, Kupperman notes, met working on Kupperman's Snake 'n' Bacon Adult Swim pilot).

In closely related news, Kupperman also notes that he contributed as a writer to the book Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk.

And in a last bit of Kuppermanic news, he has the following piece in the Law & Order-themed art show "These Are Their Stories" at Gallery Meltdown in L.A. opening tonight at 8:

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Interview: The Minneapolis City Pages talks to Zak Sally about the "2nd Annual Report," a big old hootenanny celebrating and benefitting his small press imprint La Mano which took place at Eclipse Records in Minneapolis last week (which we found out about too late to Flog, dang it): "La Mano is what it is, the stuff I love. A celebration of stuff that people make and create by hand. Last year was great, and if every year there could be a sort of one spot where all that stuff is able to happen in, I'm happy as a pig in shit!"

• Comic-Con: Jason Geyer of Action Figure Insider declares our Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse announcement "the biggest news at Comic-Con 2010"

• Comic-Con: Comic Book Resources' Sonia Harris recounts a happy encounter with Jaime Hernandez at our booth

You know the old saying: "If you remember the 60s, you weren't there." For me this cliché also applies to most of the 80 and 90s. Rampant grunge nostalgia has given rise to no fewer than a half-dozen recent or soon-to-be-published books on the subject. As a peripheral player in Seattle's proto-grunge punk scene, I've been asked repeatedly to recount the specifics of my misspent youth to a cadre of eager young "rock historians." Hell, I'm lucky if I remember what happened last week, much less 25 years ago.

Thankfully we had Peter Bagge to chronicle the entire era. His comic book series HATE went far beyond simple satire. Buddy Bradley and his gang of hapless losers helped fashion the attitudes and aesthetics of the movement. It's a sure bet that BUDDY DOES SEATTLE, collecting the first 15 issues of HATE, more accurately reflects the grunge milieu than an entire library of murky oral histories. In a prescient 1992 review, Bruce Barcott of the Seattle Weekly observed, "Twenty years from now, when people want to know what it was like to be young in 1990s Seattle, the only record we'll have is Peter Bagge's HATE." If you too are gripped by grunge nostalgia, or just curious about the period, skip the revisionist histories and pick up a copy of the real deal.

While you're at it...the most splendid comic book of the summer is Peter Bagge's HATE ANNUAL #8. From the first page you'll be reminded why you so closely identified with the series in the first place: Sexy and silly, but with an unmistakable air of familiarity. This book gives you an uneasy feeling like, "Hey, I think I know these people. Omigawd! That's me!" An imperative addition to your summer reading list.

Our fearless leader Gary Groth will be traveling to Australia next week to participate in the GRAPHIC festival at Sydney Opera House. Gary will be presenting a special "Focus on Fantagraphics" talk on Sunday, August 8, at 11 AM, giving an overview of the company and its mission from the early days of The Comics Journal through the present day. Apparently there's currently a 2-for-1 deal on tickets for the session if you use the code "comic" when booking online or by phone at (02) 9250 7777.

If any of our antipodean friends have any suggestions as to where in Sydney Gary might be able to indulge his prodigious sweet tooth during his visit, please leave a comment.

Robert Pollard has a new art exhibit in NYC on August 27/28. Its open to the public, so come on down!

As writer Rick Moody put it in his introduction to Fantagraphics' TOWN OF MIRRORS: THE REASSEMBLED IMAGERY OF ROBERT POLLARD, "The visual art of Robert Pollard ... is uncanny, moving, strange, and it summons a dark melancholy.... We are lucky to have these riddles to ponder and unlock."

THE 45 SPACE in New York will host "The Public Hi-Fi Balloon," an exhibit of collages by Robert Pollard incorporating pictures, words, and sound on August 27 and 28, 2010.

Pollard, whose super-human productivity as a songwriter is the stuff of
indie-rock legend, created most of the works for this show in the past six
months. "I've been working long hours daily getting ready for this show," he says. "It's going to be insane."

Among the works on display will be more than 60 imaginary record sleeves, as well as dreamed-up magazines and coffee table books. "You can see Duchamp in Pollard's collages, as well as the influence of the painterly spaces of De Chirico and Yves Tanguy," wrote Moody in the introduction to Town of Mirrors. Moody also noted "a residual pulse in the images of the swinging sixties, not the flowers-in-their-hair iteration, but the dark bad-acid psychedelia of that low, dishonest decade."

Pollard is the leader of the seminal indie-rock band Guided by Voices, which emerged from Midwestern obscurity in the early 1990s to conquer the national scene with such transcendentally lo-fi albums as Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, and Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. One of Spin magazine's "Top 50 Rock & Roll Front Men of All Time," Pollard recently electrified fans and critics alike when he announced that the original lineup of Guided by Voices would be reuniting for a series of shows this fall.

Pollard created the cover art for most Guided by Voices releases, not to mention those of his many other musical projects. The cover collage for Guided by Voices' 1997 album Mag Earwhig was displayed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.

Pollard's music and his visual art are unified at a fundamental level. "They
both have to do with re-assembling familiar imagery to create interesting
landscapes," he says. "One with sight, the other with sound."

Pollard was introduced to the New York art world in 2007, when visual artist Todd DiCiurcio and actor Michael Imperiole co-hosted "Do the Collage," a show that included the original art for several classic Guided by Voices album covers. DiCiurcio will co-host "The Public Hi-Fi Balloon" with Vanity Fair executive online editor Michael Hogan.

The 45 Space is located at 45 Bond Street (between Lafayette Street and the Bowery) in Manhattan. Opening night is Friday, August 27, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. The exhibit will also be open to visitors on Saturday, August 28, from 2 p.m. until 11 p.m.