Wandering Son Vol. 3
by Shimura Takako

224-page black & white/color 7" x 9.5" hardcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-533-4

Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now

SPECIAL OFFER:

Order this volume and get Vol. 1 and/or Vol. 2 for $14.99 each; that's 25% off! Use the option menu when ordering.

As shown in the first two volumes of this acclaimed series, Shuichi and his friend Yoshino have a secret: Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a boy.

But one day, abruptly, their secret is exposed, and the two find themselves the target of sixth-grade cruelty. Their friendship is strained, as Yoshino makes a half-hearted effort at being a “normal girl”... and their mentor, Yuki, reveals the harder reality of being transgendered. Meanwhile, Shuichi’s sister, Maho, realizes her dream of becoming a model, and drags Shuichi along for the ride. Shuichi meets another boy who wants to be a girl, and finds himself on an arranged date with a boy who doesn’t know that the girl he has a crush on is actually a boy.

After an unhurried, almost leisurely buildup that gave us an opportunity to get to know and understand our protagonists, artist Shimura picks up the pace in this latest volume, with tears and laughs aplenty. A sophisticated work translated with rare sensitivity by veteran translator and comics scholar Matt Thorn.

20-page excerpt (download 2.3 MB PDF):

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

The public launch of SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: THE BOOK is coming up at the Strand on Tuesday, July 10!

Join contributors LUC SANTE, MATTHEW SHARPE, MIMI LIPSON, BEN GREENMAN, ANNIE NOCENTI, SHELLEY JACKSON, JASON GROTE and Editors JOSHUA GLENN and ROB WALKER as they read their stories from and celebrate the release of SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: 100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS.

Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales.

That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination?

The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again. An object becomes valuable once it has a narrative attached. How to test that theory? Via eBay! Each narrated object was sold on eBay, and they reported that “$128.74 worth of thrift-store junk sold for $3,612.51.” This collection of tiny stories tells the tales of these “significant purchases.”

Buy Significant Objects or a $10 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. Both options admit one person. Please note that online orders require payment at the time of checkout to guarantee admission. The event will be located in the Strand's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway and 12th Street.

Additional copies of the book (and previous books by the author, when applicable) will be available for purchase at the event.

WHAT: Significant Objects: Hosted by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker
WHO: Joshua Glenn, Rob Walker, Luc Sante, Matthew Sharpe, Mimi Lipson, Ben Greenman, Annie Nocenti, Shelley Jackson, Jason Grote, and others t.b.a.
WHEN: July 10, 7:00PM – 8:00PM
WHERE: The Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway, New York City

Richard Sala is up to the 26th installment (or a pair of thirteens, if you prefer) of his delightful "Skeleton Key" series of character portraits and bios, on his Tumblr and blog.

Todd Klein posted this great photo by José Luis Garcia-López of Fantagraphics co-founder and current editor Mike Catron freelancing in the DC Comics offices in 1979. Mike is currently in the process of making his arduous cross country move back to Seattle. We miss ya Mike! (Hat tip to Robot 6.)

photo credit: Fantagraphics editorial intern, Matt Burke

This past weekend, the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery welcomed back the acclaimed Joe Sacco to discuss his forthcoming release, Journalism, out later this month from Metropolitan Books. 

The last time we were lucky to have a visit from Joe was in 2007, when he and our Store Manager/Curator Larry Reid discussed Palestine: The Special Edition. You can watch video from that here. And, as you'll see in the video below, it was another riveting discussion, this time with our head honcho Gary Groth at the helm!

(Sadly, I missed the first couple of minutes of their talk, sorry!)

You can also check out some more beautiful shots from our new Editorial Intern Matt Burke (and some not-as-beautiful iPhone shots from me), both below, and on the Fantagraphics Flickr feed!

Gary Groth rocks the mic // photo credit: Matt Burke

The crowd before the Q&A began // photo credit: Matt Burke

Joe chats with local cartoonist Kelly Froh while Fantagraphics' own Russ Battaglia gives a grin

Joe signs a book for Marketing Director Mike Baehr

If you can't wait for the official release date, the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery is the only place on the planet where you can get it before June 19th!  I bet your Dad would like a copy! We're located at 1201 S. Vale Street in Seattle's Georgetown district. Open daily 11:30 to 8:00 PM, Sundays until 5:00 PM. Phone: (206) 658-0110.

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to our mail-order customers:

New York Mon Amour
by Jacques Tardi, Benjamin Legrand & Dominique Grange

84-page black & white/duotone 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-524-2

See Previews / Order Now

Many years ago, Jacques Tardi was introduced to American audiences with “Manhattan,” a grim and grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was instrumental in defining both that magazine’s virtuoso aesthetic and its dark sensibility. Three decades later, New York Mon Amour collects “Manhattan” and three other tales of the Big Apple — rendered by Tardi with just as much panache and you-are-there detail as Paris or the trenches of World War I in his other books — in one spectacular volume.

Aside from “Manhattan,” the centerpiece of the book is the graphic novel “Cockroach Killer,” written by Benjamin Legrand. This violent, surreal conspiracy thriller, starring a hapless exterminator named Walter, features a striking two-color black-and-red technique unique in Tardi’s oeuvre, and remains one of the cartoonist’s most startling, confounding works. New York Mon Amour is rounded off with two short stories written by Dominique Grange: “It’s So Hard” (starring John Lennon — but not that John Lennon — and never before published in English) and “The Killing of Hung” (a story of revenge and redemption).

New York Mon Amour is a crucial and unique addition to Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Tardi collection.

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new title. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about it (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the link, and contact your local shop to confirm availability.

Prince Valiant Vol. 5: 1945-1946
by Hal Foster

112-page full-color 10.5" x 14.25" hardcover • $29.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-484-9

"Prince Valiant, Vol. 5 is out with more swashbuckling shenanigans (I reviewed it in last Sunday’s What Are You Reading)." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

"If I could splurge, I’d get Prince Valiant, Vol. 5: 1945-1946 (Fantagraphics, $29.99). ...[T]his is arguably the comic that defined [the sword-fighting epic] genre. The last volume ended right in the middle of Val’s epic wooing of Aleta, and I’m glad to see I’ll find out the full story – and more – in this new collection." – Chris Arrant, Robot 6

"Essays by P. Craig Russell and Brian M. Kane accompany the title character’s marriage in Prince Valiant Vol. 5: 1945-1946, by Mr. Hal Foster; $29.99." – Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal

"The series is pretty much conceptually complete at this point, so all you have to do now is sit back and enjoy the pretty art and the deliberate storytelling. These are significant pleasures, both the staring and the reading. We knew about the staring." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter

Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons
edited by Kelly Gerald

152-page two-color 10.25" x 8.5" hardcover • $22.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-479-5

Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now

Flannery O’Connor was among the greatest American writers of the 2nd half of the 20th century; she was a writer in the Southern tradition of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers, who wrote such classic novels and short stories as Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She is perhaps as well known for her tantalizing brand of Southern Gothic humor as she is for her Catholicism. That these tendencies should be so happily married in her fiction is no longer a surprise. The real surprise is learning that this much beloved icon of American literature did not set out to be a fiction writer, but a cartoonist. This seems to be the last well-kept secret of her creative life.

Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, the first book devoted to the author’s work in the visual arts, emphasizes O’Connor’s most prolific period as a cartoonist, drawing for her high school and college publications in the early 1940s.

While many of these images lampoon student life and the impact of World War II on the home front, something much more is happening. Her cartoons are a creative threshing floor for experimenting and trying out techniques that are deployed later with such great success in her fiction.

O’Connor learns how to set up and carry a joke visually, how to write a good one-liner and set it off against a background of complex visual narration. She develops and asserts her taste for a stock set of character types, attitudes, situations, exaggerations, and grotesques, and she learns how to present them not to distort the truth, but to expose her vision of it.

She worked in both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, and her rough-hewn technique combined with her acidic observations to form a visual precursor to her prose. Fantagraphics is honored to bring the early cartoons of this American literary treasure to a 21st century readership.

For an audience resistant to your views, O’Connor once wrote, “draw large and startling figures.” In her fiction, as in her cartoons, these shocks to the system never come without a laugh.

17-page excerpt (download 348 KB PDF):

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