The latest release from the Jim Flora Fine Art shop is nothing to sneeze at (haw! haw!): an open-edition mini-print reproducing the cover of Flora's 1957 children's book The Day the Cow Sneezed. You may recognize the kittycat and mouse from the cover of our book The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora. As always, much more info from Flora doyen Irwin Chusid and all the ordering details can be found at the Flora website.

Comics Alliance has a sample of Gilbert Hernandez's "old-school" Iron Man tale for Marvel's Strange Tales II #2, coming next week. Bottoms up!

Jeez, we're doing a lot of shilling for Marvel lately, huh?

More fan tattoos are coming out of the woodwork! Above, Drinky Crow in the clutches of an cephalopod by Ximena Quiroz of Portland's Skeleton Key Tattoo (who also does a pretty good Woodstock) on the leg of one Aaron Lauer (thanks to Janice for the link). Below, James Henry Dufresne's Little Enid, shared with us on our Facebook page.

Check out this amazing array of cakes featuring characters and artwork from Rip M.D. created by the Culinary Art Institute and Chef Rick Royal for their Halloween Cake Contest. Wow! See the photo album on the Lincoln Butterfield Animation Facebook page.

Ran across this one-page Alan Moore strip in an issue of Moore's Dodgem Logic magazine, and although I've seen Moore's "underground" work before, I was struck by just how heavily influenced by Robert Williams that this page was:

See below for a comparison to Williams' style (from Hysteria In Remission). The lettering, the hulking "Brody Bodine"-esque nitwit, the anthropomorphized pen, the "chicken fat" in the last panel, the stonerish detail, etc. It's impressive. Do more underground comics, Mr. Moore. 

Here's a sneak peek at Tony Millionaire's contribution to Strange Tales 2 #2 hitting stores next Wednesday from our ol' chums (*cough*) at Marvel Comics. Pure Tony Brand Pickled Hairbrain, it's delicious, even though I always pegged Thor as more of a lutefisk man, myself. 

This weekend, Seattle lost a very beloved member of its music and arts community, and more heartbreakingly, a little girl lost her father and a wife lost her husband. My friend Andy Kotowicz was killed in a horrific car accident in the neighborhood we both lived in, Ballard. Andy and I weren't close, by any stretch, but we played poker together a couple times a year for the last several years with a group of mutual friends, and I always enjoyed his company, his sense of humor, and talking about having daughters around the same age. 

I'm going to paste a bit of what our good friend Chris Jacobs wrote on the SubPop blog, where Andy worked for over a decade:

Last Thursday evening, October 21st, driving his young daughter Anna home after picking her up from daycare, our co-worker Andy Kotowicz was involved in a terrible car accident that, so incredibly sadly, proved fatal. In what qualifies as nothing short of miraculous and definitively heroic, his daughter was pulled from the remains of the car, while it was on fire, by a local business owner who witnessed the accident. Though this same person tried and was unable to rescue Andy, I can think of no greater favor to our friend than saving his daughter's life. And, in some small measure of thanks, we will all be eating as many Rizzo's French Dip sandwiches as we can hold for a very long time. "Thank you" seems ridiculously inadequate, but thank you. Thank you.

Andy was under care at Harborview Medical Center in a coma until Saturday evening when he was taken off life support in the company of his immediate family. He was an organ donor and a recipient for his kidneys was found very soon after his passing. This is a small indication of the kind of guy he was.

Anna suffered some bruises and a broken arm, but is now home with her mother and family and is, we are told, recovering and adapting. There is a lesson here about the resilience and redemptive powers of children that we can all hope to learn from.

You can read the full post HERE, which goes into more detail about what kind of a universally beloved guy Andy was. I hope you will. 

In the meantime, I also hope you might consider supporting Andy's wife and daughter as they struggle with what is going to be a very difficult climb for them.  

A Sound Community Bank account is now available to accept donations for Andy Kotowicz's family.

Please make checks payable to the Andy Kotowicz Family Foundation

They can be mailed here:
Andy Kotowicz Family Foundation
c/o Sub Pop Records
2013 Fourth Ave, 3rd Floor
Seattle, WA 98121

Or checks can be delivered to Sound Community Bank at one of the locations listed here:
http://www.soundcb.com/home/cu/loc

Still further...
Andy supported the organizations below. You might like to do the same.

WFMU:
https://www.wfmu.org/marathon/pledge.php

The Greening of Detroit:
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/

R.I.P., Andy.  

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

Bent
by Dave Cooper

80-page full-color 10.25" x 9" hardcover • $22.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-378-1

Ordering Info & Previews

Fine artist Dave Cooper offers us a window into the wobbly dollhouse that is his mind’s eye. The work in Bent gathers a diverse mix of imagery that is also strangely focussed in its single-mindedness. This work has found a devoted and passionate following with visitors to Cooper’s solo gallery shows in Los Angeles and New York in recent years.

Cooper continues to obsess and fixate over his bizarre procession of milky figures as they crawl and wriggle into hidden meadows, jungles and cities. Everything in this world seems to be undulating and overripe — the multi-coloured Jell-O vegetation, the billowing clouds, and the twitching, agitated women, whether thin like sinewy rubber, or fat and bursting with doughy flesh.

The characters in Cooper’s work have been likened to a dog chasing its tail. Or maybe it’s as though they’re like someone on drugs who can stare at their own hand for 20 minutes; either way, these girls are hypnotized by wriggling around on the ground, twisting in on themselves, walking on their hands, squeezing and chewing one another. It may sound hellish, but to the demons, hell must seem like heaven. So maybe Cooper’s landscapes are more like a weird kind of utopia where all those insane facial expressions and physical contortions are more an experession of elation or giddiness.

This monograph collects Cooper’s finest, most revealing paintings, ink drawings, pencil sketches, and photographs from the past five years, many of which enjoy homes in the collections of influential collectors and some of Hollywood’s elite. Among this esteemed crowd is the great auteur, Oscar-nominated Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), who provides an enthusiastic introduction for Bent.

Bonus Savings: To celebrate the release of his latest book, for a limited time all in-stock Dave Cooper backlist titles are 1/3 off!

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

Mome Vol. 20 - Fall 2010
by various artists; edited by Eric Reynolds

120-page color/b&w 7" x 9" softcover • $14.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-365-1

Ordering Info & Previews

We have reached the landmark 20th volume of Mome. For those of you who read the box scores, that’s 5 years, 20 volumes, 72 artists, and 2,352 pages of comics.

Much is new in this anniversary volume. Fantagraphics' flagship anthology now boasts a new design courtesy of art director Adam Grano (who also chips in a few pages of art), and we have 4 other artists making their Mome debuts: Steven "Ribs" Weissman's haunting story "This Already Happened" makes its first appearance in print after being serialized at What Things Do; Sergio Ponchione provides a full-color prequel story to his acclaimed series Grotesque (translated from its appearance in Italy's Linus magazine); and we welcome Chicago stalwart Jeremy Tinder and Portland illustrator Aidan Koch to the fold with their new stories.

From our returning champions: another "Blind Date" from Dash Shaw; a forest fable from Sara Edward-Corbett; part 2 of "The White Rhinoceros" from Josh Simmons and The Partridge in the Pear Tree; the continuation of T. Edward Bak's "Wild Man," Derek Van Gieson's "Devil Doll," and cover-boy Ted Stearn's "Fuzz and Pluck in: The Moolah Tree" serials; another atmospheric Conor O'Keefe story; a star-studded story in verse from Nate Neal; and more autobiographical vignettes by Nicolas Mahler. It all adds up to another diverse and rewarding volume of this literary comics juggernaut.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "...[T]he third annual volume proves to be the best yet, combining eccentric drama, bright fantasy, captivating whimsy and appalling human frailty into a package of stunning graphic intensity. [...] Stark, challenging, charming and irresistibly seductive, Love and Rockets: New Stories is a grown up comics fan’s dream come true and remains as valid and groundbreaking as its earlier incarnations — the cutting edge of American graphic narrative." – Win Wiacek, Now Read This!

• Review: "What to say that others haven’t? I’m not steeped enough in Jaime’s work to say that his contribution to this volume [of Love and Rockets: New Stories] was his best ever, but it was very, very strong work, and the reveal at the end so surprised me that I immediately reread the story. [...] I’ve been enjoying the way that Gilbert’s stories and stories-within-stories have interacted, though without being entirely sure why. This volume also led me to wonder to what degree the brothers are aware of what the other is up to, since the stories seemed to strangely reflect each other in ways that previous volumes haven’t." – Brendan Wright, The Wright Opinion

• Commentary: Chris Limb of Catmachine pens a heartfelt ode to las locas: "My old friends are two women who live in a Latina neighborhood in California; I've known them since we were all teenagers. Their names are Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey Glass."

• Plug: Pulitzer Prize-winning author and noted Love and Rockets fan Junot Díaz was talking up the Bros again at the New York Times recently, reports Jennifer B. McDonald at the NYT's Paper Cuts blog

• Plug: At Techland, Douglas Wolk spotlights Jason in a slideshow of "70 Years of Frankenstein Comics": "The brief, wordless 2004 graphic novel You Can't Get There from Here, by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, concerns a love triangle involving Frankenstein (the Doctor), the Monster, and the beehive-hairdo'ed Bride. It's since been collected in Jason's anthology Almost Silent."

• Commentary: At Comics Comics, Joe McCulloch discusses panel layouts and other matters pertaining to the work of Carol Swain