You may have heard that we're in the process of relocating our warehouse and shipping facilities. As we've now reached a crucial point in the transition, no orders will be shipped from October 7 through October 20, 2010. All orders placed during this period will be shipped after October 20 using the slowest method (Media Rate in the U.S., Air Mail for Canada & Mexico, and DHL Global Mail for the rest of the world) — rush shipping will NOT be available. (See our shipping information page here.)

To cushion the blow, the good news is that during this period SHIPPING IS FREE IN THE U.S. and 50% OFF FOR INTERNATIONAL ORDERS. And on top of that, use the coupon code GOODNEWS at checkout for 20% OFF YOUR ENTIRE ORDER through October 20, 2010! Now's the time to get that holiday shopping done early!

We hope that these discounts compensate for any inconvenience caused by our shipping blackout. Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "Emotionally uncompromising and graphically challenging, You’ll Never Know v.2: Collateral Damage stands out as one of the best comics of the year. Tyler reaches deep into herself, showing the unending dominoes of influence that compose a family. Do yourself a favor and check it out." – Michael C. Lorah, Newsarama

• Review: "But as powerful as this strain of valorization has been, there have been powerful statements of dissent along the way. The Americanization of Emily, for example, or Catch-22. Lucky in Love: Book 1 (by George Cheiffet, with art by Stephen DeStefano) follows their path, though it takes a much more personal, less grandiose tone than those two examples. It’s drawn in a style reminiscent of Disney WWII propaganda cartoons, though DeStefano arranges the backgrounds and perspectives with far greater sophistication." – Joshua Malbin

• Review: "Ryan takes puerile humor to unimagined heights (or depths)... Prison Pit Book Two isn't as much about punchlines and shock tactics. Here, the humor comes via ridiculously long and surreal battles between intergalactic monsters (think bizarre mutations and mass bloodshed). It's sort of a spoof on sci-fi comics, He-Man cartoons, and the over the top male bravado of WWE Wrestling...Prison Pit contains Ryan's signature WTF flourishes, like ass licking creatures, thorny alien vaginas, ghetto slang and Nazi insignia emblazoned 'death hösen' trousers. See you on the playground." – Wilfred Brandt, TwoThousand

• Review: "But the way you're just dropped into Maggie & Hopey, Already In Progress, is pretty much why I continue to recommend this volume [Maggie the Mechanic], rather than its relatively sci-fi-free successors, as the place to start if you're interested in Jaime's work. I understand why that doesn't work for everyone — and it's true, the earliest comics are relatively talky and old-fashioned-looking as befits their influences. But if you start late in the game, you're not just missing dinosaurs and rocketships and robots and superheroes and such — you're missing what really feels like a couple years in the life. Even by page one, we've already missed so much!" – Sean T. Collins, Attentiondeficitdisorderly

• Interview: The Daily Cross Hatch's Brian Heater talked to Drew Weing at SPX. Part 1 gets into the creation of Set to Sea: "The intention was to draw a panel every day and post it. It was supposed to be fun, quick side project, 'it’s the end of the day. I just draw this one, quick, small panel.' And every day it got more and more detailed and complex. By panel two it was too complex to knock off in an hour or two."

• Plug: "Four-Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s... [is a] collection of pre-Code, non-EC horror comics that are every bit as good as the famed EC comics themselves. Here in all its shocking, creepy and gory glory you can see work from Jack Cole, Reed Crandall, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, Wally Wood, and more! This one is a must!" – Benn Ray (Atomic Books), Largehearted Boy

• Coming Attractions: Bleeding Cool 's Rich Johnston continues noticing our 2011 Eurocomics reprints, now reporting on our June edition of R. Macherot's Sibyl-Anne Vs. Ratticus: "Am I the only one that’s seeing a bit of a trend? The trade dress appears similar… is Fantagraphics on a major spreee to translate and publish as many quality French comics as they can? [Yes. – Ed.] In a new imprint or line perhaps? [I'm not sure whether we're considering this a "line" or not, but it's not an imprint. – Ed.]"

Nate Neal has posted a bunch of photos from his book launch & signing at Desert Island in Brooklyn last week for his new graphic novel The Sanctuary. Looks like a good time!

Michael Kupperman takes on R. Sikoryak, Emily Flake, and David Lappé in a special all-comics edition of Literary Death Match on Friday, Oct. 8 at 7:30 (doors at 7:00) at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. More info and links to purchase tickets here.

Thanks to über-fan Chris Diaz for sending us these photos from Dave Cooper's appearance at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco last night, part of his ongoing West Coast book tour.

As part of our warehouse move, we've stumbled across a tiny cache of hardcover editions of the COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS VOLUME 11, first editions complete with signed plates. Even though the REGULAR hardcovers, which have long been sold out too, are selling for north of $100 from on-line stores we're offering these signed ones (only one per customer!) for the original $75 price. What a bargain!

We also found some signed plates for COMPLETE CRUMB VOLUME 10, and can thus once again offer this hardcover for $75. (The only other signed hardcover still in stock is COMPLETE CRUMB VOLUME 6.)

There are VERY FEW of these left, so we'd encourage anyone who wants to buy them to call us at 1-800-657-1100 muy pronto. Trust snail mail or even the website's 24-hour turnaround and you may be S.O.L.

Online Commentary & Diversions, back from a short vacation:

• Review: "In the first volume of Tyler's planned trilogy of graphic memoirs [You'll Never Know], she dug into the eruptive, violent memories of her father's WWII experiences while simultaneously dealing with a husband who decided to go find himself and leave her with a daughter to raise. This second volume is no less rich and overwhelming. [...] While the language of Chicago-raised and Cincinnati-based Tyler has a winningly self-deprecating Midwestern spareness to it, her art is a lavishly prepared kaleidoscope of watercolors and finely etched drawings, all composed to look like the greatest family photo album of all time. The story's honest self-revelations and humane evocations of family dramas are tremendously moving." – Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

• Review: "Friedman's hyper-realistic pen-and-ink and water-color portraits of show business and political luminaries have made their way into the likes of Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone over the years, and a stunning new collection has just been published by Fantagraphics Books — Too Soon?: Famous/Infamous Faces 1995-2010. [...] To say that Friedman's drawings are unsentimental or unsparing is just to scratch the surface. Known for depicting every last liver spot, burst capillary and wrinkle, his work is truly a Warts and All procedure. [...] You might say the super-realistic portraits are loving ones, but only in the sense that you love your own family members, whose soft spots and selfishness one is forced to forgive. Drew Friedman's heart is as big as his capacious eye for the telling detail. Seek him out or forever hold your peace." – David Weiss, Life Goes Strong

• Review: "...Four Color Fear offers some of the finest pre-code comic book horror tales ever produced. Extensively researched, complete with story notes, editor Sadowski compiled a superior collection of non-EC tales, many of which rarely reprinted in color. A 30-page cover art section and a fascinating article by historian John Benson, who also supplied the book's intro, about the little remembered, but prolific Ruth Roche, round out this sensational historical tour of the Golden Age of Horror Comics. Highly recommended!" – Rick Klaw, The SF Site: Nexus Graphica

• Review: "The wait [for Love and Rockets: New Stories #3] has been long, no doubt, but I dare say that it was not only worthwhile, but it has proved an inspiration to continue to have faith in mankind, because with artists like these, it is worth living. For the third annual issue..., Beto gets really wild and Xaime creates a stunning tapestry of memories and narrative levels." – Mauricio Matamoros, Iconoctlán (translated from Spanish)

• Interview: As part of his ongoing "Love and Rocktoberfest," Sean T. Collins posts his 2007 Wizard interview with Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez at Attentiondeficitdisorderly: "I liked drawing rockets and robots, as well as girls. [Laughs] It really was no big game plan. It was almost like, 'Okay, I'll give you rockets and robots, but I'll show you how it's done. I'm gonna do it, and this is how it's supposed to be done!' I went in with that kind of attitude." (Jaime)

• Review: "Like much of Hernandez’s work, there’s light amongst all this darkness, particularly later in this section of Fritz’s story. But [High Soft Lisp] remains a bleak book, with Fritz’s own cheerful optimism one of the few beacons of hope amongst a cast of incidental characters whose main purpose seems only to exploit her. Hernandez rarely performs below his best and this is no exception..." – Andy Shaw, Grovel

• Review: "Vast swaths of Wally Gropius appear — at least to my eye — to be visual homages to images that Hensley particularly loves. (The alternative is that he lays his panels out in his static, staccato rhythm just for that feeling, which is close to the same impulse.) It's all very loud and manic and bright and bizarre, veering towards and away from coherence often within the same panel. [...] The end result has that go-go energy and restless heat of the authentic products of the era Hensley sets his story in..." – Andrew Wheeler, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

• Review: "...[T]his Complete Peanuts series might be the ultimate thing for Peanuts fans! [...] I think the book [Vol. 14] is just wonderful, and I give it and all of the volumes my highest recommendation!" – Catgirl Critics' Media Mewsings

• Interview: Illustration Friday talks to Jim Woodring: "Names and labels don’t matter much. Besides, there are things that cannot be said in words. So if you say them in pictures, are they not things being said? If I draw a hill that looks like a woman, it works differently that if i write 'there’s a hill that looks like a woman.' Also there are clues that one doesn’t want discovered too quickly, or not at all. Because one wants the emanations to proceed from an unknown source."

• Plug: "Nate Neal's first graphic novel [The Sanctuary] is dumbfoundingly ambitious: it takes as its subject nothing less than the invention of comics, in the sense of narrative-in-pictures, meaning that its cast is a bunch of cave-people. Cave-people who speak a cave-person language that Neal has invented himself (he offers the translation of a few key words on its jacket copy, but that's it). The working title of the book was a drawing of a bison. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" – Douglas Wolk, Comics Alliance

• Coming Attractions: Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston did a little Amazon digging and noticed that we're publishing Gil Jourdan by Maurice Tillieux and Jacques Tardi’s Le Démon Des Glaces (The Arctic Marauder) next year

Drew Friedman joined host Bob Andelman on the Mr. Media BlogTalkRadio program this morning; listen to their conversation here or with the embedded player below.

Richard Sala has revealed a delightfully ghoulish new series of all-new artwork on his blog: "Unmasked" is a Halloween portrait gallery, inspired by old-time ads for monster masks, of the fiends and creeps who may be behind the "masks" (meaning the actual faces) of the people you see every day (including, perhaps, the one in the mirror)! Richard will be posting a new set of faces every Monday, Wednesday & Friday for the rest of October. The first installment is here; stay tuned to Richard's blog, and we'll be sure to alert you to future entries in our periodic "Things to See" posts.

New from Drew Friedman's Fine Art Prints concern is this portrait of John Lennon (originally published in TIME for a tribute to Lennon by Paul McCartney), released to commemorate what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday on October 9. Irwin Chusid's typically well-written description and ordering details can be found here.