Creator of The Cartoon Utopia, Ron Rege will be hosting a workshop at SAW, the Sequential Artists Workshop, in March 2013. In this week-long workshop, students will work with Ron from morning to evening, expanding their minds and vision and translating their ideas and stories to the finished page. Rege has created autobiography, true stories, comics from dreams and histories and lately, intricate spectacles and essays on magic and the unknown. Students will get to work with Rege for a week, to learn his process and connect to The Cartoon Utopia!

Ron's workshop follows a week-long intensive with John Porcellino so you can soak up the knowledge and inspiration from two masters of comics in a short time frame. Sign up now or send your questions to Tom, Leela and the whole cartooning gang.

Wednesday, September 26th

• Brooklyn, NY: Come see Gary Panter kill it with his band Devin, Gary & Ross at Death by Audio! (more info)

• Los Angeles, CA: It's your last chance to see John Pham's art exhibit at Giant Robot's GR2 Gallery. (more info)

Saturday, September 29th

• Brooklyn, NY: Author Pat Thomas presents his acclaimed slideshow presentation for Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. He will also be spinning records from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. (more info)

• Bothell, WA: Nico Vassilakis & Crag Hill, editors of The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008, will perform a collaged reading of essays at the "Convergence on Poetics" conference at the University of Washington Bothell. (more info)

• Long Island City, NY: The good people of Desert Island will host a signing with Ron Regé, Jr. at the seventh annual NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1! Be one of the first to get your hands on a copy of The Cartoon Utopia! (more info)

• Asbury Park, NJ: Stephen DeStefano will be a special guest at the Asbury Park Comic Con! Yes, it is being held in a bowling alley, and yes, there will be beer! (more info)

photo credit: Joshin Yamada, Stumptown 2012

Sunday, September 30th

• Vancouver, BC: Peter Bagge will be a special guest at the Word on the Street National Book & Magazine Festival! He'll be signing at the "Authors Tent" at 1:30 PM, and at "The Word Under The Street" on 3:30 PM. (more info)

• New York City, NY: Pat Thomas will be joined by special guest, Aaron Dixon, the captain and founder of the 1960's Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party, at Kim's Video & Music for a signing of Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975! (more info) 

The great Stephen DeStefano will be a special guest at the Asbury Park Comic Con this Saturday, September 29th! Stop by his table and get your copy of Lucky in Love Book 1: A Poor Man's History signed before it sells out!

The Asbury Park Comic Con is being held at The Asbury Lanes [ 209 4th Ave. ] from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Yes, it is being held in a bowling alley, and yes, there will be beer! 

The Cartoon Utopia is coming to the New York Art Book Fair this weekend, and our very own Ron Regé, Jr. will be signing on Saturday, September 29th!

The good people of Desert Island will host a signing with him at 3:00 PM in the lobby of MoMA PS1 (Gallery F). Be one of the very first to get your hands on this spectacular stunner of a book, which won't be in stores until October!

Free and open to the public, the seventh annual NY Art Book Fair runs from September 28th to 30th, at MoMA PS1 [ 4601 21st Street ], Long Island City, Queens.

In the comics and freelance world, you make your own opportunities and draw for a variety of clients. And sometimes, they happen to be a badass brewing company like Brooklyn Brewery. The Tony Millionaire-designed superhero Brooklyn Defender is also a "draft-only hoppy amber IPA". Kegs will be tapped this September 25th and rolling out to many bars for NYCC (New York Comic-Con). While the drink is draft-only, maybe the Brooklyn Brewery will print out some labels as small posters for that niche cross-over of comics and beer fans? Or some stickers, we looooove stickers. Read more on the origins of the Brooklyn Defender and where you can chug-a-lug while in New York today!

The Love & Rockets 30th Anniversary East Coast Tour, sadly, comes to an end at the Brooklyn Book Festival!

Join Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez at the Saint Francis Auditorium [ 180 Remsen Street ] for some compelling chats this Sunday, September 23rd:

2:00 P.M. // Worlds Built over Time
This all-star panel brings together the narrative geniuses of Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Carla Speed McNeil (Finder), Adrian Tomine (New York Stories) and Gabrielle Bell (The Voyeurs) to discuss how they’ve developed characters, stories, and imagined worlds over serial publications. Moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos, co-organizer, Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. Featuring screen projection.

3:00 P.M. // The Sex Panel: Taboo in Pictures
Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Leela Corman (Unterzakhn), Molly Crabapple (Devil in the Details) and Bob Fingerman (From the Ashes) talk about sex and taboo in comics. What inspires and informs their work and drives their characters (and readers)? From obscenity to art, and the delicious in-between. Featuring screen projection, with viewer discretion advised! Moderated by Heidi MacDonald.

5:00 P.M. // Enduring Unlikable Women
Elissa Schappell (Blue Print), Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets) and Dana Spiotta (Stone Arabia) write difficult, complex female characters. Join these authors in a reading and discussion that looks at the bad boy and the unlikable woman in literature and how they are reviled or celebrated by their audience and creators. Moderated by Meredith Walters, Brooklyn Public Library.

Blacklung
by Chris Wright

128-page black & white 9.25" x 12.25" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-587-7

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

Chris Wright’s Blacklung is unquestionably one of the most impressive graphic novel debuts in recent years, a sweeping, magisterially conceived, visually startling tale of violence, amorality, fortitude, and redemption, one part Melville, one part Peckinpah. Blacklung is a story that lives up to the term graphic novel, that could only exist in sequential pictures — densely textured, highly stylized, delicately and boldly rendered drawings that is, taken together, wholly original.

In a night of piratical treachery when an arrogant school teacher is accidentally shanghaied aboard the frigate Hand, his fate becomes inextricably fettered to that of a sardonic gangster. Dependent on one another for survival in their strange and dangerous new home, the two form an unlikely alliance as they alternately elude or confront the thieves and cutthroats that bad luck has made their companions and captors. After an act of terrible violence, the teacher is brought before the ship’s captain and instructed to use his literary skills to aid him in writing his memoirs. He is to serve as scribe for a man who, in his remaining years, has made it his mission to commit as many acts of evil as possible in order to ensure that he meet his dead wife in hell. As the captain’s protected confidant, finding his only comfort in the few books afforded him, the teacher bears witness to monstrous brutality, relentless cruelty, strange wisdom, and a journey of redemption through loss of faith.

Advance Praise:

“I could not have imagined how impressive a work Blacklung would turn out to be. It’s a graphic novel, both in its vernacular term and in a more literal sense, violent and horrible and poetic at the same time – the sort of thing McCarthy might write if he were more interested in pirates than cowboys or Appalachians. Blacklung is a great book; canonically great.” —Chris Schweizer (Crogan’s Adventures)

“A truly organic and interesting way to cartoon, the complete package of verbal cadence and informative visual style.” – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter

12-page excerpt (download 4.9 MB PDF):

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

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:

Barack Hussein Obama
by Steven Weissman

112-page full-color 7.25" x 9.25" hardcover • $22.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-623-2

See Previews / Order Now

What does it mean to live in America today? If you know there’s no right answer to that question, you’ll want to read Barack Hussein Obama — a book about you; about your country, your family, your president.

Barack Hussein Obama is not a graphic novel. It’s neither a biography nor an experiment, but a whole, fully-realized parallel America, a dada-esque, surrealistic satirical vision that is no more cockeyed than the real thing, its weirdness no more weird, its vision of the world no more terrifying, where the zombie-esque simulacra of Joe Biden and Hillary and Newt and Obama wander, if not exactly through the corridors of power, through an America they made and have to live in, like it or not.

American cartoonist Steven Weissman takes from the lives of the leader of the free world, his friends, his family, his sworn enemies, and gives them a new life that is both withering and oblique, devastating and contemplative, chaotic and pellucid.

Before you lose your will to vote, read Barack Hussein Obama.

Just arrived and shipping now from our mail-order department:

Naked Cartoonists: Drawers Drawing Themselves Without Drawers
by various artists; edited by Gary Groth

156-page full-color 6.25" x 8.25" hardcover • $22.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-538-9

See Previews / Order Now

At last!

Cartoonists — Naked!

In an irreverent twist to the fine art tradition of The Nude, this unique and original collection presents a “stripped” down version of the infamous “Gallery of Rogues” exhibit of cartoonist self-portraits at Ohio State University.

Here you’ll find a cornucopia of cartoonists’ nude self-portraits from the collection of Mark J. Cohen and Rose Marie McDaniel.

The cartoonists inside aren’t afraid to bare all. Here you’ll find: Scott (Dilbert) Adams, Sergio (Mad) Aragonés, Will (The Spirit) Eisner, Will (Mad) Elder, Jules (Village Voice) Feiffer, Al (Mad Fold-Ins) Jaffee, Lynn (For Better Or For Worse) Johnston, Bil (Family Circus) Keane, Russell (Broom-Hilda) Myers, Charles (Peanuts) Schulz, Jeff (Bone) Smith, Art (Maus) Spiegelman, Mort (Beetle Bailey) Walker, Gahan (The New Yorker) Wilson and over 50 more!

Good news for anyone mourning the demise of Michael Kupperman's weekly Up All Night strip (or any Kupperman fan, or anyone who likes funny things): he's now back on the beat doing a regular strip for The Huffington Post. Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington! Kupperman! Huffington!