Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking
by Charles M. Schulz

56-page three-color 5.75" x 5.75" hardcover • $9.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-624-9

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

During his fifty-year career, ninety-nine percent of Charles Schulz's creative energies went into the daily Peanuts comic strip. But once in a while he would create a special something else on the side, and this adorable little package collects two of his best "extras" from the 1960s: two Christmas-themed stories written and drawn for national magazines.

Created in 1963 (two years before the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special) as a supplement for Good Housekeeping magazine, "Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking" comprises 15 original captioned vignettes featuring the entire Peanuts cast of the time — Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Frieda, Violet, Shermy, and Sally — each with a joke or reflection about the season.

"The Christmas Story" is an original tale created for Woman's Day in 1968, this one focusing just on Snoopy and the Van Pelt siblings, with Lucy and Linus each explaining the meaning of the holiday to Snoopy. "I’m going to have to be careful," Snoopy reflects at the end of the story, resting on his doghouse next to his bone-decorated tree; "all this theology could ruin my Christmas."

The book also includes notes on the provenance of the stories and a pocket-sized biography of Schulz. A perfect gift item for the season!

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Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 4: House of the Seven Haunts
by Floyd Gottfredson

280-page black & white/color 10.5" x 8.75" hardcover • $29.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-575-4

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

Who says dead men tell no tales? When grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize, they’ll find fearless Mickey all ready to rumble — as soon as he’s done fighting gangsters, bandits, and international men of mystery, that is! From Africa to Eastern Europe, our favorite big cheese is in for terrifying thrills — and he’s bringing Goofy, Donald Duck, and that big palooka Pegleg Pete along for the ride!

When Mickey sets out to eject "The Seven Ghosts" from Bassett Manor, he finds more than just specters providing the scares! Next, moving smoothly from horror to science fiction, our hero discovers an awesome "Island in the Sky" — and meets its maker, the powerful atomic scientist Dr. Einmug!

Lovingly restored from Disney’s original negatives and proof sheets, House of the Seven Haunts also includes more than 50 pages of spooky supplementary features! You’ll enjoy rare behind-the-scenes art, vintage publicity material, and fascinating commentary by a haunted houseful of Disney scholars.

20-page excerpt (download 3.5 MB PDF):

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Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 3 + 4 Box Set
by Floyd Gottfredson

two 280-page black & white/color 10.5" x 8.75" hardcovers with slipcase • $49.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-576-1

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

Two more volumes of Mickey's thrilling adventures from the 1930s, packaged in a beautiful and sturdy slipcase and priced cheaper than the individual volumes! A perfect gift and/or collector's item.

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Get ready for a second helping of silliness and Sluggo in Nancy Likes Christmas: Complete Dailies 1946-1948 by Ernie Bushmiller, coming this November! It's another three years of goofy gags and graphic genius packaged with pop-art panache, and featuring an intro by Zippy creator and Nancy aficionado Bill Griffith. Our advance copies have arrived here at HQ (obviously) which means we'll be bringing you more previews and sneak peeks in the days to come; in the meantime you can get your pre-order in here, and find a money-saving deal on a combo of this and the previous volume here.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here, with more advance copies of holiday-themed books arriving at our door. Hitting shelves in November, it's the third book in our smash hit Carl Barks Library series, Walt Disney's Donald Duck: A Christmas for Shacktown! Another snappy hardcover collection of some of the greatest comics ever made, presented with our usual commitment to quality... need we say more? How about a 24-page excerpt with the Table of Contents and a big chunk of the featured title story? See that, and pre-order copies for under the tree and on your shelves, right here.

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):

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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

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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

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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!

We just gave you your first glimpse of our big, deluxe collection of Basil Wolverton's Spacehawk; now here's a look at a much smaller Spacehawk package which you can pick up for FREE on Halloween exclusively at participating comic shops: our Spacehawk Halloween ComicFest 2012 mini-comic! Featuring a complete space-faring, monster-jammed Spacehawk story and some fun Spacehawk surprises cooked up by our own Jen Vaughn, this all-ages treat was produced especially for Halloween ComicFest 2012. It's our second 2012 Halloween freebie along with Jack Davis's Tales from the Crypt!

Spaaaaaaaacehaaaaaaawwk! We just got our advance copies of a book that Basil Wolverton fans have been clamoring for for years and anyone who likes weird, wonderful comics will definitely want to check out: a complete collection of Wolverton's amazing Spacehawk sci-fi/Axis-busting adventure comics from 1940-1942. Painstakingly restored in glorious, saturated full color in an oversized (seriously, it's a big book) Flexibound softcover, this magnificent package will have your eyeballs blasting out of their sockets and into deep space. It'll be available in about 2 months; you can pre-order a copy and read a honking 26-page excerpt now, and we'll have more previews to share in between now and then. (And check our next post for more Spacehawky news.)