FLOG! Entries for Mike Baehr - March 2010

Things to see: 3/31/10

mike

Daily clips & strips — click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• At the Cold Heat blog, Frank Santoro (shown) and Ben Jones's layouts for the story in Mome 18

• Paul Hornschemeier's Green Day-on-Broadway illustration (and original line art) for his weekly WSJ spot

• At What Things Do, the concluding half of "Look Out for Big Della" from White Flower Day by Steven Weissman

• Too many creme eggs? How could I not post a fat bunny by Renee French?

• Now that Jon Adams is going to be in Mome I should start featuring his webcomic Truth Serum (and his new weekly strip Friendship Town for the San Francisco Chronicle when that starts showing up — via Robot 6)

• Our own Jason T. Miles came across this gallery of original vintage Comics Journal spot illustrations by Rik (a.k.a. Rick, a.k.a. Doc) Livingston, such as the swashbuckling robots from issue #49 above... and they're for sale at very reasonable prices

Daily OCD: 3/31/10

mike

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "The quality of [Gilbert] Hernandez's cartooning is unassailable. Part of the reason [High Soft Lisp] is so hard to quantify is his uncanny ability to shift focus on a moment's notice, effortlessly jumping from one character to another, suggesting whole thought processes and histories with just a handful of images." – Jason Michelitch, Comics Alliance

• Review: "The sort of horror Columbia presents in Pim & Francie works even better without the trappings of recitation and the cause and effect on which they depend. This sort of dread-inducing fright functions without regard to the recognizable comforts of logic and the niceties of narration. This is visceral, elemental terror that generally festers below — or alongside invisibly — human reckoning. ... Frontwards, backways, sneak-a-peek sideways, it all packs a monumentally disturbing wallop." – Rich Kreiner, "Yearlong Best of the Year," The Comics Journal

• Plugs: The Gosh! Comics Blog highlights recent arrivals Penny Century by Jaime Hernandez ("This volume picks up right after Perla La Loca left off, beginning with the now out-of-print graphic novel Whoa Nellie! which is probably the best female wrestling comic in town") and It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi ("Since only a fraction of Trenches was ever available to us English-speaking folk it’s a nice to see the whole lot of it in one place.")

• Panel: The Comics Journal presents the first part (of three) of a never-before-published panel discussion between Charles Burns , Chip Kidd, Seth and Chris Ware, moderated by Jeet Heer, that occurred October 29, 2005 at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Canada

• Interview: The Daily Cross Hatch 's Brian Heater, who says "Released late last month, Fantagraphics’ massive collection, Newave, has already made a strong case for its place on 2010’s list of most essential reissues," talks to the book's editor Michael Dowers: "I’ve always been into art and stuff, so I thought that [minicomics] would be fun to do. I used to do paintings, I did a bunch of wood carving, I built a few stringed instruments. I was always doing things with my hands. It wasn’t until I discovered minicomics that it just all came together. I never dreamed that, 30 years later, I would be writing a book about this stuff."

More signed Beto bonus bookplates

mike

We just announced that the just-arrived High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez is available exclusively to Fantagraphics customers with this signed bookplate as a FREE bonus:

Well, we have a couple more Beto books now available with signed bookplates for the first time — the Luba omnibus hardcover:

...and The Troublemakers:

Not only that, we've restocked with a fresh supply of signature plates for the volumes Heartbreak Soup, Human Diastrophism, Beyond Palomar, and Chance in Hell. Gilbert was a trouper and plowed through a stack of these while he was in town earlier this month.

Each bookplate is printed on acid-free cardstock and hand-signed by the author. Signature plates are limited in quantity and available only while supplies last and exclusively to individual consumers who purchase the associated books direct from Fantagraphics. We have many more books available with free bonus signed bookplates — click here for the full selection!

Diaflogue: Peter Bagge exclusive Q&A

mike

We are pleased to bring you "Diaflogue," a new semi-regular series of exclusive Q&As with Fantagraphics artists conducted by various members of our staff! Leading things off: Peter Bagge interviewed by Larry “The Love God” Reid, curator and events coordinator for Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery.

We’re anxiously awaiting the arrival of HATE ANNUAL #8. Can we expect the responsibilities of parenthood to have an effect on the maturity of Buddy and Lisa?

Yes — or an effect on their immaturity.

As a father yourself, how much of your child-rearing experience will we find reflected in Buddy?

Lots. The big difference, as always, is that I was the father of a 5-year-old 15 years ago, while Buddy is going through it now, so there are different references and cultural touchstones here and there. The gist is the same, though.

Having served as a stand-in for Leonard on a couple of blind “Stinky Dates” myself, it came as quite a blow when we lost the “Love God.” Any other big surprises in store? Might we see a return of Valerie, for instance?

Maybe down the road. The next issue of HATE ANNUAL will most likely involve Buddy and Lisa going back to Seattle to visit her parents – whom Buddy has never met!

In many ways the fictional story arc of HATE foreshadowed actual events in the social counterculture of “Generation X.” An army of young adults seemingly followed Buddy to Seattle in the early ‘90s, came of age here, then meandered back to their home towns. Many are beginning to cope with delinquent children of their own now. Where do you see the grunge generation headed?

Does anyone in their 40s still think of themselves as “grunge”? God help them if they do! Unless they’re in the Foo Fighters or something.

Tell us a bit about your new Vertigo graphic novel OTHER LIVES.

It’s about 4 different people, each of who have past or present virtual and/or fantasy lives. As the story unfolds, all of their real and fake lives intertwine, and havoc ensues. A fun read!

Any other notable projects on the horizon?

I’m slowly getting started on several: besides another eventual HATE ANNUAL, I also plan on getting back in the REASON Magazine fold. My next feature will be about volunteering for an arts project at a women’s prison. After that I may start a series of biographical profiles for them, dealing with various women writers from the past.

----------

Peter Bagge appears at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery in Seattle on April 17 signing copies of HATE ANNUAL #8 and OTHER LIVES. Also appearing is James Sturm.

Now in stock: It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

mike

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

It Was the War of the Trenches
by Jacques Tardi

120-page black & white 7.75" x 10.5" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-353-8
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi’s. (His very first — rejected — comics story dealt with the subject, as does his most recent work, the two-volume Putain de Guerre.) But It Was the War of the trenches is Tardi’s defining, masterful statement on the subject, a graphic novel that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. Like Remarque, he focuses on the day to day of the grunts in the trenches, and, with icy, controlled fury and disgust, with sardonic yet deeply sympathetic narration, he brings that existence alive as no one has before or since. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. And in a final, heartbreaking coda, Tardi grimly itemizes the ghastly human cost of the war, and lays out the future 20th century conflicts, all of which seem to spring from this global burst of insanity.

Trenches features some of Tardi’s most stunning artwork. Rendered in an inhabitually lush illustrative style, inspired both by abundant photographic documentation and classic American war comics, augmented by a sophisticated, gorgeous use of Craftint tones, Trenches is somehow simultaneously atypical and a perfect encapsulation of Tardi’s mature style. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi’s oeuvre.

It Was the War of the Trenches has been an object of fascination for North American publishers: RAW published a chapter in the early 1980s, and Drawn and Quarterly magazine serialized a few more in the 1990s. But only a small fraction of Trenches has ever been made available to the English speaking public (in now out of print publications); the Fantagraphics edition, the third in an ongoing collection of the works of this great master, finally remedies this situation.

“‘The war to end all wars’ has become a magisterial comic book to end all comic books. I seldom give blurbs, but this book is an essential classic. Among all of Jacques Tardi's towering achievements as a comics artist, nothing looms larger than this devastating crater of a work. It’s a compulsively readable wail of Existential despair, a kaleidoscope of war’s dehumanizing brutality and of Everyman’s suffering, as well as a deadpan masterpiece of the darkest black humor. The richly composed and obsessively researched drawings — perfectly poised between cartoon and illustration — march to the relentless beats of Tardi’s three horizontal panels per page to dig a hole deep inside your brain. This is one Hell of a book.” —Art Spiegelman

"Tardi’s depiction of the First World War is so impassioned and visceral that it can be compared to the work of the artists who actually served in the trenches." – Joe Sacco

Download an EXCLUSIVE 10-page PDF excerpt (3.3 MB). Also, read Tardi's Foreword and Special Thanks, and the editor's About This Book essay, here on the website.

Now in stock: Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole

mike

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole (Softcover Ed.)
By Jack Cole; edited by Alex Chun

104-page b&w/color 7.5" x 10.25" softcover • $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-284-5
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

In the rarefied realm of classic cartoon pin-up art, nobody did it better than Jack Cole. With his quirky line drawings and sensual watercolors, Cole, under Hugh Hefner's guiding hand, catapulted to stardom in the 1950s as Playboy's marquee cartoonist, a position he held until his untimely death at the age of 43.

Jack Cole has been justly celebrated as the creator of Plastic Man and an innovative comic book artist of the 1940s (especially in Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd’s Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits). After finishing his 14-year run on Plastic Man, he found himself looking for something new. According to Cole, his savior was the Humorama line of down-market digest magazines. This girls and gags magazine circuit proved to be the perfect training ground to regain his footing and develop his craft at single panel “gag” cartoons. His ability to render the female form was already without peer. Though he signed his cartoons “Jake,” Cole’s exquisite line drawings and masterful use of ink-wash — a skill he carried over to Playboy — betrayed his pseudonym. In comparison to his contemporaries, however, Cole was probably Humorama’s least prolific artist. Though his images were frequently used for covers, Cole’s cartoons were few and far between, with scarcely a single drawing appearing every five issues.

Along with a foreword by editor Alex Chun, this volume (originally released in a now out-of-print hardcover edition that now fetches high prices on the secondhand market) collects the best of these hidden gems, including several shot from Cole’s stunning original art. Most of these drawings have not seen print elsewhere since their original publication.

"Cole's goddesses were estrogen soufflés who mesmerized the ineffectual saps who lusted after them." – Art Spiegelman

"Jack Cole was a masterful comic book artist who helped define the golden age of his art form." – Village Voice

Download an EXCLUSIVE 10-page PDF excerpt (2.4 MB).

Now in stock: Penny Century: A Love and Rockets Book by Jaime Hernandez

mike

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

Penny Century: A Love and Rockets Book (Love and Rockets Library — Locas Book 4)
By Jaime Hernandez

240-page black & white 7.5" x 9.25" softcover • $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-342-2
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Picking up right after Perla La Loca, the third volume of the definitive “Maggie” series repackaging, this compilation of stories from Jaime Hernandez’s solo comic Penny Century and his subsequent return to Love and Rockets (Volume II) charts the further lives of his beloved “Locas.”

But first... wrestling! Penny Century starts off with a blast with “Whoa, Nellie!,” a unique graphic novelette in which Maggie, who has settled in with her pro-wrestler aunt for a while, experiences that wild and woolly world first-hand.

Then it’s back to chills and spills with the old cast of Hopey, Ray Dominguez, and Izzy Ortiz — including Maggie’s romantic dream fantasia “The Race” and the definitive Ray story, “Everybody Loves Me, Baby.”

Penny Century also features two major “flashback” stories: “Bay of Threes” finally reveals the full back story behind Beatriz “Penny Century” Garcia, Maggie’s long-time, bleached-blonde bombshell friend (who gives this volume its name and can be seen as a super-villainess in the first two issues of Love and Rockets: New Stories), while “Home School” is one of Hernandez’s popular looks at his characters’ lives from when they were little kids, drawn in an adorable simplified Dennis the Menace type style. This volume also includes the Maggie & Hopey Color Fun one-shot, reproduced here in glorious black and white.

Unsure how to build your Love and Rockets collection? See our handy guide on How to Read Love and Rockets.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 14-page PDF excerpt (823 KB).

Now in stock: High Soft Lisp (Love and Rockets Book 25) by Gilbert Hernandez

mike

Just arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship:

High Soft Lisp (Love and Rockets Book 25)
By Gilbert Hernandez

144-page black & white 6.5" x 9.75" softcover • $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-318-7
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

While supplies last this book is available with a signed bookplate (pictured below) as a FREE premium!

“Five six. Hundred twenty-eight pounds. Forty-three twenty-two thirty-six. High soft lisp. Genius level I.Q.” That’s how motivational speaker Mark Herrera sums up Rosalba “Fritz” Martinez, bombshell, former punkette, former psychiatrist, “Z” movie star — in this supremely sexy, constantly surprising graphic novel.

And Herrera should know, being only one of many to fall under Fritz’s “lithping” spell — others including slobbish rocker Scott “The Hog” and high school nerd turned obsessive bodybuilder Enrique Escobar (and that’s just her husbands).

Hernandez has taken this suite of stories (including the 48-page graphic novelette “High Soft Lisp”), originally serialized in Luba's Comics and Stories and the second volume of Love and Rockets, and fleshed them out with a dozen brand new pages, creating an original and inventive (and very steamy) volume that, through its connections to his main character Luba (Fritz is Luba’s half sister, and characters from the Luba stories pop up here), works both as a standalone graphic novel and a further exploration of Hernandez’s rich world.

Unsure how to build your Love and Rockets collection? See our handy guide on How to Read Love and Rockets.

Download an EXCLUSIVE 11-page PDF excerpt (762 KB).

Now in stock: The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 (Vol. 13) by Charles M. Schulz

mike

Arrived in our warehouse and ready to ship to North American customers:

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 (Vol. 13)
By Charles M. Schulz

344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-345-3
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Good grief, Charlie Brown, we're halfway there! That’s right! With this volume, The Complete Peanuts reaches the halfway point of Charles M. Schulz’s astounding half-century run on the greatest comic strip of all time.

These years are especially fecund in terms of new canine characters, as Snoopy is joined by his wandering brother Spike (from Needles), his beloved sister Belle (from Kansas City), and... did you know he had a nephew? In other beagle news, Snoopy breaks his foot and spends six weeks in a cast, deals with his friend Woodstock’s case of the “the vapors,” and gets involved in a heated love triangle with Linus over the girl “Truffles.”

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 features several other long stories, including a rare “double track” sequence with two parallel narratives: Peppermint Patty and Snoopy travel to participate in the Powderpuff Derby, while Charlie Brown finally gets to meet his idol Joe Shlabotnik. And Peppermint Patty switches to a private school, but commits the mistake of allowing Snoopy to pick it for her; only after graduation does she realize something’s not quite right!

Plus: A burglary at Peppermint Patty’s house is exacerbated by waterbed problems... Marcie acquires an unwanted suitor... Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty become desk partners... The talking school building collapses... Lots of tennis jokes... and gags starring Schroeder, Lucy, Franklin, Rerun, Sally, and that vicious cat next door. It’s another two years of Peanuts at its finest! Featuring an introduction by comedian Robert Smigel (Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Saturday Night Live).

"The Complete Peanuts has framed Charles Schulz’s enduring masterpiece about as well any lifelong fan could’ve hoped." – "The Best Comics of the '00s: The Archives", The A.V. Club

Download an EXCLUSIVE 14-page PDF excerpt (1 MB) containing all the strips from January, 1975!

Now in stock: Sand & Fury: A Scream Queen Adventure by Ho Che Anderson

mike

Arrived at our warehouse and ready to ship:

Sand & Fury: A Scream Queen Adventure
By Ho Che Anderson

144-page two-color 7.5" x 9" softcover • $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-321-7
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Sand & Fury is a story of blood, of sex, of death — of sound and retribution. It opens as a girl by the side of a desert road accepts a ride from a stranger. How could she know that behind that wheel sits the angel of death?

Of course, even the angel of death once had a life. During that life, death was a successful business woman, with a great career and an even greater future. It’s true she could be a little cavalier with her innate gifts; she had, after all, broken the heart of everyone who had ever loved her.

And then, one day, the monster entered the woman’s life and changed everything forever.

Inspired by the work of filmmakers like David Lynch and Dario Argento and cartoonists like Richard Sala and Charles Burns, a spiritual cousin to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and The Tenant, Sand & Fury is at once an homage to those classic horror sources and a contemporary romantic thriller, drawn in a stark, chiseled, expressionistic line that evokes modern attitudes and classic terror at the unknown and unknowable.

Download an EXCLUSIVE PDF excerpt containing the first 10 pages of the story (1.9 MB).

"In Sand & Fury, Ho Che Anderson has done what I would have previously regarded as impossible. He’s found the illegitimate child of Faulkner and Lovecraft buried alive in a paranoiac’s terrified vision of the desert of the American Southwest... in a grave uncovered by the shriek of his own degenerate perversion of a banshee, for fuck’s sake." – Howard Chaykin

"Anderson’s blocky figures and Expressionistic use of caricature are augmented by processed period photography, an approach that calls to mind the minimalist abstractions of Frank Miller. The characters are frequently depicted in high-contrast shadow, wherein features become flattened and skin colour is often difficult to determine. The resulting aesthetic is striking and symbolic." — The Guardian

Now in stock: King of the Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave by Mezzo & Pirus

mike

Arrived at our warehouse and ready to ship:

King of the Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave
By Mezzo & Pirus

64-page full-color 9" x 12.5" hardcover • $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-320-0
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Set in a suburb that is both nowhere and everywhere, King of the Flies is a glorious bastard, combining the intricacy and subtlety of the best European graphic novels with a hyperdetailed, controlled noir style derived from the finest American cartoonists.

Mezzo and Pirus, previously best known in Europe for a series of cynical, brutal gangster stories, have abandoned their guns and gals for this cycle of suburban stories, but in King of the Flies the violence has just (for the most part) been interiorized.

King of the Flies first appears to be a series of unrelated short stories, each starring (and narrated by) a different protagonist, but it soon becomes obvious that these seemingly disparate episodes weave together to form a single complex narrative, with events that are only glimpsed (or even referred to) revisited from different perspectives — revolving around Eric, a ne’er-do-well, drug-taking teenager at war with his stepfather and, apparently, the whole world. (He is the titular King.)

King of the Flies is designed as a trilogy of albums, which will combine to form a single graphic novel of stunning intricacy and intensity. (Vol. 2, “The Origin of the World,” will be released by Fantagraphics in Fall/Winter 2010.)

Download an EXCLUSIVE 7-page PDF excerpt containing the entire first chapter (3.1 MB).

New Comics Day 3/31/10

mike

A heaping helping of Fantagraphics is due to arrive in comic shops this week. More info and your rundown of blogospheric plugs follows:

High Soft Lisp (Love and Rockets Book 25)
By Gilbert Hernandez

144-page black & white 6.5" x 9.75" softcover • $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-318-7

At Comics Alliance, Douglas Wolk calls it "The most riveting, chilling graphic novel I've read so far this year" and "a great, shockingly dark piece of work." At Comics Comics, Joe McCulloch describes this correctly as "the newest of Fantagraphics ‘classic’ line of tall(-ish), thin(ner) softcovers, an all-Beto book collecting short stories featuring the character Fritz." The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon calls this and Penny Century below "Some of the best comics in the world..."

Penny Century: A Love and Rockets Book (Love and Rockets Library — Locas Book 4)
By Jaime Hernandez

240-page black & white 7.5" x 9.25" softcover • $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-342-2

This is "another 240-page entry in the short(er), fat(ter) line of catch-up-quick softcovers which you can promise yourself to, body and soul, in the hopes of an eventually comprehensive reading experience," says Comics Comics' Joe McCulloch, who also declares "my heart belongs to the 1996 miniseries Whoa, Nellie!, a leaner-than-usual action piece adoringly dotted with monolithic images of lady wrestlers in action – it’s like a superhero comic of the period, only just perfectly different enough." Douglas Wolk at Comics Alliance says "It's all great — I'm not sure Jaime could draw a bad comic if he tried..."

It Was the War of the Trenches
by Jacques Tardi

120-page black & white 7.75" x 10.5" hardcover • $24.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-353-8

At The Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon declares "I'd say this is the release of the week: one of the great works from one of the great, important cartoonists." Comics Comics' Joe McCulloch says of Tardi "few artists possess dual OG certification with RAW and Heavy Metal" and calls the book "a human patchwork of WWI service, perhaps the artist’s keystone work." At Comics Alliance, Douglas Wolk describes it as "Tardi's ferocious graphic novel about the horrors of war in general and World War I in particular..."

Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole (Softcover Ed.)
By Jack Cole; edited by Alex Chun

104-page b&w/color 7.5" x 10.25" softcover • $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-284-5

Joe McCulloch sums it up at Comics Comics: "You may have missed this too, when Fantagraphics released it as a hardcover in 2004 – now these 104 pages of vintage Humorama digest illustrations won’t run you $78.99 new, if you believe Amazon sellers." Tom Spurgeon recalls that the original hardcover edition of this "was a really nice book" in his Comics Reporter recommendation.

Previews and information a-plenty can be had at the links above so you can gather knowledge before you gather your wallet and head out to your local shop.

Esther Pearl Watson print at Tiny Showcase

mike

If I had 20 bucks to spare I would totally buy this new Esther Pearl Watson print from Tiny Showcase right now. Get yours before it sells out — proceeds go to the Autism Society.

Things to see: 3/30/10

mike

Daily clips & strips -- click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• More kids-book spoofs from the dream team of Johnny Ryan & Julia Wertz

• Speaking of Johnny, he uploaded this E.T.-meets-Destro drawing without explanation

• Various sketch ephemera from Anders Nilsen

• Renee French celebrates 2 years of daily art-blogging today and the world reaps all the reward

Daily OCD: 3/30/10

mike

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• List: Flashlight Worthy asks various comics bloggers to name some Great Graphic Novels By Women About Women: David Welsh says "[Linda] Medley's Castle Waiting is as funny and generous a mash-up of fairy tale and feminism was you could wish for. ... Medley focuses on quiet moments that reveal character rather than constructed intersections of fairy-tale tropes. Her small observations about human (or mostly human) nature are always warm and potent..."

• Review: Comics Comics' Joe McCulloch looks back at Paul Ollswang's out-of-print 1992 comic Doofer: Pathway to McEarth: "I’d say they don’t make ‘em like this anymore, but they barely made ‘em at all back then, unless I’ve missed some rich vein of socio-political-sci-fi satire-by-way-of-’60s-underground-homage-by-way-of-early-20th-century-Sunday-funnies running circa the Image Revolution. This actually might be the all-around least fashionable comic of ‘92, which naturally makes it an eminent candidate for revisitation."

• Plug: German site Nerdcore recommends Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box for "trash fans"

Gary Groth: The Early Years, Part 3 (Fantastic Fanzine #12, 1970)

mike

At ComicAttack.net, Ken Meyer Jr. looks at another piece of historical Gary Groth juvenilia, the 12th issue of Fantastic Fanzine from 1970 (that's the full-color cover by Robert Kline above), saying "I hope you will be interested in all the elements that make this fanzine such a great representative of the enthusiasm, the imagination, the skills, and the fun that fueled fandom at this time." You can download the whole issue as a 62.1 MB PDF file at the link.

Sneak peek of Weathercraft by Jim Woodring at Publishers Weekly

mike

Publishers Weekly presents a 6-page excerpt from Jim Woodring's new graphic novel Weathercraft today! Observe as a newly-enlightened Manhog explores the Unifactor and encounters a startlingly familiar face.

Warehouse find: Jim Vol. II #1-6 Pack by Jim Woodring, with Signed Plate

mike

Discovered in a cranny in our warehouse:

Jim Vol. II #1-6 Pack
by Jim Woodring

six 24-page b&w/color comic books with signed plate • $20.00

UPDATE: Sold Out!

It is with pride and pleasure that Fantagraphics Books presents the second "volume" of Jim, Jim Woodring's comix autojournal. Combining the best aspects of Woodring's now out-of-print Jim magazine (most of which is available in The Book of Jim) with his work in Tantalizing Stories, the new Jim was released on a regular quarterly basis in the deluxe part-color Eightball format. Woodring's work in Jim is derived primarily from his richly detailed and message-laden dreams and from bizarre events and observations which occur during his waking hours (which Jim calls his "other" life). With painstaking fidelity he recreates these experiences and impressions in comics, drawings, and text, drawing the reader into an eerily complete world that is both unprecedented and familiar. The second incarnation of Jim features Frank, Manhog, Pupshaw, Pushpaw, and Pulque in page after page of short and long stories, as well as the return of "Jimland Novelties," letters pages, and much more.

This special limited-edition pack includes all 6 issues of the series shrinkwrapped with a special plate signed by Jim Woodring.

Things to see: 3/29/10

mike

Daily clips & strips -- click for improved viewing at the sources:

• Dame Darcy is selling framed original spot illustrations from Frightful Fairytales in her Etsy shop for crazy cheap (if they're not already all sold). How can you resist Zombie Jesus?

• Amazing Facts and Beyond with Leon Beyond keeps bubbling along with Kevin Huizenga's latest

• Thank goodness Renee French is giving the teeth a rest — this guy's name is Rocky

• From Hans Rickheit, page 17 of Ectopiary and another unpublished Cochlea & Eustachia strip

• All those nutty Derek Van Gieson pages I've been posting here lately? They're part of his self-published Whiskey Is the Key Says Me, available at the MoCCA fest in a couple weeks

• What it says on the tin: Noah Van Sciver depicts scenes from a juggalo concert for the Denver Westword

• Steven Weissman's peanut butter & jelly ice cream sandwiches and the illustrated tags thereof (I sure hope he's not kidding about that recipe book)

• The continuation of Gabrielle Bell's new Lucky story "Manifestation"

• "Red Haired Girl in a Pattern Vest" by Mark Kalesniko

Daily OCD: 3/29/10

mike

Online Commentary & Diversons:

• Review: "A marvel... [Supermen!] is a non-stop visual delight as much for the art as for the colors as for the audacious (sometimes by default) layouts: A way of doing comics that would soon disappear and would return only in the 1960s and 1970s with the ascent of American underground comics, for the early days of comic books were like the underground: Everything was possible, especially the impossible. You absolutely must buy this book..." – Jean-Pierre Dionnet (co-founder, Les Humanoïdes Associés; translated from French)

• Review: "King of the Flies is a very surreal and unsettling tale. Prius does a wonderful job creating a horror-driven universe that could really happen in real life, making readers second-guess the characters they invest 64 pages in. Who are these people? What are their goals? How are they all even related to each other in the larger picture? We don’t get those answers until toward the end, but the ride there is always interesting. An ominous tone is maintained throughout, even during the funnier moments. ... [I]t’s definitely worth picking up if you enjoy dark tales of the human psyche." – Freddie Young, Fangoria

• Review: "You may want to reread certain passages — not just to fully comprehend the plotline, but to gaze upon the stark, raw artwork. Each panel is made up of striking black-and-white images that notably recall Richard Sala’s vibrant illustrations and Frank Miller’s artwork in the Sin City series. Only during acts of unflinching violence does the page becomes flushed with red. Ho Che Anderson has written and drawn a puzzling, dark tale about a mysterious woman with alluring secrets. Sand & Fury: A Scream Queen Adventure is a complex tale that uniquely blends eroticism and horror." – Jorge Solis, Fangoria