Here's our latest batch of newly-minted books and it's a heavy-hitting group! They're all in stock and shipping now.
For fans of the classics we have the third and fourth books in our EC Comics Library series, featuring artwork by Jack Davis and Al Williamson, plus our astounding career-spanning book of B. Krigstein's comic work. If you like Pop Art graphics, sexy satire and absurd adventure you'll love our new definitive edition of Guy Peellaert's long out of print classic. The new graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez is a major work by a comics genius. We've got the 19th (!) volume of The Complete Peanuts, still hilarious after all these years! Plus reprints of books collecting work by Charles Burns & Robert Crumb -- you might've heard of those guys.
Remember, our New Releases page always lists the 20 most recent arrivals, and our Upcoming Arrivals page has dozens of future releases available for pre-order.
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50 Girls 50 and Other Stories (The EC Comics Library)
illustrated by Al Williamson et al.; written by Al Feldstein et al.
264-page black & white 7.25" x 10.25" hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-577-8
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BARGAIN COMBO:
Price: $57.98 $46.38
Order one of our EC Comics Library volumes and receive the Jack Davis's Tales from the Crypt Halloween mini-comic shown here as a FREE bonus! Limit one per customer while supplies last.
Barely old enough to drink when he joined the EC Comics stable, Al Williamson may have been the new kid on the block, but a lifetime of studying such classic adventure cartoonists as Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant) had made him a kid to reckon with — as he proved again and again in the stories he created for EC's legendary "New Trend" comics, in particular Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.
As a result of Williamson's focus, it's possible to compile all of Williamson's "New Trend" EC work into one book — which Fantagraphics is finally doing here. Sci-fi aficionados should note that although most of the stories were written by Al Feldstein, 50 Girls 50 features three of EC's legendary Ray Bradbury adaptations, including "I, Rocket" and "A Sound of Thunder" — and a unique curiosity, a strip adapted from a short story submitted by a teen-aged Harlan Ellison.
Williamson ran with a gang of like-minded young Turks dubbed the "Fleagle Gang," who would help one another out on assignments. Thus this book includes three stories upon which Williamson was joined by the legendary Frank Frazetta, and one story ("Food for Thought") where Roy Krenkel provided his exquisite alien landscapes, to make it one of the most gorgeous EC stories ever printed. As a supplementary bonus, 50 Girls 50 includes three stories drawn by Fleagles sans Williamson: Frazetta's Shock SuspenStories short "Squeeze Play"; Krenkel's meticulous "Time to Leave"; and Angelo Torres's "An Eye for an Eye," an EC story that famously fell prey to censorship and was not released until the 1970s. As with other Fantagraphics EC titles, 50 Girls 50 also includes extensive story notes by EC experts.
'Tain't the Meat... It's the Humanity! and Other Stories (The EC Comics Library)
by Jack Davis & Al Feldstein
224-page black & white 7.25" x 10.25" hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-578-5
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With its pitch-perfect blend of laughs, terror, and gore, as delineated by some of the finest cartoonists to ever draw a rotting, reanimated corpse, Tales from the Crypt (1950-1955, R.I.P.) remains the quintessential horror comic of all time.
And no cartoonist better encapsulated the grand-guignol spirit of Tales from the Crypt than Jack Davis, who, even at the earliest stage of what would become a six-decade career, possessed a level of skill that would elude most other cartoonists during their lifetimes. His maniacs were more homicidal, his victims more terrified, his dismemberments bloodier, and his werewolves more feral than anyone else's.
'Tain’t the Meat... It's the Humanity and Other Stories collects all of Davis's Tales from the Crypt classics, from EC's wicked revenge fantasies ("The Trophy!" and "Well Cooked Hams!") through the outright supernatural (the voodoo yarn "Drawn and Quartered!" and "Concerto for Violin and Werewolf") to the origin of the Crypt-Keeper ("Lower Berth") — and the legendary splatter gross-out of the title story.
This volume also includes biographical notes and essays, and an ultra-rare EC bonus: Davis's completely redrawn 3-D version of "The Trophy!" — back in print for the first time since its original appearance 60 years ago (and for the first time in regular, easy-on-the-eyes 2-D).
"...I have a spot in my heart for Jack Davis. I mean, that guy just makes me laugh. Even when he's drawing a gross-out, he just makes me laugh. I love his shoes, the way he draws shoes, and knuckles... there's just something about Jack Davis' stuff that blows me away." – George A. Romero
The Adventures of Jodelle
by Guy Peellaert & Pierre Bartier
164-page full-color 10.25" x 13.25" hardcover • $45.00
ISBN: 978-1-60699-530-3
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Ensconced in the avant-garde of the extraordinary social and cultural upheavals that were drawing 1960s Europe into the building wave of postmodernism, a Belgian advertising dropout, fed up with the corporate world, conceived the first "adult comic book" virtually off the top of his head.
By creating The Adventures of Jodelle, a deluxe comics album that wore its revolutionary Pop sensibility on its sleeve, Guy Peellaert obliterated the conventions of what had up to that point been a minor, childish medium. Ironically appropriating the face and body of the teen idol Sylvie Vartan, he fashioned a new kind of heroine, a sensual, parodically beautiful spy. For his setting he chose a defiantly anachronistic Roman Empire, into which irrupted the most flamboyant symbols of a conquering America, the originator of all fantasies.
Every page of this fascinating saga features a flood of topical references and in-jokes, operating playfully on the border that separated so-called "high" and "low" cultures. Peellaert drew from the most exciting stimuli of his time, subjecting them to his powerful formal innovations: Pop Art, extreme fashions, strident advertising, shock graphics, and cinematic techniques all collided in virtuoso compositions of extreme sophistication, whose inspirations ranged from classical paintings to Gottlieb pinball machines.
Published to thunderous acclaim in France in 1966 and then throughout Europe and in the U.S., Jodelle was an instant classic, whose influence would spread far beyond the confines of comics. It also triggered Guy Peellaert's "Pop Period," a creative whirlwind marked by his 1967 creation of PRAVDA, an unforgettable character that has since been acknowledged as a major component of the European Pop movement.
Completely remastered and featuring a new translation, this long-awaited reprinting of The Adventures of Jodelle is accompanied by an 80-page, lushly-illustrated textual supplement created in partnership with the artist's estate which traces the creative path travelled by this maverick artist, who multiplied his chosen means of expression, skipping from comics to cinema and moving through fashion, periodicals, and television, including collaborations with many of the great figures of mythical 1960s-era Paris, from Serge Gainsbourg to Yves Saint Laurent.
Big Baby (New Printing)
by Charles Burns
96-page black & white 9" x 12" softcover • $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-56097-800-8
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From the creator of the 2005 hit graphic novel Black Hole and the recent trilogy X'ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull comes this new softcover edition of his other masterpiece of modern horror. Big Baby is a particularly impressionable young boy named Tony Delmonte, who lives in a seemingly typical American suburb until he sneaks out of his room one night and becomes entangled in a horrific plot involving summer camp murders and backyard burials. Burns' clinical precision as an artist adds a sinister chill to his droll sense of humor, and his affection for 20th-century pulp fiction permeates throughout, creating a brilliant narrative that perfectly captures the unease and fear of adolescence.
The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 2: Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle (New Softcover Ed.)
by Robert Crumb
144-page black & white/color 8.5" x 11" softcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-0-93019-362-1
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Another fascinating collection of early work from one of America's most original, trenchant, and uncompromising artists. "Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle" features several key stories from Crumb’s pre-underground, homemade comics of the early 1960s (such as Farb and Arcade), with stories featuring early Crumb characters Fritz the Cat, Jim, Mabel, and Little Billy Bean. It also includes "Roberta Smith, Office Girl," Crumb's charming 4-panel strip for the American Greetings employee newsletter; a full-color section of cover illustrations; copious reproductions from Crumb's sketchbooks; and more of the biographical introduction by Crumb confidant Marty Pahls.
1989 Harvey Award Winner, Best Domestic Reprint Project
The Complete Peanuts 1987-1988 (Vol. 19)
by Charles M. Schulz
344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $28.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-634-8
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So what do we have for Peanuts fans this time around?
An ill-considered attempt at flirting sends Charlie Brown to the school doctor... Linus's ongoing romance with the too-young "Lydia" of the many names continues... Snoopy is joined in the trenches by his brother Spike... Sally engages in a career as a playwright by penning the school Christmas play but mixes up Gabriel and Geronimo... A hockey mishap sends Snoopy to the doctor for knee surgery, in a (clearly autobiographical) sequence that lasts only until everyone figures out that dogs don’t have knees... Linus and Lucy’s kid brother Rerun begins to take on the greater role that will lead to him being one of the dominant characters in the 1990s... and Snoopy, inevitably, writes a "kiss and tell" book.
As we reach the 19th (!) book in this epochal, best-selling series collecting arguably the greatest comic strip of all time and head toward the end of the 1980s, Charles Schulz is still as inventive, hilarious, and touching as ever... and this volume even features a surprise format change, as the daily strip switches from its trademark four-square-panels format to a more flexible one-to-four-variable-panels format which, along with Schulz's increased use of gray tones, give this volume a striking, distinctive look.
This volume's introduction is by a fellow comic strip legend, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau.
PEANUTS ® & © Peanuts Worldwide
Julio's Day
by Gilbert Hernandez
104-page black & white 7.5" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-606-5
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It begins in the year 1900, with the scream of a newborn. It ends, 100 pages later, in the year 2000, with the death rattle of a 100-year-old man. The infant and the old man are both Julio, and Gilbert Hernandez’s Julio’s Day (originally serialized in Love and Rockets Vol. II but never completed until now) is his latest graphic novel, a masterpiece of elliptical, emotional storytelling that traces one life — indeed, one century in a human life — through a series of carefully crafted, consistently surprising and enthralling vignettes.
There is hope and joy, there is bullying and grief, there is war (so much war — this is after all the 20th century), there is love, there is heartbreak. While Julio’s Day has some settings and elements in common with Hernandez’s Palomar cycle (the Central American protagonists and milieu, the vivid characters, the strong familial and social ties), this is a very much a singular, standalone story that will help cement his position as one of the strongest and most original cartoonists of this, or any other, century.
Messages in a Bottle: Comic Book Stories by B. Krigstein
edited by Greg Sadowski
272-page full-color 8" x 10.5" softcover • $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-60699-580-8
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Working in comic books for just over a decade in the 1940s and '50s, Bernard Krigstein applied all the craft, intelligence, and ambition of a burgeoning "serious" artist, achieving results that remain stunning to this day. While his legend rests mostly on his landmark narratives created for EC Comics, dozens of stories for lesser publishers equally showcase his singular draftsmanship and radical reinterpretation of the comics page.
Harvey and Eisner Award-winning Krigstein biographer Greg Sadowski has assembled the very best of the artist’s work, starting with his earliest creative rumblings, through his glory days at EC, to his final daring experiments for Stan Lee’s Atlas Comics — running through nearly every genre popular at the time, be it horror, science fiction, war, western, or romance.
This edition reprints the out-of-print 2004 hardcover B. Krigstein Comics, with a number of stories re-tooled and improved in terms of reproduction, and several new stories added. Legendary EC colorist Marie Severin, in her last major assignment before her retirement, recolored 20 stories for this edition. The remainder has been taken from printed comics, digitally restored with subtlety and restraint. Original art pages, photostats from Krigstein's personal archives, and an extensive set of historical and editorial notes by Sadowski round out this compelling volume.
