Delivered fresh this morning: advance copies of Noah Van Sciver's debut graphic novel The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln, a bracing and evocative account of the President-to-be's struggles with depression as a young man. Having garnered advance praise from both Chester Brown and Lincoln biographer Joshua Wolf Shenk, this is a major work by a prolific rising talent. Stay tuned for more previews and pre-order your copy today to make sure you're among the first to get the book when it's released in September.

More Mattotti coming soon! Here's a first glimpse of a recently-arrived advance copy of The Crackle of the Frost, our new English edition of 2003's El rumor de la escarcha by Lorenzo Mattotti & Jorge Zentner. Wait until you see the stunning full-color interiors... keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming previews! The book should be out around the end of August, maybe the beginning of September — you can be among the first to get it by pre-ordering it now.

I gotta say, even after 9 years of this (well, at least for 6, which is how long I've been here), it's still a pretty big thrill when the advance copies of the new volume of The Complete Peanuts show up at the office. Here's Vol. 18, 1985-1986, and the 1983-1986 Box Set, fresh out of the box. As a long-time Spike fan I love Seth's design for these, and as a big Patton Oswalt fan I'm excited about the new volume's introduction. These guys'll be available in a couple of months — stay tuned for previews!

I'm pleased to report that thanks to a few tips, we've got 103 of the 104 Sunday POGO pages we need for the next book (three of them include black and white panels from book reprints that we've colored to match the surrounding strips, but that's just between you and us).

The August 19, 1951 strip remains the problem child -- or "chile," as one of Kelly's characters might say. We have a 1/3 Sunday page tearsheet, and have been able to track down two of the three panels from the missing top strip as this sequence appears in a book, but the opening panel is nowhere to be found. If push comes to shove, we'll print it this way with a little note explaining to fans that we haven't been able to locate this strip (and will publish a full version in a later book if and when it turns up) -- we did that with a PEANUTS strip back when, and it did eventually turn up.

(click image to enlarge)

Here are your first glimpses of a couple books we have coming out in the August/September timeframe. They're both big, beautiful and unabashed! Up top we have Captain Easy Vol. 3 by Roy Crane, continuing the globe-trotting adventures of Easy and his pal Wash Tubbs from the Sunday pages of 1938-1940. And below that is Sexytime from Portable Grindhouse mastermind Jacques Boyreau, collecting eye-popping vintage skin-flick posters in an oversized coffee-table art book. Hit their respective links for additional sneak peeks and to pre-order your copies, and stay tuned for more previews!

We're coming down the home stretch on the second volume of Walt Kelly's Complete Pogo, and the good news is that we've got literally 99% of the never-beforere-reprinted, full-color Sundays from the two years covered in this collection. The bad news is that we're missing a half dozen panels still.

How can we be missing panels and not strips, you ask? Simple: the Pogo Sunday was put together in an odd configuration in which of the three possible formats -- full page, half page, and third page -- only one, the third page, contained the complete strip. The third page was missing the full top tier, and the full page was missing one square panel in the middle of the strip that was designed to be removable so that the strip could be assembled in this format.

So if we've got the half-page we're fine. If we've got both the full and the third page we're also fine because the two "complete each other" (to be romantic about it).

However, in the case of the following four strips:

July 8, 1951
December 9, 1951
September 14, 1952
October 12, 1952

We have only the full page, which means we're missing that little square. (We actually have a black-and-white version of all except December 9, 1951 hanks to a book reprint, so if push comes to shove we can colorize them and insert them -- but December 9, 1951 is the tricky one, we've only got a bad microfilm version of that panel.)

There is also August 19, 1951, for which we have only the third (meaning we're missing the entire top third of it) -- here again we have access to a black and white version (which seems to have been edited for the book version, another problem) but nothing else.

So we're sending out a call to collectors: If you know of or can find or can put us on the track of HALF or THIRD page versions of the first four strips, and FULL or HALF page versions of that final one... do let us know!

Fantagraphics is proud to announce it has obtained the rights to the first two books by award-winning cartoonist Charles Forsman.

The first book, The End of the Fucking World, will be released during the 2013 Spring / Summer season (exact release date t.b.a.). The 128 page black and white graphic novel, which will include all twelve issues of the critically-acclaimed minicomic series, follows the unfeeling, sociopathic teen James and his earnest girlfriend, Alyssa, on the brink of adulthood.

The second book, to be released during our 2013 Fall Season, is an original graphic novella titled Celebrated Summer. This funny and moving story escalates the humor and tension between two acid-fueled teens, Mike and Wolf, on a turbulent road trip. Celebrated Summer is clocked in at 48 pages of resplendent black and white comics.

Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds says publishing Forsman was a "no-brainer."

"Like a lot of folks, I've been reading Chuck's minis for a few years and loving them," says Reynolds. "He has a keen ability to write brutally honest and hilarious stories about adolescence, and pitch-perfect dialogue. His cartooning is also wonderful; I see echoes of very fine company, from Schulz to Huizenga, but it's entirely Chuck's voice."

Forsman modestly says, "When I was a kid reading Hate and Eightball in my bedroom, I knew I wanted to be the kind of person that would make comics like those. Now that Fantagraphics has agreed to publish my comics, I guess I am now that person."

Charles Forsman graduated from The Center for Cartoon Studies in 2008. That same year he won two Ignatz awards for his series, Snake Oil. Now, Forsman is himself a mini-comics publisher, called Oily Comics, and he also creates a monthly comic strip for Rhode Island newspaper, Mothers News. A consummate small-press advocate himself, Forsman created the Muster List to comic and zine lovers' delight. He lives in Massachusetts with his partner, Melissa, and has a cat named Bruce.

Yes, our Jodelle book is running late, and we're sorry. All we can say is, the project has expanded to something way beyond our original planning and you'll be blown away by the scope of what we've come up with. We're also in the final stages of refining and fixing the coloring of the book itself, which turned out to be a lot more labor- and thought-intensive than we initially thought.

In the meantime, here is a 1968 video clip of the Bee Gees (RIP Robin!) performing "IDEA" against sets designed by the one and only G.P. What a decade!

The days are ticking down to the arrival of Ron Regé Jr.'s The Cartoon Utopia this November. If, like me, you're eagerly looking forward to the book and you're a fan of Ron's hand-lettering (seriously, he doesn't get enough credit for it), you'll be happy to see this Table of Contents Ron's just posted.

I don't think the new drawing by Ron below, "The Harmony of Emptiness and Dependent Arising," is in the book — just some extra eye candy for you:

Late last year Gary Groth interviewed the recently-departed Maurice Sendak for the forthcoming next issue of The Comics Journal (#302, due toward the end of this year). At TCJ.com, Gary shares the story of how his encounter with Sendak came together along with a sneak peek of a few choice snippets from the interview.