• Review: "Low Moon collect[s] five good examples of Jason's bitter, funny sense of humor... Despite the funny animal surface, Jason's actually one of the best crime writers of this generation, and three of these pieces are very dark crime stories, with a sort of science fiction story about estrangement from love and the title story, a very funny parody of western movie clichés that doesn't require any knowledge of the originals. If you're feeling bleak about the bleak underbelly of human existence, this probably isn't your best relief, but if you can see the humor in it, there's pretty much no better guide working today." - Steven Grant, Comic Book Resources
• Preview: New York Magazine posts an exclusive excerpt from A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross, saying "she writes about her own high-school years with affectionately brutal honesty."
• Plug: "Want a collection of one of the most brilliant comics of the modern era? Fantagraphics has released a collection of Gilbert Hernandez's Luba." - Matt Price, The Oklahoman/Nerdage
Just a stack of original Gilbert Hernandez pages for Love and Rockets: New Stories #2 sitting around the office waiting to be scanned, bathing us all in the brilliant radiance of their presence. You know, nothing to get worked up over.
• Review: "Jaime [Hernandez]'s entry [in Love and Rockets: New Stories #1]... is like a huge riff on what might have happened if superhero comics started their evolutionary path by focusing on more female-centered concerns instead of testosterone-fueled fisticuffs... Gilbert's contributions are hard to describe, mainly because they are so surreal. They really have to be experienced and interpreted on your own." - John Jakala, Sporadic Sequential
• Interview: The National Post's huge spate of pre-TCAF Q&As includes one with Dash Shaw. Sample quote: "When I'm not drawing I just walk around wondering what to do. It's sad."
• Oddity: "...last night I had a dream about an issue of Thrizzle that was in a sideways format and written by Art Spiegelman and illustrated by Steve Ditko..." - Timmy Williams, The Daily Cross Hatch
This exclusive, ultra-limited edition (just 30 copies are available) of the new 600-page hardcover Luba omnibus graphic novel features a special, deluxe cloth binding, and each copy will be signed and numbered with an original hand-drawn sketch by Gilbert Hernandez. See photos below — more images will become available when we receive the books back from Gilbert (if the edition does not sell out beforehand). The ultimate collectible for the elite Beto fan, available ONLY direct from Fantagraphics.
Note: Despite previous indications that this edition would be a future convention exclusive, we have instead decided to make it available via website and phone orders. If you have already ordered the standard edition and would like to upgrade, please call (1-800-657-1100; 206-524-1967 outside the U.S.) or email us before placing your order. Act quickly — supplies are extremely limited!
600-page black & white 7" x 10.25" hardcover • $100.00 SOLD OUT
Due to the somewhat obsessive nature of my link gathering, I had the idea to start calling these posts "Daily OCD: Online Commentary & Diversions." What do you think, readers? Too cutesy-poo? Offensive to sufferers of real OCD?
• List: The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon names "The Ten All-Time Best Long-Running Comics Series," with Love and Rockets Vol. I at #2 ("The best long-running and organic artistic achievement in serial comic book form... The Hernandez Brothers inspired and outworked a greatest generation of comics auteurs. Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez are each among that handful of artists who must be given serious consideration when talking about the best cartoonists working. In Love & Rockets each created fictional worlds for the ages and used them as a vehicle for enormous artistic development, lapping the majority of their peer group. One so inclined could argue with seriousness a top 25 of American graphic novels where 1/3 of the titles listed came from this series") and Acme Novelty Library at #8 ("...a mind-bending achievement... ACME punched right in the scrotum the notion that every issue of a single comic book series had to look like the others... Its primary value is that it presented [Chris] Ware's giant talent to enough of an audience to bring him thousands of hardcore fans... Ware can dream up a single-page that if it were the only thing he ever published people might still know his name")
• List: The A.V. Club's Noel Murray offers commentary on Spurge's list ("There’s no one definitive L&R storyline; it’s just story after amazing story, accumulating over the past three decades like personal correspondence. [...] Ware... turn[ed] comic books into a kind of readable sculpture...") and lobbies for the inclusion of Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix
• Review: "Miss Lasko-Gross' self-caricature in her autobio stories [in A Mess of Everything] is an interesting mash-up of a typical teen with low self-esteem and that of an indignant outsider determined to make her increasingly confident voice heard -- and loudly. [...] Lasko-Gross' greatest strengths as an artist are her character design, gesture and use of body language. It's the way she stages her characters that makes looking at each page interesting... I love the touch of the exaggerated and the grotesque that she injects into her drawings, distorting faces and bodies to reflect emotional tumult." - Rob Clough
• Review: "I read Leah [Hayes]’s whole book, Funeral of the Heart [in one sitting]; I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a beautiful, engrossing book... Amazing." - Anika in London
• Review: "Formerly-suppressed, entirely classic, these stories [in Blazing Combat] are all solid examples of comic storytelling and craftsmanship... [T]he teams here make things look too easy. Not surprising since we’re talking about master artists like Toth, Frazetta, Severin, Crandall and others. The stories have all aged surprisingly well... Highly recommended..." - Matt Maxwell, Robot 6
• Reviewer: At that same Robot 6 link, Miss Lasko-Gross reviews books by Osamu Tezuka and Gabrielle Bell
• Events: Portland, your Free Comic Book Day cup runneth over, as Andrice Arp and the other contributors to the excellent free anthology comic Bird Hurdler will be appearing at various locations throughout town -- Andrice has the full itinerary and details on her blog
• Things to see: Ragged Claws Network presents a few of Jeffrey Jones's Jones Touch strips which can be found in the out-of-print collection of the same name from our Eros Comix imprint (NSFW)
Now older but perhaps not so very much wiser, the hammer-wielding matriarch Luba has relocated to the United States of America, where she continues to contend not only, as an immigrant, with a brand new and not always welcoming culture but also her tempestuous extended family — her eccentric sisters Fritz and Petra, her nurturing but often disapproving cousin Ofelia, her many children ranging from the fully grown (Guadalupe and Doralis) to the latest brood sired by her husband Khamo (Casimira, Socorro, Joselito, and Conchita) — many of them in turn each with her own network of family members, lovers, and friends (including a number of other escapees from Palomar).
These “America” stories — over 100 of them, ranging from quick one-page blackout sketches to bona fide graphic novellas — were originally published in a number of different comics and reprinted in a trilogy of oversized paperbacks. Luba finally collects in one compact, affordable hardcover the entirety of these tales, showcasing Gilbert Hernandez’s wicked wit, great compassion, and uncanny understanding of how human beings love, squabble, and ultimately find a way to make it through this life. Tales of sex, violence and rock and roll rub elbows with stories of love, sensitivity, and understanding — and thanks to the miraculous alchemy of Hernandez’s peerless storytelling, what emerges is a coherent, exciting, funny portrait of one of the richest group of fictional characters ever to spring from a cartoonist’s mind.
NOTE: Stay tuned for the future announcement of the Collectors Edition of Luba, signed by Gilbert Hernandez, with a special binding, and strictly limited to 30 copies, which will most likely be a convention exclusive starting this summer!
All last week and this week we're bringing you a sneak peek at our Fall 2009 - Winter 2010 schedule of releases! Today's excerpt from our latest book distributor's catalog includes Norman Pettingill: Backwoods Humorist, the outsider cartoonist's first retrospective; King of the Flies Vol. 1: Hallorave by Pirus and Mezzo; Scream Queen: Sand and Fury by Ho Che Anderson; and The High Soft Lisp, a new Love and Rockets collection from Gilbert Hernandez. (Note that all the info in this catalog is subject to change along the way to the books' release, including release dates, prices, cover art, book specs, etc.) Click here to download the PDF!
Public confusion surrounding the overwhelming critical regard that the WATCHMEN graphic novel continues to be held in amongst those who haven't read the book but paid good money to see the feature film is rampant. "Wait, are comics for kids, or aren't they?" many have asked. Now that these people have seen WATCHMEN the movie, how do they erase it from memory and avoid wantonly dismissing the entire medium from which it sprung? We're here to help. Point them in the right direction with Fantagraphics Books' new "AFTER WATCHMEN, CLEANSE YOUR PALATE" program.. Please visit our homepage for more information on these fine "essentials" from Fantagraphics Books, perfect for anyone who sees WATCHMEN on film and can't believe that comics are worth taking seriously.
• Review: "Blazing Combat... [is] packed with gloriously miserable... war stories covering everything from the battle of Thermopylae to Vietnam... all beautifully captured by comics legends like Archie Goodwin, Alex Toth, Joe Orlando, and Gene Colan in appropriately murky grays... Fantagraphics has slapped together a nice, hefty... hardbound collection that's worth a read, whether you're a comic nerd, war buff, one-legged veteran, or one of those snooty I-only-read-graphic-novels types. Bombs away." - Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, The Stranger
• Review: "Miss Lasko-Gross's autobiographical comics are the best in the field since [Lynda] Barry and Phoebe Gloeckner put pen to paper. A Mess of Everything is a collection of short (mostly two to three pages) cartoons about high school. All of Lasko-Gross's cartoons are told mostly in shades of gray and brown, and they're brief, unsentimental anecdotes about shoplifting, pointless rebellion, and boys who fall in love too easily." - Paul Constant, The Stranger
• Review: "[Mome] Volume 14 is the best issue yet. About half of the contributors are new to the anthology, and their work — especially 'The Carnival,' Lilli Carré's bizarre, wistful story of damaged love at a state fair, and Spanish cartoonists Hernán Miyoga and Juaco Vizuete's noir about corruption and fame, 'The New Servant' — is skillful, funny, and possessed of a confident literary quality that many cartoonists, try as they might, can never achieve." - Paul Constant, The Stranger
• Review: "...[T]he Luba stories interweave into a panoramic soap opera that are as much about her friends and extended family as about her, a vast, chaotic superstory of a kind most comics creators can only fantasize about creating... [R]ead individually the stories are good, but read as a unit they really take on a surrealistic yet concrete life, infused throughout with a random coherence that nonetheless unifies into a real experience. It's an impressive act." - Steven Grant, Comic Book Resources
• Review: "If [Fletcher] Hanks’s stories were fascinating for their anger, lunacy, and wild urgency, then these rediscovered gems [in Boody. The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers] are a revelation for being every bit as strange, but seemingly on purpose. It’s akin to David Bowie coming along and taking the unstoppable id of The Ramones and The Stooges and crafting something much more complex and layered... Get it together, America. Check out this strange book and dare to dream, one last time, because dark days are ahead, and when the bullets start flying you’ll wish you spent more time laughing." - Tom Batten, Brick Weekly
