Fantagraphics is thrilled to welcome world-famous cartoonist and filmmaker Max Andersson to town for the Seattle International Film Festival. He'll be screening his first feature-length film Tito on Ice at the SIFF Cinema Uptown on Sunday, May 26th at 8:00 PM, with an encore screening on Tuesday, May 28th at 3:30 PM.
To promote their Fantagraphics book Bosnian Flat Dog, Andersson and fellow Swedish artist Lars Sjunnesson toured the countries of former Yugoslavia with a mummified Marshal Tito in a refrigerator.
Now comes the documentary, Tito on Ice, which takes Super 8 footage of their tour and animates it with cardboard cutouts and garbage and other recycled materials. The result is a surreal trip through the Balkans that is part promotion, part performance art, and part history of Marshal Tito and the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It’s also about the underground arts and music venues that popped up when the country split apart.
Through it all there is a comics creator’s eye at work: live-action interviews suddenly switch to animation, and more than 50 sets were built for the film, all shot and animated on Super 8 film. Tito on Ice is a joyous trip through the war torn subconscious of an underground artist.
Max will be in town on Sunday night to introduce the film and engage in a Q&A afterwards. Fantagraphics will be on site, selling you copies of Bosnian Flat Dog to get signed. Tito on Ice is screening at the SIFF Cinema Uptown, located at 511 Queen Anne Avenue North. See you there!
• Review: "What elevates Werewolves of Montpellier into the top rank of Jason’s work is the way he manages to dovetail the story’s genre elements with the emotional narrative. ... Overall, this is a pitch-perfect, expertly-crafted story by an artist who is clearly working in his comfort zone. It’s remarkable to see a creator go to the same well so many times and yet continue to produce nuanced and powerful variations on the same themes." – Rob Clough, The Comics Journal
• Review: "...Billy Hazelnuts and the Crazy Bird is as good as the first book. It has the same atmosphere, the same sense of humor and almost all the [same] positive elements..." – Thomas Papadimitropoulos, Comicdom (translated from Greek)
• Review: "What speaks to this reader ten years later is how emotionally satisfying on a primal, child-like level these highly complicated and ornately drawn stories [in Death & Candy #1] can be, how much easier they are to read now as opposed to then when it seemed Andersson was making some of the strangest comics on earth. He wasn't; he was making normal comics very strangely." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter
The Harvey and Eisner nominated anthology of action, thrills, chills and trangression is back with a third volume! Anything goes in Hotwire, eschewing literary high-mindedness for a pure, gut-wrenching viscerality that you can tune in and rest your brain on after a long day.
Hotwire the third leaps off the page from the get-go with David Sandlin’s “Infernal Combustion,” about boozing it up in a broke-down caddy, and Tim Lane’s bit of freight-hopping grit, “Spike.” Underground comics legend Mary Fleener returns with “The Judge,” a true tale about her own life fending off thugs… with a .38! Meanwhile, Hotwire Captain Glenn Head spins the biography of German surrealist Hans Bellmer as a down and out Vaudevillian in decadent Weimar Berlin. R. Sikoryak turns in a brand new batch of "Masterpiece Comics", as Dennis the Menace stars as Prince Hamlet! Other creepy delights: Rick Altergott delivers a fable of a child-molesting clown pleasuring himself in the suburbs, while Matti Hagelberg’s “Passion of Atte” is a modern-day Dante’s Inferno of comics.
There’s also more knockout work and crazy visuals by Mark Dean Veca, Johnny (Angry Youth Comix) Ryan, Mats?!, Max Andersson, Sam Henderson, Steve Cerio, Stephane Blanquet, Doug Allen, Michael (Tales Designed to Thrizzle) Kupperman, Danny Hellman, Mack White, David Paleo, Chadwick Whitehead, Onsmith, Karl Wills and Jayr Pulga. Looking for laffs? A psychic jolt? A partner for your next trip? Look no further than… Hotwire!
Download an EXCLUSIVE 15-page PDF excerpt with a sampling of pages from throughout the book (16.5 MB).
Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!
Today's installment features Swedish artist Max Andersson, whose work Charles Burns describes as "my kind of fun":
Alka Seltzer and Angina Pectoris have all the luck — bad, that is. They've been ejected into the street because their apartment was put to sleep, Angina had to abort their child (the result of a malfunctioning Safe-Sex bodysuit) — how could it get worse? When a friendly stranger offers them his apartment, things seem to be looking up... but then Angina gets a call from the Netherworld. It's her aborted fetus: he's drunk and he's pissed off. So begins Pixy, which Neil Gaiman calls "the best comic I've read this year" — a 65-page journey into a nightmare world unlike any you've ever seen before. The rest of the book follows Alka's attempts to infiltrate the Kingdom of the Dead (where time runs backwards and is sold by the pint to time-addicts), in order to track down the malevolent Pixy and kill him for good. Shedding bodies and identities with some regularity (Pixy himself blows one to smithereens), Alka finds his own sense of reality eroding further and further during his sojourn down under — and it doesn't help at all when Pixy, now his best friend, accompanies him back up to the Land of the Living, where the gun-happy undead sprite wreaks unspeakable havoc. Pixy is the first major work by Swedish cartoonist Max Andersson, and it combines the freewheeling-yet-obsessive graphic and narrative weirdness of such contemporary North American cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Kaz and Charles Burns with a bizarre yet coherent story that mixes coal black humor, barbed satire, wild surrealism, and stark horror in a totally new way — a feast for the (preferably deranged) mind and the (preferably diseased) eye.
72-page black & white 9" x 12" softcover regularly $11.95 • ON SALE $8.96 Order Now
The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. A grenade shell from a Sarajevo souvenir shop. A refrigerator with the frozen mummy of Tito... These serve as the starting point for a journey further and further down the collective unconscious of the Balkans, where the borders between dream and reality are erased and redrawn until they form a tale as exciting as it is fantastic, a tale which could be about our times and a war-torn Europe but just as well might be a deep dive into the psyches of its authors or a discussion about the essence of drawing. Bosnian Flat Dog is the result of a unique collaboration between two of Sweden's most internationally renowned cartoonists, Death and Candy and Pixy creator Max Andersson and Lars Sjunnesson. Each of them contributed to every single drawing to the extent that they no longer can tell themselves exactly who did what. This has lead to the emergence of an independent artistic entity which is neither of the two, but something else, at once familiar and unknown and perhaps a little bit scary.
112-page black & white 10" x 7.5" softcover regularly $13.95 • ON SALE $10.46 Order Now
