We're in the midst of assembling our Fall 2013-Winter 2014 season, and while there's still lots of stuff we're keeping under our collective hat for now (we've barely just revealed our Spring-Summer 2013 season, for pete's sake), some other stuff has been leaking out here and there... like this forthcoming book from Paul Hornschemeier, Artists Authors Thinkers Directors, collecting his sketchbook portraits from his Daily Forlorn blog. Pictures of smart people for smart people! Did excitement for this book cause yesterday's catastrophic Tumblr outage? We may never know.

Hot pixels! Paul Hornschemeier just revealed the cover art for Forlorn Funnies Vol. 1, the first volume of his new one-man anthology series which we have the pleasure of bringing to you in September of next year. (You may remember it was originally announced for Fall 2010, but then Paul got busy with little things like getting married, moving, becoming a dad, doing artwork and animation for an IFC show amongst other projects... stuff like that.) For several months now Paul has been revealing work-in-progress glimpses (along with sketchbook artwork) on his Tumblr blog, so head over there for a taste of things to come.

Yesterday, our friends at Tiny Showcase unveiled their latest print from our own Paul Hornschemeier!

Titled "The Fading Fair," this poignant six-color boardwalk-inspired screen print measures 18" wide by 24" high, with each individual vignette measuring 5" wide by 7" high.

Get yours before their availability, well, fades away!  $10 of every print sold will go to the American Red Cross in support of ongoing Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

Paul Hornshemeier recently shared with us some animation stills he made for the IFC show Comedy Bang! Bang! Check out a clip of the show here and check Paul's website for more exciting stuff!

The most delicious comic-con ever debuts this weekend, Saturday, June 16th and Sunday, June 17th... Introducing CAKE: the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, a weekend-long celebration of independent comics, inspired by Chicago’s rich legacy as home to many of underground and alternative comics’ most talented artists!

While Fantagraphics won't be tabling there ourselves (sob!), many of our wonderful artists will be there, as featured guests, panelists, exhibitors, or probably just walkin' around somewhere.

Some of the featured guests include:

• Jeffrey Brown Table 57
• Lilli Carré Table 1
• Paul Hornschemeier Table 71
• Anders Nilsen Table 80
• Laura Park (who did that gorgeous poster, btw!) Table 1
• Jeremy Tinder Table 3

Some more exhibitors:

• Gabrielle Bell
• Nick Drnaso
• Charles Forsman
• Justin Hall
• Kevin Huizenga
• Tom Kaczynski
• Jim Rugg
• Leslie Stein 

And check out these panels with our Fantagraphics artists! Why, it's the icing on the... okay, I'll stop:

•  Crude and Rude: Comics and Vulgarity: featuring Ivan Brunetti , Lisa Hanawalt, Hellen Jo and Onsmith, moderated by Josh Reinwald and Justin Rosenberg (Sponsored by Quimby’s Bookstore)

•  Jeffrey Brown Makes a Minicomic: Jeffrey Brown makes a minicomic in 1 hour!

•  Double Vision: Comics and Animation: with a Q&A featuring Jo Dery, Jim Trainor, Amy Lockhart and Marc Bell, presented by the Eyeworks Animation Festival (Lilli Carré and Alexander Stewart)

•  Start a Micropress: featuring Sarah Becan, Austin English, Jesjit Gill, Annie Koyama, Greg Means and Caroline Paquita, moderated by Zak Sally

•  Comics In Chicago: The Past 10 Years (Sponsored by the Chicago Independent Radio Project - CHIRP): featuring Ezra Claytan Daniels, Lyra Hill, Paul Hornschemeier, Robin Hustle and Jeremy Tinder, moderated by Edie Fake;

•  Queer Communities, Queer Anthologies: featuring Justin Hall, Robert Kirby and Annie Murphy, moderated by Noah Berlatsky (Sponsored by Little Heart, a Comic Anthology for Marriage Equality)

•  Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen and John Porcellino in Conversation, moderated by Caitlin McGurk

•  Violent Line: Mark-Making and Meaning: featuring Anya Davidson, Charles Forsman, Patrick Kyle, Grant Reynolds, Conor Stetchschulte, Lale Westvind and Mickey Zacchilli, moderated by Noel Freibert

•  Real Life: A Roundatable on Women and Graphic Autobiography: featuring Rina Ayuyang, Lucy Knisley, Keiler Roberts, Marian Runk, Leslie Stein, Julia Wertz

CAKE will be held at the Columbia College of Chicago's Ludington Building [ 1104 S. Wabash (8th Floor) ] from 11 AM to 6 PM. It is free and open to the public.  Go, and give our artists a hug and your money.

Comedy Bang! Bang! premieres on the IFC cable network tonight (check your local listings) with an animated title sequence and incidental artwork by the great Paul Hornschemeier (with an inking assist from our own Eric Reynolds, among others) and Paul is sharing a bunch of behind-the-scenes production art and sketches at his blog here and here. My DVR is set!

Wednesday, May 30th

• Hanover, NH: Join our very own Jen Vaughn at the The Howe Library for a lecture and discussion on Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier! (more info)

Thursday, May 31st

• Brooklyn, NY:  It's your last chance to see the exhibit Drew Friedman: My Way, his very first New York gallery show of comic strip and illustration art at the Scott Eder Gallery! (more info)

• Seattle, WA:  Join Jeffrey Brown at the SIFF Cinema Uptown for a screening of his new film Save the Date! See if you can spot artwork by  Paul Hornschemeier and Anders Nilsen around the set! (more info)

Friday, June 1st

• Seattle, WA:  It's your last chance to catch the Jeffrey Brown film Save the Date, this time over at the Harvard Exit theater! (more info)

Saturday, June 2nd

• Seattle, WA:  And then join us at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery as we welcome Jeffrey Brown for a book signing and informal reception, plus yours truly will be interviewing him about the new movie, his comics, and knowing me, probably cats. (more info)

Get your summer vacation off to a melancholy start with Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier! 

The Howe Library in Hanover, NH and The Center for Cartoon Studies will be co-sponsoring a discussion series and lecture focusing on the graphic novel this summer, and they'll be kicking it off with this very title!

Join them this Wednesday, May 30th, at 6:15 PM in the Howe Library cafe [ 13 South Street ]. The discussion will be co-led by Heather Backman from Howe Library and our very own Jen Vaughn, also from The Center for Cartoon Studies!

Today's (and yesterday's when it was slow) Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "The Dutch artist and designer Joost Swarte has a tremendous reputation among cartoon-art aficionados, given his tiny body of comics work. The answer to the title of his 40-year retrospective, Is That All There Is?, is: 'Pretty much, yeah.'... Plot is beside the point. Swarte is more concerned with formal purity, and with making the deep structures of cartooning visible. He pares his art to mechanical, hard-edged vectors and curves: caricature triple-distilled into symbolic visual shorthand, with every line canted just so. His geometrically precise, nearly architectural drawings are the bridge between the Tintin creator Hergé and contemporary artists like Chris Ware, who wrote this volume’s foreword." – Douglas Wolk, The New York Times

• Review: "Now we're talkin'! The first two volumes in Fantagraphics' Steve Ditko Archives (edited by Blake Bell) were rewarding collections of the offbeat auteur's early work, and among the best archival books of horror comics published in the last several years. But in volume 3, a.k.a. Mysterious Traveler, we see Ditko's lunacy reach its full maturation... The bold dynamism and moody linework that would characterize Ditko's Spider-Man and Dr. Strange work just a few years later, as well as his horror tales for Creepy and Eerie, is in evident throughout.... Volume 3 is essential for classic horror comics fans, and further cements Ditko's reputation as an artist without peer." – Joseph McCabe, FearNet

• Review: "Kevin Avery has compiled an incredibly thorough account of one of folk and rock music’s most important critics of the 20th Century: Paul Nelson. Avery reveals Paul Nelson as not just a music critic, but also a true writer who loved his subject matter possibly more than anything else. After reading, I felt that I knew more about Nelson than simply his life’s accomplishments—I knew him as the man he was: an observer who secluded himself with his books, film and music." – SLUG Magazine

• Review: "Madcap university mystery. Girl detective Judy Drood, with the hapless Kasper Keene, investigates the disappearances of girls on campus. Beautiful young women (some dressed like pirates), monstrous old men (some of them professors), photography, a puppet, and a misguided quest for eternal youth all figure in.... The dark edge in Sala’s other work is fully expressed here [in Mad Night]. The book is incredibly violent (though the dark, woodcut-like art makes it feel absurd). Here’s a body count by how victims meet their end..." – Gene Ambaum, The Unshelved Book Club

• Plug: "Published three years ago in an indie porn comic, Josh Simmons’ 'Cockbone' remains a high water mark for today’s horror comic.... The Furry Trap will collect that story, along with ten others being described by the publisher as 'hard-edged horror.' You already know if you can handle this stuff, so if you can, it’s time to start counting days. Eli is, most definitely, coming." – Tucker Stone, "Flavorpill's 10 Most Anticipated Comics Releases, April-July 2012"

• Plug: "While it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call Dal Tokyo Panter’s lost masterpiece, it certainly hasn’t been the easiest thing to come by. That’s to be the case for anything that’s serialized over the course of multiple years, multiple publications, and two different continents. Thankfully, the entire book has finally found a home at Fantagraphics, and those of us without access to early-’80s copies of the LA Reader can finally experience 'a future Mars that is terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers' as only Gary Panter — one of the most influential cartoonists alive — can provide. For some of us, this book has been a long time coming." – Tucker Stone, "Flavorpill's 10 Most Anticipated Comics Releases, April-July 2012"

• Interview (Audio): "Listen and see how well I survived this one! The interviewer grilled my ass off," says Pat Thomas of his interview today on KUOW Presents to discuss Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 and in particular former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown

• Interview (Audio): Yesterday's Pat Thomas radio guest spot to discuss and spin Listen, Whitey! on The Hear and Now on Berkeley's listener-powered KPFA can be streamed from their website for another couple of weeks

• Interview (Audio): Stream last week's chat and DJ set with Listen, Whitey! author Pat Thomas on KCRW with host Mathieu Schreyer, who says "This book is a great read and the topic is ever relevant."

Contest: Read the winning stories (and all the other entrants) in Studio 360's Significant Objects Story Contest

• List: Who are the Top Ten Oregon Cartoonists? Anne Richardson of the Oregon Movies, A to Z blog lists Oil and Water artist Shannon Wheeler among them

• Analysis (Video): At his  blog, Paul Hornschemeier shares video of two "talks given during my recent graphic novelist's residency at Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. Tammy Birk (Professor of English, Otterbein University) discusses themes in Mother, Come Home while Ryan Jordan (Department of Philosophy, The Ohio State University) examines the nature of paradoxes in general, using Zeno's paradoxes in The Three Paradoxes as a launching point."

• Analysis: At where else but The Hooded Utilitarian: "'Lightning Only Strikes Twice Once, Y'Know': Phallic Mothers, Fetishism, and Replacement in the Comics of Los Bros Hernandez," Part I (focusing on Gilbert's work) and Part II (focusing on Jaime), by Eric Berlatsky

Not only does the Threadless t-shirt company keep us lookin' good, but now they're also helping defend our first amendment rights with a benefit for the mighty Comic Book Legal Defense Fund!

Tonight, Friday, April 13th, they'll be hosting the CBLDF/THREADLESS C2E2 Fashion Show Welcome Party, launching a colossal new "Comics-On-Tees" collection featuring artwork by Jeffrey Brown, Anders Nilsen, Paul Hornschemeier, and Jeff Lemire, based on a story from Jeffrey!

Raffle prizes will include a plethora of awesome Threadless swag, including original retail art, and great CBLDF items, including classic signed comics, exclusive prints, and more! Giant games of Mario Kart will be projected for attendees to play, with a guest DJ providing non-stop music, getting you in the mood for a weekend of comic con revelry. There will also be a “drawing wall” for ongoing Live Art throughout the night and plenty of beer, wine, and popcorn from the famous Threadless popper.

To top it all off, THREADLESS and CBLDF will announce a major project for 2012, expanding their fundraising partnership and creating something awesome for comic fans of every stripe. 

The CBLDF/THREADLESS C2E2 Fashion Show Welcome Party kicks off at 9:00 PM at The Threadless Atrium [ 1260 West Madison, Chicago ]. Free for card carrying CBLDF members, with a $20 suggested door donation for non-members. Sorry kiddoes, 21 and up only!