• Review: "The book is lovingly made and the strips presented with care and pleasure. But is it any good? Oh yes. It's funny and charming, bursting with witty wordplay and vivid characters you love immediately. You can see the influence the Marx Brothers and Krazy Kat and Mark Twain had on Pogo and its love of silly grammatical puns and Southern dialect. And you can see the influence Pogo had on Doonesbury and Calvin & Hobbes... In short, read Pogo and you can immediately see it slide into the pop cultural matrix and how it drew upon the work that came earlier, moved forward the art form of comic strips and influenced artists after it for generations to come. But most of all you'll laugh..." – Michael Giltz, The Huffington Post
• Review: "The only real problem with this beautifully produced book [Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture ] is that it’s much, much too short.... The art reproduces gorgeously, scanned in many cases from the original material, and the volume as a whole is an effort to give Davis the respect he deserves as a legitimate artist.... A few essays, slotted at the front and back of the back, rather than next to the art itself, place him in context and give some biographical details, but the work, with Davis’s fluid, effortless line and gift for characterization, speaks for itself." – Hillary Brown, Paste
• Review: At Greek site Comicdom, Tomas Papadimitropoulos looks at Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010 by Michael Kupperman: "Δεν είμαι σίγουρος αν είναι ο καλύτερος τρόπος για να γνωρίσεις τον Kupperman και τις ιδιαιτερότητές του, αλλά σίγουρα θα ικανοποιήσει (και θα χορτάσει) τους fans του (ίσως και αυτούς του Twain – ο Αμερικανός συγγραφέας δεν έγινε γνωστός για το συμβατικό χιούμορ του, άλλωστε), οι οποίοι θα βρεθούν σε γνώριμα μεν νερά, αλλά με κάποιες καλοδεχούμενες διαφορές."
• Review: At his blog Mandorla, Santiago Garcia looks at the latest chapters of Jaime Hernandez's "Locas" saga: "Estas últimas semanas he comentado que uno de los mejores tebeos que he leído en el 2011 ha sido 'The Love Bunglers,' historieta que Jaime Hernandez ha publicado en los números 3 y 4 de Love and Rockets: New Stories. Pero no había dicho nada sobre ella todavía, quizás porque es de esas historietas sobre las que uno se queda casi sin nada que decir. Son demasiado inmensas para encerrarlas en un puñado de palabras. Pero eso es lo que tenemos aquí, un puñado de palabras, así que vamos a dejar que lleguen hasta donde lleguen, al menos."
• Interview: The writer of Straight 2 DVD blog talks with editor Michel Gagne about Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby's Romance Comics: "I quickly realized that if someone didn’t make an effort to preserve this material, most of it would vanish into oblivion. That’s when it hit me! Perhaps I should be the one to start the ball rolling. I had been itching to do a comic book preservation project for many years and this would be the perfect opportunity."
• Plug: "Another comprehensive package is going to take a bit longer to collect: the complete Peanuts library from Fantagraphics.... Currently the collection has progressed to the early 1980s, where the strip is at its peak... There's nothing that says 'holidays' like the Peanuts gang. Didn't all of us watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving a thousand times?" – Andrew A. Smith, Scripps Howard
• Scene: At Examiner.com, Christian Lipski reports from the Oil and Water discussion group at Bridge City Comics recently, which was crashed by writer Steve Duin, artist Shannon Wheeler and editor Mike Rosen: "Those who had attended the team's convention panels and saw video clips from the trip tended to expect more of a straight travelogue, and were surprised by the addition of fiction to the equation. On the other hand, it was noted that the reader could identify with the observers as an entry into the story. The characters also allowed Duin to tell a side of the story through the reactions of outsiders. 'I think that Fantagraphics was as surprised as you guys,' the author confided."
• Plug: At The Huffington Post, Dave Scheidt's "2011 Holiday Gift Guide Comic Books" include Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 1 by Michael Kupperman: "The funniest comic you've never read. Laugh out loud funny. Spastic, bizarre and gut busting. Fans of Saturday Night Live, Mad Magazine and just anyone who likes to laugh will love this book. A fair warning, if you read this book in public, you will laugh like a mad man and most likely frighten people like I did."
"Kelly's Pogo is a masterclass in wordsmithing, satire, and relatable art. Although this collection apparently doesn't get to the more overtly political satire that made Pogo so famous, it does promise to be a great look at the start of an important and quintessential comic strip. The statements Kelly makes in these early stories are about character relationships, design, and humor as well as use of the English language in surprising and touching ways. This is the surely the ground floor of what looks to be the next great collection series in comics literature."
"Charles M. Schulz's relatable characters are literally part of the fabric of my being. Peanuts helped forge my earliest appreciation for sequential art and, funny as it seems, philosophy. I can't wait until the day I have a shelf filled with every strip ever starring Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Pig-Pen and the rest of the Peanuts gang."
• Plugs:iFanboy's "2011 Holiday Gift Guide: Lost Treasures," written by Paul Montgomery, includes:
"Mickey’s grown soft in his old age, but back in the day he was my kind of bastard. Dude’s a straight up rascal, and launches headlong into danger, starting with the seminal 'Race to Death Valley.' Floyd Gottfredson’s wily take on the character is revered by the best cartoonists, and Fantagraphics has packaged these earliest serial strips from the 30s in some truly handsome volumes. Take advantage of the two volume slipcover edition for a great value and the publisher’s now signature excellence in presentation."
"Every year, the top item on my own Christmas list is the annual box-set collecting Fantagraphics’ latest volumes of Charles Schulz’s Complete Peanuts.... Watching Chuck and Snoopy evolve from their original designs of the early 50s to the more familiar iterations I grew up with in the Funnies is an incredible experience."
"Turns out it wasn’t that easy navigating the Arctic Ocean from Russian to France at the turn of the 20th century. If you dig on Poe and Verne and antique diving helmets, this woodcut melodrama is just for you."
"Years in the making, this new collection of Walt Kelly’s Pogo dailies and weekend strips does due justice to a comic that ought to be as much a household name as Peanuts or Doonesbury.... Mix in Kelly’s whimsical, lyrical 'Swamp speak' and you’ve got some real poetry on your hands."
"This is as beautiful a book as I’ve purchased this year, and the stories within have much to offer both children and adult fans of visual storytelling and even comedy. Barks knew how to contract a joke, and this is a masterclass."
• Plug:Robot 6's Michael May makes an unexpected choice when spotlighting upcoming titles listed in the current issue of Previews: "The Big Town- Charles Schulz’ son wrote this novel (the last in his jazz-age trilogy) about the end of the Roaring Twenties and 'the role of business, crime, morality, and love in our lives.' It’s not comics, but it sounds ambitious and transporting."
• Interview (Audio):Renee French is the guest on the latest episode of The Ink Panthers Show podcast, who promise chat about "puffy man-nipples"
In addition, the French-language edition of The Complete Peanuts 1973-1974 (Dargaud) has been named to the Sélection Patrimoine list of classic reprints, and Ô Dingos, Ô Chateaux! by Jacques Tardi & Jean-Patrick Manchette (Futuropolis), which we plan to publish in English some time in the unannounced but not-too-distant future, is on the Sélection Polar list of crime comics.
The big show goes on January 26-29 in Angoulême, France naturellement, with our fellow American Art Spiegelman as this year's Président du jury.
We've got all your holiday hits at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery. (Vintage Royal Guardsmen vinyl courtesy of Georgetown Records.)
Please drop by and see us this Saturday, December 10 to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the store. Holiday cheer galore with "Playing Possum: The Pogo Art of Walt Kelly," music by Sawsome (a female banjo and saw duet), Christmas carolers, and complimentary seasonal refreshments.
I can scarcely believe it's been 5 years already. This wonderful experiment in promoting comix culture has been an awesome experience for me. I've always pictured myself as a kind of crossing guard at the uncontrolled intersection of fine art and pop culture. The bookstore has seen a lot of traffic. Here's to another 5 busy years at the crossroads.
The new Diamond Previews catalog is out today and in it you'll find our usual 2-page spread (download the PDF) with our releases scheduled to arrive in your local comic shop in February 2012 (give or take — some release dates may have changed since the issue went to press). We're pleased to offer additional and updated information about these upcoming releases here on our website, to help shops and customers alike make more informed ordering decisions.
This month's Spotlight item is a new softcover edition of Swiss horror-meister's short story collection Cinema Panopticum; our anthology of Scandinavian cartoonists Kolor Klimax: Nordic Comics Now is "Certified Cool"; and the issue also includes the new volumes of our best-selling The Complete Peanuts and Prince Valiant series; a new, expanded edition of The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 1 with 60 newly-discovered, never-before-published pages; Folly, a collection of Hans Rickheit's inscrutable and discomfiting minicomics; and the final (prose) novel in Monte Schulz's jazz-age trilogy, The Big Town.
• Plug: Pamela Paul of The New York Times asks "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" creator Jeff Kinney about his favorite books from childhood: "...[T]he works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks’s ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Uncle Scrooge’ comics from the 1940s through the 1960s. Mr. Barks wrote tales of high adventure generously peppered with moments of high comedy.... Classics such as ‘Lost in the Andes,’ ‘Only a Poor Man’ and ‘A Christmas for Shacktown’ left a deep impression on me. Mr. Barks taught me that comics could be high art, and I consider his work to be the best storytelling I’ve experienced in any form. ...Fantagraphics has announced that it is publishing the Barks collection in beautiful hardcover books that do great honor to the cartoonist and his stories, and I can’t wait to buy them for my kids. Proof that great storytelling endures from generation to generation."
• Review: "This volume [Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes] reprints tales from December 1948 through August 1949, when Barks was in high feather as a creator of breathless adventures and light comedies for his Ducks... Great pop culture, great analysis. Scrooge is always searching for more gold, and there’s plenty here. [Rating] 10/10" – Michael Barrett, PopMatters
• Review: "The finale of the story Jaime has been telling over the past couple of annual issues [of Love and Rockets: New Stories] is a moment of bravura comics storytelling, but the buildup to it in the opening portions of this issue is pretty great as well... Ah, but as nice as these stories are, they all seem to be prelude to the dazzlingly virtuosic end of this chapter in the Locas saga... This could signal an end to the current era of Locas stories, but these characters are less figures of Jaime's imagination than real people alive in the minds of readers everywhere at this point, and even if another story featuring them never appears, we can rest assured that they will continue to live on, somewhere, sometime." – Matthew J. Brady, Warren Peace Sings the Blues
• Review (Audio): Introducing the latest episode of the Wait, What? podcast, co-host Jeff Lester says "we dollop more praise on Ganges #4 by Kevin Huizenga because honestly that sucker could probably use another five or six dollops."
• Plugs: "Fantagraphics’ collections featuring Charles Schulz’s comic strip masterpiece, Peanuts, are fantastic and if you’re a Peanuts fan, you need to be reading these. Floyd Gottfredson probably did as much to shape the personality of Mickey Mouse and his supporting cast as Carl Barks did for the Disney Ducks, yet his work has never received the same degree of attention as the work of Barks. Fantagraphics is correcting that with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. The first two volumes of this series are fantastic and the strips probably look better here than they did when they were originally published. It’s a joy to watch Gottfredson develop as a storyteller as Mickey and the gang evolve along with him.... There’s also plenty of background material to place the stories into historical perspective. And the collection of Walt Kelly’s Pogo that hits stores this week is gorgeous. I have some of Fantagraphics’ previous Pogo volumes and this one blows them away. I’m also getting into Popeye for the first time with their collections of Segar’s classic strip." – Roger Ash, Westfield Comics Blog
• Interview: At The Vinyl District, Dulani Wallace talks to author Kevin Avery about Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson: "He would only really enjoy writing about things that meant something to him personally, so there are a few clues about his own life in many of his pieces. So that became the idea — the first half of the book is the biography, the second half of the book is Paul’s writing. It’s kind of like Paul telling his own story."
• Commentary: At Comic Book Resources, Laura Sneddon, who is documenting her experiences in the postgraduate Comic Studies program at the University of Dundee in Scotland, examines the work of Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb for the class topic "Comics and Gender"
In this month's issue of Booklist you can find praise for three of our recent releases:
The Complete Peanuts 1981-1982 by Charles M. Schulz: "These early 1980s episodes see Snoopy reunite with his brother Marbles (who’s baffled by his sibling’s WWI fantasies), Linus and Lucy plant a garden, and Peppermint Patty apply to a school for gifted children (she thinks they’re going to give her presents). But the strip’s fragile heart remains good ol’ Charlie Brown, who faces a crisis when liability issues bar him and his team from their baseball field. In a moving introduction to the volume, cartoonist Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse) writes about her close friendship with Schulz." – Gordon Flagg
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec Vol. 2 by Jacques Tardi: "The second collection of the Belle Époque exploits of Adèle Blanc-Sec sees the intrepid occult investigator confronting things walking the streets of Paris that shouldn’t be: a prehistoric ape-man revived by a mad scientist and a reanimated mummy from her own collection of artifacts. With their wryly overwrought captions, melodramatic dialogue, and convoluted plotlines, the stories work both as gentle genre parodies and full-out fantasy-detective thrillers, thanks in great part to Tardi’s lithe cartooning, which vividly evokes the period while sporting an entirely contemporary sensibility." – Gordon Flagg
Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 2: Trapped on Treasure Island by Floyd Gottfredson: "For contemporary audiences who know Mickey Mouse only as the bland corporate mascot of the Disney empire, these 1932–33 newspaper comic strips featuring the famous rodent will be a revelation. As in his contemporaneous animated cartoons, this Mickey is a feisty, wisecracking daredevil, who searches tropical lands for buried treasure (encountering stereotyped cannibals that are offensive even by the era’s insensitive standards), treks to the frozen north to recover a stolen orphanage fund, and starts a detective agency with second banana Goofy. Gottfredson’s charmingly old-fashioned drawings accentuate the gags and briskly propel the plotlines." – Gordon Flagg
• Review: "Charles Schulz's lovable gang bring hilarity to the Reagan era in the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts 1981-82. Now up to Volume 16, the comic strip shows no signs of getting stale as the years go by and the antics continue.... As usual, the strip reproduction is flawless, each appearing in crisp black and white with 3 daily strips per page and full page Sundays. The handy index to quickly find a favorite character or subject returns as well.... So make sure your trick or treat bag is a big one and fill up on the fun, you’ll enjoy every morsel. It’s almost as if the 'Great Pumpkin' arrived after all!" – Rich Clabaugh, The Christian Science Monitor
• Interview:Comic Book Resources' Alex Dueben talks with Steve Duin, Mike Rosen and Shannon Wheeler about Oil and Water, illustrated by some exclusive looks at Wheeler's sketchbooks from the trip that led to the book. Says Duin: "I approached this project as I usually approach my newspaper column: You have to personalize the tragedies, and celebrations, you're writing about. What's more, I was blown away by the characters we stumbled upon."
• Plug: At O Grito's Jazz Metal, Paolo Floro says No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics "...is set to be the most important work of its kind ever published.... For those who enjoy history, investigating the gay world or simply love comics and the endless possibilities that it can generate, this book is a treasure." (Translated from Portuguese)
• Profile: At Giant Robot, a quick introduction to Eleanor Davis based on her participation in the Robots art show at GR2
• Profile: Auburn University's The War Eagle Reader has a quick catch-up on the career of Noah Van Sciver since he did an illustration for them last year
• Review: "Into the '80s and no sign of the much-feared and long-rumored decline in quality in Charles Schulz's life's work that was supposed to come about 10 years earlier. The strips in this volume of Fantagraphics' series are stronger than ever. If there's a different quality to them it's because Peanuts is a mature strip now instead of a precocious, sometimes-astonishing one.... Schulz at this point still puts on frequent display his nearly unequaled ability to return to core character elements for a gag without seeming repetitive or didactic. Part of the richness of the characters is their largely unchanging nature is part of the cross each bears." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter
• Review: "Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot is an EXCELLENT new hardcover graphic novel written by crime fiction novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette and illustrated by one of the masters of sequential art illustration, Jacques Tardi. The central character of Like a Sniper... is a mercenary turned contract killer, named Martin Terrier, who is forced out of retirement, and the way his return to his line of work unfolds ranks at the top with any hard-boiled crime fiction I've ever read. Anyone who had enjoyed Tardi's adaptation of Manchette's West Coast Blues will definitely love Like a Sniper... and if this is your introduction to Tardi and Manchette, you're in for a treat!" – Ralph Mathieu, Ich Liebe Comics
• Review: "Fantagraphics has chosen to start with books 3 & 4 in the series, skipping the stories where the reader (and the creator) gets to know the title character, Gil Jordan, and going right for the good stuff. And these books are good stuff, the writing as well as the art.... There is something in this story for every reader: mystery, adventure, humor, bad jokes and a real sense of menace.... This is absolutely the kind of book that I would hand to someone who has expressed an interest in comics." – R.M. Rhodes, Forces of Geek
• Review: "Fantagraphics is very nearly finished with their complete reprint of E.C. Segar's run on Popeye, with just one more volume to go after this. It's a breathless, surreal and ridiculous collection of fisticuffs and wonderfully funny violence, and every home should own it.... Highly recommended." – Grant Goggans, The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf
• Review: "I’m using the past tense here because tragically the amazing anthological compendium [Mome] closes with this bonanza-sized final edition after six eye-popping, parameter-expanding years ... [T]he experiment ends but even though gone this superb, bold endeavour mustn’t be forgotten. There are plenty of places to still find back issues and these tomes – especially this double-sized delight – would make captivating Christmas presents." – Win Wiacek, Now Read This!
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