Daily clips & strips — hit the links for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• This limited-edition print by Sergio Ponchione is available at festivals (I think — the autotranslation is a little sketchy) from Coconino Press. Sergio also reveals that Grotesque #4 is in the can (and coming this summer from Fantagraphics); the complete Italian run of Grotesque will be available in a slipcased set with additional materials, and the slipcase will be available separately (hopefully U.S. fans will be able to order it from overseas); and the full-color Grotesque stories from Linus magazine will appear in future volumes of Mome (hey, that was my suggestion)!

• More progress on Steven Weissman's ghosts-in-progress

• Go-Getters is a new lithograph from John Hankiewicz

• Dame Darcy provides illustrations for The Penalty of Hope, a book of poetry by Vincent D. Dominion — more info

• The new installment of Belligerent Piano by Tim Lane

• This week's Truth Serum by Jon Adams

• Soon to be on the Covered blog? Our own Eric Reynolds gives his take on a Jesse Marsh Tarzan cover, in color and black & white

Daily clips & strips — click through for improved/additional viewing:

• Wally Gropius gets animated by Tim Hensley — I had't previously noticed the floppy ascot action

• The fourth and fifth installments of Tim Lane's Belligerent Piano

• I love it when Renee French takes these lo-fi snapshots of her sketches

• Steve Brodner's latest — it seems I've been missing a lot of his stuff because I've been following the wrong feed, so there's lots to catch up on

• Johnny Ryan presents The Lighter Side of Being an Unstoppable Killing Machine

Daily clips & strips — click for improved viewing at the sources:

• The conclusion of Steven Weissman's "This Already Happened" is up at What Things Do — you gotta go back and read the whole thing

• This week's "Belligerent Piano" by Tim Lane is up

• Gonna try to remember to send you to Tony Millionaire's new Maakies strip each week from now on

• OLMH is a new lithograph from John Hankiewicz

• Floating Moats is a new abstract minicomic/art zine from our own Tony Remple, available at Profanity Hill

• Nobody draws the mysterious object quite like Renee French

• Two recent illo jobs by Ray Fenwick

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "It’s vaudevillian and it’s Old Hollywood. It’s rock n’ roll and beat poetry. It’s introspective and depressing and quite often funny, and depicts a world that exists on the fringes of society where the American Dream meets the cold, harsh reality of life as viewed through a grimy windshield. ... When you put all the pieces together, you don’t simply get a story or a group of stories, you get a book that pulls back the curtain on the collective unconscious of a nation. ... Like the myths that it is inspired by, Abandoned Cars lingers long after reading and grows in stature as you re-live and re-tell it." – Chad Derdowski, Mania

• Review: "Part of Pim & Francie’s disconcerting effect is that it confounds easy categorization, leaving the reader uncertain what exactly this book is, or how to approach it. It doesn’t contain discrete, coherent stories, but it’s also more unified and linear than a sketchbook; there are continuing characters, recurring images and situations, even a discernable arc. It’s possible to piece together narratives from the fragments here, the way you might reconstruct a crime scene from bits of evidence, or a nightmare from fading details. These stories may even be all the more potent for having to be inferred, like the phantasms we imagine when we listen to horror stories on the radio." – Tim Kreider, The Comics Journal

•Profile/Review: Thought Balloonists' Charles W. Hatfield has a doozy of a report from Robert Williams's March 10 lecture at Cal. State Northridge, with plenty of insight into the artist, the talk, and the Conceptual Realism exhibit at the CSUN gallery: "Williams and his academic audience met halfway; the bracing, not to say ass-kicking, potency of the paintings seemed to wow most of the crowd. This was a fine performance, enlivened from the start by Williams' genuine gratitude and enthusiasm for being there."

• Plug: Library Journal spotlights Jason's Werewolves of Montpellier among notable July graphic novel releases: "Having subjected zombies to the witty vagaries of his goofy, humanized animals, Eisner Award winner Jason tackles werewolves mixed up in re-creational burglary and romance. It’s the pretender vs. the professionals — who are not happy about amateur competition."

• Television: Adult Swim will start re-running The Drinky Crow Show starting March 30, so mark your calendars and set your DVRs now. Even if you caught it the first time, it merits repeat viewings

Abandoned Cars (Softcover Edition)
by Tim Lane

168-page black & white 7.5" x 9" softcover • $18.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-341-5

Ships in: April 2010 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now

This item is available with two different cover designs. Please indicate your preference when ordering.

THE ACCLAIMED 2008 DEBUT, BACK IN PRINT IN A 2010 SOFTCOVER!

Abandoned Cars is Tim Lane’s first collection of graphic short stories, noir-ish narratives that are united by their exploration of the great American mythological drama by way of the desperate and haunted characters that populate its pages. Lane’s characters exist on the margins of society—alienated, floating in the void between hope and despair, confused but introspective. Some of them are experiencing the aftermath of an existential car crash—those surreal moments after a car accident, when time slows down and you’re trying to determine what just happened and how badly you’re hurt. Others have gone off the deep end, or were never anywhere but the deep end. Some are ridiculous, others dignified in their efforts to struggle to make sense of, and cope with, the absurdities, outrages, ghosts, and poisons in their lives.

The writing is straightforward, the stories mainstream but told in a pulpy idiom with an existential edge, often in the first person, reminiscent of David Goodis’s or Jim Thompson’s prose or of films like Pick-Up on South Street or Out of the Past. Visually, Lane’s drawing is in a realistic mode, reminiscent of Charles Burns, that heightens the tension in stories that veer between naturalism on the one hand and the comical, nightmarish, and hallucinatory on the other. Here, American culture is a thrift store and the characters are thrift store junkies living among the clutter. It’s an America depicted as a subdued and haunted Coney Island, made up of lost characters—boozing, brawling, haplessly shooting themselves in the face, and hopping freight trains in search of Elvis.

Abandoned Cars is an impressive debut of a major young American cartoonist.

2009 Ignatz Award Nominee: Outstanding Anthology or Collection

Video & Photo Slideshow Preview (view in new window):

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Just click on the size that matches your monitor resolution and the image will open in a new window; if you're on a PC, right-click the image and select "Set As Background"; if you're on a Mac, control+click and select "Set As Desktop Background." (We don't know what the procedure is for iPhones, but if you have one, you probably do, right?) More wallpapers...

Your daily Fantagraphics-related artblog links:

• The penultimate installment of Steven Weissman's "This Already Happened" at What Things Do

• Rick Veitch presents part 1 of a mid-1990s comic based on a dream he had while being interviewed for The Comics Journal #175 (via The Comics Reporter)

• A censored cover by Marco Corona

• This week’s episode of Belligerent Piano from Tim Lane

Tim Lane graces the cover of the Seattle Weekly this week. Matt Silvie, who does double duty at Fantagraphics and the Weekly, offers a No-Prize to the first person who can name the classic Marvel Comics cover that inspired this.

Get ready for the HOTWIRE comics slide show! That’s right, the Eisner and Harvey nominated anthology comic is about to chew up the scenery live. Presented by HOTWIRE editor Glenn Head and Carousel host R. Sikoryak.

Featuring these great artists performing their comics for your delectation: Danny Hellman, Sam Henderson, Michael Kupperman, Tim Lane, Jayr Pulga, David Sandlin, Chadwick Whitehead, plus Head and Sikoryak. This show is sure to offer both spontaneous cartoon funk and the slickest of production values. Live comic entertainment at its best!

MoCCA Thursday, March 25, 2010. 7pm
Admission: $5 | Free for MoCCA Members
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art
594 Broadway, Suite 401
New York, NY 10012
212-254-3511

For more information about MoCCA please visit www.moccany.org.
For info on HOTWIRE visit www.hotwirecomics.com.

Your daily art bloggery:

• Reminder: the Covered art show at Secret Headquarters opens tomorrow night! Here's a piece by show curator/organizer Robert Goodin as revealed on Steven Weissman's blog...

• ...and Richard Sala posts his own contribution

• Tim Lane's serialized strip Myth of Jack Theatre Presents: Belligerent Piano begins running this week in the St. Louis Riverfront Times and on Tim's blog

• Corporate motivation, Jim Flora style, 1956

• Paul Hornschemeier on the Oscars for the WSJ, with process art on his blog

• Pucker up for some Renee French — and this one too, ooh

• You want a bunch of Jaime Hernandez superheroine sketches gathered all in one place? Scans Daily has you covered

• Derek Van Gieson keeps up his feverish pace — can't go wrong with a cat in a suit

• Tom Kaczynski captioned this drawing "unnatural megalithic formation" — 'nuff said

• T. Edward Bak draws Dr. Strange??

They're real and they're spectacular:

These are our first advance copies of the softcover edition of Tim Lane's Abandoned Cars (both covers!) and our new Basil Wolverton book The Culture Corner, both coming in April. We'll have better pics for you coming soon.