At a point last month during the production process on Tony Millionaire's 500 Portraits, due this coming November, we were down to just a handful of illustrations we couldn't identify, so we sent some images to Andrew Leland at The Believer for his help identifying those that ran in the magazine. Designer Jacob Covey asked me to share this with you, saying "I believe it appropriately sums up our process." Click it to see it bigger.

From the ol' mailbag.

Seattle: Fantagraphics Comics

If you've always wanted to get a behind-the-scenes look inside our glamorous offices and see what things are like around here on a day-to-day basis, this segment that The A.V. Club came by to film for their "Pop Pilgrims" series should give you a pretty good idea. Host Dan Telfer and his crew got the grand tour from Gary Groth, and we had Peter Bagge stop by to give his perspective and insights. My favorite parts are the bits that show my co-workers just going about their day and getting shit done. (I missed all the hubbub that day because I was on my way to... oh, some darn convention or other.) They wrote up a nice profile of us too — be sure to check it out.

On his Cozy Lummox blog, award-winning designer Eric Skillman discusses his process for putting together the new issue of The Comics Journal: "I was pretty excited when Jacob Covey emailed me to ask if I might be interested in re-designing the venerable Comics Journal for its upcoming relaunch as an annual (rather than monthly) publication. Then I found out it was going to be 600-something pages. But by that point it was too late to say no! (I'm kidding... mostly.)" It's a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek!

Minneapolis comics maven Sarah Morean recently visited Zak Sally's studio with Tom Kaczynski and documented the occasion with a bunch of photos and the brief video above.

O, the sights! View the full set of photos here.

A pair of interviews with our staff have gone up today. First, The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon chats with Jason T. Miles about his job here, his own comics, and his zine distro Profanity Hill. Next, at The Comics Journal, check out the first part of Chris Mautner's chat with Eric Reynolds about editing our quarterly anthology Mome. Good job, fellas!

UPDATE: Part 2 of the interview with Eric is up now.

While we were enjoying a nice little holiday break, Comics Alliance posted an interview with our own Eric Reynolds in which Eric discusses our nascent strategy for making our books available for digital download for your various e-readers and such: "Our digital plans are still very much in the formative stages. I'm not going to lie; we've definitely been slow to move on the digital front, but not for a lack of interest. [...] We've been paying close attention for the past year or more and have been slowly developing a strategy, exploring all of the various third party apps out there, and playing with most of them." Hit that link for the whole discussion. While Fantagraphics on your Kindle or iPad or other device is still a way off on the horizon, for now this is the definitive word and should at least give an inkling of what you might expect in the future.

(Click to enlarge)

This "Handy Fantagraphics Map/Staff Field Guide" was created by Chi-Wen Lee and Andrew Davis to help future interns: it dates roughly back to the third week of October, where it originated over a bubble tea-fueled discussion about Lucky in Love, how awesome the Fantagraphics people are, the awesomeness of Seattle, the mysterious stairway that leads to the upstairs apartment, how hard it is to remember everyone's names, and Pinocchio with a gun. Yes, in that order. 

Courtesy of Kristy Valenti, lead copyeditor for Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film, some highlights of the book's editorial style guide:

video game titles in quotation marks

afterschool special

arthouse

badass

blond for both sexes, unless is a noun for a female (the blonde kicked the monster, she has a blond mohawk, his liberty spikes are blond).

blow-dried

boombox

buzzcut

chrissakes not christ's sakes

’dos

drug runner but gunrunner

eyeshadow

facepaint, facepainted

"fairytale"

g-string

machine guns (but machine-gunning when verb)

RoboCop

shitstorm (1 word, no hyphen)

wack (as in slang, not to hit)

Here's a nice little bonus feature for you: Back in January, The Greenville Advocate covered Charles Schneider's visit to their town to research the DeMoulin Bros. and take photos for his Introduction to the book Catalog No. 439: Burlesque Paraphernalia and Side Degree Specialties and Costumes. Click the image above for a much larger, legible version. Thanks to Daniel Clowes for providing the scan.