Journalism FAIL.* 

Sincerely, 

Seattle's Fantagraphics Books 

* See: 3rd graph in story.

An underground comics fan and billiards lover with $30K to burn? This is for you. 

I'm a bit late with this, it somehow escaped me until last night, but the fine folks at Giant Robot need your help. Peggy Burns at D&Q already made a better case than I could as to why you might want to do this, so I'll simply direct you to her if you need reasons to help. I wholeheartedly concur with everything she wrote. 

So, Tuesday nights are band practice. We get together in a seedy old building in Seattle's Ballard district, an old theater of some kind that's been subdivided into a bunch of nonsensical, Winchester Mystery House-style rooms and stairways. The Grunge Era lives on here, where garbage bags filled with empty beer cans are piled in the main "lobby" about ten feet high by at least as wide. The cavernous, pitch black hallways that lead to the restroom can make you feel like you're in an indoor version of "The Blair Witch Project". The bathroom stall is splattered with red paint for dramatic effect. You need a lighter or iPhone to light the way. Walls are routinely tagged, there's new stuff on them almost every week. Imagine my surprise last night when I came upon these faces staring me down in one of the hallways:

Very creepy. I was afraid that Dave Sim was going to come through a door and rape me for not being more manly. I ran back to our room and locked it. We might need to explore a new practice venue. 

Photo by my pal Kurt Schlosser. 

The landscape for literature in Seattle took a major turn for the uglier yesterday when news leaked that the venerable indie bookstore Bailey/Coy, a mainstay on Seattle's Capitol Hill for 26 years, would be closing at the end of the month. This might be the single most alarming sign I've seen yet in regard to the future of independent bookstores and publishers. If the most literate neighborhood in the most literate city in the country can't support a great store like Bailey/Coy, it makes me think we're all doomed. We will greatly miss B/C, a longtime supporter of Fantagraphics and home to numerous Fanta events over the last 19 years or so. One of the only downsides to opening up our own retail space almost three years ago is that I haven't had the opportunity to work with B/C owner Michael Wells as much as I'd like the last few years, but I've always been grateful that he's never been nothing but encouraging and enthusiastic about us opening our own space. He's one of the true class acts in this racket and his store's closing will make the culture of Capitol Hill and Seattle that much less vibrant. If you're in Seattle, go do some early Christmas shopping at B/C, as the store will shut its doors at the end of this month.

Above image: One of the handbills for one of the seemingly dozens of successful Ellen Forney events that B/C hosted over the years.  

Courtesy Ethan Persoff. Happy Halloween!

Paul McCartney on "illegitimate" artforms, in discussing the forthcoming Beatles Rock Band: "Rock 'n' roll, or the Beatles, started as just sort of hillbilly music, just a passing phase, but now it's revered as an art form because so much has been done in it. Same with comics, and I think same with video games." From the New York Times. What graphic novels do you think Paul McCartney reads?!?