Order this volume and get Vol. 1 and/or Vol. 2 for $29.99 each; that's 25% off! Make your selection when ordering.
“Crane’s work is sheer energy. It’s somewhere between Crane and E.C. Segar that (Carl Barks’ beloved) Donald Duck got forged; the kind of ruddy-cheeked adventurousness that underlies the content is certainly the same work that moves Donald and his nephews through their stories.” —Art Spiegelman
The third volume in Fantagraphics’ ongoing reprint of Roy Crane’s legendary comedy-action series features what many consider the absolute peak of the series: “Temple of the Swinks,” in which Wash and Easy discover an ancient temple with statues of an unknown animal called a swink... a real-life specimen of which shows up!
In other stories, Wash and Easy sail for Singapore aboard a dhow with a cargo of wild animals, crash land a plane on an island inhabited by (inevitably) pirates and (just as inevitably) beautiful women, and sail the South Seas in a schooner whose villainous captain plans to rob them. When they return to America, Wash Tubbs’ pet swink draws huge crowds and a reputation for being worth a million dollars. Then Wash and Easy travel to Peru to rescue an American lost in the jungle and, in the cover-featured story, Easy goes deep sea diving in search of a beautiful girl’s lost diamond.
156-page full-color 6.25" x 8.25" hardcover • $22.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-538-9
Ships in: September 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
At last!
Cartoonists — Naked!
In an irreverent twist to the fine art tradition of The Nude, this unique and original collection presents a “stripped” down version of the infamous “Gallery of Rogues” exhibit of cartoonist self-portraits at Ohio State University.
Here you’ll find a cornucopia of cartoonists’ nude self-portraits from the collection of Mark J. Cohen and Rose Marie McDaniel.
The cartoonists inside aren’t afraid to bare all. Here you’ll find: Scott (Dilbert) Adams, Sergio (Mad) Aragonés, Will (The Spirit) Eisner, Will (Mad) Elder, Jules (Village Voice) Feiffer, Al (Mad Fold-Ins) Jaffee, Lynn (For Better Or For Worse) Johnston, Bil (Family Circus) Keane, Russell (Broom-Hilda) Myers, Charles (Peanuts) Schulz, Jeff (Bone) Smith, Art (Maus) Spiegelman, Mort (Beetle Bailey) Walker, Gahan (The New Yorker) Wilson and over 50 more!
104-page black & white 7.5" x 9.25" softcover • $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-586-0
Ships in: September 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Order this or any other Love and Rockets book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown at left as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last.
How do you follow up a one-two punch like Jaime Hernandez’s stunning two-part masterpiece “The Love Bunglers” from LRNS #3 and #4, which sent Maggie and Ray’s relationship in a startling new direction, as well as providing some mind-blowing revelations about Maggie’s (and her family’s) past?
If you’re Jaime, you deftly move sideways and switch focus to other characters, specifically Ray’s ex, the rambunctious “Frogmouth.” In “Crime Raiders International Mobsters and Executioners,” Tonta, the Frogmouth’s half-sister, comes to visit for a weekend and sees what kind of life the Frog Princess is living with Reno and Borneo — as well as a brand new character or two.
On the other-brother side, Gilbert Hernandez celebrates the 30th anniversary by bringing one of his current characters (“Killer,” granddaughter to the legendary Luba) into the Palomar milieu in a story that showcases a fictionalized “movie” Palomar (starring Fritz as a combination of Luba and Tonantzín), even as it brings back a number of the classic Palomar characters for real. This will be a much-anticipated homecoming for fans of the “classic” Love and Rockets of the 1980s.
Thirty years in, Love and Rockets continues to surprise and delight.
144-page full-color 7.5" x 10.25" softcover • $25.00 ISBN: 978-1-60699-628-7
Ships in: September 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Order this book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown at left as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last.
By appropriating and subverting Tintin creator Hergé’s classic “clear line” style, Joost Swarte revitalized European alternative comics in the 1970s with a series of satirical, musically elegant, supremely beautifully drawn short stories — often featuring his innocent, magnificently-quiffed Jopo de Pojo, or his orotund scientist character, Anton Makassar.
Under Swarte’s own exacting supervision, Is That All There Is? will collect virtually all of his alternative comics work from 1972 to date, including the RAW magazine stories that brought him fame among American comics aficionados in the 1980s. Especially great pains will be taken to match Swarte’s superb coloring, which includes stories executed in watercolor, comics printed in retro duotones, fiendishly clever use of Zip-a-Tone screens, and much more. (There’s even a story about how to color comics art using those screens, with Makassar as the teacher.)
Other noteworthy stories include Swarte’s take on an episode from Hergé’s early days, a Fats Domino story, a tribute to the legendary “Upside-Downs” strip, and a story titled simply “Modern Art.”
“I’ve loved Joost Swarte’s perfect cartoons, drawings and designs for decades and it’s nothing short of ridiculous that a comprehensive edition of this brilliant artist’s work has never been available in America until now. Swarte is considered a national treasure in his native Holland, and if you open this book, you’ll understand why.” — Chris Ware
144-page full-color 7.75" x 10.5" hardcover • $35.00 ISBN: 978-1-60699-510-5
Ships in: September 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Due to popular demand, in addition to the new softcover edition, we are offering this new hardcover edition at the same increased trim size (and with a new matte cover treatment — see photo above for comparison with First Edition), limited to 500 copies!
144-page two-color 6" x 9" softcover • $16.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-610-2 Published by Recoil Graphic Novels
Ships in: September 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Welcome To Big Spring, Texas and The Cavalier Hotel. A place brimming with all manner of colorful characters – horse thieves, roughnecks, shady lawmen, con men, oil barons, gamblers, bootleggers, flappers, dappers, wildcatters, railroad men, drunkards and murderers...
But Frank Hill, the proprietor of The Cavalier, has a new hotel dick (Nick Ford) to keep a sharp eye on folks who may cause trouble. Along with number one son, Sam Hill, The Cavalier should have been easy to patrol and kept duty free of any sort of criminal or unsavory activity.
That is, until Ross Thompson – a slick operator from Chicago — came into their humble abode and turned everything upside down. Not just the hotel, but the whole damn town! Big Spring was a just string of yarn for Mr. Thompson to pull and pull at, until the entire community came unraveled! Now you’ll have to crack open this here book for yourself to find out just how he done it...
120-page full-color 8" x 10" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-543-3
Ships in: September 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
When confronted with his girlfriend’s request that they have a child together, Samuel fled that relationship. But now, a year later, when he receives a letter from Alice announcing she is expecting a baby, old emotions flare up and he embarks on a long journey to see Alice again — to re-open, or perhaps close forever, that important chapter of his life. The Crackle of the Frost is the story of what he sees, hears, experiences, and learns during that journey.
In 2011, Fantagraphics presented the extraordinary Stigmata, a stunning display of Mattotti’s whirling, emotional, black and white linework put in the service of a devastating story — as well as his painted illustrations for Lou Reed’s The Raven. The Crackle of the Frost ups the visual ante even on those masterpieces, combining the narrative drive of the former with the lush color illustrations of the latter to create a graphic-novel masterpiece with panel after panel of sumptuous full-color paintings, as if Edward Hopper had suddenly decided to jump into comics.
"Mattotti is a master. It's obvious at one glance. His colors are music one can't help but dance to. Draw in closer, and Zentner's story conjures the psychic and emotional depth of Marguerite Duras and Murakami." – Craig Thompson (Blankets, Habibi)
World War II has ended, and with so many pilots mustered out at the end of the war, jobs for pilots are hard to find, and Buz’s record as a “hot-shot” pilot does not recommend him to commercial airlines. While looking for a job, Buz visits his old alma mater and spends time with glamorous Tot Winter and girl-next-door Christy Jameson. He finally finds the perfect job as a troubleshooter for International Airways, flying to trouble spots all over the world.
He encounters Sultry, the beautiful and dangerous woman he met on a Japanese-held island during the war, with fatal results for a major character in the strip. He travels to the arctic to stop the Mad Baron, an insane ex-Nazi trying to shoot down International Airways planes. And, in the only adventure to combine the daily and Sunday story lines, he teams up with his old pal Roscoe Sweeney to discover a fabulous ancient Mayan treasure. This book reprints the Sunday pages from this adventure in full color for the first time.
In the last adventure in our 2nd volume, Buz is kidnapped and flown to Africa by mysterious assailants. His friend Chili Harrison bets International Airways chief Mr. Wright $200 that even in this desperate situation, Buz will manage to get involved with a pretty girl. Long-time readers of the strip will have no trouble guessing who wins that bet.
Comic strip historian Brian Walker wrote, “Buz Sawyer combined fast-paced adventure stories…with authentically illustrated military equipment and real locations, which Crane researched during trips around the world.”
Roy Crane’s drawing and storytelling skills just get better and better. With this volume’s Buz reprints from 1945 to 1947, Crane hit his stride.
192-page black & white 7.25" x 9.25" hardcover • $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-619-5
Ships in: August 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Order this book and receive this FBI•MINI comic shown at left as a FREE bonus! Click here for details. Limit one per customer while supplies last.
The debut graphic novel from Noah Van Sciver follows the twentysomething Abraham Lincoln as he loses everything, long before becoming our most beloved president. Lincoln is a rising Whig in the state’s legislature as he arrives in Springfield, IL to practice law. With all of his possessions under his arms in two saddlebags, he is quickly given a place to stay by a womanizing young bachelor who becomes his friend and close confidant. Lincoln builds a life and begins friendships with the town’s top lawyers and politicians. He attends elegant dances and meets an independent-minded young woman from a high-society Kentucky family, and after a brisk courtship, becomes engaged. But, as time passes and uncertainty creeps in, young Lincoln is forced to battle a dark cloud of depression brought on by a chain of defeats and failures culminating into a nervous breakdown that threatens his life and sanity. This cloud of dark depression Lincoln calls “The Hypo.”
Dense crosshatching and an attention to detail help bring together this completely original telling of a man driven by an irrepressible desire to pull himself up by his bootstraps, overcome all obstacles, and become the person he strives to be. All the while unknowingly laying the foundation of character he would use as one of America’s greatest presidents.
Advance praise:
"Noah Van Sciver has brought new soul to this hard, weird time in Lincoln's life. The Hypo is a story of suffering & yearning, artfully told." — Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy
"Noah Van Sciver has developed a storytelling style that I find enormously appealing. In this book he's used that style to create a vivid and engaging portrait." — Chester Brown, author of Louis Riel
220-page black & white 16.25" x 6.25" hardcover • $35.00 ISBN: 978-1-56097-886-2
Ships in: August 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Gary Panter began imagining Dal Tokyo, a future Mars that is terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers, as far back as 1972, appropriating a friend’s idea about “cultural and temporal collision” (the “Dal” is short for Dallas).
Why Texan and Japanese? Panter says, “Because they are trapped in Texas, Texans are self-mythologizing. Because I was trapped in Texas at the time, I needed to believe that the broken tractor out back was a car of the future. Japanese, I’ll say, because of the exotic far-awayness of Japan from Texas, and because of the Japanese monster movies and woodblock prints that reached out to me in Texas. Japanese monster movies are part of the fabric of Texas.”
In 1983, Panter finally got a chance to fully explore this world, and share it with an audience, when the L.A. Reader published the first 63 strips. A few years later, the Japanese reggae magazine Riddim picked up the strip, and Panter continued the saga of Dal Tokyo in monthly installments for over a decade. But none of these conceptual descriptions will prepare the reader for the confounding visual and verbal richness of Dal Tokyo, as Panter’s famous “ratty line” collides and colludes with near-Joycean wordplay, veering from more or less intelligible jokes to dizzying non-sequiturs to surreal eruptions that can engulf the entire panel in scribbles. One doesn’t read Dal Tokyo; one is absorbed into it and spit out the other side.
344-page black & white 8.5" x 7" hardcover • $28.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-572-3
Ships in: August 2012 — Available to order upon its arrival in our mail-order warehouse.
Peanuts reaches the middle of the go-go 1980s in this book, which covers 1985 and 1986: a time of hanging out at the mall, “punkers” (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Snoopy with a Mohawk), killer bees, airbags, and Halley’s Comet. And in a surprisingly sharp satirical sequence, Schulz pokes fun at runaway licensing with the introduction of the insufferably merchandisable “Tapioca Pudding.”
Also in this volume: Peppermint Patty wins the “All-City School Essay Contest” with her “What I Did During Christmas Vacation” essay but snatches defeat from the jaws of victory with a disastrous acceptance speech… Charlie Brown, Linus, Sally and Snoopy go to “rain camp” one year, and “survival camp” the next… The World War One Flying Ace gets the flu and is nursed back to health by a French Mademoiselle (Marcie)… Sally gives Santa Claus a heart attack (literally!)… Lucy talks Charlie Brown into posing in swimtrunks for their school’s “Swimsuit issue”… Peppermint Patty gains a crabby tutor… Linus suffers a crisis when addressed for the first time as “Mister”… plus another return appearance by Molly Volley, Snoopy’s accidental destruction of his dog house (with a cannon!), and lots of near-Beckettian strips set in the desert starring this volume’s cover boy, the one and only Spike!
This volume's introduction is by comedian and actor Patton Oswalt (Big Fan, Young Adult, Ratatouille).
It’s another two years of hilarious, heart-warming strips from the great Charles M. Schulz.
two 344-page black & white hardcover volumes in a custom 8.75" x 7.125" x 3" slipcase • $49.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-573-0
Ships in: August 2012 — Available to order upon its arrival in our mail-order warehouse.
A boxed set of the seventeenth and eighteenth volumes of The Complete Peanuts, designed by the award-winning graphic novelist, Seth. Shipping shrinkwrapped, with volumes 1983-1984 and 1985-1986 packed in a sturdy custom box designed especially for this set, it's the perfect gift book item. (For more information on the contents of each volume, see the individual product listings linked above.)
"The Complete Peanuts has framed Charles Schulz’s enduring masterpiece about as well any lifelong fan could’ve hoped." – "The Best Comics of the '00s: The Archives", The A.V. Club
The 2013 Fantagraphics Ultimate Catalog of Comics is available now! Contact us to get your free copy, or download the PDF version (9 MB).
Preview upcoming releases in the Fantagraphics Spring/Summer 2013 Distributors Catalog. Read it here or download the PDF (26.8 MB). Note that all contents are subject to change.
Register and Login to receive full member benefits, including members-only special offers, commenting privileges on Flog! The Fantagraphics Blog, newsletters and special announcements via email, and stuff we haven't even thought of yet. Membership is free and spam-free, so Sign Up Today!