424-page black & white 6" x 6" hardcover • $26.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-528-0
Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Jewish Images in the Comics showcases more than 150 comic strips, comic books and graphic novels from all over the world, stretching over the last five centuries and featuring Jewish characters and Jewish themes.
The book is divided into chapters on Anti-Semitism, the Old Testament, the Holocaust, Israel, the Golem and much more, featuring everything from well-known comics like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the work of Will Eisner to much more obscure (and in some cases far less savory) but no less culturally and historically interesting examples of how Jewish culture has been depicted in comics.
As with Strömberg’s previous two books for Fantagraphics, each strip, comic, or graphic novel is spotlighted via a short but informative 200-word essay and a representative illustration. The book is augmented by a context-setting introduction as well as an extensive source list and bibliography.
Jewish Images in the Comics is the third book in a series in which Strömberg examines different phenomena in our society, as mirrored in comics. Black Images in the Comics examines the way Black people have been portrayed in comics and The Comics Go to Hell looks at how the Devil has been used as a comics character.
“Ya still think it pays to fight dirty?” No bad guys can beat Walt Disney’s classic Mickey; no other “modest mouse” has seen more two-fisted action or outrageous comedy! And now our big-eared hero is back with more edge-of-your-seat adventures: traveling from Umbrellastan to Texas — and duking it out with villains like Dr. Vulter, Pegleg Pete, and malicious miser Eli Squinch!
Floyd Gottfredson, artist and writer of Mickey Mouse, turned the strip into a 100-proof cocktail of thrills, comedy, warmth, and cynicism. In this volume, you’ll saddle up for Gottfredson’s two most famous Wild West epics: a “Race for Riches” amid rockslides and rustlers, then a dead-shot showdown with the brutal “Bat Bandit!” Back home in Mouseton, the mayhem continues when Mickey, Donald, and Goofy run a crime-fighting newspaper — and face trouble with mobsters and speeding black sedans!
Lovingly restored from Disney’s proof sheets, High Noon at Inferno Gulch also includes more than 50 pages of rootin’-tootin’ supplementary features! You’ll enjoy rare behind-the-scenes art, vintage publicity material, and vivid commentary by a pistol-packin’ posse of seasoned Disney scholars, including a Foreword by Thomas Andrae and an appreciation by the late Bill Blackbeard.
Walt Disney often said that his studio’s success “all started with a Mouse.” Now it’s time to rediscover the wild, unforgettable personality behind the icon!
208-page full-color 10.25" x 13.25" hardcover • $49.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-447-4
Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Jack Davis arrived on the illustration scene in the euphoric post-war America of the late 1940s when consumer society was booming and the work force identified with commercial images that reflected this underlying sense of confidence and American bravado. Advertising agencies were looking for new ways to tap a rich and expanding market, and there was a vast array of media that needed illustrations. Davis’ animated and exuberant images possessed a sense of spontaneous energy that proved to have universal appeal in every medium he worked in.
Beginning with his masterful pen and ink cartooning at EC Comics, he quickly forged a reputation as one of the most versatile artists in comics, drawing humor, horror, and war stories. In Harvey Kurtzman’s MAD, especially, Davis made a mark as a master of caricature, composition, and wild, anarchic crowd scenes, practically vibrating with energy.
After stints at MAD, Trump, and Humbug — three humor magazines that defined the satirical zeitgeist of the ’50s — Davis went on to become the most successful commercial illustrator of his generation, illustrating movie posters, magazine articles, magazine fiction, LP jackets, and more.
Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture is a gigantic, unparalleled career-spanning retrospective, between whose hard covers resides the greatest collection — in terms of both quantity and quality — of Jack Davis’ work ever assembled! It includes work from every stage of his long and varied career, such as: excerpts of satirical drawings from his college humor ’zine, The Bull Sheet; examples of his comics work from EC, MAD, Humbug, Trump, and obscure work he did for other companies in the 1950s such as Dell; movie posters including It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Bad News Bears, Woody Allen’s Bananas, The Party, and others; LP jacket art for such musicians and bands as Hans Conreid and the Creature Orchestra’s Monster Rally, Spike Jones and Ben Cooler; cartoons and illustrations from Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Time, TV Guide, Esquire, and many others; unpublished illustrations and drawings Davis did as self-promotional pieces, proposed comic strips that never sold (such as his Civil War epic “Beaureagard”), finished drawings for unrealized magazine projects — and even illustrations unearthed in the Davis archives that the artist himself can’t identify!
Much of the material will be scanned directly from original art, showing the painterly brush strokes and black and white pen work with far greater fidelity than any previous reproduction ever has. Many paintings and illustrations are accompanied by preliminary drawings that demonstrate the evolution of Davis’ drawing process.
In the back of the book you'll find a biography of Davis by Gary Groth, as well as tributes and testimonals written by a spectrum of Davis's cartoonist contemporaries and fans including Sergio Aragonés, Peter Bagge, Coop, Bob Fingerman, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith, Al Jaffee, Joe Kubert, Peter Kuper, Tony Millionaire, Nate Neal, Spain Rodriguez and Jim Woodring.
Download a PDF excerpt (33.2 MB) with a smattering of 22 pages from the book.
224-page black & white/color 7" x 9.5" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-533-4
Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
SPECIAL OFFER:
Order this volume and get Vol. 1 and/or Vol. 2 for $14.99 each; that's 25% off! Use the option menu when ordering.
As shown in the first two volumes of this acclaimed series, Shuichi and his friend Yoshino have a secret: Shuichi is a boy who wants to be a girl, and Yoshino is a girl who wants to be a boy.
But one day, abruptly, their secret is exposed, and the two find themselves the target of sixth-grade cruelty. Their friendship is strained, as Yoshino makes a half-hearted effort at being a “normal girl”... and their mentor, Yuki, reveals the harder reality of being transgendered. Meanwhile, Shuichi’s sister, Maho, realizes her dream of becoming a model, and drags Shuichi along for the ride. Shuichi meets another boy who wants to be a girl, and finds himself on an arranged date with a boy who doesn’t know that the girl he has a crush on is actually a boy.
After an unhurried, almost leisurely buildup that gave us an opportunity to get to know and understand our protagonists, artist Shimura picks up the pace in this latest volume, with tears and laughs aplenty. A sophisticated work translated with rare sensitivity by veteran translator and comics scholar Matt Thorn.
152-page two-color 10.25" x 8.5" hardcover • $22.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-479-5
Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Flannery O’Connor was among the greatest American writers of the 2nd half of the 20th century; she was a writer in the Southern tradition of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers, who wrote such classic novels and short stories as Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She is perhaps as well known for her tantalizing brand of Southern Gothic humor as she is for her Catholicism. That these tendencies should be so happily married in her fiction is no longer a surprise. The real surprise is learning that this much beloved icon of American literature did not set out to be a fiction writer, but a cartoonist. This seems to be the last well-kept secret of her creative life.
Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons, the first book devoted to the author’s work in the visual arts, emphasizes O’Connor’s most prolific period as a cartoonist, drawing for her high school and college publications in the early 1940s.
While many of these images lampoon student life and the impact of World War II on the home front, something much more is happening. Her cartoons are a creative threshing floor for experimenting and trying out techniques that are deployed later with such great success in her fiction.
O’Connor learns how to set up and carry a joke visually, how to write a good one-liner and set it off against a background of complex visual narration. She develops and asserts her taste for a stock set of character types, attitudes, situations, exaggerations, and grotesques, and she learns how to present them not to distort the truth, but to expose her vision of it.
She worked in both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, and her rough-hewn technique combined with her acidic observations to form a visual precursor to her prose. Fantagraphics is honored to bring the early cartoons of this American literary treasure to a 21st century readership.
For an audience resistant to your views, O’Connor once wrote, “draw large and startling figures.” In her fiction, as in her cartoons, these shocks to the system never come without a laugh.
84-page black & white/duotone 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-524-2
Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Many years ago, Jacques Tardi was introduced to American audiences with “Manhattan,” a grim and grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was instrumental in defining both that magazine’s virtuoso aesthetic and its dark sensibility. Three decades later, New York Mon Amour collects “Manhattan” and three other tales of the Big Apple — rendered by Tardi with just as much panache and you-are-there detail as Paris or the trenches of World War I in his other books — in one spectacular volume.
Aside from “Manhattan,” the centerpiece of the book is the graphic novel “Cockroach Killer,” written by Benjamin Legrand. This violent, surreal conspiracy thriller, starring a hapless exterminator named Walter, features a striking two-color black-and-red technique unique in Tardi’s oeuvre, and remains one of the cartoonist’s most startling, confounding works. New York Mon Amour is rounded off with two short stories written by Dominique Grange: “It’s So Hard” (starring John Lennon — but not that John Lennon — and never before published in English) and “The Killing of Hung” (a story of revenge and redemption).
New York Mon Amour is a crucial and unique addition to Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Tardi collection.
136-page black & white/color 8.75" x 11.25" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-539-6
Ships in: June 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.
Originally serialized in Love and Rockets: New Stories, “Ti-Girls Adventures” managed to be both a rollickingly creative super-hero joyride (featuring three separate super-teams and over two dozen characters) that ranged from the other side of the universe to Maggie’s shabby apartment, and a genuinely dramatic fable about madness, grief, and motherhood as Penny Century’s decades-long quest to become a genuine super-heroine are finally, and tragically, fulfilled.
In addition to introducing a plethora of wild new characters, God and Science brings in many older characters from Jaime’s universe, some from seemingly throwaway shorter strips and some from Maggie’s day-to-day world (including some real surprises). The main heroine of the story, forming a bridge between the “realistic” Maggie stories and the super-heroic extravaganza is “Angel,” Maggie’s sweet-tempered and athletic new roommate and best friend, and now herself an aspiring super-heroine.
Aside from being presented in a large format that really displays Jaime Hernandez’s stunning art, God and Science will be a “director’s cut” version that includes a full 30 new pages in addition to the original 100-page epic, including four new full-color faux Ti-Girls covers, several expansions of scenes, an epilogue set back in Maggie’s apartment, and a long fantasy/timewarp sequence that draws the focus back on Penny’s awful predicament.
288-page black & white 6" x 8.25" softcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-544-0
Ships in: June 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.
In 2011’s Dungeon Quest Book Two, we left our heroes, Millennium Boy, Steve, Lash and Nerdgirl, in the Temple of Bromedes as they began their initiation into the mysteries of Atlantis under the tutelage of the androgynous forest mystic, Bromedes. In this third book, our heroes complete their learning with Bromedes and are guided towards further quests in Rufford Park and beyond, to the Zuur Plateau. However, they are not yet clear of the hazards of Fireburg Forest. Resurfacing to the forest floor (after hitting the strongest weed in the universe, “Orangutan Daydream”), they must survive a perilous cliff path, discover moon shrines, battle wild Womraxes, endure knock-out gas, hypnagogic visions, nakedness and deprivation and, finally, embark on a desperate and courageous mission to rescue Nerdgirl from cruel Forest Bandits and retrieve their stolen equipment.
In this third book, by far the longest installment of the series so far (288 pages!), the reader is also introduced to the history and mysticism of The Romish Book of the Dead, a sexually avant-garde “little forest man” (who becomes the fifth member of the crew), Steve’s newly discovered “battle warping” abilities (which Millennium Boy dismisses as being a mere “kundalini spasm”), weapons and armor upgrades and a whole new level of bizarre comedy, rousing adventure and ass-kicking action — all staged in front of fantastic backdrops replete with strange vegetation, ancient ruins and steampunk imagery.
One of the greatest visual storytellers in the history of comics. That was Mort Meskin, famed Golden Age artist whose name belongs in the first rank of comics storytellers: Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko.
See for yourself why Meskin earned the admiration and respect of his peers (as well as contemporary critics and historians) for his atmospherically charged work, his masterful use of form and composition to convey mood and action, his noirish use of light and shadow to create suspense.
This, the first-ever collection of Meskin’s comics, surveys his work from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Here, in just under 200 pages, you’ll discover the artist’s amazing ability to stamp his own fresh visual imprimatur across a wide variety of genres: superheroes (The Black Terror, The Fighting Yank, a never-before published Golden Lad), adventure (the origin of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), science fiction (Tom Corbett, Space Cadet) — plus horror, kid gangs, crime, Western — even romance!
Rescued from the fading obscurity of old, yellowing comic books, this deluxe volume meticulously reproduces his work from the best available sources. At last, Mort Meskin steps into the spotlight and — OUT OF THE SHADOWS!
Praise for Mort Meskin:
“Deserves to be treasured by all comics fans and studied by all artists of the medium” – Rich Clabaugh, Christian Science Monitor
• Preview/Interview: At Print Magazine, Michael Dooley presents a bunch of pages of The Sincerest Form of Parody: The Best 1950s Mad-Inspired Satirical Comics and has a quick Q&A with editor John Benson: "When Isaac Asimov edited his massive Before the Golden Age anthology of 1930s science fiction... he relied entirely on his memories of reading the stories when they first appeared, and that's how he made his selections. Similarly, Jules Feiffer largely relied on his memories of the stories from his original reading when making selections for his seminal The Great Comic Book Heroes in 1965. Like the Asimov and Feiffer books, The Sincerest Form of Parody is partly an exercise in nostalgia, so in making my selections, I think it's fair to give some consideration to my reaction to the material when I first saw it."
• Review: "...Fantagraphics recently unlocked whatever crate must have been used to house Mr. Twee Deedle: Raggedy Ann's Sprightly Cousin: The Forgotten Fantasy Masterpieces of Johnny Gruelle. Over a foot long and over a foot-and-a-half tall, the hardcover features the most beautiful endpapers in recent memory. Gruelle’s artwork is full of whimsy, presented in both the richest nostalgic color and black and white. The narrative involves two children on a journey through a magical land as guided by a wood sprite, but this is truthfully an art book. It’s meant to be read sprawled out on the floor, the only surface in an average reader’s home that is likely large enough to properly balance this fine luxury. Rick Marschall provides a lengthy, informative essay that is lavishly accompanied by further illustrations." – Alex Carr, Omnivoracious
• Review: "In an age of indie-comics dependent upon the banality of the everyday, a hesitant realism, Rickheit eschews reality in favor of the impossible, a state of existence that is truly fantastical. But this is not a utopia, this is a world entirely of the body, though not only the body of human beings, but the body of all living meat, of anything that breathes and shits. This is a world of pure imagination, of subconscious desires let loose with an acutely detailed drawing style. And ultimately, [Folly]’s a perfect work for those who refuse to float away from their bodies but are ready to let their heads go where-ever one can find the new." – Invisible Mike, HTMLGIANT
• Tweet of the Day: "I just read The Furry Trap by Josh Simmons; I'll be on the Internet the rest of the day looking for instructions on how to boil my eyes." – Tom Spurgeon (@comicsreporter)
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!
![The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 3: Starring Fritz the Cat [New Softcover Ed. - with Special Offer]](http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=c5b556210545bc47042c45f73eb7c9f8.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout=)
![7 Miles a Second [Pre-Order]](http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=7d887be28f6e78b24b75a5c6e78edd88.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout=)
![Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 2 [Pre-Order]](http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=8c29d16608edaa56c969275d0085b97c.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout=)
![The Comics Journal #302 [Pre-Order]](http://www.fantagraphics.com/components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=d461088882b14b24bc633838c60b7266.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout=)
Twitter
Facebook
Flickr
Google+
Tumblr
YouTube