Anders Nilsen is a unique and fearless cartoonist: on one hand, he's an innovative and boundary-expanding experimenter with the comics form; on the other, his emotional and philosophical explorations of being human are deeply felt and enormously powerful. No work of his better exemplifies these qualities than The End. Produced in the aftermath of a devastating personal loss several years ago, The End is a wrenching, sometimes abstract, sometimes angry, sometimes bitterly funny meditation on grief, loss, mortality, and hope.
For this new hardcover edition, due out late next month, the original 32-page comic from 2007 has been expanded to 80 pages, including new full-color work. Read an 11-page excerpt, and pre-order a copy right here.
144-page black & white/color 8.5" x 11" softcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-0-930193-92-8
Ships in: April 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Available with a limited-edition bookplate signed by R. Crumb for an additional $30. The bookplate has been uniquely designed for this book, and each bookplate is printed on acid-free cardstock and hand-signed by the author. Please indicate your preference when adding the item to your shopping cart.
Another year's worth of prize Crumb here, folks — including the second issue of Zap!, the introduction of Angelfood McSpade, lots and lots of Mr. Natural, the long Fritz story "Fritz the No-Good," and plenty of little-seen and rare art, plus all of Crumb's contributions to the legendary Snatch comics, possibly the raunchiest book in the raunchy history of the undergrounds. There's also a jam or two with some of the other Zap! artists, the little-seen alternate version of the famous Janis Joplin Cheap Thrills album cover, the alternate version of the cover to Zap #3... all wrapped up with Crumb's hilarious new cover and an extensive set of photographically illustrated biographical notes from Crumb himself.
"Fantagraphics' Crumb project advances into wilder, woolier, scarier, more fantastic, and lewder and still lewder territory in [Volume 5]... This is definitely X-rated material — make that triple-X! — but it's brilliant, scabrously hilarious, absolutely basic to understanding the 1960s American counterculture, and authentically mind-blowing." – Booklist
1991 Harvey Award Winner, Best Domestic Reprint Project
We're proud to soon be releasing Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, a major work of comics autobiography by Austrian cartoonist Ulli Lust and winner of the 2011 Angoulême "Revelation" prize.
In 1984, 17-year-old Ulli and her friend Edi spent several eventful months on a trip from Vienna to Sicily. By turns exhilarating and harrowing, their journey is told with uncanny recall, lucid observation, and emotional honesty. Lust's cartooning is evocative, detailed, and punctuated with expressionistic outbursts.
"Ulli Lust really nails my favorite part of storytelling. Bumming cigarettes, learning how to hitchhike - the small details that create great character." – Jaime Hernandez
The 464-page book will debut at MoCCA Fest next week, and we'll also have copies — and Ulli herself! — at TCAF in May! It should be on shelves in stores about 2 months from now. You can get it a bit sooner by pre-ordering direct from us, and in the meantime you can take a test drive with our 30-page excerpt.
232-page full-color 7.5" x 10.25" hardcover • $28.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-653-9
Ships in: May 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
With this volume, "The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library" loops back to Barks's earlier days, collecting the entirety of Barks's (astounding) 1948 output.
The title story, "The Old Castle's Secret," is notable not just for being the first full-length 32-page adventure instigated by Scrooge McDuck (in his second-ever appearance), but for featuring some of Barks's spookiest, lushest settings in old Clan McDuck castle of Dismal Downs. The other long story, "The Sheriff of Bullet Valley," plunks Donald and the nephews in the Wild West, with Donald as an overconfident deputy having to deal with some high-tech rustlers. The book also includes the less-known "In Darkest Africa," originally published in a giveaway and unreleased for decades.
This volume also features an even 10 of Barks's dynamic "Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories" 10-pagers, including "Wintertime Wager" (the first appearance of a not-yet-lucky-but-still-obnoxious Gladstone Gander); "Spoil the Rod" (in which the exquisitely named educational professor Pulpheart Clabberhead is brought in to help tame the nephews); "Rocket Race to the Moon" (a rare full-on adventure — interplanetary, no less — in the short form); "Gladstone Returns" and "Links Highjinks" (two more Gladstone yarns); and five more stories... plus a half-dozen hilarious one-page gags.
Of course, once again all the stories have been shot from crisp originals, then re-colored (and printed) to match, for the first time since their original release over 60 years ago, the colorful yet soft hues of the originals — and of course the book is rounded off with essays about Barks, the Ducks, and these specific stories by Barks experts from all over the world.
We're greatly honored to follow up two-time National Book Award nominee Stephen Dixon's amazing short story collection What Is All This? with his brand new novel, His Wife Leaves Him. Design maestro Jacob Covey has put the finishing touches on the beautifully minimalist jacket and the book is off to the printer for release this Summer. Here are some learned opinions which may sway you:
"Stephen Dixon is one of the great secret masters — too secret. I return again and again to his stories for writerly inspiration, moral support and comic relief at moments of personal misery, and, several times, in a spirit of outright plagiaristic necessity: borrowing a jumpstart from a few lines of Dixon has been a real problem-solver in my own short fiction. Please read him, you." – Jonathan Lethem
"Startling candor, humor, and concern; every utterance promptly qualified; rigorous narrative economy combined with near-manic obsessiveness. Embrace [Dixon] and you will be held by a princely storyteller." – John Barth
"There is no better chronicler of our antic and anxious age than Stephen Dixon." – Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket)
"Mr. Dixon wields a stubbornly plain-spoken style; he loves all sorts of tricky narrative effects. And he loves even more the tribulations of the fantasizing mind, ticklish in their comedy, alarming in their immediacy." – The New York Times
We have a generous 38-page excerpt you can read, and you can pre-order the book right here.
Some views of The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove, collecting Oscar-winning animator Gene Deitch's jazz cartoons and illustrations from The Record Changer magazine from 1945-1951 with the artist's commentary. This new softcover edition will be out in April.
Click the images for bigger versions and see more in our Flickr set.
168-page full-color 11.75" x 9.25" softcover • $35.00 ISBN: 978-1-60699-617-1
Ships in: April 2013 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in "cool cat"), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled "The Cat," which quickly became a fixture of the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with "The Cat." Deitch's stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of jazz and became a visual paean to the joy of collecting and appreciating jazz.
Fantagraphics Books is proud to collect all of Deitch's Record Changer covers and "Cat" cartoons in one coffee-table, landscape-format art book, reproducing his covers in the same gorgeous colors in which they first appeared as well as the black-and-white Cat cartoons, with commentary and reminiscences by Deitch himself. Originally published in 2003 in hardcover and out of print for years, this redesigned, first-ever paperback edition will delight a new generation of fans.
"This oversized volume... is a hipster's delight nonpareil." – Booklist
"Anyone hoping for a contact high from the manic crazy-man pulse of the '40s hipster should look no further than here. To momentarily slip into the vernacular, this really is a bitch. Five stars." – MOJO
"Deitch achieves what only the greatest cartoonist can — a deep spiritual resonance with minimal representation. The Deitch covers are thrilling for their quiet beauty. [...] This is a terrific rediscovery of a forgotten giant of a small world." – New York Press
"This book is a must for any collector of vinyl, shellac and even wax. Four stars (and a thousand laughs) for this volume." – Anything Phonographic
"Excellently reproduced volume. [...] Hard to think of a better present." – Jazzwise
If you didn't get a chance to watch our slideshow of photos of Castle Waiting Vol. 2: Definitive Edition by Linda Medley, here's a sampling of images — click them for bigger versions to see the art in all of its glorious detail. And dig that classy bound-in ribbon bookmark! We're expecting the book to be available next month; hopefully this is the next best thing to flipping through a copy yourself.
