Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features the debut volume from Eve Gilbert, which garnered high praise and an introduction from Robert Crumb:

Tits, Ass & Real Estate

Populated by junkies, grifters, hustlers, strippers, pimps and various strains of victims and criminals, this is a biting and satirical portrait of America as seen from the lower depths. A collection of autobiographical stories, this volume by Eve Gilbert allows readers full access to her decidedly unglamorous world, filled with people you probably hope never to meet. "The Real Resume" is a depressingly realistic tour of the various wage-slave jobs Gilbert has held over the years. Another highlight is "Pregnate?" — which was written in a San Francisco porn store while Gilbert was waiting for an interview — in which Gilbert relates how she ended up pregnant despite a safety net of latex, with no money for even a pregnancy test, let alone an abortion. Unflinchingly candid and caustic, Gilbert has one of the most uniquely confident and iconoclastic voices to hit the world of graphic novels in several years. If you put Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and Kathy Acker in a blender and added the ratty, unadorned drawing style of Charles Rodriguez, you'd have some idea of just how hot and incendiary a brew this is.

96-page black & white 8" x 11" softcover
regularly $12.95 • ON SALE $9.71
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features Francesca Ghermandi, who is justly lauded in her native Italy but remains underappreciated here in North America. Hopefully that will change with her new graphic novel Grenuord, coming soon from Fantagraphics.

The Wipeout

One of the brightest lights in the modern Italian comics firmament, Ghermandi infuses her work with a gorgeous full-color palette of stylized graphics and a decidedly hard-boiled (but very funny) story sensibility. Set in her crazy, surreal universe, The Wipeout is half Double Indemnity, half Mulholland Drive — a violent, dream-laden fantasia with enough twists and turns to delight any adventurous comics reader. Jo Tartaglia, who works for a global cleaning-products company, is putting the finishing touches on a revolutionary new fluid that would clean everything at once — the only drawback being that, when mixed with milk, it becomes a deadly poison. Nagged nearly to death by his hair-transplant-obsessed wife Belle, he falls in with the lovely Virgin Prune, a lady with a shady past who enlists him to get her out from under a villainous loan shark (who happens to be an exact double for Jo). In typical film-noir style, there are plots within plots, not everyone ends up alive at the end of the story, and those who are dead aren't necessarily dead for good.

80-page full-color 9" x 12.5" softcover
regularly $19.95 • ON SALE $14.96
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features Mary Fleener, a true grande dame of the underground/alternative comix movement!

Life of the Party

The ultimate collection of Mary Fleener's groundbreaking Drawn & Quarterly series Slutburger in book form! Mary recounts tales of rock n' roll, southern California life, strange phantasms, and more in the pages of Life of the Party. Fleener's trademark neo-cubist cartooning ("cubismo") and her unique perspective on life in Southern California, from hippie art student, to gigging musician on the lesbian bar circuit, to surfer, make Life of the Party a striking and singular comic experience. Included here are such stories as "Turn Off That Jungle Music," "The Jelly," "Hush Yuppies," "Ashes of Passion," "Tales from the Pink Coffin," and many others. With Slutburger, hordes of fans joined the Fleener conga line — Life of the Party is the perfect place to get on the good foot!

152-page black & white softcover
regularly $14.95 • ON SALE $11.21
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features a title by Bob Fingerman which, again, didn't exactly escape notice when it was released, having been heaped with praise by the likes of Augusten Burroughs, Margaret Cho, Penn Jillette, Entertainment Weekly and many others... but it's been a while, so we're thrusting it back into the spotlight:

Beg the Question

Bob Fingerman's Beg the Question tells the story of Rob and Sylvia, two twenty-somethings navigating the labyrinth of New York City life. Imagine a cross between Seinfeld and Caligula, set in Manhattan, and you'll have an idea of Fingerman's caustic wit. Beg the Question follows Rob & Sylvia's relationship through all of its ups-and-downs, from courtship to marriage, rentals to real estate salesmen, public sex to unwanted pregnancies, and everything in between. Performance art, extended families, the comic book industry and Screw magazine are just a few of the other topics subjected to Fingerman's satirical microscope. Fingerman's mid-1990s comic book series Minimum Wage was a breakthrough success, and this marks the first collection of the entire run, completely retouched, with added gray tones that give the art a much fuller, richer look, plus almost 40 pages of never-before-published material. Find out why Beg the Question is one of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels we've ever published!

240-page black & white 6" x 9" softcover
regularly $16.95 • ON SALE $12.71
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features another debut from a Xeric Grant winner, Alex Fellows:

Canvas

During a camping trip one weekend, Canvas, a fourteen-year old girl born to a pig and a frog, suffers the attraction of two young guys, goes on a shocking double date, and gets drunk for the first time. Her parents, despite their odd appearance, have a very typical fear of their daughter's new experiences. Hot upstart cartoonist (and Xeric Grant winner to boot) Alex Fellows compels the reader with this teenage girl's decisions based on the only quality she's had time to develop: curiosity.

80-page black & white 7.5" x 9" softcover
regularly $9.95 • ON SALE $7.46
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features a recent book from South African cartoonist Joe Daly which didn't quite escape notice, having garnered a 2007 Eisner Award nomination for "Best Graphic Album - New," but we're turning the spotlight on it again anyway:

Scrublands

This debut collection is the first book Fantagraphics has published by a South African cartoonist. Daly's earlier work has been described as "Tintin meets the Freak Brothers in the Cape of Good Dope." Indeed, Daly's cartoons, offbeat, hallucinatory, and often hilarious, seem descended from and in some cases an amalgamation of the substance-induced work of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay Wilson, filtered through the artist's own unique vision and sense of the absurd. Stories alternate between full color and black-and-white and range from representational Jim Jarmusch-like scenarios to wild visual excursions, albeit linear ones. We are pleased to introduce a unique new voice to the world of cartooning and predict Daly's mix of deadpan absurdity and surreal imagery will be greeted with enthusiasm by readers and critics alike.

128-page color/b&w 8.5" x 11" softcover
regularly $16.95 • ON SALE $12.71
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features the Xeric Grant-winning debut from artist and animator Santiago Cohen:

The Fifth Name

Based on a 1920s Austrian novella by Stefan Zweig, this story is a reaction to the politics of the time. A personal story of a man searching for a sense of justice and responsibility towards the others, it takes place in India before Buddha when people had very different moral values. Divided into 5 sections, each section deals with different aspects of the life of the main character Virata as he tries to be righteous. Stefan Zweig was a humanist and after seeing what became of his beloved Europe when the Nazis took over he eventually committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 when he couldn't bear it any longer. Xeric Grant winner Santiago Cohen's personal connection with the story is evident in each line of this wonderful book. This engrossing tale of an ancient soldier's quest for wisdom and justice amidst the chaos of medieval life resonates with the archetypical immediacy of a children's fable, but don't let that fool you. Behind the simple but expressive art is a profound meditation on life, loss, guilt and the search for enlightenment that will stay with you long after you've finished reading.

128-page two-color softcover
regularly $14.95 • ON SALE $11.21
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features the accomplished 1997 debut by Brian Biggs:

Frederick & Eloise: A Love Story

Brian Biggs is a talented illustrator whose first comic is a strange and hypnotic love story that maneuvers around Paris and Frederick's dreams with a light touch that belies its grisly subject matter. Told in a strict format of two panels per page, it features Biggs's elegant and surreal drawings. Consider a comic written by Roman Polanski and drawn by Alfred Hitchcock and you'll have some idea of what to expect: dreamlike and perverse (though not in the least bit explicit), it engages the senses and lingers in the mind. This stunning debut is presented in a unique, deluxe mini-book format, printed on high-quality, enamel-coated art paper, with full-color painted covers and a beautifully executed halftone interior. This is one of the most accomplished works by a new talent we've ever been privileged to publish.

32-page black & white 8" x 7" comic
regularly $4.95 • ON SALE $3.71
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features a great collection of classic '50s romance comics compiled and edited by John Benson:

Romance Without Tears

A first-time collection of the best romance comics of the 1950s. These bright, naturalistic tales (originally published by Archer St. John and written by unrecognized comics master Dana Dutch) are about high school girls who may be inexperienced but definitely have minds of their own. Many of these stories are illustrated by Matt Baker, who achieved fame for his work on Phantom Lady and other sexy female characters in the '40s and '50s.

"With bold writing and smooth, graceful artwork, these tales are fun and visually compelling stories — not just relics of the past, but good comics that hold up." – Publishers Weekly

160-page full-color 8" x 10" softcover
regularly $22.95 • ON SALE $17.21
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Every day in July we're spotlighting books from our month-long Hidden Gems Sale, wherein we're featuring some of our under-the-radar backlist titles and encouraging you to try them by offering them at a nice discount of 25% off!

Today's installment features Swedish artist Max Andersson, whose work Charles Burns describes as "my kind of fun":

Pixy

Alka Seltzer and Angina Pectoris have all the luck — bad, that is. They've been ejected into the street because their apartment was put to sleep, Angina had to abort their child (the result of a malfunctioning Safe-Sex bodysuit) — how could it get worse? When a friendly stranger offers them his apartment, things seem to be looking up... but then Angina gets a call from the Netherworld. It's her aborted fetus: he's drunk and he's pissed off. So begins Pixy, which Neil Gaiman calls "the best comic I've read this year" — a 65-page journey into a nightmare world unlike any you've ever seen before. The rest of the book follows Alka's attempts to infiltrate the Kingdom of the Dead (where time runs backwards and is sold by the pint to time-addicts), in order to track down the malevolent Pixy and kill him for good. Shedding bodies and identities with some regularity (Pixy himself blows one to smithereens), Alka finds his own sense of reality eroding further and further during his sojourn down under — and it doesn't help at all when Pixy, now his best friend, accompanies him back up to the Land of the Living, where the gun-happy undead sprite wreaks unspeakable havoc. Pixy is the first major work by Swedish cartoonist Max Andersson, and it combines the freewheeling-yet-obsessive graphic and narrative weirdness of such contemporary North American cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Kaz and Charles Burns with a bizarre yet coherent story that mixes coal black humor, barbed satire, wild surrealism, and stark horror in a totally new way — a feast for the (preferably deranged) mind and the (preferably diseased) eye.

72-page black & white 9" x 12" softcover
regularly $11.95 • ON SALE $8.96
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Bosnian Flat Dog

The 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. A grenade shell from a Sarajevo souvenir shop. A refrigerator with the frozen mummy of Tito... These serve as the starting point for a journey further and further down the collective unconscious of the Balkans, where the borders between dream and reality are erased and redrawn until they form a tale as exciting as it is fantastic, a tale which could be about our times and a war-torn Europe but just as well might be a deep dive into the psyches of its authors or a discussion about the essence of drawing. Bosnian Flat Dog is the result of a unique collaboration between two of Sweden's most internationally renowned cartoonists, Death and Candy and Pixy creator Max Andersson and Lars Sjunnesson. Each of them contributed to every single drawing to the extent that they no longer can tell themselves exactly who did what. This has lead to the emergence of an independent artistic entity which is neither of the two, but something else, at once familiar and unknown and perhaps a little bit scary.

112-page black & white 10" x 7.5" softcover
regularly $13.95 • ON SALE $10.46
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