Art School Confidential
by Daniel Clowes
$14.95 paperback . 204 pages (with16 pp. color)
Art School Confidential is DANIEL CLOWES and TERRY ZWIGOFF's major motion picture follow-up to their Academy Award-nominated 2001 debut feature, Ghost World. Directed by Zwigoff from a script by Clowes (his first since his Oscar-nominated Ghost World screenplay), the film stars John Malkovich, Max Minghella, Jim Broadbent, Steve Buscemi, Anjelica Huston and Sophia Myles. The film premieres nationally on April 28th from Sony Pictures Classics. Art School Confidential follows Jerome (Minghella), an art student who dreams of becoming the greatest artist in the world. The film expands on a short comic story by Dan Clowes that was originally published, in black-and-white, in his hit comic book series Eightball; for this new book, the strip will be published in full-color for the first time.This scrapbook/screenplay also features the original shooting script for the film, including scenes edited out from the final cut. It also boasts two full-color sectio ns jammed with stills from the film, character designs from Clowes' sketchbook, artwork created as set dressing by Clowes and his friends, and many other surprises.
The Complete Peanuts 1959-60
by Charles M. Schulz; Introduction by Whoopi Goldberg
$28.95 Hardcover . 344 pages
As the first decade of Peanuts closes, it seems only fitting to bid farewell to that halcyon decade with a cover starring Patty, one of the original three Peanuts. Major new additions to classic Peanuts lore come fast and furious here. Snoopy begins to take up residence atop his doghouse, and his repertoire of impressions increases exponentially. Lucy sets up her booth and offers her first five-cent psychiatric counsel. (Her advice to a forlorn Charlie Brown: "Get over it.") For the very first time, Linus spends all night in the pumpkin patch on his lonely vigil for the Great Pumpkin (although he later laments that he was a victim of "false doctrine," he's back twelve months later). Linus also gets into repeated, and visually explosive, scuffles with a blanket-stealing Snoopy, suffers the first depredations of his blanket-hating grandmother, and falls in love with his new teacher Miss Othmar. Even more importantly, several ye ars after the last addition to the cast ("Pig-Pen"), Charlie Brown's sister Sally makes her appearance - first as an (off-panel) brand-new baby for Charlie to gush over, then as a toddler and eventually a real, talking, thinking cast member. (By the end of this volume, she'll already start developing her crush on Linus.) All this, and one of the most famous Peanuts strips ever: "Happiness is a warm puppy." Almost one hundred of the 731strips collected in this volume (including many Sundays) have never been collected in any book since their original release, with one hundred more having been collected only once in relatively obscure and now impossible-to-find books; in other words, close to one quarter of the strips have never been seen by anyone but the most avid Peanuts completists.
Sex, Rock & Optical Illusions
by Victor Moscoso
$34.95 Hardcover . 146 pages
The 1960s are known as a decade of social and political unrest: The Cuban Missile Crisis, the struggle for civil rights, the escalating protests against the Vietnam war, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, the formation of radical home-grown organizations such as the Weather Underground. It was also a time of cultural revolution, in music, literature, journalism, films, and the heady conflation of Fine Art with the Pop Art movement. Comics were undergoing their own revolution and no one epitomized underground comix and psychedelia more than Victor Moscoso, whose posters for such bands as The Grateful Dead and Big Brother & The Holding Company, stand as enduring works of art and instantly recognizable icons of their time. Moscoso revolutionized the poster aesthetic and defined the visual culture of a generation. R. Crumb invited Moscoso to join the Zap Comix collective in 1968, and Moscoso's work has appeared in every issue si nce. His comix work contrasted with his fellow artists by his unique stylization, less confrontational point of view, hallucinatory visual rhythms, and wordless, dreamlike stories. Sex, Rock & Optical Illusions is Moscoso's first career-spanning retrospective, from his earliest poster work in 1966 to his most recent graphic experimentation. Optical Illusions contains his best posters that advertised bands playing in San Francisco's famous dance ballrooms of the time - the Avalon, the Matrix, and the Fillmore - as well as many of his Zap Comix contributions, and his solo comix work, many in Moscoso's signature color. This wide-ranging career retrospective - Moscoso's famous technique employing "vibrating colors" that he pioneered in his posters is impeccably reproduced with as much fidelity to the original as modern printing can achieve, his black-and-white and full color comix work is collected here for the first time - is an intense, vibrant, and revelatory experience.
Billy Hazelnuts
by Tony Millionaire
$19.95 Hardcover . 100 pages
Tony Millionaire, creator of Sock Monkey and one of America's most popular weekly comic strips, Maakies, delivers his first original graphic novel for Fantagraphics. Billy Hazelnuts transmutes nursery rhymes and the golem myth into a storybook about Becky, girl scientist, her friend Billy Hazelnuts (who was created from cooking ingredients by tailless mice), and their journey to find the missing moon while battling an evil steam-driven alligator with a seeing-eye skunk. Millionaire fuses the darker spirit of older fairy tales with an absurdist adventure story, throws gender politics into the mix, and brings it to life with his dementedly charming and meticulous drawing style that is utterly transporting. Billy Hazelnuts features all-new characters, a first for Millionaire after building a tremendous following for his Sock Monkey and Maakies characters, which is sure to delight existing fans as well as introduce an entirely new audience to his breathtaking line and imagination.
Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis The Menace 1953-1954by Hank Ketcham
$24.95 Hardcover . 680 pages
Dennis the Menace has, for over 50 years, captured the mischievous, rambunctious, anarchic worldview of a kid better than any other cartoon strip. It is the most hilariously observed and empathetic strip cartoon about childhood ever drawn - with a sly humor that kids identify with and parents nod knowingly and ruefully at. Now, courtesy the same publisher that publishes the award-winning Complete Peanuts series (the series that sparked a comic strip renaissance), Hank Ketcham's beloved cartoon can be enjoyed by new generations, in a series collecting for the very first time every Dennis cartoon panel over the half-century life of the strip. Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1953-1954 is the second volume in the series, which debuted in the fall of 2005 to cheers from comic strip fans worldwide.
Beasts And Priests
by Jim Blanchard; Introduction by Art Chantry
$9.95 Softcover . 64 pages
Beasts and Priests collects for the first time more than ten years' worth of portraiture of the world's most legendary scene-makers as rendered by the infamous Seattle artist Jim Blanchard. Blanchard's work is often twisted, mutated and ultimately sickly gorgeous, with a pervasive psychedelic tone. Heavily influenced by such underground greats as Robert Williams and Victor Moscoso, Blanchard fuses meticulous craftsmanship with a pop underground sensibility to produce some of the most vivid and striking portraiture in the world. Born in Houston, Texas in 1965, Blanchard earned his bachelor's degree in fine arts from the University of Oklahoma in 1987. He has done a wide range of work in illustration, comics and graphic design, including many iconic rock posters for bands such as Nirvana and the Melvins. He was an art director for Fantagraphics through much of the 1990s, and inked Peter Bagge's comic Hate. Fantagraphics has also published his ar t collection Glam Warp and his comic Trucker Fags in Denial (written by Jim Goad). Portrait subjects include: Duke Ellington, Redd Foxx, Frances Farmer, Patti Page, Shane MacGowan, Lemmy Kilmister, Ron Jeremy, Marcel Proust, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tom Jones, Curtis Mayfield, Terry Southern, Jackie Gleason, Amos Milburn, Willie Nelson, Henry Kissinger, Courtney Love, Steve McQueen, Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, Brigitte Bardot, Andy Warhol, Lee Marvin, Isaac Hayes, Johnny Cash, Bon Scott, Lee Hazlewood, Raymond Chandler, Ennio Morricone, Bill Hicks, and Lenny Bruce.
Chicken Fat
by Will Elder
$14.95 Softcover . 96 pages
This companion volume to Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art peeks into the gray matter of one of comics' most fertile and wide-ranging imaginations. Elder coined the term "chicken fat" to describe the myriad background gags crammed into his stories for MAD, Panic, Humbug, Goodman Beaver and Little Annie Fanny: "It's the part of the chicken soup that is bad for you, yet gives the soup its delicious flavor," he once explained. This is a collection of sketches, drawings and a variety of obscure commercial illustration over the course of Elder's long career. Elder's stable of characters is duly represented, with Goodman Beaver, Little Annie Fanny, the Mole and the more obscure Anthony Adverse, together with caricatures of celebrities and politicians, studies of classic comics characters, movie posters, assorted gag panels, anatomical and fine art studies, and pages upon pages of ingeniously realized doodles.
Luba: The Book of Ofelia
by Gilbert Hernandez
$22.95 Softcover . 260 pages
Gilbert Hernandez last wowed critics in 2003 with his epic life's-work Palomar, collecting more than 20 years of groundbreaking comics that Booklist called "the most substantive single work that the comics medium has yet produced." In his first graphic novel in two years, Hernandez's Luba: The Book of Ofelia features the latest travails of Palomar matriarch Luba and her cousin Ofelia, along with their close circle of family, friends, enemies, and lovers. Luba: The Book of Ofelia begins with Luba, Ofelia and company trying to acclimate to life in America, where Luba still has yet to learn English. When Ofelia decides to chronicle her life with Luba in a tell-all book, she discovers inspiration in Luba's young children - the one-armed Casimira, Socorro with the photographic memory, the loner Joselito and the silent Conchita. Luba: The Book of Ofelia uses elements of Latino soap opera and soft-core porn, with touches of magic-realism, to tell the s tory of the changes that come with age and the unchanging need for sex and love, with the most vivid, memorable, and honestly depicted characters in comics.
Jimbo's Inferno
by Gary Panter
$29.95 Hardcover . 40 pages
Special Limited Edition, Includes Signed And Numbered Woodblock Print by Gary Panter. $99.95
Jimbo's Inferno is the hugely anticipated sequel (or prequel, as it was actually completed first) to 2004's acclaimed Jimbo In Purgatory. In this hardcover, produced to the same exacting standards as Purgatory, Jimbo, accompanied by his trusty guide and ride Valise, visits Hell (here envisioned as a gigantic subterranean shopping mall called Focky Bocky), and in so doing runs across minotaurs, drug-addled punkettes, UFOs, giant robots, and more, leading him to such profound questions as, "Why do so many recreational activities involve smoke and heat?" Panter's wild Albrecht-Dürer-meets-Jack-Kirby graphics are more hallucinatory and visionary than ever, and given the full, expansive treatment they so richly deserve.
MOME Winter 2006 (Vol.3)
by Various; Edited by Eric Reynoldds & Gary Groth
$14.95 Softcover . 112 pages
Fantagraphics Books is proud to announce two new additions to the ranks of its flagship anthology Mome with this third volume: French cartoonist David B., author of the landmark graphic novel Epileptic, contributes a 36-page complete story, "The Armed Garden," which appears in English for the first time; also, R. Kikuo Johnson, whose Night Fisher was the most acclaimed graphic novel debut of 2005, debuts his first post-Night Fisher work, a series of comic strips titled "Cher Shimura." MOME Winter 2006 also features new contributions from Martin Cendreda, Anders Nilsen, Jonathan Bennett, David Heatley, Kurt Wolfgang, Andrice Arp, Gabrielle Bell, and Jeffrey Brown, as well as an interview with Wolfgang conducted by MOME co-editor Gary Groth. MOME is edited by Groth and Eric Reynolds, with design by Jordan Crane and Adam Grano. MOME is an accessible, reasonably priced, quarterly anthology that runs approximately 120 pages per volume a nd spotlights a regular cast of a dozen of today's most exciting cartoonists. MOME is quickly earning a reputation as the premiere literary anthology in comics. Think of something like The Believer or Granta - especially in regard to iconic design, format, and content - but with comics.
Ghost Of Hoppers
by Jaime Hernandez
$18.95 Hardcover . 120 pages
Ghost of Hoppers collects for the first time the new adventures of Maggie Chascarrillo, as serialized in the Love & Rockets comic book, and represents Jaime Hernandez's much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2004 magnum opus Locas, which Entertainment Weekly gave an 'A' for its "innovative technique and complex, character-driven stories about Mexican-American life."
Ghost of Hoppers begins with the newly divorced Maggie now working as the resident building-manager of the notorious Capri Apartments deep in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, where imaginary dogs roam its walkways at night, all the air conditioners are broken, and the empty swimming pool is covered with flies. As if the eccentric, oddball tenants weren't weird enough, Maggie's houseguest and old friend Izzy Ortiz shakes things up with her usual nervous breakdowns, nocturnal screaming, and obsessive fly-swatting (sometimes with a knife!). When Izzy makes a guest appearance on a local cable access talk show to promote her book, Maggie meets the voluptuous Vivian the "Frogmouth," a curvaceous, hapless bombshell with a foghorn voice who is despised by Hopey (Maggie's long time on-again-off-again girlfriend, now a bartender sporting an eye patch after one of Vivian's previous bottle-breaking altercations). Maggie finds herself swept up in Vivian's life of rand om catfights, her mob-connected, knife-wielding stalker ex-boyfriend, and his violently jealous fiancée. Maggie and Vivian eventually strike up a reluctant and awkward romance, and when they set out for Hoppers to retrieve a stolen art object from Izzy, they get a lot more than they bargained for!
Alex
by Mark Kalesniko
$19.95 Softcover . 250 pages
Alex is the story of failed dreams and the consequences faced by a man who discovers that accomplishing his career goals are no route to inner peace. It is a story about the redemptive power of art, and about how fleeting those chances for redemption can be in a society that emphasizes different values. This existential, 250-page exploration of depression and the healing power of art was originally published over ten years ago as a six-issue comic book series and is collected here as one book for the first time. Kalesniko is a former Disney animator with credits including Mulan, The Lion King and The Little Mermaid. He has also created the graphic novels Why Did Pete Duel Kill Himself? and Mail Order Bride.
Runaway Comic #1
by Mark Martin
$3.50 . 24 page comic book
After a hiatus from a regularly serialized comic -but not from comics- Mark Martin debuts his new, semi-annual title Runaway this month. Mark Martin is probably best known for his hilarious Nude Dancer single-pagers (collected by Tundra) and his anthology comic that he shared with Jim Woodring, Tantalizing Stories. Since then, he's contributed comics to anthologies from Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Disney Adventures, Nickelodeon, and other venues. Martin is now back with a vengeance with his own solo, semi-annual Runaway Comics. The first issue begins the longest story starring his popular character Montgomery Wart (from Tantalizing Stories) - plus several shorter stories to round out the first issue. The book is full of Martin's patented visuals, at once dazzling and animated, slapstick humor, perfect timing, distinctive character designs, and rambunctious storytelling. Find out why so many cartoonists, from Scott McCloud to Jim Woodrin g, love Martin's comics.
Grenuord #2
by Francesca Ghermandi
$4.95 . 32 page comic book
In the second chapter of Francesca (Pastil, The Wipeout) Ghermandi's wild, surrealistic six-issue series, fate continues to heap abuse upon poor hapless uprooted George, as he crosses paths with the mysterious home invader from #1, loses his new job, and gets his car stolen. To make matters worse, the two oddball protagonists of Grenuord's back-up strip invade his story and irritate him, and his snoopy, somewhat batty neighbor makes her presence known, despite her daughter and son-in-law's best attempts to constrain her...
Luba's Comics And Stories #7
by Gilbert Hernandez
$3.50 . 24 page comic book
A high-rise apartment building in an unnamed European city. Its inhabitants come and go, meet each other, talk, dream, regret, hope... in short, live. A ghostly, shape-shifting anthropomorphic white rabbit roams from apartment to apartment, surveying and keeping track of all this humanity... and at the end of every night, he floats down to the basement where he delivers his report to the "great dark one." Lushly delineated in penciled sepia halftones, this debut "Ignatz" by Gabriella Giandelli offers a hauntingly unique vision and a tantalizingly open-ended beginning to an ongoing series.
The Comics Journal #275
Cover by David B.
$9.95 . 200 page magazine
This issue, sit in on a candid conversation with one of 2005's breakout cartoonists, Epileptic author David B., in a wide-ranging discussion on life, art and cartooning. David's autobiographical debut has received praise in national magazines and newspapers, and his accessible art style and complex storytelling have garnered him a respectable American audience that will want to learn more about the artist behind the work! Plus: The Journal's roster of critics analyze the best comics and graphic novels of 2005, in a wide-ranging section that looks into the work of cartoonists from Winsor McCay to Hank Ketcham to Chris Ware; celebrate the 25th anniversary with the leftist firebrands behind incendiary agit-prop comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated; and all the news, criticism and commentary that you've come to expect from the finest, most provocative magazine about comics available today, The Comics Journal!
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