Fantagraphics

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In “Call of the Wild Sea,” Donald Duck faces mind-numbing nightmares of a terrible tsunami—and Ludwig Von Drake says they won't stop till Donald proves himself a master sailor! But Donald left the Navy in disgrace… and only the mysterious Captain Windblower knows the way to redemption! Then in “Two-Bit Tycoons,” see the secret origin of an all-new rivalry: when bombastic Euro-billionaire Velma Vanderduck challenges both Scrooge and Flintheart Glomgold, Donald gets dragged to Amsterduck to help save the McDuck name!

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“The McDuck Journals: The Duckburg Years!” In a 42-page epic complete in this issue, Scrooge personally recounts his earliest adventures in Duckburg! As a newfound bank owner moving his head office from the Klondike, Scrooge slams into trouble with show-off tycoon John D. Rockerduck and his sinister Uncle Soames! Soon Captain Blackheart Beagle joins the clash of titans—which unfolds across dueling mailplanes, sinking cargo ships, and skyscrapers so tall it takes llamas to scale them! Then fan-favorite artist Ben Verhagen brings us a “Three-Scoop Task” when Huey, Louie and Dewey take on Scrooge and Unca Donald!

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Art & Beauty Magazine is at once a satirical take on aesthetics and a continued exploration of Crumb’s subversion of sexuality and mainstream values. Drawings of women in positions ranging from lascivious to modest or mid-sport are accompanied by quotations from artists like Leonardo da Vinci, George Grosz, William de Kooning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harvey Kurtzman. Mining his own obsessions and fantasies, Crumb reimagines the history of art, challenging notions of beauty, along with society’s mores and expectations of propriety around the female form. The images appeal to a mostly erotic sensibility, which in turn is undercut by the inclusion of sometimes ironic and frequently philosophical prose. The images drag philosophy back down to earth, while the writing challenges the pure eroticism of Crumb’s drawings. Presenting all three issues of the series in one book, Art & Beauty Magazine is arranged chronologically, from the earliest images in the 1990s to drawings completed in 2016. Paul Morris, longtime gallerist and supporter of Crumb’s practice, writes an introduction that contextualizes this body of work and the artist’s career.

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Already a Marvel/Timely legend for his creation of the Sub-Mariner in 1939, Bill Everett returned to Marvel during the 1950s to become Atlas’ most versatile and effective practitioner of horror-fantasy. Everett’s art was a combination of Graham Ingels, Harry Anderson, and Bernie Wrightson, with the slick ink line of Jack Davis, all melded within his own uniquely captivating imagery and in-your-face ghastliness. This mammoth Fantagraphics/Marvel volume is packed with Atlas pre-Code horror stories — the first volume of a series collecting the Atlas works of Sub-Mariner-creator Bill Everett. Including: “Spectacles of Doom,” “The Evil Eye,” “The Pit of Horror!” “Horror in the Moonlight!” “Don’t Bury Me Deep,” “One Head Too Many!” “Burton’s Blood!” Werewolf!” “The Madman,” and “The Graymoor Ghost,” from titles like Menace, Journey into Unknown Worlds, Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales, Spellbound, Mystic, Suspense, as well as “Zombie!” from Menace #5, featuring a character rebooted as Simon Garth in the black-and-white Marvel Magazine explosion of the 1970s. An introduction by Atlas expert Dr. Michael J. Vassallo puts it all in context.

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Artist Hugo Pratt’s most famous creation, the indefatigable sailor Corto Maltese, sails back to American readers after a far too-long absence in Corto Maltese: Fable of Venice and Other Adventures. Corto, a modern Ulysses whose wanderings in the early decades of the 20th century take him to the most fascinating places on Earth, is a hard-luck, hard-driving iconoclastic anti-hero who values freedom and independence more than wealth and status. In “Fable of Venice,” a riddle from a deceased friend plunges Corto into a phantasmagorical mystery thriller that zigzags between the solidity of dreams and the fluidity of reality. A frantic chase in 1921 Venice ensues, up twisting stairs and down tangled alleys, as Corto vies against Freemasons, occultists, budding fascists, and his friend (suddenly back from the dead) in a mad scramble to secure a mystical emerald that will open the doors of forbidden magic and unravel time and space itself! In addition, this collection of quintessential seafaring adventures also presents the Corto Maltese classics “The Secret of Tristan Bantam,” “So Much for Gentlemen of Fortune,” and “The Seagull's Fault,” making this book an exciting introduction to Pratt’s work.

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“Curse me kilts!” As soon as Scrooge McDuck became the world’s richest miser, a rascally rogues’ gallery assembled to rob him. Now Fantagraphics launches the new Disney Greatest Comics Collection with a wild anthology of these beloved bad guys at their best... and worst! Flintheart Glomgold, “The Second-Richest Duck,” is here in Carl Barks’ 1956 classic! Sorceress Magica De Spell is out to get “The Midas Touch,” then turns Duckburg sideways in Don Rosa’s “A Matter of Some Gravity!” The Beagle Boys pull Scrooge’s simoleons skyward in Barks’ “The Money Well,” then turn his assets liquid in Rosa’s “Cash Flow!” Playboy billionaire John D. Rockerduck debuts in Barks’ “Boat Buster,” then outspends Scrooge again in Flemming Andersen’s “Crash Course”! Plus never-before-collected tales starring Dutch tycoon Velma Vanderduck, space-monkey Tachyon Farflung... and more! See these classic adventures outfitted with new commentary by Disney historians Jim Fanning and David Gerstein, plenty of extras... and more surprises than Scrooge’s Money Bin has booby-traps. (With all these villains around, he’ll need them!)

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The second volume of this six-part collection of annotated, never-before-seen sketches by Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster continues the series’ project of revealing in intimate detail the act of creating this landmark comic strip. Part sketchbooks, part biography, part tutorial, part memoir — Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant Sketchbooks are an unprecedented revelation of Foster’s personal life and creative process during his final nine years on the strip, as well as a fascinating look behind the curtains as Foster coached and interacted with his chosen successor: John Cullen Murphy. Beautifully, meticulously designed and produced with the full participation of the Murphy family, this series is a testament to author and Prince Valiant historian Brian M. Kane’s research prowess and determination to bring Foster’s aesthetic and storytelling strategies to light. Over the course of these volumes, Kane annotates with painstaking clarity and thoroughness 366 penciled layout pages, 40 character sketches, and 577 text pages of Foster’s descriptions of each panel. Also featured are an additional 143 pieces of art, mostly by Foster, 100 photographs detailing his life and career, and 123 personal letters and notes, all adding immeasurably to this exploration of Foster’s life and art, as well as his collaboration with Murphy.

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In 1950s Brazil, somewhere by the beach, not far from Rio, Hélcio, a young and promising soccer player, and his friend Noël, spot someone fishing with dynamite. They decide to take a boat and steal some of the dead fish to make some money. The boat trip turns into a perilous journey as the two thieves embark on an adventure that will challenge their friendship. Inspired by the life of Marcello Quintanilha’s father, Hélcio Quintanilha, this graphic novel is both a suspenseful thriller and a breathtaking story about friendship. In The Lights of Niteroi, internationally acclaimed graphic novelist Marcello Quintanilha returns to the city where he was born and raised. He dives into the waters of Guanabara Bay and crafts a plot based on real events that took place in the 1950s. It’s an adventure full of suspense, involving fishermen, soccer, the Brazilian feminist and striptease artist Luz del Fuego, and the first naturist camp in Brazil. Translated by the author with Bruna Dantas Lobato.

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Sitting on a bench one day, four-year-old Kim Deitch is accosted by an elderly man. Flask in hand, the man exclaims, “Is it possible? Sid! SID PINCUS! Good God, man! You’ve changed!” A lightbulb goes off in the man’s head. “You died, Sidney! And now you live again!” Whisked away by his mother, young Deitch is left to wonder: Was it all just the mad ravings of a drunk or a tantalizing glimpse into reincarnation? Thus begins Deitch’s quest to piece together the cosmic jigsaw puzzle of creation and reveal his past lives. This sprawling odyssey weaves through time and space, encompassing a dizzying array of oddball characters, including aspiring screenwriter Sidney Pincus, a tribe of moon-dwelling Native Americans, a feline YouTube star, a has-been silver screen cowboy, Frank Sinatra, and the awesome Monkey God! Featuring Deitch’s surreal scenarios and eye-popping psychedelia, Reincarnation Stories is a gripping yarn and a cartooning tour de force.

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In the mid-19th century, millions of Africans were enslaved and brought to Brazil. Among them was the real-life Teodora who, separated from her husband and her son, worked in the home of a priest in São Paulo. Wishing to reconstruct the family ties lost during the journey from Africa to Brazil and to achieve emancipation for herself and her family, she gave Claro, a Black man who could read and write, money to help her write letters: some addressed to her husband and her son, whereabouts unknown, in the hopes that the letters would find them and that they could achieve this quest together; and some addressed to enslavers, intended to either help locate her family or to persuade them to let her buy her freedom. Inspired by this correspondence, Tiodora’s Letters is a rigorously researched historical work, a compelling narrative based on her letters, and masterfully drawn by D’Salete, who graphically recreates her struggle. In the 1860s, Benê, a fictional Black young man who likes Tiodora because she was kind to him, takes it upon himself to seek Tiô’s family and deliver the letters. He embarks on a dangerous and world-building journey into the interior of Brazil and to the coffee plantations where they might be. There are many wordless passages of heartbreaking horror, character beats, breathtaking drawings of nature, and much more. In Tiodora’s Letters, D’Salete reconstructs a forgotten part of Brazil's dark history of slavery and pays tribute to the strength of a woman who fought for her rights single-handedly. Includes educational and contextual material.

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Once there was a republic of boundless wonder and achievement whose bright horizon had gone dark, soiled by a populace it imagined as undisciplined, unhealthy, feebleminded, and whose very existence stained and subverted a great society. A solution appeared in the furious logic of Biological Dominion that named the ineffectual and weak, the criminally deformed and unwell, as the root cause of this decline. Now, imagine laws conceived in the high halls of government to rid this society of millions deemed infected by a curious disease supposedly responsible for that poverty of health and morality. Next, imagine those millions considered to be unfit and unworthy for daily life loaded onto freight trains and ushered away to perish in distant woods and fields. Imagine more thousands chased into the vast underground of labyrinthine caves and dark catacombs beneath vibrant city streets and lovely city parks to wither away and die. Undercity collects the voices of brave survivors, of those who’ve refused to submit to the indignities of eugenical persecution, the horror of gas chambers, and relentless warfare in rural provinces. Some of these stories demonstrate the moral disaster of eugenics, while others tell of courage and love and that indomitable magic of the human spirit that refuses to be silenced in the face of unspeakable crimes. Perhaps Undercity is a warning to us, as well, that what we might think is unimaginable needs only apathy and inattention to arise. This is a prose novel, not a graphic novel.

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The year: 2128! New Mouseton is a bustling space metropolis. But the Phantom Blot’s latest trillion-dollar heist has thrown the future city on its ear! And when Mickey Mouse, Space Ranger, sends the Blot to the hi-tech slammer, the Blot reveals his master plan to break right out again... along with a state-of-the-art team of the galaxy’s worst marauders! Ranger Mickey will need his own team to stop these supervillains. But are Goofy, Donald Duck, and Minnie really ready to tackle the Beagle Boys, Peg Leg Pete, mad submariner Dr. Vulter, and a giant robot? Doesn’t matter—the Space Ranger Patrol is born, and a clash of the titans looms on the horizon! Artist Johan Pilet and writer Nicolas Pothier bring Fantagraphics an epic Disney adventure full of out-of-this-world twists—drawn and colored in a retro-futurist style and loaded with classic Franco-Belgian comics storytelling!

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Young Shadow usually protects sci-fi Bolt City by making deliveries for the food bank and rescuing pets. But this time around, he needs to focus on two things: hitting and pitching! When Young Shadow and the eight Watchdogs — Elmore, Gerry, Larry, Gomez, Marta, Ketchum, Rolando, and Junior — investigate a concerning chemical sludge being dumped into Bolt City’s water, Elmore discovers a haunted baseball glove and inadvertently summons a team from the beyond that challenges them to a game to the death. With a stadium full of hostile vampires, mummies, frankensteins, and ghouls rooting for the visitors, the Watchdogs enlist Young Shadow to fill out their roster — and save Bolt City! This exciting new middle-grade graphic novel from cartoonist and musician Ben Sears establishes a world that embraces classic superhero, sci fi, and supernatural comics without any irony, executed in a brilliant two-tone color scheme of jet black and mustardy yellow that perfectly suits the spooky fun and fast paced adventure. Young Shadow & the Watchdogs is a page-turner for readers of any age.