Fantagraphics Books

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A series of comic strips joined together by the theme of the author's chosen profession - cartooning - reveals a funny and often poignant reflection on the human condition and the lives we choose to live. Acclaimed cartoonist Noah Van Sciver puts to use all the creative arrows in his quiver in this captivating collection of fiction, biography, memoir, and more. Van Sciver juxtaposes fictional stories about what life as a "19th Century Cartoonist" might have looked like with a series of autobiographical strips about life as a contemporary cartoonist, along with pieces about his father and childhood that inform the path in life he has chosen. The resultant effect is a routinely funny (Van Sciver never takes himself too seriously unless it is intended for comedic effect) but also deeply relatable book that touches on some of life's big questions, whether about the ways we measure happiness or success, the ways we often define ourselves by our careers, or the ways we can sometimes lose sight of the most important things. Van Sciver displays a love of the history and form of cartooning that recalls Art Spiegelman, a Lynda Barryesque thirst to unpack ideas of what creativity really means, and a Harvey Pekar-like way of just trying to stay alive in the face of despair.

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Fantagraphics is embarking on a project to reprint Marvel Comics' 1950s genre titles - war, crime, supernatural, funny animal, Western - under its new Atlas series with the first eight issues of the pre-Code horror series Adventures Into Terror. Atlas holds a special place among aficionados of the genre, producing more horror titles and issues by far, than anyone in the industry. While the quality of E.C.'s six horror/sci-fi titles was unsurpassed with their elite cadre of talent, Atlas was the equivalent of the B-movies studio, churning out anywhere from 8 to 12 different horror titles a month, giving a wider array of artists, including some of the best craftsmen of the era, a chance to show off their talents: in addition to those already mentioned, future volumes will include works by Bill Everett, John Romita, Bernie Krigstein, Jerry Robinson, Harry Anderson, and Matt Fox. Stories from Marvel's Atlas line have barely been reprinted. The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library is the first attempt to publish a carefully curated line of Atlas titles. Our first volume, Adventures Into Terror, includes a treasure trove of stories drawn by many of the most stylistically accomplished artists of the Golden Age including George Tuska, Carl Burgos, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Maneely, Basil Wolverton, and Joe Sinnott. Highlights include Russ Heath's twopart story "The Brain" from issue #4 and "Return of the Brain" from issue #6; Basil Wolverton's classic "Where Monsters Dwell" from issue #7; Gene Colan's moody "House of Horror" in issue #3; and Don Rico's wild layouts are on display from #4's "The Torture Room." The stories are written firmly in the tradition of the pulpy, perverse, borderline deranged style that brought Fredric Wertham, the United States Senate Sub-Committee, and public opinion down like a sledgehammer on comics in the early '50s.

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, Hank Chapman, Various, Mike Sekowsky Expanding Fantagraphics' project to reprint Marvel Comics' 1950s genre titles, this volume blasts off to space opera adventure. In the vein of earlier comics-to-multimedia stars Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Atlas Comics launched their own pulp hero in 1951, looking ahead to the futuristic year 2000. Across five issues of Space Squadron (and one of Space Worlds ), headline talents including George Tuska, Werner Roth and Allen Bellman (with back-up features by Joe Maneely, Christopher Rule, George Klein and Vern Henkel) showed Captain Jet Dixon and his Space Squadron blasting into action, facing cosmic threats like "The Armada of Death," "The Space Demons," "Terror from the Deep," "The Temptress of Jupiter," and "The Midnight Horror." Come 1953, Hank Chapman and Joe Maneely gazed further into the future, envisioning the distant year 2075 and the adventures of Speed Carter, Spaceman . Scripted throughout by Chapman, Maneely launched and drew the first three issues before handing off to one issue each by Mike Sekowsky, George Tuska and Bob Forgione, with back-up features by John Romita, Maneely, and Bill Savage. As other aspects of the Atlas line leaned into the peak of pre-Code horror, the Captain of the Space Sentinels and young cadet Johnny Day battled monstrous aliens with stories including "The Space Trap," "A Slaughter in Space," "Die, Spaceman, Die," and "The Thing in Outer Space." Unseen in 70 years, scanned in high resolution, restored to perfection, and packaged as one extra-sized, beautiful hardcover volume, In the Days of the Rockets will open a wormhole to the early cold-war four-color era of futuristic science fantasy. HANK CHAPMAN (1915-1973) wrote steadily for a variety of comics publishers between 1940 and 1967, usually uncredited, but he has been identified as the author of several hundred stories. He is most known for his war stories while on staff at Atlas in the 1950s and at DC in the '50s and '60s. JOE MANEELY (1926-1958) landed at Timely in 1949 following the Street & Smith line's collapse and freelanced for Timely/Atlas for the next eight years, becoming one of the most prolific and important artists of the Atlas period. MIKE SEKOWSKY (1923-1989) was a prolific workman of the Silver Age of comics, notably co-creating the Justice League of America for DC in 1960 and having a run as writer/artist on Wonder Woman . But he began at Timely, drawing everything from Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal to The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner.

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, Gene Colan, Bob Powell Before focusing on superheroes, Marvel published eleven crime-related titles including Justice Comics, Official True Crime Cases, All-True Crime, Crime Cases, Crime Can't Win, Crime Must Lose, and Crime Exposed. Of these, Fantagraphics has selected Police Action which features a run of noir-ish morality plays, pitting the police against the criminal element, and was produced by the cream of the Atlas freelance roster. Rounding the volume off is Police Badge #479, a snapshot of the industry's attempts to adapt to the new Comics Code.

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Fantagraphics introduces Barnaby, with it's playful mix of fantasy, wit and elegantly spare images, to a new generation of children and parents. Created by Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon) in the 1940's, this five-volume series, with art direction by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), will collect the entirety of the original newspaper strips.

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The second in a five volume series collecting Crockett Johnson's comic strip masterpiece features the years 1944-1945. In this volume, Barnaby and his Fairy Godfather, J.J. O'Malley, take a trip to D.C. to serve in Congress, and Launcelot McSnoyd, the invisible leprechaun is introduced. Also, O'Malley enlists Barnaby on a seaside treasure hunt. Plus Ermine hunters, soap salesmen and more! Foreword by Jules Feiffer and designed by Dan Clowes!

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The final volume collecting "the last great comic strip," by the creator of Harold and the Purple Crayon. The long-lost comic strip masterpiece by legendary children's book author Crockett Johnson, is finally collected and designed by acclaimed graphic novelist and Barnaby superfan Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Volume Five collects the final two-plus years of the strip, including the rarely-if-ever-seen conclusion of the strip, as five-year-old Barnaby Baxter says goodbye to his Fairy Godfather, Mr. O'Malley. Unlike most comic strips, Barnaby ended its ten-year run with an emotionally satisfying ending that broke the hearts of fans when first published in newspapers. The magic of Barnaby resides in its canny mix of fantasy and satire, amplified by the understated elegance of Crockett Johnson's clean, spare art. Barnaby expanded our sense of what comics can do through its combination of Johnson's sly wit and O'Malley's amiable windbaggery, illustrating a child's feeling of wonder and an adult's wariness, highly literate jokes and a keen eye for the ridiculous. This volume also features essays by comics historian Susan Kirtley and Johnson biographer Philip Nel, as well as an introduction by filmmaker Ron Howard, whose acting career was launched in 1959 at the age of five, when he was cast as Barnaby in a 1959 adaptation for General Electric Theater, hosted by Ronald Reagan. The book includes rarely-seen stills from the 1959 production - which also featured Wizard of Oz alum Bert Lahr as Mr. O'Malley!

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From the author of Fante Bukowski and Joseph Smith and the Mormons, a hysterical character comedy about an aging rock-God-in-his-own-mind forced to face the music. Rufus Baxter is an aging, professionally unemployed loser, desperately - delusionally - hanging on to his 1980s hair metal fantasies of headlining arenas, despite so much evidence to the contrary (like audience members ducking when he tosses promo t-shirts at an open-mic night). The rest of his bandmates in Funky Cool died decades ago in a horrible plane crash on the cusp of their first big break. When he gets kicked out of the Denver storage unit he's been illegally sleeping in, his only prospect is a last-second wedding gig the very next day - in Wyoming. A hop in his car, and possibly a peyote button or two, sends Baxter on a psychedelic and existential road trip through his past, and forces him to confront every bad decision he's made along the way. Beat It, Rufus is very much a kindred spirit with Van Sciver's Fante Bukowski series, a comedic character study both played for laughs but also infused with a surprising gravitas that has you rooting for Rufus despite having every reason not to. Van Sciver's comedic and graphic talents are in peak form in this original graphic novel, his follow-up to the award winning and critically acclaimed graphic bio, Joseph Smith and the Mormons.

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Living in a beat-up motel, consorting with the downtrodden and mid-level literati, Fante Bukowski must overcome great obstacles: a love interest turned rival, ghostwriting a teen celebrity's memoirs, no actual talent ? to gain the respect and adoration from critics and, more importantly, his father. Van Sciver has created a scathing, hilarious, and empathetic character study of a self-styled author determined to prove that he's just one more poem (or drink) away from success. Originally published in hardcover in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, The Complete Works of Fante Bukowski quickly sold out and is nominated for a 2021 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album. This expanded paperback edition includes eight new pages, including a 2020 Slate interview with Fante himself and a cover gallery of Fante's previous books. Also: a foreword by novelist Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife); a facsimile reproduction of Bukowski's literary debut, 6 Poems (thought lost to time in the wake of a motel fire that destroyed the entire original print run); a "Works Cited" section; and a selection of "visual tributes" by over two dozen cartoonists - including Nina Bunjevac, Simon Hanselmann, Jesse Jacobs, Ed Piskor, Leslie Stein, and others.

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, Ted Richards, Gary Hallgren, Willy Murphy THE STORY OF AMERICA'S BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE... BUT FUNNY FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION. The true history of the American Revolution as it was never taught in school! Two titans of underground comix team up to retell the essential moments of the war against the British -- as it might have seemed to the ordinary people of the time. Gilbert Shelton (ZAP Comix, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) and Ted Richards (Air Pirates, The Forty Year Old Hippie) combined their cartooning talents to create an episodic, comedic, and more-or-less accurate summary of the founding of the United States of America. Originally serialised in alternative weekly newspapers through 1975-76. Now, for only the second time in 250 years, Fantagraphics Underground brings this lost classic back to print.

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In this adaptation of the original 1924 version of In Our Time, cartoonist Jason Novak finds the graphic equivalent of Hemingway's lean, muscular prose - stark, punchy, beautifully composed panels that convey the understated poetics of those early, famously breathtaking stories.

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Imagine a world where behind every suburban front door is a licentious bacchanal. Except that you don't have to imagine it because John Cuneo has imagined it for you. Whether it's ram-headed, alcoholic, paperpushers; hand puppet sex parties; or Hokusai's insatiable octopus (who turns out, knows a thing or two about the saxophone), Cuneo renders each intimate tableaux with delightfully feverish pen strokes and delicate watercolors. Like Aesop's deranged cousin, the artist effortlessly combines the fantastical and the grotesque, dashing off outrageous snapshots of bulbous heads, dapper cats, muses depicted as gargantuan Crumbian women, and a multitude of sex acts invented for the occasion. Say what you will about the intentions, the effect is a pearl-clutching, monocle-popping, knee-slapping graphic revelation.

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With a stylistic nod to the wordless novels of Frans Maserell and the expressionist drawings of Franz Kafka himself, Jason Noivak's short graphic novel Kafka's Manuscript begins at the author's deathbed, where he entrusts his friend Max Brod with the task of destroying his unpublished papers. Brod refuses, and what follows is the story of how Kafka's literary legacy escaped Europe under the shadow of fascism. It is a survey of Kafka's paranoid landscape in kinetoscopic monochrome. As a master of deadpan satire, Kafka was as eloquent with both words as he was with what was left unsaid. Kafka's Cartoonist Jason Novak seizes upon the unsaid to comment on Kafka's afterlife, exploring in a new way what countless books about Kafka have previously attempted to explore with words. Every epoch has its conundrums, but the qualities that unite our age with Kafka's are a reminder that some characteristics of a culture are perennial. What better way to capture Kafka's enduring but evasive voice than with pantomime? This book is wordless with pages only on the recto; for the press preview, I removed the blank verso pages.

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Muderburg (sic), a sleepy island town off the coast of Maine aims to maintain a quiet existence for their population of families, fishermen, craftspeople, and aging oddballs. But every so often, incursions from scheming outsiders require ex-gangster mayor Leo Scazzo (and his loving wife and children) to enact counter-schemes in order to keep the peace for the other townsfolk... Collecting the complete run of short stories (serialized as Murderville in the 2010s) under one cover, Carol Lay's vivacious cartooning keeps the light side of these dark comedies shining.

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When her dementia-stricken grandmother Babi dies, 15-year-old Lucy -sensitive and sentimental, with a punky haircut and ears full of piercings- is left reeling and unmoored. That is, until a secret diary locked away in a hidden compartment drops out from Babi's desk. What follows is a living epistolary, reflecting grandmother and granddaughter's struggles with belonging. Babi, caught between her Polish-Jewish past and Mexican home, both of them reckoning with lesbian identity and the need to conceal it. Lucy comes to find in a life they shared far more than a birthday. In a style that perfectly captures tenderness and heartache, painter and animator Santiago Cohen crafts a moving reflection on love, grief, and connection across generations.

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For almost three decades, master cartoonist Jordan Crane has put together a body of short stories that garnered him multiple Eisner and Ignatz Award nominations, via the pages of his comic book series Uptight and the influential comics anthology, Non. Yet they have never been collected until now. Featuring over a dozen short stories (spanning multiple genres) published over the past 25 years, Goes Like This is a gorgeously packaged anthology (including varying paper stocks and exposed spine) of Crane's work. "The Hand of Gold" is a short but grim Weird Western, a morality play in which an accidental crime leads a criminal to a supernatural maximum security cell. "Below the Shade of Night" presents an anxiety that is rooted in the follies and ignorance of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. "Vicissitude" maps uncharted territory of graphic melancholia via a tale of infidelity. "Trash Night" depicts the troubled relationship of Dee and Leo, with mounting tension and mistrust that reaches a boiling point. In "The Dark Nothing," a rare foray into science fiction, the three-person crew of prospecting ship Sagasu 17 attempt to harvest an asteroid, and things go horribly awry. "The Middle Nowhere" begins with a man waiting in a small shack. All around him is a black sand desert. The wind rises, the rain comes, and it just might be the end of everything he's known. Also featuring additional prints and drawings from the author's archives, Goes Like This is a tantalizing sampler of one of the most brilliant cartoonists working today.

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20 years in the making, the long-awaited graphic novel masterpiece from acclaimed cartoonist Jordan Crane. A young couple is stuck in traffic, reading a book aloud to each other to pass the time. The relationship is already strained, but between the encroaching road rage, and a novel that hits way too close to home, tensions are running especially high by the time they arrive back at their apartment. When one of them leaves to get takeout and a movie, each of the young lovers is individually forced to confront loss, grief, fear, and insecurities in unexpected and shocking ways. Crane's formal use of the comics medium - threading several timelines and the interior and exterior lives of its protagonists together to create an increasing, almost Hitchcockian sense of dread and paranoia - is masterful. But as the title hints, there are dualities at its core that make it one of the most exciting works of graphic literary fiction in recent memory, a brilliant adult drama that showcases a deep empathy and compassion for its characters as well as a visually arresting showcase of Crane's considerable talents. Keeping Two is ostensibly a story about loss, but by the end, it just might also be about finding something along the way - something that had seemed irredeemable up to that point. In that way, it's also a deeply romantic book. Cartoonist Jordan Crane has been one of the most quietly influential comics-makers of the past quarter-century - in multiple senses of the word: as a cartoonist, a designer, an editor, a publisher, a printmaker, an advocate, an archivist, and more. But Keeping Two is his biggest project in close to two decades and will be one of the most anticipated graphic novels of 2022.

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Two Latinas, separated by a generation, hinder and help each other find their place in a world they never made. Ten years in the making (and torn from the pages of the legendary Love and Rockets), Jaime Hernandez's newest graphic novel skillfully weaves two generations of his beloved characters into a satisfying story of love-both young and middle-aged. Life Drawing darts primarily between the youthful Tonta and the venerable Maggie. Tonta has a crush on her art teacher, Ray, as well as an axe to grind with an older woman in the neighborhood. When Tonta finds that the woman, Maggie, is married to Ray, things get complicated. And Tonta does not handle complications well. Life Drawing showcases Hernandez's brilliant talent for character, weaving relationships, rejections, infidelities, and adventures involving: Tonta's self-involved sisters Vivian, Violet, and Muñeca; her colorful pals Gomez, Judy Fair, and Brown Alice; her mother, the infamous 'Black Widow of the Valley'; and of course, the two great loves of Maggie's life, Ray and Hopey. There's also a forest spirit, two weddings, some cosplay, a little pole dancing, and page after page of breathtaking comics by the medium's most wide-eyed romantic. Did we mention the weddings?

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My Time Machine unfolds across the socially and politically confused landscape of early 2020, where Carol Lay's middle-aged female protagonist (who bears a suspicious resemblance to the author) embarks on a time-hopping odyssey that takes her from the addled and anxious "contemporary" America to the farthest reaches of time. Finding the blueprints belonging to the eponymous Time Traveler of H.G. Wells' novel, our reluctant and all-too-human heroine enlists her ex-husband Rob's engineering genius in constructing the same kind of machine capable of the same awesome power. With a (more or less) functioning time machine at her disposal, she decides there's no better time to do her part to save humanity from itself and starts looking for (figurative) butterflies to pin down in hopes of altering the history of human civilization and averting the impending effects of climate change. Wary of causing unintended consequences by traveling into the past to change history, she heads into the future, alone, to see if she can gain any insights she can bring back to 2020 that could help change the course of a world suffering from the reckless consequence of the Anthropocene. She anticipates the worst, but that's not quite bad enough: Not only is there the ecological collapse she feared, but by 2035, America has devolved into a fascist state and by 2060 to full blown totalitarianism. It appears environmental havoc is ineluctably accompanied by political disaster. My Time Machine is both a sly, cautionary political satire and a rollicking time travel story, full of playful time travel paradoxes, edge-of-your-seat suspense, breezy badinage, and a deeply felt wonder at the universe. It is serious and funny, timely and timeless (literally).

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For the past 40 years, Jaime Hernandez has been privately amassing a body of work that no one else has seen. Until now. This parallel universe to his Love & Rockets world is set in the heyday of 1960s and '70s women's wrestling with an entirely new, original cast of characters who have aged and evolved. This book spotlights the women who are often ignored in pro-wrestling in 125 full-color illustrations: pin-ups, action shots, fake wrestling magazine covers, echoing the lucha libre magazines of the 1960s. Hernandez also discusses the work in an interview with fellow cartoonist Katie Skelly.

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Hot on the heels of Jaime Hernandez's masterpiece, Is This How You See Me?, comes a stand-alone graphic novel that focuses on one of Hernandez's most memorable characters, Tonta, while she confronts her family history. Her half-sister Vivian gets involved with a small-town gangster while Tonta befriends a young woman who keeps tabs on the neighborhood from the surrounding woods. Meanwhile, back at school, Tonta discovers that Coach Angel harbors a secret while local punk band Ooot provides the soundtrack.

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, Silvio Camboni The mind-bending creative duo of Denis-Pierre Filippi and Silvio Camboni (Gregory and the Gargoyles) throw Mickey, Goofy, and Peg Leg Pete into a steampunk comics adventure of world-changing proportions! In a dystopian future located in a parallel reality, scavengers rule the Earth: pals like Mickey and Goofy are salvaging rare fuel from the seafloor, and rogues like Peg Leg Pete are fighting to get it first! One day the realm is rocked by the arrival of a strange stone cube with untold powers. Brilliant Dr. Einmug wants it, but so does Pete's genius cousin Portis. Can Mickey reach the cube before it makes the ocean itself fly to the sky... and takes control of our heroes' world next? The European writer/artist team of Denis-Pierre Filippi and Silvio Camboni present an incredible new Mickey Mouse graphic novel adventure - at once reflecting the Golden Age of comics past, and illustrating incredible steampunk sights like no Disney fan has seen before!