Fantagraphics Books

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In 1919, Victorian author Daisy Ashford (1881-1972) published a book she wrote at 9 years old to great success. Inspired by her imaginative adventure, writer Mathew Klickstein and cartoonist Rick Geary have created a delightful graphic novel, in which little Daisy goes to outer space, visits the cosmic automat, watches TV with a time traveler, and more! Rick Geary turns his pen from vintage true crime to whimsy in Daisy Goes to the Moon, an adaptation of a novella written by Mathew Klickstein inspired by the real-life Victorian author Daisy Ashford's successfully published juvenilia, co-written with her parents. Geary's version stars little Daisy herself and pastiches everything in his unique visual stylization from Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz to late-19th-century and early-20th-century comics: Daisy is lured to adventure by a "rokitship" as she decides to go to the moon with a man named Mr. Z. They encounter many-eyed monsters, time travelers with TVs, her duplicate, a "troobador," and more delights and vexations. Geary places his expressive, clean-line black-and-white figures, each with distinct body language, in ornate frames to denote settings and narrative layers. There's rollicking verbal and physical comedy as characters (sometimes literally) bounce off each other. Geary's rare artistic gift of being able to depict ornate period detail without sacrificing storytelling clarity or fun pairs perfectly with Klickstein's imaginative writing. Showcasing elements of Philip K. Dick, Douglas Adams, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the book will delight readers as they discover Daisy's playful, madcap space adventures.

Creative Team

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A debut graphic novel that poignantly blends memoir, magic realism, and graphic medicine. Ephemera is a poetic and dreamlike take on a graphic memoir set in a garden, a forest, and a greenhouse. The story drifts among a grown woman, her early memories as a child, and the gossamer existence of her mother. A lyrical entry in the field of graphic medicine, Ephemera is a story about a daughter trying to relate to a parent who struggles with mental illness. Gorgeously illustrated, it is a quiet book of isolation, plants, confusion, acceptance, and the fog of childhood.

Creative Team

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This new collection of George Herriman's masterpiece Krazy Kat brings back into print the inventive language, haunting vistas, and brick throwing that makes this strip so special. Perfect for Krazy Kat veterans or brand-new readers, this collection provides you with the joy of joining the inhabitants of surreal Coconino County in the strip that originally elevated the comics medium into a celebrated art form.

Creative Team

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George Herriman's Krazy Kat detailed the comings and goings of a lovestruck vagabond "Kat," a malicious mouse, and a diligent dog trying to keep order. This new deluxe hardcover collects the full-sized Sunday pages from 1919 through 1921 including photographs, artwork, and introductory text by comic historians Bill Blackbeard and Michael Tisserand.

Creative Team

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One of the most renowned and celebrated comic strips in the art form's history waywardly treks on through the 1920s, with all its madcap animal inhabitants in tow, in this gorgeous, archival hardcover collection. In this volume: precarious coconuts, incarcerated elephants, and witty weather patterns. Krazy Kat themself take a swing at singing, astronomy, and starring in ... their own comic strip! It also features essays by Herriman scholars, plus ten rare full-color experimental strips by Herriman. This Eisner Award-nominated series, featuring all the Krazy Kat Sunday strips' eternally beguiling love triangle, luminous language, and grand desert décor, makes it plain to Herriman fans and newcomers alike why historians, scholars, and cartoonists consider this the best comic strip ever created.

Creative Team

Description

Meticulously and lovingly restored, this exquisite, generously sized volume collects the acclaimed and groundbreaking Krazy Kat Sunday strips of 1925, 1926, and 1927. This Eisner Award-nominated series showcases one of the most renowned and celebrated comic strips in the art form's history as it strides boldly through the mid-1920s, its quirky characters in full flower in this gorgeous, archival hardcover collection. In this volume: Ignatz repeatedly sets elaborate traps for Krazy (long before the Road Runner), adventures on the "enchanted mesa," wacky weather, literal cliffhangers - and what happens when Santa and the stork arrive at the same chimney at the same moment? BONUS: The most complete collection of Herriman's long-lost Book of Magic pages ever assembled. With incisive essays by Herriman scholars, this entry in our ongoing series makes it plain to Herriman fans and newcomers alike why historians, scholars, and cartoonists consider this to be the best comic strip ever created and why The Comics Journal proclaimed it to be "the greatest comic strip of the 20th Century." Krazy Kat is an ongoing story of a (head-) achingly unrequited love triangle. Krazy adores Ignatz, who returns that affection by launching literal bricks at Krazy's cranium. Offisa Pup loves Krazy and seeks to protect "her" (Herriman always maintained that Krazy is genderless) by tossing Ignatz in the pokey. With this deceptively simple structure, Herriman builds entire worlds of meaning into the actions, building thematic depth and sweeping his readers up with the looping verbal and visual rhythms of his characters' unique dialogue and his loopy, ever-shifting surrealistic backgrounds.

Creative Team

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In this volume: What insights can Krazy glean from an art exhibit of the old masters? What happens when Krazy applies for a job as a debt collector? What's with all the balloons? And volcanos? Why is a giraffe wandering lost in the desert? These are just some of the questions in this collection of the surreal adventures of Krazy Kat, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup. With incisive essays by Herriman scholars, and reproductions of rare Herriman ephemera, this entry in our ongoing series makes it plain why this is considered this to be "the greatest comic strip of the 20th Century."

Description

Two long lost interviews with two of the greatest pop singers of the modern era by one of the greatest rock journalists and interviewers. In 1991, legendary but down-and-out rock critic Paul Nelson landed his dream assignment: fly from New York to Los Angeles and separately interview two of the most distinguished popular music artists: Leonard Cohen and Lucinda Williams. He encounters them at a time in their careers when both are wrestling with their respective record companies to be better taken seriously-in some cases just to be heard. Previously unpublished, these landmark interviews provide the opportunity to compare, among other things (upbringing, education, influences, loves and losses), the thought processes behind Cohen and his music ("I've always admired the people who could write great songs in the back of taxicabs like Hank Williams. I was never one of those guys") to Williams and hers ("See, I'm trying to dispel the myth ... that you have to be miserable and suffering and so on and so forth to be able to write"). I Like People That Can't Sing allows us to read the minds, so to speak, of these nonpareil singer-songwriters over three decades after the fact. Whether it's the sometimes prickly Williams, protecting her time and privacy, or the ever-elegant Cohen, openly discussing his bouts with depression, the book sometimes reads like an intimate conversation (Williams discussing her estranged brother), other times as a late-night confession (Cohen on the breakup of his marriage). Includes a heartfelt foreword recounting her relationships with Cohen and Nelson by Suzanne Vega.

Creative Team

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This brilliant YA graphic novel is a love letter to family and all of the messy complexities they come with, from the acclaimed author of Ephemera: A Memoir. Set in the author's own teenage years, Raised By Ghosts begins in 1991 with semi-autobiographical Briana in middle school. Classes are a bummer, but lunches are worse; either spent alone, or being teased. Traditionally a good student, Briana is not doing well in her academics, but keeps it a secret. Her parents (divorced) are a mess, and largely absent. She spends a lot of time by herself. By high school, she makes friends, and those connections are her only source of happiness as they help each other navigate adolescence. But life at home with each parent remains fraught. When her relationships at school begin to falter, she has no one to turn to, forcing Briana to grapple with her sense of self-worth, her longing for belonging, and her desire for authenticity in her relationships. Raised By Ghosts is a powerful, affecting graphic novel for young adult readers. The story is told by shifting between Briana's first-person class notes and diary entries. In her understated yet masterful approach to comics storytelling, Loewinsohn eschews dramatic confrontations and overt sentimentality, preferring instead to underscore the idea that sometimes acceptance and love can be communicated through quiet, everyday moments and close family bonds.

Creative Team

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, Mangiatordi What would you do if your wishes came true? With amazing genie magic on his side, Donald Duck is very good at making bad decisions! Donald Duck doesn't want much in life: just a great plate of pancakes - and to be a better treasure hunter than Uncle Scrooge! And for everyone in town to follow his perfect example, and for his whole family to be superheroes! Wait a minute, this is getting wacky... but the mystical E-Genie, an all-powerful being housed in a smartphone, is here to grant Donald's wackiest wishes before you can say "App-acadabra"! It's Donald Duck's 90th anniversary, and a corps of European Disney comics masters is bringing his magic makeover to life in an all-new feature-length graphic novel! Can Scrooge McDuck, Daisy, Huey, Dewey and Louie, and Cousin Fethry save Duckburg from Donald... and our birthday boy from himself?