Fantagraphics Books

Creative Team

Description

Two probing conversations between Prometheus and the Eagle ranging from the deep past to the present day, including an answer to the question: "A 'phone?' What is a 'phone?'". And Astrid explores the mysteries of the cube.

Creative Team

Description

, Benni Bodker A tongue-in-cheek guide to the beasts to watch out for during a cozy Christmastime. In the wintry season, when we all delight in joyful thoughts of family, presents, and sugarplums, we mustn't forget that the night is dark and full of terrors. Thankfully, bold adventurers Benni B dker and John Kenn Mortensen have journeyed far and wide to comb through ancient tomes, listen to folk tales, and spy upon loathsome lairs to catalog the most frightful creatures of the netherworld that appear around Christmastime. A Christmas Bestiary is an essential guidebook to all the horrors that await us during the darkest time of the year, from common creatures such as Baba Yaga and the Krampus to the less encountered (but quite deadly) Yule Wight and Gryla. B dker's brief text entries include the lore and background of each creature, plus handy info such as danger level that will help you survive (but no guarantees!). Mortensen's gothic, pen-and-ink renderings bring these bone-chilling beasts to life on the page. Eerie, playful, and practical, A Christmas Bestiary is the perfect collection for the ones who love - or fear - the things that go bump in the night. John Kenn Mortensen is a Danish cult illustrator celebrated by fans around the world for his incredibly detailed illustrations of monsters. Benni B dker is one of Denmark's leading writers of YA horror fiction.

Creative Team

Description

The Goddess of Love...and SF horror: The eagerly anticipated single volume collecting the 10 rare issues of the overstuffed Venus comics! In the late 1940s, the first half of the Venus series from Marvel Comics predecessors Timely and Atlas Comics was published as a lighthearted romance comic about the goddess Venus taking a job on Earth at a beauty magazine. Never a company to miss a trend, Atlas began introducing more science fiction elements in the 1950s, and eventually turned Venus' dating adventures into a straight-out horror anthology. Collected here, 70 years later and for the first time ever, is that swift-changing second half of the 19-issue run. Future Marvel stars Bill Everett (seven issues) and Werner Roth (three issues) take Venus to heights of four-color weirdness and pre-Code horror ghastliness. Everett is given free rein and seizes the opportunity: writing, drawing, and lettering twenty ghoulish and goofy masterpieces, including classics like "Hangman's House," "The Day Venus Vanished," "The House of Terror," "The Sealed Spectors," Tidal Wave of Terror," and the phantasmagorical "Cartoonist's Calamity!" These stories showcase the brilliant draftsmanship and storytelling of Everett, one of the giants of the 1940s and '50s comic book industry. His slick, fluid line rendered at Timely/Atlas, from his seminal god-child Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, to the atomic age Marvel Boy, is some of the finest pre-Code horror this side of E.C.'s Graham Ingels. Series editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo assisted in the compilation of Venus for Marvel 13 years ago, and Fantagraphics is delighted to publish the horror half as the second title in The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library.

Creative Team

Description

Continuing Fantagraphics' project to reprint Marvel Comics' 1950s genre titles, this volume compiles the first of what became the industry's largest line of war books. Produced by veterans of WWII, the eight issues here feature future mainstream comics stalwarts such as Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, and more. Forged in the crucible of the Korean War, and produced by veterans of the Second World War, this volume's eight issues present the brutality and grimness of armed combat by some of Atlas' most notable war artists and future comics stars including Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Dave Berg, Jay Scott Pike, Mike Sekowsky, Vern Henkel, Allen Bellman, Pete Morisi and Norman Steinberg. Propaganda abounds from the very first story, published in War Comics #1 in September 1950: "Peril in Korea," a primer explaining why the U.S. joined the conflict. Other highlights include Colan's "The Chips are Down" and "Victory," Heath's "Alone" and "No Survivors," Maneely's "Stormy Weather," Henkel's "Total Destruction," and Berg's "The Infantry's War." Originally a trial spun off from the publisher's "Men's Adventure" publications, in the nine years to follow Atlas went on to produce 533 comic book issues with war content, across 34 different titles. War Comics is where it all began, unseen in decades, scanned from the original books, restored, and packaged as one large, beautiful hardcover volume.

Creative Team

Description

When a pair of bohemians descend upon a neglected working-class neighborhood in search of cheap rent, they soon discover something sinister lurking behind the walls of their new home. BTTM FDRS (pronounced "bottomfeeders") offers a vision of horror that is gross and gory in all the right ways. Funny, scary, and thought provoking, it confronts the monstrous forces that are displacing cultures in urban neighborhoods today.

Creative Team

Description

Josh Simmons (Black River) returns with a harrowing and genre-bending collection of more than two dozen short stories. The individual stories in Flayed Corpse stand on their own and also complement each other in ways that only heighten the anxiety and dread pouring from the pages. Flayed Corpse also collects several collaborations between Simmons and other cartoonists, including James Romberger, Anders Nilsen, Tara Booth, Eroyn Franklin, Tom Van Deusen, and Eric Reynolds, amongst others.

Creative Team

Description

, Bob Powell, Jack Cole, Reed Crandall, Mike Peppe, Lou Cameron, Basil Wolverton, Manny Stallman, John Giunta, Sid Check, Harry Lazarus, Jack Katz, Howard Nostrand, Al Williamson, Warren Kremer, Wally Wood Of the myriad genres comic books ventured into during its golden age, none was as controversial as or came at a greater cost than horror; the public outrage it incited almost destroyed the entire industry. Yet before the watchdog groups and Congress could intercede, horror books were flying off the newsstands. During its peak period (1951-54) over fifty titles appeared each month. Apparently there was something perversely irresistible about these graphic excursions into our dark side, and Four Color Fear collects the finest of these into a single robust and affordable volume. EC is the comic book company most fans associate with horror; its complete line has been reprinted numerous times, and deservedly so. But to the average reader there remain unseen quite a batch of genuinely disturbing, compulsive, imaginative, at times even touching, horror stories presented from a variety of visions and perspectives, many of which at their best can stand toe to toe with EC. All of the better horror companies are represented: Ajax-Farrell, Atlas, Avon, Charlton, Comic Media, Fawcett, Fiction House, Gilmor, Harvey, Quality, Standard, St. John, Story, Superior, Trojan, and Youthful. Artist perennials Jack Cole, Steve Ditko, George Evans, Frank Frazetta, Alex Toth, Al Williamson, Basil Wolverton, and Wallace Wood contribute both stories and covers, with many of the forty full-sized covers created by specialists Bernard Baily, L.B. Cole, William Eckgren, and Matt Fox. Editors Benson and Sadowski have sifted through hundreds of rare books to cherry-pick the most compelling scripts and art, and they provide extensive background notes on the artists, writers, and companies involved in their creation. Digital restoration has been performed with subtlety and restraint, mainly to correct registration and printing errors, with every effort made to retain the flavor of the original comics, and to provide the reader the experience of finding in the attic a bound volume of the finest non-EC horror covers and stories of the pre-code era.

Creative Team

Description

A career-spanning comics project 24 years in the making, Josh Simmons creates a deeply personal fantasy drama infused with psychological horror. Like a Lynchian take on Alice in Wonderland, Jessica Farm opens with an exterior of what could be any Midwestern farmhouse. Once inside, we track our titular heroine (she is a person, not a place) as she bounds out of bed on Christmas morning and goes about her routine, eventually breakfasting with her grandparents. The banality of the situation is subverted by a ratcheting sense of dread as we discover that Jessica's increasingly nightmarish house - where the inside seems bigger than the outside, like Snoopy's doghouse - is filled with creatures around every corner: some whimsical, some sexual, some despairing, and some malevolent. Most terrifying of all is Jessica's father. Will she even get to open the presents under the Christmas tree? Taking place over a single Christmas Day, Jessica Farm is a career-spanning comics project in which Simmons has been drawing one page every month for the past 24 years, starting in January 2000. This is a horror-fantasy-psychodrama that will appeal to fans of Charles Burns, David Cronenberg, and Dario Argento.

Creative Team

Description

Reminiscent of Edward Gorey and Bernie Wrightson, a collection of spine-chilling line drawings of the creatures that haunt our dreams when night falls. When the sun goes down, our minds invent all manner of horrors that may lurk in the darkness. Danish cult illustrator John Kenn Mortensen (Sticky Monsters) draws inspiration from this shadowy realm, and his pen skillfully conjures these eerie visions on paper. Open this book (if you dare) to encounter a frightful horde of sepia-toned spooks - witches, wraiths, goblins, giant spiders, wild boars, evil clowns - and countless other unspeakable creatures. Hairy, hooded, or horned, they peer at you ominously through dead eyes, their fangs bared. By turns playful, wicked, stunningly imaginative, and masterfully rendered, the compositions in Night Terror are like a combination of Edward Gorey and Bernie Wrightson - and the monsters themselves are as formidable and menacing as those that The Witcher might hunt down. A deliciously creepy collection of pen-and-ink drawings for those who find themselves beguiled by the things that go bump in the night.

Creative Team

Description

For horror fans of all ages, a spinetinglingly creepy and darkly comedic picture book. Fantagraphics' third release in English from Danish cult illustrator John Kenn Mortensen. Gruesome, spindly figures gather outside a house, then spirit away a dreaming youth, bed and all. The stage is set for 32 skin-crawling poems imagining various children's nightmares, all with sequential illustrations by Danish horror master Mortensen. His eerie visions fade to black at the edges, like a dreamer unable to shift their focus, and inspire delicious terror all by themselves. Similarly, the short poems each evoke a distinct sense of dread for the sleeping imagination to expand upon; together, the words and pictures conjure a nightmarish world tinged with pitch black humor. The sequences splay across double-page spreads, evoking Edward Gorey gone grand scale, and grand guignol. For those of a nervous disposition, read in bright sunlight. For those in search of a nervous disposition, take two before bed.

Description

This collects six wildly inventive short comics stories that might collectively be dubbed "speculative memoir." Schrauwen's deadpan depictions of his and his offspring's upcoming lives include alien abduction, dialogue with future agents, and coded messages in envelopes at breakfast.

Creative Team

Description

This stocking-stuffer sized collection features two Christmas-themed stories from the 1960's created for national magazines. From 1963, 'Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking' features the entire Peanuts cast of the time, each with a joke or reflection about the season. 'The Christmas Story' (1968) focuses on Lucy and Linus explaining the meaning of the holiday to Snoopy. Also included are notes on the provenance of the stories and a pocket-sized biography of Schulz. A perfect gift item for the season!

Creative Team

Description

, Jerome Mulot, Olivier Schrauwen Guy is a mediocre mariner, able enough, but also a lazy, thieving, lying drunkard. All of which makes him more real than the swashbuckling Hollywood heroes that grace most pirate narratives. This tour de force of sea-faring gallows humor is also an international event in modern comics, teaming for the first time three titans of the field: Belgian comics master Olivier Schrauwen (Parallel Lives, Arsene Schrauwen) and the acclaimed French duo, Ruppert & Mulot (The Perineum Technique).

Description

A cyberpunk, outlaw, splatterpunk masterpiece from the New York Times bestselling creator of Hip Hop Family Tree and X-Men: Grand Design! Aided by the anonymous dark web and nearly untraceable cryptocurrency, a criminal subculture has emerged. It livestreams murders as entertainment. Who are the killers? Who are the victims? Who is paying to watch? How to stop it? Red Room is constructed as a series of interconnected stories, shining a light on the characters who exist in the ugliest of corners in cyberspace. Piskor cuts the graphic horror with his sharp sense of humor, gorgeous cartooning, and dynamic storytelling. Red Room peels back the curtain on the side of humanity few of us knew existed, let alone understood. Fans and followers of Piskor's YouTube channel sensation, Cartoonist Kayfabe, have already made Red Room: The Antisocial Network one of the most eagerly anticipated and talked-about releases of 2021. It is the first in a series of graphic novels, with the second scheduled for release in Summer 2022.

Creative Team

Description

Internationally acclaimed graphic novelist Olivier Schrauwen returns with a masterfully funny and profound day in the life narrative. Sunday follows, over the course of one day, the stream of consciousness of a fictionalized version of the author's cousin, Thibault. On the day of his girlfriend's return from an extended trip, Thibault wakes up, does nothing, gets James Brown stuck in his head, drinks and smokes, grows paranoid about his relationship, struggles to compose text messages, and watches The DaVinci Code, all the while avoiding anyone and everyone, descending deeper into his own thoughts and fears. Meanwhile, a former crush and another cousin of Thibault's plan a surprise birthday for him, sending the external and internal on a collision course. Schrauwen's brilliant comic timing and formal mastery transcends the quotidian nature of the plot. Through use of color, flashback and the dissonance between text and image, the ways in which Schrauwen layers a depiction of human consciousness as lines on paper are infused heavily with slapstick and white-knuckle tension and make for an exhilarating read and breathtaking use of the comics medium.

Creative Team

Description

This seminal book collects the classic original Usagi stories chronicling a time of settling unrest and political intrigue, told through the story of a wandering and masterless samurai named Miyamoto Usagi, AKA Usagi Yojimbo! With over fifty graphic novels in print, the samurai rabbit is more popular than ever! This is the seminal Usagi book collecting all the classic original Usagi stories from Albedo, Critters, Doomsday Squad, and the Usagi Yojimbo Summer Special. This is one of Fantagraphics' very best sellers, and is also where Usagi started-don't miss out! The setting is 17th century Japan, when the age of civil wars has barely ended and the Shogun has established power. The samurai is the ruling class throughout the land, following a warrior's code of honor known as Bushido. Usagi Yojimbo Vol. 1 chronicles this time of settling unrest and political intrigue, told through the story of a wandering and masterless samurai named Miyamoto Usagi, aka Usagi Yojimbo! One of the great classics of the last 20 years, perfect for all ages. Black-and-white comics throughout

Creative Team

Description

This volume features Usagi's origins as a wandering rabbit warrior in feudal Japan, and introduces many members of the cast of characters. Brimming with drama and humor, this is some of Stan Sakai's finest work.

Creative Team

Description

, Don Rosa Dive into the amazing adventures of Disney's feisty fowl with an action-packed, superstuffed comics anthology collecting 90 years of stories by Donald's most beloved writers and artists! In honor of Donald Duck's 90th anniversary, join us in tracing his comics career from 1934 to the present! Carl Barks' "Lost in the Andes" and Don Rosa's "Return to Plain Awful" take the Ducks to the legendary land of square eggs - while Romano Scarpa's "Legend of Donald Hood" pits Donald against Scrooge in a feature-length Sherwood Forest spoof! Marco Rota's "Life and Times of Donald Duck" traces our hero from birth - as a wild duck in a nest?! - while William Van Horn's "The Black Moon" finds outer-space peril threatening Duckburg! From Daisy to Gladstone to Gyro and the Beagle Boys, the gang's all here... for an unprecedented look at everybody's favorite duck!

Creative Team

Description

But that's not all! We also have a double dose of Duck adventures for the holidays! This season's Carl Barks Library slipcased gift box set collects two of our earlier volumes in this popular series: Walt Disney's Donald Duck: "Balloonatics" (A looney balloon, a space saboteur, and the start of a new Woodchucks series!) and Walt Disney's Donald Duck: "Duck Luck" (Icebergs at sea, Gyro's telescope, and captured by cavemen!). (Vols. 25 and 27.) More than 400 pages in two volumes snugged into a sturdy slipcase at a special price that even Uncle Scrooge couldn't resist!

Creative Team

Description

A loony balloon, a fraidy falcon, and a new Woodchuck series! Carl Barks delivers another superb collection of outrageous hijinks, preposterous puzzlements, and all-around comics brilliance. Carl Barks's stories of the Junior Woodchucks starring Huey, Dewey, and Louie - written and penciled by Barks with finishes by internationally acclaimed Duck artist Daan Jippes - debut in this volume! Other stories include: When Gyro Gearloose invents a ten-story-tall Donald Duck balloon - bigger than anything ever seen at the Macy's Parade! - Donald decides to take a ride. But Gyro's "new balloon gas" is stronger than he thought it was, and Donald finds himself out of control, sailing higher and higher, until... Then, Huey, Dewey, and Louie try to help a "fraidy falcon" overcome his fear of flying by getting Donald to help, but Donald has his own ideas... Next, somebody's blowing up experimental rockets at the launchpad, and the nephews are on the trail of the spy, but Donald's sure of who it's not - until he finds himself on board the next rocket to blast-off... 180 pages of story and art, each meticulously restored and newly colored. Insightful story notes by an international panel of Barks experts.

Creative Team

Description

Icebergs at sea, Gyro's teleporter, captured by cavemen - and the Junior Woodchucks fight to defend the environment! In this collection of world-famous Disney comics stories, Donald Duck decides to enlist Gladstone Gander and his unfailing good luck to prove a fortune cookie wrong when it warns, "You can't do anything right today." (Good luck with that!) Next, it's off to the roaring North Seas, on one of Uncle Scrooge's schooners, where Donald and the boys compete to bring in the most fish. But they're falling behind - until Donald unlocks Scrooge's "Secret Device." Then Donald gets into trouble when Gyro invents a matter transmitter that only half works. And Donald and the boys, while on a trip to the Grand Canyon (to expose a fraud), get captured by cavemen! Plus: Daisy Duck strikes a blow for women's equality when she and her nieces climb Precipice Peak - a feat that no man has ever dared! Also in this volume - Carl Barks's stories of the Junior Woodchucks starring Huey, Dewey, and Louie, written and penciled by Barks with finishes by internationally acclaimed Duck artist Daan Jippes! This season's Carl Barks Library slipcased gift box set collects two volumes in this popular series: Walt Disney's Donald Duck: "Christmas in Duckburg" (An impossible Christmas wish and a nail-biting race to a South Seas island!) and Walt Disney's Donald Duck: "Under the Polar Ice" (Lost in the arctic, flying sleds, and peril in the jungle!). 400 pages in two volumes snugged into a sturdy slipcase at a special price that even Uncle Scrooge couldn't resist! Carl Barks (1901-2000), one of the most brilliant cartoonists of the 20th century, entertained millions around the world with his timeless tales of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.