Fantagraphics Underground

Creative Team

Description

For over 50 years, Glenn Bray has been shining a spotlight on some of the most outrageous, powerful, and subversive art made in the 20th century. He was the first to note and preserve what amounts to an alternative history of American pop culture. In his new memoir, At, With and About, he turns his focus on the potent post-war landscape of the San Fernando Valley’s washed-up entertainers, suburbs, and Hollywood debris that lit the fuse for a life of endless aesthetic engagement. Bray met and befriended some of the most wild and woolly icons of outré culture as well as fellow travelers, collectors, and dealers that make up the world of So Cal pop history. With all-new artist interviews and Bray’s own large-format photographs, this book bears graphic witness to it all with hundreds of images tracing his life of collecting art and befriending artists.

Creative Team

Description

The first new edition in 30 years, I Want to Be Your Dog is the story where Ho Che Anderson announced himself as a creative force to be reckoned with. Mary Greenberg, a Jewish Guyanese woman living in Toronto, is recovering from a bad breakup. One that makes her want to be bad all by herself. Mary’s ex, Xal, is a sadomasochistic abuser and petty thief, lying low in New York City with his brother Baron. Mary was Xal’s collared “dog” but this time around, she wants to be the one holding the leash.That’s when she meets Damian—sweet, soft, and woefully insecure about sex. What starts as a genuine connection becomes an ugly web of moral corruption, domination, and submission. To make matters worse, Mary wants to know what it’s like to kill someone. And that’s before Xal washes up back in Toronto. This new omnibus edition includes, for the first time ever in print, the digital-only short story “Miles From Home”, a gently heartbreaking side sequel focusing on Mary’s sister, Mo, and a brand-new chapter focusing on Mary decades later which is a bittersweet coda to the main story. Plus, bonus material featuring promotional sketches, deleted scenes, and the author’s reflections on the work three decades later. Visually daring and thematically fearless, Anderson’s opus remains as real and raw today.

Creative Team

Description

A secret history of comics, unearthed within the moving biography of legendary comic artist Bernard Krigstein. Take a walk with The Outsider. Comics in the 1950s is a nowhere medium for journeymen and artistically frustrated illustrators. Certainly that’s what Bernie Krigstein —a comics artist and out-of-step painter slumming in the sleazy comics industry to make ends meet— thinks. What starts as an escape attempt from the rut of cranking out comics takes successive leaps into tales of labor organizing and fighting tenaciously to realize the artistic potential of the medium. The Outsider is both a bird’s-eye view of the comic book industry in the 1950s and an intimate portrait of one of its most militant artists. Joseph D’Esposito explores the Jewish roots of comics and its lineage of Black, women, and other unsung participants (such as Matt Baker, a Black pioneer of the graphic novel). In the political hotbed of postwar America, the personal and the political weave vertiginously, culminating in “Master Race,” written by Al Feldstein and elevated into one of the few serious early comics works by Krigstein’s formal innovations. The beating heart of Krigstein’s journey is his wife, Natalie, a multifaceted character who grapples with competing roles as steadfast partner, postpartum mother, and ambitious writer. Other friends and foils include Stan Lee, Harvey Kurtzman, and Robert Kanigher. The Outsider is a story about dedication, frustration, ambition, anger, integrity —the 1950s comic book industry— all told in vivid, painterly strokes of melancholic blue.

Creative Team

Description

Barbara “Willy” Mendes’ masterpiece of hallucinogenic storytelling, Queen of Cosmos Comix Trilogy, collected for the first time in a single volume. In Queen of Cosmos Comix Trilogy, underground cartoonist, fine artist, and muralist Barbara “Willy” Mendes chronicles women creators’ psychedelic journey through Biblical tableaux, modern life, and into a fantastical, interstellar future, weaving in her own intimate stories of being an artist, mother, and grandmother, especially in the never-before-published third volume. Inspired by Jewish mysticism, Mendes presents a creation myth shaped by feminine cosmic consciousness, with new, immersive worlds — and a radical reimagining of this one. Includes an illuminating and entertaining interview with Mendes, as well as the 3 rd never- before-published chapter of the trilogy.