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Fantagraphics Books Solicitations For April 2003

Posted: Thursday, December 19
By: J Hues

ART & BEAUTY #1 (1st Fantagraphics printing)
by R. Crumb

Art & Beauty #1 is back in print after five years, and in a new format chosen by Crumb! Featuring 35 portraits of Crumb's ideal feminine forms, each accompanied with annotations regarding that woman's beauty. A manifesto of sorts, Art & Beauty is preoccupied with the same figures that have been at the root of Crumb's id-reflective art from the start, but presents each with rare tenderness and thoughtfulness. Crumb's artwork has never looked better, there is little doubt that he had as much fun writing and drawing this book as you will have reading it. Originally published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1996, this first Fantagraphics edition of Art & Beauty #1 has be re-formatted to standard comic book size and re-shot from the original art to Crumb's specifications, improving on the original.
MATURE READERS

32-page black & white comic book
$4.95; $7.95 in Canada


ART & BEAUTY #2
by R. Crumb

ALL NEW R. CRUMB! Let's let Crumb describe this one himself: "The beautiful feminine champions of sport as seen every day in magnificent action in the mass media are inevitably a source of inspiration to the artist in search of visual images that are heroic and at the same time erotic in their wholesomeness, and that are also, it must be said, one of the more positive phenomena of the 'post-modern' age. And so, happily, we dedicate a special section of this issue to portraits of the athletic female figure in action, interpreted with pen and ink." Included are portraits of tennis "champeen" Serena Williams, Playboy's Hugh Hefner (with lady friends, of course), and over 30 other women who have struck Crumb's muse.
MATURE READERS

32-page black & white comic book
$4.95; $7.95 in Canada


CAT ON A HOT THIN GROOVE: "The Complete Collection of 78 RPM Artwork from the Old Record Changer Magazine"
by Gene Deitch

On the long road to becoming an Oscar-winning animation director, Gene Deitch became an intense jazz fan. At the age of 21, he discovered The Record Changer magazine, a jazz collector's magazine filled with fanatical, scholarly, and purist essays about jazz as well as listings of hard-to-find jazz albums. Every jazz swinger in the '40s was called a cat (as in 'cool cat,' derived from the West African word "Katta," a human), so Gene Deitch created a cartoon feature for Record Changer titled "The Cat," which quickly became a fixture of the magazine. He also started drawing the covers, which graced almost every issue from 1945 to 1951 along with "The Cat." Deitch's stylistically virtuoso images exquisitely embodied the essence of jazz and became a visual paean to the joy of collecting and appreciating jazz. Fantagraphics Books is proud to collect all of Deitch's Record Changer covers and "Cat" cartoons in one coffee-table, landscape-format art book, reproducing his covers in the same gorgeous colors in which they first appeared as well as the black-and-white Cat cartoons and a commentary by Deitch - who later went on to become an award-wining animator as the Creative Director of CBS/Terrytoons, where he created Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog for The Captain Kangaroo Show, as well as many other animated features.

160-page (60 color pages) 11" x 14" (landscape format) hardcover graphic album
$39.95; $63.95 in Canada
ISBN 1-56097-526-1


THE COMICS JOURNAL #252
cover by John Romita Sr.!

In April, we're proud to present an exhaustive conversation with the staggeringly talented John Romita Sr.! The Journal's own Tom Spurgeon chats with the legendary DC romance and Spider-Man artist about his fascinating life, his beautiful art and his long career! If that weren't enough, we're also bringing our readers a long-awaited interview with young lion Ron Regé Jr. (Skibber Bee-Bye, Boys) conducted by The Ganzfeld's Dan Nadel, as well as the kind of news and criticism that has earned us a wall of Harvey and Eisner Awards and the 2002 Utne Independent Press Award for Arts & Literature Coverage!
MATURE READERS

128-page magazine about comics
$6.95; $10.95 in Canada
UPC: 0-74470-74114-5-4


THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOLUME 2: FRANK MILLER
edited by Milo George

This volume, the second in The Comics Journal Library series of oversized coffee-table collections of interviews drawn from the Journal's 26-year history, features interviews with the controversial and influential Frank Miller spanning his entire professional career, including a new interview conducted for this volume. We experience Miller, in his own words, as a 24-year-old revolutionary freelance artist of Marvel Comics' Daredevil (a major motion picture, based on Miller's work, is to be released soon); Miller as a 28 year old on the cusp of changing mainstream culture forever with the novels The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One for DC Comics; a 30-year-old Miller on the cusp of leaving Marvel and DC behind to work independently, passionately speaking out against censorship and advocating creator's rights; a 41-year old Miller on his independent work, like the comics noir Sin City series, Big Guy and Rusty the Robot (stars of their own animated series for Fox) the European-flavor excess of Hard Boiled and his historical drama 300; and beyond! Heavily illustrated with rarely seen Miller art, art-directed by multiple comics-industry-award winner Jon B. Cooke(the editor of Comic Book Artist) and featuring an introduction by New York Times film critic and National Public Radio commentator Elvis Mitchell - as well as a major essay on Miller's entire oeuvre by the Journal's own Larry Rodman - this book is sure to be the seminal tome on a major cartoonist.

120 page 12"x12" softcover graphic album (16 color pages)
$18.95; $30.35 in Canada
ISBN 1-56097-528-8


JIMMY CORRIGAN: "The Smartest Kid On Earth" SOFTCOVER
by Chris Ware

The blockbuster graphic novel that garnered Chris Ware the Guardian Award for literature last year is now in paperback! A lengthy, meandering experiment in reader tolerance, this first book from Chicago author Chris Ware is a nonetheless pleasantly-decorated look at a lonely and emotionally-impaired "everyman" (Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth) who is given the opportunity, in his mid-thirties, to meet his father for the first time. An improvisatory romance which gingerly ignores all sense of plot and drama, the reader is unaccountably transported between 1890's Chicago and 1980's small town Michigan, helped along by thousands of colored illustrations and diagrams, which, when read rapidly in sequence, provide a startling illusion of life and movement. Mr. Ware has painstakingly tweaked this trade paperback version to make it a whole new book! Over 75,000 sold in hardcover!
MATURE READERS

380-page Softcover graphic novel
$17.95; $28.75 in Canada
ISBN: 0-375-71454-5o
Published by Pantheon


POGO Vol. 2 (2nd printing)
by Walt Kelly

With acclaim garnered from a recent review in The New York Review of Books and a current political environment that invites satire, POGO by Walt Kelly is in more demand now than ever! Fantagraphics' second volume in this classic reprint series highlights Kelly's masterful use of dialect and puns, his satirical gift and his bee-yu-tee-ful drawings of the swamp and its inhabitants. Walt Kelly's POGO provides warm, wholesome humor with an edge of wit and intelligence that few comics today even attempt. Now in its second printing!
ALL AGES

80-page graphic album
$9.95; $13.50 in Canada
ISBN 1-56097-126-6


PRINCE VALIANT Vol. 47: "QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS"
by Hal Foster & John Cullen Murphy

The greatest adventure epic since Beowulf continues in this perennial, full-color series. In Vol. 47, while traveling through the Middle East, Queen Aleta is ambushed, but saved at the last minute by a mysterious woman who brings her to a hidden valley - home of Petropolis, the City of the Amazons. In his search for Aleta, Valiant discovers the same secret passage, but so do his followers, perhaps endangering the peaceful isolation of the Amazon people... Fantagraphics' deluxe, full-color editions of Prince Valiant run chronologically, and Volume 47 includes work from the years 1977-1978. Hal Foster's assistant, John Cullen Murphy, who had been quietly assisting Foster for several years, actively took over the bulk of the drawing chores in 1971. With Foster's blessing, Murphy continued the tradition of superior writing and meticulous artwork, immediately developing a fan following himself. Each volume in the series presents close to a year's worth of strips per volume in an oversized format showcasing the strip's spectacular color pages.

48-page 10"x13" color graphic novel
$16.95; $27.15 in Canada
ISBN 1-56097-527-X



FANTAGRAPHICS REOFFERS


SQUA TRONT #10 (REOFFER)

Fantagraphics Books is proud to publish the tenth issue of the legendary magazine about EC Comics and artists, SQUA TRONT. Edited by renowned editor and critic John Benson, SQUA TRONT #10 is filled with the kind of fascinating historical and archival material that the magazine has become famous for, including: A 1978 panel discussion with Bernie Krigstein, Wally Wood, and Harvey Kurtzman; A contemporary interview with Al Feldstein about how EC planned its cover illustrations and designs, spotlighting one by Al Williamson/Roy Krenkel that Feldstein touched up, profusely illustrated with Krenkel's cover roughs; A privately taped discussion among Arnold Roth, Al Jaffee, and Harvey Kurtzman, moderated by Benson; An appreciation and personal reminiscence of Arnold Roth by Benson; Two interviews with Harvey Kurtzman from 1963 by Benson, and another 1963 interview with James Warren, also by Benson. There's much else besides, including a 16-page full color section, an unpublished EC page, previously unpublished full-page drawing by Wally Wood, an unpublished cartoon by Jack Davis, and more. Plus a gorgeous SF cover painting by Al Feldsten! SQUA TRONT publishes, on average, fewer than one issue every three years, which makes this an event. Don't under order; the printing is limited!
MATURE READERS

48-page 8-1/2" x 11" squarebound w/ 16 pages of color
$7.95, $11.95 in Canada


CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 1 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada


CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 2 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada

CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 5 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada

CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 6 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada


CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 7 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada


CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 8 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada


CRUMB SKETCHBOOK 8 (REOFFER)
by R. Crumb

A fascinating look into the working mind of the finest cartoonist of the last 25 years. Each of the Fantagraphics volumes reproduces over 150 pages of Crumb's own private sketchbooks from the early and mid-'60s. The subjects include portraits of his friends, sketches of landscapes, roughed-out (and sometimes finished) strips, studies for commercial work, and, of course, girls, girls, girls.
MATURE READERS

160-page b&w and color graphic album
$19.95; $31.95 in Canada


POGO Vol. 1 (REOFFER)
by Walt Kelly

Relive the humor and beauty of Walt Kelly's timeless creation with the first volume, which in cludes not only the earliest syndicated strips, but also the pre-syndicated strips that Kelly created for the New York Star in 1948 (which are otherwise impossible to find).
ALL AGES

80-page trade paperback
$9.95; $13.95 in Canada
ISBN 1-56097-018-9