Seattle is the place to be this Friday – the awesomeness that is Peter Bagge will be in the Fantagraphics (1201 S. Vale Street) store Friday November 25th from 7pm – comics, signings, chat and brews will be the order of the evening, followed by decamping to next door club Mix where Bagge’s “power pop combo”  Can You Imagine? will be rockin’ it. Comics, brews, music and an excuse to post up some Peter Bagge art, that sounds like a damned fine Friday night…

Joost Swarte is well-known as the inventor of the term ligne claire, and, with his extremely stylised version of the graphic style that Tintin creator Hergé debuted, is still of one of the uncrowned kings of the clear line.  The publication of Is That All There Is, which will collect all of Swarte’s comics from 1972 to date, is announced for January 2012 (right on time for the Angoulême Festival).

The English edition will be published by Fantagraphics, and the book will contain, amongst others, “Swarte’s take on an episode from Hergé’s early days, a Fats Domino story, a tribute to the legendary Upside-Downs strip, and a story titled simply Modern Art.”

Early work of Peter Pontiac was published in Swarte’s Modern Papier underground comic, and in his own way, he is at least as impressive a virtuoso, but that’s as far as the comparison goes.  Pontiac is the quintessense of the underground artist, heavily influenced by luminaries as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Spain Rodriguez, with a baroque and chaotic style, filling up the pages right to the brim.

He is a master when it comes to typography and stylized renderings of debauchery, drug abuse and other tropes from the rock culture (many of Pontiac’s illustrations still are published in music magazines).  Rhythm was recently published at Oog & Blik/De Bezige Bij, and collects all the comics Pontiac created from 1969 until 2001.  And if this book is too extreme to grant it translation, maybe Kraut, his major opus about his father’s life, thoughts and disappearance, might make it…

Noted comics creator and commentator Trina Robbins discusses some of the subject matter of her Fantagraphics book The Brinkley Girls, 1920s illustrator Nell Brinkley (via Graphic Eye):

Trina Robbins talks Nell Brinkley from Gavin Lees on Vimeo.

Walt Kelly’s Pogo is one of the greatest comic strips I’ve ever read. It’s simply brilliant; quaint and sweet on the surface but deeper readings reveals layers of very smart political and social satire. And as you can clearly see, Walt Kelly’s artwork is magnificent.

The scheduled ship date of September was a deadline that made that famous whooshing sound so enjoyed by Douglas Adams as it went whizzing by. But after many trials and tribulations it’s now scheduled for November.

Fantagraphics are presenting the entire strip, including the beautiful full colour Sunday strips for the very first time, in a series of 12 hardcover volumes that reprint approximately 2 years worth of  material at a time. I guarantee that if you get Volume 1, you’ll be signing up for the remaining 11.

(Via Heidi and then Kenny Penman jumping up and down about it on twitter)

Love & Rockets: New Stories #4 by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez ships in September (hopefully).

Will it be brilliant? Probably.

Will it be as good as Love and Rockets: New Stories #3, where Jaime Hernandez gave us a look at Loca Maggie after three years of absense in two beautiful tales The Love Bunglers and Browntown? Now that might be tough.

Our own Kenny Penman had this to say about Jaime’s Browntown story, and L&R in general:

“Los Bros single-handedly changed the way I read comics and the comics I read. Without them, there would be no Blank Slate Books as I would never have left the reading ghetto of superhero comics I had so long luxuriated in. At times I liked Gilbert’s stories more – although there was never much in it – but I knew, and still do, that Jaime is probably the best cartoonist in the world. It’s not just his drawing, the writing can be off the cuff sometimes but when he gets it right the comics can be filled with melancholy and still be uplifting.

This look at Maggie’s early life with her siblings in a desert town that their dad’s job has brought them to, is wonderful. The art is sublime, as mindful of empty space as the drawn parts – beautiful and elegant. The story gives us lots of Maggie’s back story, which as we know her life after this, gives us hope in how she rose above circumstance. I’d started to take L&R for granted – always good but maybe not with the punch of those early comics that had turned my head. This came up and gently whispered in my ear and I was deeply in love all over again. Comic of the year.”

And the thing is, he certainly wasn’t alone in that praise. Browntown is quite rightly up for an Ignatz for outstanding story. So the expectation for New Stories #4 is huge.

Jaime is returning to The Love Bunglers and presents a sort of sequel to Browntown with the teenage Maggie returning to Hoppers in Return For Me, it may be magnificent.

Gilbert isn’t slacking off either – his two stories are the 35-page cover story King Vampire and the return of High Soft Lisp’s Fritz returns in the 15-pager And Then Reality Kicks In, which Fantagraphics are describing as “This complex and layered dialogue may be Gilbert’s finest piece of writing yet”.

Fantagraphics have provided a preview of Love And Rockets: New Stories #4 here with 5 pages from each brother. But just to tempt you…

First one up to bat is Jason: I chose to do a page from Daniel Clowes’ Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron.

Clowe’s Velvet Glove page….

Jason’s Version…..

(Via Fantagraphics)

“Barks alternated between longish, sprawling 20- or 30-page adventure yarns filled with the romance of danger, courage, and derring-do, whose exotic locales spanned the globe, and shorter stories that usually revolved around crazily ingenious domestic squabbles between Donald and various members of the Duckburg cast. Barks’s duck stories, famously enjoyed equally by both children and adults, are both evanescent celebrations of courage and perseverance and depictions of less commendable traits — greed, resentment, and one-upmanship.

Our initial volume begins when Barks had reached his peak — 1948-1950. Highlights include …. The title story, “Lost in the Andes” (Barks’s own favorite). Donald and the nephews embark on an expedition to Peru to find where square eggs come from only to meet danger in a mysterious valley whose inhabitants all speak with a southern drawl, and where Huey, Dewey, and Louie save Unca’ Donald’s life by learning how to blow square bubbles!”

Fantagraphics have produced a promotional brochure for the new release, with a new cover design, and some nice recolouring by Rich Tommaso. Go to the Fantagraphics blog for more, but not before we share some pictures…. and scroll to the bottom for the bad news.

And the bad news:

“NOTE: BECAUSE OF OUR CONTRACT WITH THE LICENSOR THESE BOOKS CANNOT BE SOLD OUTSIDE OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA. IF YOU RESIDE ANYWHERE OTHER THAN THESE COUNTRIES PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO ORDER THEM FROM OUR WEBSITE; YOUR ORDER WILL NOT BE PROCESSED.”

No. No. No. No. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Although this sort of thing has happened before (Langridge’s Muppets from Boom, Lost Girls from Top Shelf, The Black Dossier from DC) and copies made it through, one way or another……

Saw this on Tom’s Comic Reporter earlier – Fantagraphics have announced their intention to publish the EC Comics Library. But not by individual title as all previous reprint projects have done. This time Fantagraphics are going to be collecting together work by specific artists with a schedule of 4 per year, in glorious black and white:

“The intention, says the publisher, is to present the material to a new generation that may not have been exposed to the EC Comics except in fits and starts, and to better underline specific artistic achievements of creators like Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood and Bernard Krigstein.”

The first four books, to begin publication at that rate per year in 2012, are:

Corpse On The Imjin And Other Stories. Reprinting all of the quite brilliant Harvey Kurtzman Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat war stories.

Came The Dawn and Other Stories – a Wally Wood collection.

Jack Davis’ Horror Stories in a yet untitled volume, with work written by Al Feldstein.

Al Williamson’s Science Fiction Stories in a yet untitled volume – 174 pages of material from Weird Fantasy and Weird Science.

(Kurtzman on Two Fisted Tales #21)

Over at The Comics reporter Tom speaks to Fantagraphics co-publisher and series editor Gray Groth:

“Groth said that Jacob Covey will design the books for Fantagraphics, although whether or this will include an overall series design or whether the company will design each book from the group-up, and to what extent each strategy might be employed, is still being debated in the office. “I’m leaning toward treating each individual book as an individual book, customized to the individual artist,” Groth stated. “I want to get away from treating EC Comics as this kind of cultist monolith. I want the stories to stand on their own.” Groth admitted that the one thing that may eventually lead to more of a series design is the opportunity that comes with exploiting the still-popular EC brand.”

“I assume there’s a generation of comics readers out there that are either unfamiliar with EC Comics or only dimly familiar with them,” Groth said of his decision to re-purpose the material into author-driven books, which he says was part of his original proposal. “I want to introduce EC Comics to a generation of readers.”

It’s fantastic news, and I can already feel money being suctioned out of my bank account for these books.

The Fantagraphics Flog has a fab video shot by Ian Burns of Jim Woodring’s entire presentation on his new Congress of the Animals that he have recently at Elliot Bay Book Company, a nice chance for most of us who love Woodring’s amazing artwork but who couldn’t be at the event to catch up with it and get a nice look behind the scenes at how he approaches his work. Fab.

Jim Woodring’s Congress of the Animals by gavlees

(Get your motor running, head out on the highway… Motorbiking, Pravda style by Guy Peelaert)

The books in question are The Adventures of Jodelle and Pravda, which were both written by Eric Losfeld.  They were originally published in serial format in the French underground magazine Hara-Kiri and consequently in album format in 1966 and 1967 respectively.  The stories were rather revolutionary in their combination of counterculture values and elements from popular music, film and comics, and still look pretty cool today.

(Les Aventures de Jodelle, by Guy Peellaert)

Jodelle tells the story of a female spy in a very kitschy, fantasy world, built out of elements from space-age design and classic romanesque culture.  Pravda follows the voyages of an all-female motorcycle gang through an America that is equally mythical and spun together from all kinds of imagery and clichés.  But even though in their narrative they were already distinctly modern, it was the artwork that set them apart from all the rest.  Peelaert freely borrowed from the visual language of pop art (fair enough, since pop art ‘borrowed’ from comics too!), with its continuous clash of pop and classical culture references, rendering it all in a fluid line combined with large swatches of flat, often clashing colours.

(fabulous artwork from Jodelle by Guy Peelaert)

You don’t need to know that Jodelle and Pravda were based respectively on French chanseuses Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy to enjoy these books, and I think they will prove to be a very good addition to Fantagraphics’ continually growing library of classic comics from round the world.  Perhaps later they may even think about reissuing the book Rock Dreams, which he created in 1973 with rock journalist Nick Cohn, presenting a series of surreal collague portraits of the musical heroes of his youth.