![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More about Fantagraphics
Jun. 2nd, 2003 12:01 amThere's a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article about the problems they're facing. I misidentified the distributor who hosed them; it was Seven Hills, not LPC.
I wrote this a couple of days ago in response to someone e-mailing me asking for recommendations:
here's *so much* that's good from Fantagraphics, and I don't know what all you've seen, so I might be telling you to buy things you already have....
It's hard to go wrong with Joe Sacco. His documentary of the Bosnian war, Safe Area Gorazde, is probably the most important non-fiction comic since Maus. It starts a bit slow, but makes full use of its format to depict the war in a way that no other account could, freely mixing direct and indirect reporting to create a total picture of the war. Palestine, a two-part account of his visit to the Occupied Territories just before Oslo, is moving and, I felt, impartial. His short works (currently collected in Stories from a Defeatist) are also wonderful, especially "How I Loved the War", an account of getting hooked on TV coverage of the the 1991 Gulf War.
Jessica "Artbabe" Abel: It's all good. Wonderful, small, insightful stories about life. Semi-autobiographical, clearly.
Peter Bagge's "Hate" collections are wonderful fun, something like a cross between the close observation of American Splendor and the ultrarealism of a Chuck Jones cartoon, with a heavy dose of Richard Linklater's Slacker thrown in. Definitely try "Hey Buddy" and "Buddy the Dreamer" if you haven't already.
Dan Clowes. I think his short stories are better than his continuing works, so I would recommend 20th Century Eightball, though all of the collections have things to recommend them. Pussey!, the collection of his rather unfair but wildly funny stories about superhero artist "Dan Pussey", is also a hoot. The most recent issue of Eightball is a twisted story about a crime in a small town, told in the form of 27 separate vignettes. Not just a technical triumph, it's also a genuinely moving and funny piece of work about typically Clowesian characters (i.e., hopeful losers).
Robert Crumb is, well, Robert Crumb. His work does have a terrific range, from the embarrassingly self-revealing to, well, the interestingly self-revealing. But he's an interesting self. Random volumes of The Complete Crumb are chock-filled with great stuff; my picks would be volume 8 (featuring "Whiteman Meets Bigfoot") or the most recent, volume 16, which contains the later and better stories from Weirdo.
Roberta Gregory isn't *really* what she's been called--a female Robert Crumb. She's nowhere near as insane and, alas, not nearly as good an artist. But she's often tremendously funny and, unlike Crumb, is not afraid to let you care about her characters. "Burn Bitchy Burn" or "Bitchy's College Days" are probably the best places to start.
Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead collections. Odds are that you love him or and Just Don't Get him. The Zippy Annuals are a great way to read Zippy--large doses to get into the mindset, organized thematically so that you can see Griffith ring subtle and complicated changes on his ideas and jokes.
Los Bros Hernandez: Still two of the most interesting people in comics today. If you've never read Love and Rockets, I would recommend starting with volume 2, "Chelo's Burden", rather than with the first volume; the material in the first volume is somewhat rough and not representative of what comes later. By the second volume, both Jaime and Gilbert had found their voices. "Heartbreak Soup", which begins in volume 2, is a gripping, humane, and, again, funny story spanning decades in the life of a small Mexican town; the "Mechanics" stories form a sometimes silly but always delightful saga of the lives of three slightly off-kilter Latino women in a slightly off-kilter version of our world. If you have read Love and Rockets, well, it's still damn good these days. The latest volumes--"Fear of Comics" and "Locas in Love"--are masterpieces of form as well as great stories.
Chris Ware creates obsessively detailed and technically baroque (and challenging) comics about, well, depressing things. Jimmy Corrigan is a sprawling and profoundly sad story of a man who really will never amount to anything, amounting to nothing. It's breathtaking.
Fantagraphics is also reprinting two of the best comic strips ever: Pogo and Krazy Kat. It would be hard to find anything in the world better to spend your money on than these.
I haven't read it, but a number of disinterested sources have said that their two-volume biography of Bernard Kriegstien is one of the most important critical works ever published on comics--a detailed analysis of technique and form like none other in the field.
There's lots of other stuff, too. It is the nature of Fantagraphics to be eclectic and innovative; nothing they do will appeal to everyone, and I doubt there's a person in the world who likes everything they've done, even the publisher. But there's something for everyone in their catalog (and that's not even counting the stuff they distribute but didn't publish, like Jason Lute's Berlin and Jar of Fools, or the two volumes of art spiegleman and Francoise Mouly's Little Lit, oh and I just noticed the Complete Jules Feiffer and oh god there's so much to buy).
Did that help?
I wrote this a couple of days ago in response to someone e-mailing me asking for recommendations:
here's *so much* that's good from Fantagraphics, and I don't know what all you've seen, so I might be telling you to buy things you already have....
It's hard to go wrong with Joe Sacco. His documentary of the Bosnian war, Safe Area Gorazde, is probably the most important non-fiction comic since Maus. It starts a bit slow, but makes full use of its format to depict the war in a way that no other account could, freely mixing direct and indirect reporting to create a total picture of the war. Palestine, a two-part account of his visit to the Occupied Territories just before Oslo, is moving and, I felt, impartial. His short works (currently collected in Stories from a Defeatist) are also wonderful, especially "How I Loved the War", an account of getting hooked on TV coverage of the the 1991 Gulf War.
Jessica "Artbabe" Abel: It's all good. Wonderful, small, insightful stories about life. Semi-autobiographical, clearly.
Peter Bagge's "Hate" collections are wonderful fun, something like a cross between the close observation of American Splendor and the ultrarealism of a Chuck Jones cartoon, with a heavy dose of Richard Linklater's Slacker thrown in. Definitely try "Hey Buddy" and "Buddy the Dreamer" if you haven't already.
Dan Clowes. I think his short stories are better than his continuing works, so I would recommend 20th Century Eightball, though all of the collections have things to recommend them. Pussey!, the collection of his rather unfair but wildly funny stories about superhero artist "Dan Pussey", is also a hoot. The most recent issue of Eightball is a twisted story about a crime in a small town, told in the form of 27 separate vignettes. Not just a technical triumph, it's also a genuinely moving and funny piece of work about typically Clowesian characters (i.e., hopeful losers).
Robert Crumb is, well, Robert Crumb. His work does have a terrific range, from the embarrassingly self-revealing to, well, the interestingly self-revealing. But he's an interesting self. Random volumes of The Complete Crumb are chock-filled with great stuff; my picks would be volume 8 (featuring "Whiteman Meets Bigfoot") or the most recent, volume 16, which contains the later and better stories from Weirdo.
Roberta Gregory isn't *really* what she's been called--a female Robert Crumb. She's nowhere near as insane and, alas, not nearly as good an artist. But she's often tremendously funny and, unlike Crumb, is not afraid to let you care about her characters. "Burn Bitchy Burn" or "Bitchy's College Days" are probably the best places to start.
Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead collections. Odds are that you love him or and Just Don't Get him. The Zippy Annuals are a great way to read Zippy--large doses to get into the mindset, organized thematically so that you can see Griffith ring subtle and complicated changes on his ideas and jokes.
Los Bros Hernandez: Still two of the most interesting people in comics today. If you've never read Love and Rockets, I would recommend starting with volume 2, "Chelo's Burden", rather than with the first volume; the material in the first volume is somewhat rough and not representative of what comes later. By the second volume, both Jaime and Gilbert had found their voices. "Heartbreak Soup", which begins in volume 2, is a gripping, humane, and, again, funny story spanning decades in the life of a small Mexican town; the "Mechanics" stories form a sometimes silly but always delightful saga of the lives of three slightly off-kilter Latino women in a slightly off-kilter version of our world. If you have read Love and Rockets, well, it's still damn good these days. The latest volumes--"Fear of Comics" and "Locas in Love"--are masterpieces of form as well as great stories.
Chris Ware creates obsessively detailed and technically baroque (and challenging) comics about, well, depressing things. Jimmy Corrigan is a sprawling and profoundly sad story of a man who really will never amount to anything, amounting to nothing. It's breathtaking.
Fantagraphics is also reprinting two of the best comic strips ever: Pogo and Krazy Kat. It would be hard to find anything in the world better to spend your money on than these.
I haven't read it, but a number of disinterested sources have said that their two-volume biography of Bernard Kriegstien is one of the most important critical works ever published on comics--a detailed analysis of technique and form like none other in the field.
There's lots of other stuff, too. It is the nature of Fantagraphics to be eclectic and innovative; nothing they do will appeal to everyone, and I doubt there's a person in the world who likes everything they've done, even the publisher. But there's something for everyone in their catalog (and that's not even counting the stuff they distribute but didn't publish, like Jason Lute's Berlin and Jar of Fools, or the two volumes of art spiegleman and Francoise Mouly's Little Lit, oh and I just noticed the Complete Jules Feiffer and oh god there's so much to buy).
Did that help?
