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Charles Rodrigues was one of the fiercest, most audacious, taboo-busting cartoonists who ever lived, and our second collection of his cartoons from the National Lampoon may be the most jaw-droppingly potent collection of single gag cartoons ever published. There was no subject Rodrigues wouldn't tackle, and none that he couldn't make funny. There is no example of human suffering, misery, tragedy, or absurdity that is off limits. If they weren't as funny as they in fact are, they would be considered tasteless, repugnant, and horrifying―but without a drop of rancor, even the chapter titled "Good Ways to kill a Rock Performer." There is virtually no way to adequately describe Rodrigues' viciously wicked imagination.

Fantagraphics is proud to announce the release of the first volume of another great, under-appreciated, quintessentially American cartoonist. “Black as sin and decay and perversion” is how National Lampooneditor Tony Hendra described the work of Charles Rodrigues. By all accounts, this small, politically conservative, devout Catholic, was a good-natured dumpling of a man. But inside lurked an untapped vein of savage wit that only the National Lampoon saw fit to unleash. Given carte blanche by its young editors, Rodrigues produced a 20-year tsunami of hilarious self-contained comic strips, themed gag spreads, and serials that boggled the mind and challenged all sense of decency and propriety. In this first-ever collection of his comics, readers are treated to the misadventures of conjoined twins The Aesop Brothers; Sam deGroot, a private detective in an iron lung (whose life actually gets worse when he is sprung from his enclosure); Deirdre Callahan, a girl so hideous that to look upon her causes madness and suicide; and the heartwarming (in relative terms) titular tale of Ray and Joe, the saga of a man and his dead best friend. Also included are his brilliant “biographies” of Marilyn Monroe, Abbie Hoffman, Eugene O’Neill, and others. Rodrigues rendered his cast of grotesqueries and naifs in a ragged, unpretty line within dense panels and pages, that perfectly reflects his uniquely bizarre, riotous and repellent world. Charles Rodrigues may be gone and, if not forgotten, insufficiently remembered, and this collection will rectify at least one of those tragedies.

This is a graphic novel about a noise rock band, based in an alternate reality version of Chicago, and their community of friends and acquaintances. Though beset with disaster at every turn―and frequently reduced to squabbling―they stick together because the band is the core of their existence, and they help each other find their way. Band for Life is a love letter to people compelled to create with no hope of financial reward.

Even as butterflies ominously proliferate in town, the rumor of a mysterious creature lurking in the tunnel behind the school spreads among the children. When the body of Arié Kimura's mother is found by this tunnel's entrance, next to apparently human traces, the legend seems to be confirmed. Is the end of the world coming? In order to appease the wrath of the beast, the children decide to offer it a sacrifice: The unfortunate Arié, whom they believe to be the cause of the curse, is shoved into a well that leads to the Nijigahara tunnel ― an act that in turns pushes Komatsuzaki, the budding thug who has carried a torch for Arié for a while already, entirely over the edge. But this is only the beginning of the complex, challenging, obliquely told Nijigahara Holograph, which takes place in two separate timelines and involves the suicidal Suzuki; Higure, his stalkerish would-be girlfriend; and their teacher Miss Sakaki, whose heavily bandaged face remains a mystery; and many more ― brothers, sisters, parents, co-workers, teachers, aggressors and victims who are all inextricably linked to one another and all will eventually ― ten years later ― have to live with what they've done or suffered through.

This series is rated Adults Only
DISCLAIMER: graphic sexuality
What's this? An all-new, stand-alone, one-shot comic book from one of our greatest living cartoonists? Christmas has come early! Featuring six mostly wordless, thoroughly surreal adventures featuring a cast of misfits, monsters, and anthropomorphs that could only spring from the id of the great Gilbert Hernandez, last year's Eisner Award winner for "Best Short Story"!

The punk art legend sends his best-loved character into Dante's Inferno.
"Don't try to pass a pop quiz on Dante's Hell based on a reading of this comic," warns Gary Panter. "It won't work. Even though the comic is engorged with Dante's Hell and though Jimbo mouths a super-condensed version of what happens in The Inferno, canto by canto, characters are fused, actions inverted, parodied, subject to mutation by my odd memories and obsessions and whims…"
That said, Jimbo's Inferno is the hugely anticipated sequel (or prequel, as it was actually completed first) to Jimbo In Purgatory. In this oversize hardcover cloth-and-gold-finished volume, produced to the same exacting standards as 2004's Purgatory, Jimbo, accompanied by his trusty guide and ride Valise, visits Hell (here envisioned as a gigantic subterranean shopping mall called Focky Bocky), and in so doing runs across minotaurs, drug-addled punkettes, UFOs, giant robots, and more, leading him to such profound questions as, "Why do so many recreational activities involve smoke and heat?"
Panter's wild Albrecht-Dürer-meets-Jack-Kirby graphics are wilder and more hallucinatory than ever, and given the full, expansive treatment they so richly deserve. Black-and-white comics throughout

The founder of "Punk" art reinvents Dante through his character Jimbo in this landmark graphic novel.
Gary Panter has been one of America's pre-eminent designers and cartoonists of the last quarter century: In addition to being a prolific and sought-after illustrator, he was one of the graphic minds behind the award-winning Pee-wee's Playhouse show, and, as the creator of Jimbo, one of the pillars of the legendary RAW magazine. Panter's early graphics defined the California punk ethos and the alternative zine scene—and although he hasn't achieved the notoriety of Keith Haring or Kenny Scharf, the post-Pop painting world is also deeply in his debt. Now, Fantagraphics is proud to present a major, all-new book by Panter: Jimbo in Purgatory.
In this spectacular graphic novel, Panter has transformed his protean punk hero Jimbo into the protagonist of a reinterpretation of Dante's Purgatorio. After years of comparing Dante and Boccaccio to find commonalities between the two, Panter developed a narrative of his own that includes literary and pop references regularly injected throughout the captions of the reinterpreted cantos.
In Panter's adaptation, Jimbo traverses a vast infotainment-testing center built in the shape of Dante's Mount Purgatory. Within its borders every man or robot stands in for a character in the Divine Comedy. In this version all the participants in the drama must respond to one another within a lunatic logic wherein each quotes a literary fragment that demonstrates their respective knowledge of a particular passage and its import to the specific location in a poem.

This book collects all of Schulz’s rare, non-strip Peanuts art: storybooks, comic book stories, single-panel gags, advertising art, book illustrations, photographs―even a recipe! With close to 1000 Peanuts images included, all created by Schulz himself, no true Peanuts library would be complete without this final volume. As a fitting end to The Complete Peanuts series, Jean Schulz, who was instrumental in putting this beloved series together, provides an emotional introduction to the volume.

The Collected Stories from 1968 to 1985 - In 1968, Spain Rodriguez created his most famous hero, Trashman, Agent of the Sixth International, an urban guerrilla fighter of the near future who battles fascist cops and soldiers in a post-Bomb police state Amerika. In the late Sixties, Trashman became the Superman of the New Left, idolized by the Weathermen and admired by a generation of young people disillusioned with the collapse of the American dream.

Josh Simmons returns with his first full-length graphic novel since 2007's acclaimed House. A group of women, one man, and two dogs are making their way through a post-apocalyptic world in search of a city that supposedly still has electricity and some sort of civilization. Along the way, they go to a comedy club, take a drug called Gumdrop, and encounter gangs of men who are fools, lunatics, or murderous sadists. In other words, all manner of terrors. Josh Simmons is one of the field's most distinctive voices in the genre of horror (The Furry Trap, House), and this full-length graphic novel is his best work yet, echoing director John Carpenter's perfect tick-tock pacing, as well as Shirley Jackson's ability to transcend genre and turn it into literature.

In 1953, in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the World Series, legendary cartoonist Willard Mullin created images illustrating one of America's best-loved poems: Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat." These images were then put on a series of drinking glasses that were given away as premiums at various major and minor league ballparks across America. The first set was issued on April 15, 1954, at the very first home game for the modern day Baltimore Orioles.
The illustrations by Mullin were for years thought to have been lost, but were found at an auction in 2002. They have been meticulously reproduced to create this stunning edition of "Casey at the Bat." This edition will include additional Mullin material like the "Fan's Alphabet" from 1953 and the poems "Iron Horse Lou" and "O Brooklyn, My Brooklyn" from 1947. With a preface by Yogi Berra and an essay on the history of both "Casey" and Mullin's images by noted baseball historian Tim Wiles, this edition of "Casey" is the most authentic ever produced. A keepsake for the ages.

PREMIERE GRAPHIC NOVEL FROM 'IGNATZ' AWARD WINNER TEotFW follows James and Alyssa, two teenagers living a seemingly typical teen experience as they face the fear of coming adulthood. Forsman tells their story through each character's perspective, jumping between points of view with each chapter. But quickly, this somewhat familiar teenage experience takes a more nihilistic turn as James's character exhibits a rapidly forming sociopathy that threatens both of their futures. He harbors violent fantasies and begins to act on them, while Alyssa remains as willfully ignorant for as long as she can, blinded by young love. Forsman's story highlights the disdain, fear and existential search that many teenagers fear, but through a road trip drama that owes as much to Badlands as The Catcher in the Rye. Forsman's inviting, Charles Schulz-influenced style lends a deadpan quality that underscores the narrative's tension. The End of the Fucking World is certain to be one of the most talked-about graphic novels of 2013. Forsman is arguably the most acclaimed talent to come out of the Center for Cartoon Studies, a school founded in 2004 by graphic novelist James Sturm and educator Michelle Ollie in White River Junction, VT. Forsman graduated in 2008 and is a two-time Ignatz Award-winner for his self-published minicomic, Snake Oil. The End of the Fucking World is his first graphic novel.

Bottomless Belly Button is a comedy-drama that follows the dysfunctional adventures of the Loony Family. After 40-some years of marriage, Maggie and David Loony shock their children with their announcement of a planned divorce. But the reason for splitting isn't itself shocking: they're "just not in love any more." The announcement sparks a week long Loony family reunion at Maggie and David's creepy (and possibly haunted) beach house. The eldest child, Dennis, struggles with his parents' decision while facing difficulties of his own in his recent marriage. Believing that his parents are hiding the true reasons behind their estrangement, Dennis embarks on a quest to discover the truth and searches through clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels in attempt to find an answer. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother whose 16-year-old daughter, Jill, is apathetic to the divorce but confounded by Claire and troubled by her own "mannish" appearance. The youngest child, Peter, is a hack filmmaker suffering from paralyzing insecurities who establishes an unorthodox romance with a mysterious day care counselor at the beach. In a six-day period rich with atmospheric sequences, these characters stumble blindly around one another, often ignoring their surroundings and consumed by their own daily conflicts. Visually, Shaw employs a leisurely storytelling pace that allows room for exploring the interconnecting relationships among the characters and plays to his strength as a cartoonist -- small gestural details and nuanced expressions that bring the characters to vivid and intimate life.

In this all-new, original graphic novel from an acknowledged master, Frank’s found a soulmate.
For the past 20 years or so, Jim Woodring’s beloved trilobular chuckbuster Frank has enjoyed one mindbending catastrophe after another in the treacherous embrace of The Unifactor, the land into which he was born and from which escape seemed neither desirable nor likely. And then, abruptly, in 2011’s acclaimed Congress of the Animals (the second Woodring original graphic novel, following Weathercraft) Frank did leave the Unifactor for uncharted lands beyond—where, after a string of trials, he acquired a soulmate named Fran. This development raised far more questions than it answered. Would Frank become placid and domesticated? Would he be jilted? Would he turn out to be a dreadful cad? Would he become a downtrodden and exhausted paterfamilias staring vacantly into the dimming fire of life as obnoxious grandchildren pulled his peglike ears and stole his porridge? The answers to these fruitless speculations and many more are delivered in a devastatingly unpredictable fashion in Fran, which is in effect part two of Congress of the Animals. Fans of Frank, connoisseurs of bizarre romance, and spelunkers in the radiant depths of graphic metaphysical psychodrama will want to add this singular cartoon adventure story to their lifetime reading list. Black & white illustrations throughout

This superbly evocative graphic novella by the award-winning Norwegian cartoonist Jason (his first appearance in the English language) starts off as a melancholy childhood memoir and then, with a shocking twist midway through, becomes the summary of lives lived, wasted, and lost. Like Art Spiegelman did with Maus, Jason utilizes anthropomorphic stylizations to reach deeper, more general truths, and to create elegantly minimalist panels whose emotional depth charge comes as an even greater shock. His sparse dialogue, dark wit, and supremely bold use of "jump-cuts" from one scene to the next (sometimes spanning a number of years) make Hey, Wait... a surprising and engaging debut. Love and Rockets co-creator Gilbert Hernandez calls this one of the best graphic novels ever.

Frank is, as everyone knows, Jim Woodring's bestselling cartoon character. Jim, on the other hand, is Woodring's cartoon alter ego, the fictional doppelganger who has for 30 years inhabited Woodring's alternate universe where shifting, phantasmagoric landscapes, abrupt, hallucinatory visual revelations, and unexpected eruptions of uninhibited verbal self-flagellation are common- place. Jim is a mind-bending collection of all of Woodring's best non-Frank creative work - comics stories, prose stories, drawings, and paintings, with a new introduction and afterword by the man himself. Collected here for the first time, Jim is a bounty of Woodring's inspired artistry.

This series is rated Adults Only
DISCLAIMER: GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: Ulli Lust's sprawling, vivid autobiography depicts the trials and tribulations of a teen runaway with the unflinching honesty one would expect from the self-portrait she paints on the page. Frank discussions of sexuality and other adult material are important parts of her story, and as such, reader discretion is strongly advised.
A long, dense, sensitive, and minutely observed autobiographical masterpiece recalling the summer of 1984, when the artist, a rebellious, punked-out 17-year-old, hitchhiked her way across Italy. 2011 Angoulême prize winner. "Ulli Lust really nails my favorite part of storytelling. Bumming cigarettes, learning how to hitchhike -- the small details that create great character." -- Jaime Hernandez

2008 Eisner Award winner for Most Promising Newcomer: an absurd but hopeful cartoon fable for these strange times we live in. Cathy Malkasian has made the jump from animation to the printed page with a graceful, delicate leap. She deftly uses her pencil to create thick, expressive characters moving through the twilight of a shadowy Orwellian world. Humorous and bewitching at the same time, Percy Gloom is a unique gem of a story.

Frank is a unique, visionary comic, exquisitely drawn and so fully realized that adults and children alike find themselves drawn deeply into Woodring's hallucinatory mindscape. The stories, almost entirely wordless, are told with brilliant, candy colors that people of all ages find alluring. Frank is an 11-year-old generic anthropomorph who lives in a force-laden landscape called the Unifactor. He is curious but not smart, naive but not noble, and his most outstanding character trait is his ineducability. Along with Pupshaw, Frank's semi-subservient housedog-like godling, the two traipse across their surreal landscape, occasionally encountering Manhog, the bloated bladder of sin with a heart of radiance who exists to thwart their prosperity. For all its mystery, the world of Frank is a simple, delightful, mesmerizing example of world-building at its most fanciful, surely to delight parents and children alike.