SEPTEMBER
THE CLASSIC PIN-UP ART OF JACK COLE
NOW IN SOFTCOVER Edited by Alex Chun
$18.99 Paperback
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / General • CQ: 30
104 pages, color and black-and-white, 7 ½” x 10 ¼”
ISBN 978-1-60699-284-5
(Previous hardcover edition: ISBN 978-1-56097-559-5)
NOT FINAL COVER
• Viral promotion and distribution of multimedia assets (video previews, book
page and photo galleries) via online social networks (MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and the Fantagraphics.com website
• Digital ARC (PDF)
• From the fan favorite creator of Plastic Man
• AGE RANGE: 15 +
CLASSIC PIN-UPS FROM A GIANT OF THE FIELD
A collection of the rare ’50s pin-ups that led to the artist’s final gig, as Playboy’s first star cartoonist. In the rarefied realm of classic cartoon pin-up art,
nobody did it better than Jack Cole. With his quirky line drawings and sensual
watercolors, Cole, under Hugh Hefner’s guiding hand, catapulted to stardom in
the 1950s as Playboy’s marquee cartoonist, a position he held until his untimely
death at the age of 43.
Jack Cole has been justly celebrated as the creator of Plastic Man and an
innovative comic book artist of the 1940s (especially in Art Spiegelman and
Chip Kidd’s Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits). After finishing his 14-year run on Plastic Man,
he found himself looking for something new. According to Cole, his savior was the Humorama line of down-market
digest magazines. This girls and gags magazine circuit proved to be the perfect training ground to regain his footing and
develop his craft at single panel “gag” cartoons. His ability to render the female form was already without peer. Though
he signed his cartoons “Jake,” Cole’s exquisite line drawings and masterful use of ink-wash — a skill he carried over to
Playboy — betrayed his pseudonym. In comparison to his contemporaries, however, Cole was probably Humorama’s least
prolific artist. Though his images were frequently used for covers, Cole’s cartoons were few and far between, with scarcely
a single drawing appearing every five issues.
Along with a foreword by editor Alex Chun, this volume (originally released in a now out-of-print hardcover edition
that now fetches high prices on the secondhand market) collects the best of these hidden gems, including several shot
from Cole’s stunning original art. Most of these drawings have not seen print elsewhere since their original publication.
JACK COLE was born in 1914 and died in 1958.
“Jack Cole was a masterful comic
book artist who helped define the
golden age of his art form.”
— Village Voice
Other books featuring Jack Cole:
Betsy and Me,
ISBN 978-1-56097-878-7,
$12.99 Paperback Original, 104 pages,
black-and-white, 8 ½” x 6”
Supermen!,
ISBN 978-1-56097-971-5,
$24.99 Paperback Original, 208 pages,
full-color, 8 ½” x 11”
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edited by Steffen P. Maarup
$29.99 Paperback Original
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / Anthologies • CQ: 22
176 pages, color and black-and-white, 8” x 11”
ISBN 978-1-60699-325-5
SEPTEMBER
FROM WONDERLAND WITH LOVE:
DANISH COMICS IN THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
• Viral promotion and distribution of multimedia assets (video previews, book
page and photo galleries) via online social networks (MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and the Fantagraphics.com website
• Digital ARC (PDF)
• AGE RANGE: 15 +
Edgy comics from the country of Lars Von Trier
and the Raveonettes!
In all the excitement over manga from Japan and bandes dessinées from
France, it’s easy to forget that other countries have a thriving comics culture all
their own. This eye-popping anthology, assembled by Danish publisher/editor/
translator Steffen P. Maarup, introduces adventurous readers to 19 exciting talents, most of whom are taking their first bow on the English-speaking stage.
One centerpiece of the book is Nikoline Werdelin’s stunning “Because I
Love You So Much,” a Doonesbury-style slice-of-life daily strip about a suburban Danish couple who discover their daughter is being molested — is it
happening at her daycare center, or, horrifyingly, closer to home? Other major
revelations include Julie Nord’s elegantly drawn “From Wonderland With Love” (which gives the collection its title),
a modernistic riff on Alice in Wonderland, and Ib Kjeldsmark’s “Sloth,” a riotously punk-inflected day-glo duo-toned
road trip.
The book also spotlights the snarky and surreal single-panel work and gags by HuskMitNavn, Christoffer Zieler, and
Johan F. Krarup; the visually explosive silent comics of Mårdøn Smet and Peter Kielland; cover artist T. Thorhauge’s
spectacular philosophical piece “M”; and many other stories in a wide variety of styles from the sinister black and white
Lynchian surrealism of Simon Bukhave’s wooden robot story “All that I Hold in My Hand” to the watercolored animalfable extravaganza “Tomb of the Rabbit King” by Allan Haverholm, from Søren Mosdal and Jacob Ørsted’s meticulously
delineated and colored nightmare yarn “Dog God” to Zven Balslev’s slashing, black and white, Panter-esque “Cadarul
Zombie.” And more!
Through his publishing house Aben Maler, Steffen P. Maarup has published Danish edition of books by (among others)
Edward Gorey, Chris Ware, and Daniel Clowes, as well as original graphic novels and collections by Danish authors.
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By Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest
$26.99 Hardcover
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / Literary • CQ: 14
192 pages, black-and-white, 7 ¾” x 10 ½”
ISBN 978-1-60699-294-4
SEPTEMBER
YOU ARE THERE
• The beginning of an ambitious publishing project introducing one of Europe’s
most beloved cartoonists to American audiences
• Viral promotion and distribution of multimedia assets (video previews, book
page and photo galleries) via online social networks (MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and the Fantagraphics.com website
• Digital ARC (PDF)
• AGE RANGE: 15 +
THE SATIRICAL MASTERPIECE THAT USHERED IN THE
GRAPHIC NOVEL ERA TO EUROPEAN COMICS… FINALLY
AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH
One of the earliest full-length, standalone graphic novels to be published in
Europe, and certainly one of the best and most original, Ici Même was serialized in the adult French comics monthly (A Suivre) in the early 1980s and then
released in book form. A quarter of a century later, this dark, funny, consistently surprising masterpiece has finally been translated into English.
An unexpected yet smoothly confident collaboration between the darkly
cynical Jacques Tardi and the playful fantasist Jean-Claude Forest (of Barbarella fame), You Are There is set on a small island
off the coast of France, where unscrupulous landowners have succeeded in overtaking the land from the last heir of a previously wealthy family. That heir, whose domain, in a Beckettian twist, is now reduced to the walls that border these patches
of land he used to own, prowls the walls all day, eking out a living by collecting tolls at each gate.
His seemingly hopeless struggle to recover his birthright becomes complicated as the government sees a way of using his
plight for the sake of political expediency, and the romantic intervention of the daughter of one of the landowners (who
has her own sordid history with the politician) engenders further difficulties, culminating in an apocalyptic, hallucinatory
finale.
Set in Tardi’s preferred early 20th century milieu, You Are There is drawn in his crisp 1980s neo-“clear line” style, gorgeously detailed, elegantly stylized, with impossibly deep slabs of black: You Are There is a feast for both the eyes and the brain.
With over 30 graphic novels under his belt (a half-dozen of which have been translated into English), JACQUES TARDI is considered the leading European cartoonist of the generation that came of age in the 1970s. He lives in Paris with his wife, the singer
Dominique Grange, and their cats.
There are worse things to be linked with than the image of a naked Jane Fonda spinning in zero gravity, but it should be stressed
that JEAN-CLAUDE FOREST’s career in comics stretches far beyond Barbarella, the 1962 sci-fi romp that ushered in the era of
adult comics first in France, then worldwide. He died in 1998 at the age of 58.
“You Are There is a masterpiece — a work unique in the history of comics,
one of those books one reads and re-reads.” — David B. (Epileptic)
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SEPTEMBER
WEST COAST BLUES
By Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette
$18.99 Hardcover
COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS / Literary • CQ: 28
80 pages, black-and-white, 6 ¾” x 10 ½”
ISBN 978-1-60699-295-1
• The beginning of an ambitious publishing project introducing one of Europe’s
most beloved cartoonists to American audiences
• Viral promotion and distribution of multimedia assets (video previews, book
page and photo galleries) via online social networks (MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and the Fantagraphics.com website
• Digital ARC (PDF)
• AGE RANGE: 15+
A SAVAGE NOIR THRILLER REUNITING A MASTER CRIME
NOVELIST AND A SUPERLATIVE FRENCH CARTOONIST
George Gerfaut, aimless young executive and desultory family man, witnesses
a murder and finds himself sucked into a spiral of violence involving an exiled
war criminal and two hired assassins. Adapting to the exigencies of his new life
on the run with shocking ease, Gerfaut abandons his comfortable middle-class
life for several months (including a sojourn in the countryside after an attempt
to ride the rails turns spectacularly bad) until, joined with a new ally, he finally
returns to settle all accounts... with brutal, bloody interest.
Released in 2005, West Coast Blues (Le Petit bleu de la côte ouest) is Tardi’s adaptation of a popular 1976 novel by the
French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette. (The novel had been previously adapted to film under the more literal title
Trois hommes à abattre, and was released in English by the San Francisco-based publisher City Lights under the English
version of the same title, 3 to Kill.)
Tardi’s late-period, looser style infuses Manchette’s dark story with a seething, malevolent energy; he doesn’t shy away
from the frequently grisly goings-on, while maintaining (particularly in the old-married-couple-style bickering of the two
killers who are tracking Gerfaut) the mordant wit that characterizes his best work. This is the kind of graphic novel that
Quentin Tarantino would love, and a double shot of Scotch for any fan of unrelenting, uncompromising crime fiction.
See page 31 for a biography of
JACQUES TARDI.
“West Coast Blues shows a terrific sense of pace, place, and casual violence, all related with a firm grip
on a beautifully spontaneous style that reeks of utterly justified self-confidence. To put it simply, this shit
kicks ass.” — Howard Chaykin
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The Marseilles-born JEAN-PATRICK
MANCHETTE (1942-1995) authored
ten short, tough-minded, highly
acclaimed crime novels, as well as a
multitude of other books, screen- and
teleplays, magazine columns, and
translations of American crime and
science fiction novels. A lifelong comics
fan, he also wrote the hardboiled
graphic novel Griffu for Jacques Tardi
in 1978, and in the late 1980s, was
selected to translate the French edition
of Watchmen.
NOT FINAL COVER
PROS E
NOVE L
By Monte Schulz
$22.99 Hardcover
Fiction / Literary • CQ: 24
304 pages, 6” x 9”
ISBN 978-1-60699-296-8
SEPTEMBER
this side OF JORDAN
• Viral promotion and distribution of multimedia assets (video previews, book
page and photo galleries) via online social networks (MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Flickr, etc.) and the Fantagraphics.com website
• Digital ARC (PDF)
• An ambitious, literary novel
• AGE RANGE: 15 +
A seductive novel of southern lyricism
Monte Schulz's prose novel opens in the spring of 1929, as the 19-year-old
consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast attends an ill-fated dance marathon he's
too sickly to participate in. After a year of his life has been stolen by a sanitarium, Alvin knows he's relapsing, and dreads not only the drudgery of his family's homestead, but a return to the hospital. In this state of mind, an invitation
for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it,
Alvin crosses the Mississippi River and finds himself working for a slick con artist
named Chester Burke.
Alvin is no match for Chester, who's not merely a con man, but a gangster from
Chicago, following the bootleg liquor trade through the small towns of America's middle border. With Alvin in tow,
Chester's insouciant disregard for life serves him well as he embarks upon a series of bank robberies and senseless murders. All summer long, Chester assumes the role of a dark angel on Judgment day, cleansing the scrolls of those whose
sad fortune had drawn them across his path. Too ill to flee, too morally weak to object, Alvin resigns himself to what
seems like certain doom somewhere down the road. Fortunately, Alvin finds another companion on his journey, a lonely,
eccentric, and grandiloquent dwarf named Rascal, whose own infirmity binds his and the farm boy's destiny together.
Drawn deeper and deeper into Chester's murderous frolic, they come across a curious assortment of characters, from
small town businessmen and religious kooks to wayward girls and dance contestants, spiritualists and sideshow freaks.
Caught between Chester's villainy and Alvin's own physical deterioration, the young farm boy must make a decision:
stick with Chester, who would surely kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, or muster the courage to stake his life on
faith in Rascal's clever plan to save them both. Tired of being afraid, Alvin finally grasps the need not only to outwit the
gangster but to find another road to travel. What he discovers about the meaning of home offers a solution to escape
and freedom.
This Side of Jordan is a thoroughly American novel told in the voice of a lost generation hurtling toward the Great
Depression, and evokes a long ago America of crowded Main Streets and tourist camps, miles of cornfields, rural churches, and musty parlors. It ends on the fairgrounds of a traveling wagon circus that beckons gangster, farm boy, and dwarf
toward a startling resolution, and a hard-fought absolution for the two young, frightened collaborators. The narrative of
this novel has the momentum of a freight train, but told in the seductive, rhythmic tradition of Southern lyricism reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote, and filled with vivid, outsized literary characters. If Jim Thompson
and Carson McCullers went on a collaborative bender by kidnapping Holden Caulfield, Perry Smith, and Ignatius J.
Reilly, they'd have come up with something like This Side of Jordan.
MONTE SCHULZ received his M.A. in American Studies from UCSB. He published his first novel, Down By The River, in
1990, and spent the next twelve years writing a novel of the Jazz Age, of which This Side Of Jordan is only one of three parts. He
wrote it for his father, the late cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz
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