Fantagraphics strana 2 z 4

Fletcher Hanks was arguably the first great comic book auteur: He wrote, pencilled, inked, and lettered all of his own stories - an unprecedented solo act in the 1940s comic book industry. Between 1939 and 1941 he created nearly 50 comics stories, all unified by a uniquely artistic vision - primitive, bizarre, and singularly idiosyncratic. Whether it''s the superhero Stardust doling out ice cold slabs of poetic justice, or the jungle protectress Fantomah tearing evildoers from limb to ragged limb, contemporary readers will be stunned by the pop surrealism and unfiltered violent mayhem of Hanks'' work. This new paperback edition brings back into print all of Hanks'' previously published material and is the most complete collection of his work.

Tommi Parrish is an Australian trans cartoonist and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Balancing emotional honesty with a keen awareness of the human condition, Parrish navigates fear, loneliness, identity, body politics, queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the ever-fluid nature of all human relationships. The Past Is A Grotesque Animal collects over two dozen short stories of varying lengths, interspersed with ephemera from Parrish''s own life: diary entries, photographs, illustrations, paintings, and more. Parrish''s autobiographical elements inform their voice as a writer, and the ways their characters constantly find one another adrift in their own seas of experience, current situations, trauma, and desire - and how those things coexist, and how they are complicated by outside forces and internal ones that affect our hardwired need for meaningful connection. The book also showcases Parrish''s singular and assured visual style, blending clear lines, expressionistic character designs and gorgeously complex, hand-painted colour. ''I think of my work as trying to work out how to cultivate a type of intimacy that doesn''t have a roadmap, and everyone is just feeling around in the dark trying to work out how to do it,'' Parrish says. ''I think that''s what I am always trying to get at - how to cultivate that closeness when you''re also really fucking traumatised and lonely. I know a lot of people where that''s their story. There have definitely been moments where that''s my story as well.''

Dogtangle opens with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell nestled in the bland corporate environment of Business Park. A man, bleating to anyone who will listen about the evils of current zoning laws, meets a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. They begin a relationship. They get married. From their union springs the idea of the Hypermutt: a many-headed mass of dogs that absorbs each new dog it encounters. This debut graphic novel from Chicago cartoonist Max Huffman, about an awful power couple who defy God and nature in creating a hound of hell for our times, is at turns a rich satirical fable, a white-collar black comedy, and a stylistic tour de force blending elements of abstraction, cubism, mid-century modernism, and visual sight gags. One of the most visually distinctive and funny graphic novels in recent memory, Dogtangle is also underpinned with a deep mistrust of corporate and cultural hegemony, cementing its relevance in our increasingly oligarchal times.

Told through powerful allegory, Shadows of the Sea is a story about grief and the winding path to healing, with help from friends, loved ones, and a little magic. On the lonely road meet two outcasts - Doris, a small but spitfire woman and Stanwick, a shy and sensitive dog. Each of this unlikely pair harbours grief, and must decide whether to stay with the pain or run from it. On their journey, the two travel through lush forests, to the eerily abandoned town of echoes, clear to the ''mudder'' sea, where they finally confront the unbearable trauma of their pasts. Cartoonist Cathy Malkasian''s graphic novels are known to be crafted with layered, affecting allegory and metaphor, and Shadows of the Sea is no exception. In this story, shadows become characters themselves, weighed down with painful truth. They cannot be released until their owners acknowledge, reflect, and heal. Charged by the magic of the ''mudder'' sea, the shadows reveal the loss Doris and Stanwick have been carrying - a husband and a child - and sets them free at last.

45 years after his first political cartoons focused on capitalism''s impact, Peter Kuper takes stock of the state of the world... and isn''t optimistic about what he sees. Across 100 pages of vivid, colourful, silent four-panel comics, Kuper traces as many aspects of how business and politics have accelerated the climate crisis, and looks at how, if things keep going in the direction they are, how our oligarchic lives will be further transformed. Witty and angry in equal measure, Kuper deploys bold figures, clever metaphors, despairing howls, and some of the best drawings of his career to get his message across. Originally serialised in the legendary French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, each page is a single blackly funny gag strip, but themes flow, recur and build across sequences to create a true hybrid of political cartoon and graphic novel. Since co-founding World War III Illustrated in 1979, Kuper has maintained his deeply humanist/anti-capitalist perspective, while developing and broadening his graphic and story-telling skills across a range of topics and styles. In this book, he brings all of that experience, study and passion together into a single powerful work that stands as a culmination of his career. See the future now, and laugh hollowly while you still can.

In the wake of losing her husband of four decades, estrangement from her daughter, and a string of other deaths, Carol Tyler descended into grief. Being an artist by vocation, she transformed her grief in the only way she could - through artistic expression. Exploring realms metaphorical, half-imagined, and all-too real, she processes her loss and distress through dissociations and hard work alike and combines the two into a magnum opus of aching art. Tyler explores not just her grief, but our grief, and the idea of grieving in a work that is both painfully intimate and philosophically rich. An artistic advancement nearly forty years into Tyler''s comics-making career, The Ephemerata features Tyler''s most breathtaking picture making ever - fine, dense brush lines complemented with occasional colour washes or highlights - and formally stunning cartooning. Combining art and text in multiple ways - in the traditional comics panel grid, as words-and-illustration, as organically flowing images surrounded by floating text - she depicts the inner monologue of a fallible human being grappling with questions of profound relevance. Tyler''s memoirist skills also rise to the fore, excavating and colliding scenes from her history, delineating with sensitive intuition ways in which the inevitability of grief is built into our lives and our loves. To struggle in the face of loss is a universal experience. To turn it into this compassionate, deep and beautiful book takes a true artist.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1768. It is a dark and foreboding night when the boat arrives from Europe, bringing three shadowy figures to shore. Before long, the Maria sisters will take the New World by storm. In the coming years, they wend their way from town to town, assisting women in need and wreaking vengeance against the men who''ve wronged them. At once fiercely righteous and gleefully malevolent, the sisterhood of witches exert their powers across centuries, from the 1700s to the present, leaving a wreckage of shattered and impotent men in their wake. Told as a fractured narrative, through the eyes of the people whose lives the sisters have cast asunder, Witchcraft is a mesmerising mystery to piece together. This masterpiece of a graphic novel combines strange magic, absurdist humour, and a fiery undercurrent of female rage, to tell a heady tale of colonialism, feminism, and indigenous folklore. Hand drawn in a playful, kinetic cartoon style, with a vibrant colour palette, this experimental, eerie, and hilarious work assures Sole Otero as one of the most dynamic comics artists in South America - and everywhere.

The cartoonist known as Jason returns with a collection of three short graphic stories, connected by an absurdist thread, showcasing his idiosyncratic cultural obsessions, clear line style, and deadpan humour. The title story, ''Death in Trieste,'' sets the scene in 1920s Berlin, a bustling cultural hotspot in the shadow of the coming Nazism. Here, a host of unlikely characters - time-travelling David Bowie, Rasputin, Nosferatu, Marlene Dietrich, and more - are all connected by a group of Dadaists who perform the art of rationality through madness. In ''The Magritte Affair,'' a wisecracking pair of detectives must crack a case involving art forgeries, masked men, and mysterious disappearances - all linked to the surrealist world of the famous Belgian painter. Finally, in ''Sweet Dreams,'' Jason reimagines the New Romantics of the 1980s as X-Men-esque superheroes. While this supergroup easily dispatches such supernatural threats as living mummies, animated suits of armour, and rampaging golems, they soon face their biggest challenge yet, as a giant meteorite hurtles toward the Earth.

How do you prevent history from repeating itself, and is it possible to protect the one you love from themselves? When cartoonist Moa Romanova joins her rock star bestie on a U.S. tour, life quickly turns chaotic, as adolescent trauma begins to haunt her. Buff Soul tackles addiction, friendship, and loss in a rollicking road trip adventure involving selling speed, breaking bones, massive hangovers, drug withdrawal, having your entire fist inside your best friend, and shooting guns in the desert. What begins as an insanely comical, hedonistic road trip in the spirit of Pineapple Express, takes a dark turn when her best friend disappears. This event triggers memories of an adolescent trauma she had yet to reckon with, leading Romanova to confront the reality of how far she''s let her self-destruction go.

When Howard Chaykin broke into comics in the 1970s, there was nothing quite like him. His original characters Dominic Fortune and Monark Starstalker took classic pulp heroes and ran them through a postmodern blender. This new volume contains retro-science-fiction bounty hunter Monark Starstalker''s debut appearance and all Chaykin''s color-comic-book Dominic Fortune stories, including the character''s unexpurgated Max series, published a generation later. Completing the package is the collision between pulp heroism and the devastating, bloody realities of World War I in Chaykin''s 111-page collaboration with The Boys writer Garth Ennis on War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle. The collection is introduced by author and comics scholar Brannon Costello. This second title in Fantagraphics'' Lost Marvels series collects some of the most exciting, sought-after work by Howard Chaykin from 1975 to 2008.

Mistreated for being mixed-race and forced into hard labour at a workhouse in West Hoboken, New Jersey, young Max and Molly are ordinary orphans - or so they think. That is, until a wise old man hears their last name: M''Chawi. Rattled by this realization, he sends them off on a journey that will uncover the secret behind their mystic lineage and give them purpose and power far from home - on the Moon! There, they encounter the Moon''s fantastic inhabitants: the Sky Pirates and their merciless Queen Melissa; the Groos, blue primates and genius mechanics - literal grease monkeys - and their robot protector, Moma Machina; and a kingdom of singing spiders giant enough to eat a man. Looks can be deceiving, and those who first appear frightening can turn out to be allies, and even friends. Take Prince Grakko, pampered heir-apparent to the Bat-People. The Moon is a land locked in constant battle. Races live in fear and ignorance of one another. To make matters worse, the siblings'' getaway isn''t as clean as they''d hoped, and the Earth Queen''s Grand Inquisitor is hot on their trail. Armed with a bejewelled dagger, pendant, and pure hearts, Max and Molly must unite the denizens of the Moon under a common cause, before humanity''s folly reduces their world to rubble. Equal parts Jules Verne and Bone, The Moon Prince is a star-spanning, page-turning epic for the ages.

Peter Bagge, along with the Hernandez brothers and Daniel Clowes, is one of the primary architects of the alternative comics genre that exploded in the 1980s and 1990s. His compelling and best-selling comic book series Hate chronicled the exploits of Buddy Bradley and his gang of lovable losers through the rise and fall of the grunge era, and beyond. Going beyond mere satire, Bagge''s observations helped fashion the aesthetics and attitudes of the only significant youth movement to emerge from the Pacific Northwest. A contemporary review by Bruce Barcott in the Seattle Weekly stated, ''Twenty years from now, when people want to know what it was like to be young in 1990s Seattle, the only record we''ll have is Peter Bagge''s Hate.'' The Complete Hate is a new paperback series that includes the original 30-issue run from 1990-1998, the nine subsequent Hate Annuals, and tons of other Hate-related comics, illustrations, and ephemera created for books, magazines, comics, toys, and other merchandise. Bagge combined his cartoony drawing style with uncomfortably real Gen X characters, and the comic books resonated with readers. Vol. 1 collects the first major arc of the series, (Hate 1-15), focusing on young Buddy Bradley''s travails in early 1990s Seattle, with a lengthy introduction by Bagge. Each volume contains new covers, endpapers, title pages, and other surprises by the author.

In 1947, the author''s grandfather, Arsene Schrauwen, travelled across the ocean to a mysterious, dangerous jungle colony at the behest of his cousin. Together they would build something deemed impossible: a modern utopia in the wilderness - but not before Arsene falls in love with his cousin''s wife, Marieke. Whether delirious from love or a fever-inducing jungle virus, Arsene''s loosening grip on reality is mirrored by the graphic novel reader''s uncertainty of what is imagined or real by Arsene. This first full-length graphic novel from the critically acclaimed Olivier Schrauwen is an engrossing, sometimes funny, slightly surreal and often beautiful narrative. Originally released in 2014, Arsene Schrauwen heralded the then largely-unknown-to-English readers Olivier Schrauwen as a major voice in international comics - a reputation that has onBuddy Bradley and Lisa Leavenworth, now middle aged with a free-spirited young adult of their own, confront their own poor decisions as young people in the grungy 1990s. Expertly shifting between the present day (in full colour) and their Gen X heyday (in glorious, crosshatched black-and-white), we learn for the first time the story of how Buddy met Lisa, Stinky, George, and Val. Meanwhile, Buddy is forced to come to terms with the tragic - and covered-up - circumstances of Stinky''s untimely death in the original Hate series, while navigating elder care, contemporary politics, family and friendships. Hate Revisited! expertly showcases Bagge''s inimitable humour and knack for character, and the generational shift lends an unexpected gravitas to their lives. While the original Hate is indelibly rooted in a key pop cultural era, the themes and characters of Hate remain timeless. Misanthropy never gets old!ly gained momentum over the ensuing decade with releases like 2024''s Sunday.

In Wales 1974, a fisherman inadvertently reels in a Nazi flag. Meanwhile, young Idris and his mother ride a train in the countryside. Idris''s mother has a new housekeeping job awaiting her in the small town of Bothelli, by the sea. Her new employer, a wealthy man named Mr. Miller, is confined to a wheelchair and beginning immediately upon their arrival, Mr. Miller''s unceasing demands as an employer leave the socially awkward Idris adrift in his new town, friendless. That is, until he meets the mysterious and profane Gwen in the local cemetery. When Idris shows Gwen a map that he found at Mr. Miller''s, it sucks them into a web of mystery and unimagined horrors. As he did in his acclaimed 2018 graphic novel Dull Margaret (Fantagraphics), co-created with Jim Broadbent, Dix brings his world to life with his distinctive cartooning, weaving lumpy characters, earthy palettes, grim rumination, deadpan humour, supernatural elements, and a dreary countryside setting into one of the gnarliest graphic novels of the year.

Freestyle wrestler The Sledgehammer has never met defeat, not at the hands of Painkiller, Handsome Jens, Fezzik the Giant or the Angel of Death. But over the course of 80 pages, Danish illustrator John Kenn Mortensen''s surreal black and white graphic novel will take Sledgehammer to the limits of reality, to show that he''s motivated by far more than hubris - it''s also love. Mortensen''s first English-language graphic novel delivers on the promise that his delightfully macabre books of illustration had previously made to readers around the world. With his spidery black-ink style, reminiscent of Edward Gorey''s gothic line, we''re taken to a world in which heavy metal mixes with the WWE by way of The Seventh Seal and Faust.

Robert wasn''t born into an ordinary life. It began in a rush: flushed down a toilet by his mother and carried into the sewer by a demon. This monstrous presence stalks Robert into adulthood, haunting his dreams. Robert just wants to be like his idol, Jim Morrison, writing poetry, playing rock ''n'' roll, and chasing beautiful women. But the demon soon begins haunting the entire city of Henryville. Dandelion, a young poet, falls in love with Robert and begins having confusing, terrifying romantic visions of the demon she can''t seem to shake. Gary, a cartoonist, becomes convinced that his vengeful cartoons are channelling the word of a righteous God, capable of manipulating reality in powerful and destructive ways. They and other residents of Henryville find themselves tangled in a web of sex, drugs, rock ''n'' roll, newspaper funnies, and demonic possession. Will the town''s residents find a way to escape? With its mix of comedy, horror, magic realism, anthropomorphism, naturalism, humour, psychedelia, and pathos, The Devil''s Grin is a remarkable work of contemporary fiction by one of comics'' most distinctive storytellers. Weaving together multiple character arcs at a brisk, deft pace, Graham juggles their secrets, desires, and insecurities in continually surprising ways, slowly introducing layers of malice that lead to an unexpected darkness. Graham''s clear yet loose cartooning perfectly unfolds every twist and turn with creative precision.