Dennis Eichhorn launched the autobiographical comic book, Real Stuff, in 1990. Dennis has had some of the strangest life experiences you can imagine, and he comes across as a person who is adventurous, compassionate, curious, and enjoys laughing at himself. Best of all, he is a terrific storyteller.

Real Stuff is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I have some good news to share. Boing Boing is going to run the amazing stories from the pages of Real Stuff, once a week (Read the first one here). I’m immensely excited that a new audience is going to be able to read Real Stuff on Boing Boing, free of charge. I hope you’ll enjoy reading, or re-reading them.

Craig Thompson, the award-winning graphic novelist who wrote and illustrated Blankets and Habibi, recently interviewed Blutch, the award-winning Alsatian novelist whose work influenced Thompson.

Later this month PictureBox is releasing Blutch's So Long, Silver Screen, "a series of interlocking short comics that combine scholarly movie history with ribald romanticism, and feature a motley cast of actors and characters, including Claudia Cardinale, Jean-Luc Godard, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Michel Piccoli, Tarzan and Luchino Visconti."

As much visual essay as graphic novel, a daydream and fantastic meditation on the other art of telling stories with images, So Long, Silver Screen is the finest work yet from an uncontested master of contemporary cartooning, as well as his first full-length work to be published in English. It is designed by famed cartoonist David Mazzucchelli.

Blutch has published over a dozen books since debuting in 1988 in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial: among his books are Mitchum, Peplum and Le Petit Christian, and his illustrations regularly appear in Les Inrockuptibles, Libération and The New Yorker.

Read the interview

Love & Rockets co-creator Gilbert Hernandez is on tour to promote his sublime Marble Season graphic novel (it's an all-ages story). Peggy Burns of Drawn & Quarterly (the book's publisher), had this to say:

As soon as Gilbert sent us his list of images for his MARBLE SEASON tour slide show, it took EVERYTHING in us to not immediately blog or tweet to tease all the great comics. And since Gilbert is half way done with his tour, and I got to see him do the slide show last night, I'll tease you this Little Archie page. Why? Because Gilbert made the astute point that "old ladies were running it in those days, and where are the old ladies now [in pop culture]?" And he remarked, can you imagine a kids comics with two old ladies on the same page? As someone who will admit to worrying about how comics will treat her when she is an old lady, I loved it.

Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season tour schedule

Gilbert Hernandez is the co-creator of, Love & Rockets, one of the best comic book series of all time. His newest work is Marble Season, a beautifully-told semiautobiography of a boy growing up. Read the 8-page excerpt below.

Marble Season is the semiautobiographical novel by the acclaimed cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, author of the epic masterpiece Palomar and cocreator, with his brothers, Jaime and Mario, of the groundbreaking Love and Rockets comic book series. Marble Season is his first book with Drawn & Quarterly, and one of the most anticipated books of 2013. It tells the untold stories from the early years of these American comics legends, but also portrays the reality of life in a large family in suburban 1960s California. Pop-culture references—TV shows, comic books, and music—saturate this evocative story of a young family navigating cultural and neighborhood norms set against the golden age of the American dream and the silver age of comics.

Middle child Huey stages Captain America plays and treasures his older brother’s comic book collection almost as much as his approval. Marble Season subtly and deftly details how the innocent, joyfully creative play that children engage in (shooting marbles, backyard performances, and organizing treasure hunts) changes as they grow older and encounter name-calling naysayers, abusive bullies, and the value judgments of other kids. An all-ages story, Marble Season masterfully explores the redemptive and timeless power of storytelling and role play in childhood, making it a coming-of-age story that is as resonant with the children of today as with the children of the sixties.

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Panels 2 Ponder is a website that presents comic book panels taken out of their context, likely making them more enjoyable than the source material.

Here's a sneak preview of Primates, Jim Ottaviani's upcoming nonfiction graphic novel about the three most famous primatologists. It looks terrific!

Jim Ottaviani returns with an action-packed account of the three greatest primatologists of the last century: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. These three ground-breaking researchers were all students of the great Louis Leakey, and each made profound contributions to primatology — and to our own understanding of ourselves.

Tackling Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas in turn, and covering the highlights of their respective careers, Primates is an accessible, entertaining, and informative look at the field of primatology and at the lives of three of the most remarkable women scientists of the twentieth century. Thanks to the charming and inviting illustrations by Maris Wicks, this is a nonfiction graphic novel with broad appeal.

Read the rest

When I read this as a 16-year-old I thought it was a brilliant idea. Decades later, I like it even more. (Giant size)

(Via Meine Kleine Fabrik)

EC is best known as the publisher of MAD, but they also published a line of horror and science fiction comics that featured some of the best cartoonists and writers in the history of comics. Today, Fantagraphics released two beautiful hardbound books that collect the work of two of their superstars: Al Williamson and Jack Davis. The reproduction quality is superb.

The Williamson collection also includes a short comic story by Frank Frazetta, called “Squeeze Play.” Sample below. (The Fantagraphics book is in black and white and the art is much cleaner than this sample.)

50 Girls 50 and Other Stories Illustrated by Al Williamson

'Tain't the Meat...It's the Humanity! and other Stories Illustrated by Jack Davis

First of all, I’ve finally caught up with the rest of the English speaking world and read Ellen Forney’s Marbles. And yes, it’s totally fascinating and deeply affecting, but I’m not telling you anything you hadn’t already heard in December’s Best Damn Comics of the year, so I’ll save you that here. Also, it’s worth pointing out that Quebec’s Drawn & Quarterly is just killing it lately -- like, more so than usual, to the point that I had trouble picking just one of their books this month, though you definitely be hearing their name in the next several of these -- unless I can trick Boing Boing into letting me sneak out reviews of the new Gauld and Hanawalt sooner.

Other Stuff By Peter Bagge. Fantagraphics

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this one -- well before Fantagraphics ever announced the thing, and certainly Other Stuff doesn’t disappoint. In fact, the mere bringing together of Bagge’s Murry Wilson strips is worth the price of entrance alone. In fact, Peter and assorted Fantagraphics employees, if you’re reading this (as I suspect some of you are), I will be the first in line to buy a graphic novel-length biography of the Wilson family patriarch and self-appointed musical genius drawn in Bagge’s signature style. Ditto for the assorted liberty taking rock and roll tales of folks like Sinatra and Sly Stone.

And then there are the collaborations with R. Crumb, Alan Moore, Dan Clowes and the like, many of which I already own in some form or other, though my self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder thanks Bagge’s publishers for collecting them all into on handy volume. It’s great to see all of this stuff together, particular those Hate b-stories that fell through the cracks of Fanta’s excellent “Buddy Does...” collections. Like we really needed another testament to Peter Bagge’s greatness.

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