Seattle-based, world-slobbered, excellent comics and dazzling-arts publisher Fantagraphics is really going all out for their 4th Anniversary Party this Saturday, December 11, 2010. It will be thrown at their awesome store in Georgetown, and promises "the season’s most festive party featuring amazing music, comix, art, and more!"

Coinciding with the Georgetown Art Attack, and featuring a probably incredible (and very rare) turntable set from famed Fall Out Records founder DJ Russ Fallout, the evening includes performances by cherished troubadour and Low founder Zak Sally, who has comics published by Fantagraphics as well as from his own exquisitely hand-made La Mano imprint; also on board is Pacific NW legend and firebrand Mark Pickerel.

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We have a genius artist in our midst in Seattle, beloved internationally, who started in graphic novels but whose paintings have been avidly collected, his imagery made into hot-selling Japanese toys, and those art-work has been animated. Jim Woodring was a co-recipient of the highly lauded United States Artist Fellowship (2006, with collaborator Bill Frisell) and then in 2008 became an Artist Trust recipient for Washington State Artists. He also had exhibitions in Australia and France last year. And he benefits Seattle by having called it home for a very long time, for many different reasons, but mostly because his work kicks ass.

Beyond that, Woodring has been a source of encouragement and inspiration to a couple of entire generations of younger cartoonists, painters, illustrators, and "outsider" artists who admire his ability to create impeccably rendered artwork that pulls you in and hammers open a third eye to your subconscious. He hosts a local artists group (Friends of the Nib) that has been helping other artists get up to snuff on their craftsmanship autonomously, and giving them camaraderie in the midst of a world plagued by bad computer graphics and terrible commercial "art."

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Fantagraphics (the publisher) has announced a couple of frantic hype-worthy meet-the-artist shows coming up at Fantagraphics (the store) in the next few weeks.

Michael Kupperman is currently known for still creating probably the last great alternative comic (pamphlet format), Tales Designed To Thrizzle. His slowly-building career includes doing strips like Up All Night for The Stranger for years; getting animated shorts on cult favorite TV Funhouse (SNL's Robert Smigel's short run Comedy Central freak out); crafting astounding design work for McSweeney's eponymous publication; and getting his strips for the utterly-absurd Snake 'n' Bacon comic on to Adult Swim once and for possible future consideration.

The point to all this is that Kupperman is really funny, and Thrizzle always rips a few genuine, audible laughs out of me with every issue. As his illustration skills (using hammy clip art styles and garish color juxtapositions with a strange B&W old newspaper psychedelia) have become perfectly suited to chopped-up and tweaked stories and jokes about Mark Twain & Albert Einstein, Cowboy Oscar Wilde, Ever-Approaching Grandpa, "Oi'm Glad I Became A Cockney Grave Robber," and "Jungle Princess," Thrizzle has become the one actual serialized alternative comic book to buy among all the loftier graphic novels. (I'm leaving out all the titles for those of us with infatuations for other genres besides what was once called "undergrounds.")

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It's no secret among literary types that graphic novelist James Sturm has written and drawn some of the best books in that field. From Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight to The Golem's Mighty Swing, Sturm's approach to American history is refined, restrained, but revelatory, chronicling for example, the dangers of capitalism steered by evangelism (and vice versa), and the glories of a fictional all-Jewish baseball league in the early part of the 20th century. Sturm's artful but deceptively simple and sketchy illustrations characterize the journalistic restraint and elegance of his work.

But did you know that he helped co-found The Stranger, Seattle's long-running confident and controversial alt-weekly, back in 1991? He and publisher Tim Keck were at giant of printed satire the Onion and moved out to Seattle together to found it, and for many years Sturm's profound design and illustration skills defined The Stranger's cunning approach to graphic style. It's Sturms's stark, timeless art that captivated so many Pacific NW readers from the tabloid's inception, and now the author returns to Seattle at the Fantagraphics Store in Georgetown on Saturday, April 17, to unveil his new book, Market Day.

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This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14) Seattle area comics fans have a big old funny book hootenanny to party at inside the Washington State Convention Center. There are some panels and huge rooms full of comics and toys being sold. Also, dealers of another kind: I found the bootleg soundtrack to the Aussie skinhead flick Romper Stomper there last year! Right before a dark cloud of Suicide Girls turned a long table's corner and crashed into a swarm of Star Wars Storm Troopers. I am not making any of this up. It was freaking awesome-possum.

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The Spectacular Saturday Series begins this Saturday at the Fantagraphics store in frisky Georgetown, starting with the press party for NEWAVE! The Underground Mini-Comix of the 1980s.

If you're a fan of graphic novels like Ghost World and wanted to see the raw cool beginnings of Daniel Clowes and his fellow "ink studs," this would be like releasing a DVD set of a mess of vintage Velvet Elvis and Paradox performances for Death Cab and like-minded band fans. The mini-comix and zine scenes back in the Reagan era were entwined around each other, filled with post-Robert Crumb surreal political protest and punk rock splattering and autobiographical bizarreness.

Clowes won't be at the event this Saturday, but a lot of his contemporaries are in this lavish, beautiful, hardcover ode to that berserk generation, and many of them will be at the store to celebrate: Jim Blanchard (a Roq La Rue gallery demigod whose depictions of celebrities and weird kids and meat are queasy-legendary and painstakingly rendered), David Lasky (who has a comic in The Stranger this week and is working on a GN tome based on the Carter Family with scribe Frank Young, for the Smithsonian), Dennis Worden (whose nihilistic Stickboy was a proto-grunge era favorite, as ubiquitous in coffee shops in Seattle as Tad records), and Michael Dowers, who will be giving a mini-comic demonstration and giveaway. It all takes place this Saturday, January 30, beginning at 6 PM and tapering off at 9. Music to be performed by iji, as a special treat.

After this, coming up through the top half of February will be a signing for Chocolate Cheeks by cruel children's tale satirist Steven Weissman. His books were big sellers at Confounded, when it used to exist in the same space as Wall of Sound on Cap Hill. He masterfully captures the dark side of kids' lives and the usually banal cartoons created for and by them, with nasty little brute characters and a chaotic mess of misadventures. His work is very accessible and trouble making indie-punks would probably feel his comics are more friendly than VICE's Johnny Ryan but not exactly Dennis The Menace either. This party will be held on Saturday, February 6, from 7 to 8 PM.

 

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Eroyn Franklin recently won the the indie comics-supporting Xeric award, and has produced a graphic novel. This Saturday, August 22 local alternative comics fans will be celebrating its publication at the Fantagraphics Store (which shares space with Georgetown Records).

Another Glorious Day at the Nothing Factory is described as "a revealing examination of the artist’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. Franklin’s impressionistic narrative complements the austere hand cut imagery in her exquisitely crafted autobiography. Produced with the support of the Xeric Foundation and Allied Arts, this 216 page book consists of striking hand cut images, with an individually die-cut silkscreen cover in a numbered edition of 1,000 copies."

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Come Party With "Beasts!" In Georgetown Saturday!

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MOME is graphic fiction and illustration for those who are already into McSweeney's and such.

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