Fresh Comics

1854 W. North Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622

Past Events

March 12, 2020: Ditch Life/The Intoxicated Signing

Amy Lockheart and Maggie Umber sign at Quimby’s Bookstore on Thursday, March 12, 2020 at 7 PM.

Local treasures, Amy Lockheart and Maggie Umber join forces to celebrate new works at Quimby’s! Animator and cartoonist Amy Lockheart (aka Amy Logheart) will read from and sign her new book, Ditch Life, an absurdist black comedy published via Fantagraphics FU Press imprint. Ditch Life tells the tale of two luckless ditch dwellers as they navigate a shape-shifting pizza box, a botched lobotomy, Hollywood betrayal, celebrity obsession, wealth disparity, and a brood of maggot children who just want to be loved! The book is published in full-color hardcover and also includes a fold-out board game, Females As: Furniture!

Amy Lockhart is a filmmaker, animator and artist. Her animations have screened internationally, including the Whitney, NY, British Film Institute, N.Y. Anthology Film Archives, Carnegie Mellon, GLAS Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hiroshima International Animation Festival and The Ottawa International Animation Festival. Lockhart has received fellowship at the National Film Board of Canada and support from the Canada Council for the Arts. She has completed residencies at Calgary’s Quickdraw Animation Society, Struts Gallery, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her drawings, comics and paintings have been published by Fantagraphics (Ditch Life, 2019), Drawn & Quarterly (Dirty Dishes, 2009), and by Colour Code (Looking Inward), 2016.

Maggie Umber paints, prints and programs comics and she’s a co-Founder of the alternative comics publishing label 2dcloud. She’s published three graphic novels with 2dcloud (Sound of Snow Falling, Time Capsule and 270°) and her work has been widely anthologized. She’ll be signing a new story, “The Intoxicated” in Now: The New Anthology #8, which will debut at the event and also includes new work from Zuzu, Noah Van Sciver, Tara Booth, and others!

Sept. 27, 2019: Rusty Brown Signing

Chris Ware appears in conversation with Marnie Galloway at Quimby’s Bookstore on Friday, September 27, 2019 at 7 PM to present his new graphic novel RUSTY BROWN.

A major graphic novel event more than 16 years in progress: part one of the masterwork from the brilliant and beloved author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories.

Rusty Brown is a fully interactive, full-color articulation of the time-space interrelationships of a couple people in the first half of a single midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit. A sprawling, special snowflake accumulation of the biggest themes and the smallest moments of life, Rusty Brown aims at nothing less than the coalescence of one half of all of existence into a single museum-quality picture story, expertly arranged to present the most convincingly ineffable and empathetic illusion of experience for both life-curious readers and traditional fans of standard reality. From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed in the entangled stories of a child who awakens without superpowers, a teen who matures into a paternal despot, a father who stores his emotional regrets on the surface of Mars and a late-middle-aged woman who seeks the love of only one other person on planet Earth.

March 11, 2019: Is This How You See Me? Signing

Cartoonist Jaime Hernandez appears in conversation with Chicago-based artist Anya Davidson, author of Band For Life, School Spirits & more, at Quimby’s Bookstore on Monday, March 11, 2019 at 7 PM to discuss and sign his latest book IS THIS HOW YOU SEE ME?

In Is This How You See Me?, Maggie and Hopey get the band back together — literally. Now middle-aged, they leave their significant others at home and take a weekend road trip to reluctantly attend a punk rock reunion in their old neighborhood. The present is masterfully threaded with a flashback set in 1979, during the very formative stages in Maggie and Hopey’s lifelong friendship, as the perceived invincibility of youth is expertly juxtaposed against all of the love, heartbreak, and self-awareness that comes with lives actually lived. The result is no sentimental victory lap, however — this is one of the great writers of literary fiction at the peak of his powers, continuing to scale new heights as an artist.

Nov. 8, 2018: Drawn to Berlin Signing

Ali Fitzgerald will be at Quimby’s Bookstore on Thursday, November 8th from 7-8pm to celebrate the release of her new book, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe.

Entwining political and personal displacement, Ali Fitzgerald’s graphic memoir, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe, is about loss, community, and the drawings that bind us. The students in Fitzgerald’s drawing classes are among the record-breaking number of people who are seeking asylum in Berlin, fleeing from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan. They draw images of experienced violence and careful optimism: rafts and tanks, flowers and the Eiffel Tower. Over the course of her decade in Germany, Fitzgerald experiences the highs of the creatively hopeful along with the deep depression of the disillusioned, all while waiting to stumble into her own glory like the great Modernists before her. Her comics are compassionate and unflinchingly intimate, as the fantasy of her bohemia crumbles in a globalized city.

Ali Fitzgerald is a comic artist and writer living in Berlin. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. Her comics have also appeared in New York Magazine’s The Cut, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Bitch, and The Guardian. From 2013 to 2016, she wrote and drew the popular webcomic Hungover Bear and Friends for McSweeney’s.