I Love Led Zeppelin: Panty-Dropping Comics By Ellen Forney

Introduction by Sherman Alexie
Fantagraphics Books
9” x 12”, 112 pages in full color and b/w
Trade Paperback, $19.95
ISBN 1-56097-730-2  Pub. Date: August, 2006

• Featuring collaborations with Margaret Cho, Kristin Gore, Camille Paglia, and Dan Savage

I Love Led Zeppelin is the long-awaited collection of strips by the Harvey and Eisner Award-nominated cartoonist Ellen Forney. This book includes full-page comics published in venues such as the L.A. Weekly, Seattle’s The Stranger, BUST Magazine, and the Oxford American.

Several of Forney’s strips fall into the “How To” category, although this is not your standard advice column fare: topics range from the practical (“How to Smoke Pot and Stay Out of Jail”) to the whimsical (“How to Twirl Your Tassles In Opposite Directions”) to the fascinating but hopefully impractical (“How to Sew an Amputated Finger Back On”).  Other strips include “The Final Soundtrack,” a death fantasy involving blood, glamour, and Led Zeppelin; “How to Be a Fabulous Fag Hag,” an illustrated interview with Margaret Cho; “Seattle's Erotic Landmarks”; and “Memories of Love,” a graphic tour of Courtney Love’s rise and fall of celebritydom.

“One big, zany breath of fresh air.”

-L.A. Times Book Review

“Forney's line work is so graceful, bold and supple it's hard not to feel like you're ogling it… Her work is bristling with badass attitude, but every page she draws reveals her compassionate interest in other people's minds.”

“Ellen Forney’s hilarious, exuberant, powerful, voluptuous drawings are a frickin’ force of nature.”

MONKEY FOOD: The Complete "I Was Seven in '75" Collection

Comics by Ellen Forney
Fantagraphics Books
7 1/2" x 7 1/2", 144 pages b&w illustrations
Trade Paperback, $12.95
ISBN: 1-56097-362-5 Pub. date: September, 1999

Breathing some life into the current trend of seventies nostalgia, MONKEY FOOD is sweet, charming, and very funny, free from the mocking irony that mars most "retro" stories in the 1990s. Readers will recognize their own childhood selves in these coming-of-age stories, whether they were '70s babies or not. Based on semi-autobiographical material of growing up in a liberal, suburban hipster "Free to Be...You and Me" family in the '70s, this is a collection of hilarious, light-hearted, and fondly-remembered stories. Storylines include getting caught reading Judy Blume's Forever, family camping trips to a nudist camp, arm-wrestling the second-grade class bully, trying to avoid getting stuck with a regrettable nickname (like "Horny Forney"), how to fake blowing one's nose into one's hands, and the author's perfect moment: when Lindsay Wagner sang "Feelings" on The Bionic Woman.

Nominated for Harvey and Eisner National Comics Awards

"I Was Seven in '75" is a photo album of the '70s come to life in all its shag-rug glory. Forney's witty documentation of the Me Decade... and charmed nostalgia stands in relief to typical Gen-X angst-drenched memoirs." - Elle

"The comic is hilarious week to week, but this collection reveals the remarkable and subtle changes in Ellen, Matt, Mom and Dad over time that give this comic strip more grace, power, and narrative scope than most contemporary novels." - The Stranger (Seattle)

"Sweet, funny, and refreshing." - Trina Robbins, author, A Century of Women Cartoonists