Fantagraphics Books announced today that it has acquired worldwide publishing rights to Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two, the story of a couple who face a number of issues in the course of a single day that will affect their future together.  Crane spent 20 years creating the graphic novel, which will be released in hardcover  on March 22, 2022, with an MSRP of $29.99.

Crane is a cartoonist, printmaker, and designer who was the editor and publisher of the comics anthology NON, which first appeared in 1996.  He was involved with the small comics press Highwater Books and has published several graphic novels, including the all-ages titles The Clouds Above, published by Fantagraphics in 2005, and We Are All Me, published by TOON Books in 2018 (see “Review: We Are All Me”).  Fantagraphics also published his quarterly comic Uptight, where portions of Keeping Two first appeared. Uptight #3 won two Ignatz Awards, for Outstanding Series and Outstanding Comic, in 2009 (see “Ignatz Award Winners”), and Crane’s story “The Dark Nothing,” in Uptight #5, was nominated for a 2017 Eisner Award (see “The 2017 Eisner Award Nominees”).