I haven’t heard the term “zombie comics” used this way before: The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna on undead strips on the funnies pages of newspapers, continuing to live on after their creators have passed away. This is the only link I have today that has absolutely no connection to Barack Obama.

Is “Spider-Man” not in the Associated Press style manual?: Because after reading about a thousand mainstream media reports like this one about Obama meeting Spidey this week and seeing the latter’s name spelled hyphen-less in a ton of them, I’m thinking it really oughta be if it’s not. Even J. Jonah Jameson spells it right, and he hates Spider-Man.

“I swear to God this is the most often a black man has appeared on the cover of a superhero comic since they canceled Power Man & Iron Fist back in the 80s”: The Stranger‘s Paul Constant on you-know-what, in a piece entitled “Everybody Knows Obama First Appeared in ROM Spaceknight #53.” I’d go double-check that in my copy of Essential ROM Spaceknight Vol. 3, but it doesn’t exist because there is no justice in the world.

Wait, that’s the really real cover of the non-variant cover of the Obama/Spider-Man?: If you look at Marvel.com’s solicitation for Amazing Spider-Man #583, it shows the John Romita Sr. image of Peter Parker walking down a street, his arms around two women, while Spider-Man lurks on a lamppost in the background. It’s a nice looking image. What you don’t see there is the text that Marvel would eventually put on the final, finished shipped-to and sold-at cover. The first place I saw the final cover was here, so I just kinda assumed the crass sex jokes on the cover were the work of Mr. Mike Sterling, given the context of the post. They’re funny in the way that superhero sex jokes on the Internet are funny, after all, and certainly aren’t the sort of thing you’d expect a major comics publisher to put on the cover of their comic, particularly if it was going to be one of the most looked-at covers of any of their comic books of late. But now I’ve seen it three or four other places, and that dialogue and blurb are on all of them.

So, let me make sure I get this straight: The actual, real, real-life cover of this week’s Amazing Spider-Man, the one that all those non-comics readers were looking for, makes a sex joke out of a line from a decades-old cartoon theme song (“Action is his reward”) and features Peter Parker calling two women “cougars”…? Seriously? Really? No lie? This isn’t a joke, dream, hoax or imaginary story?

Sigh…

Author, artist, animator and occasional cartoonist Mo Willems has a new book out: It’s entitled Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, and it’s about a naked mole rat. Who gets dressed. Willems has a typically amusing blog post up here about his tour supporting the book, including a drawing from Cul De Sac cartoonist Richard Thompson and a hand-drawn book a seven-year-old fan gave him, entitled The Pigeon Finds Obama.

Also not quite comics, but close enough for hand grenades: Check out this New York Times slideshow of little kids’ drawings of Obama; it is fantastic. I especially #2 and #3.

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