I think he deserves an award just for being able to cartoon while wearing boxing gloves: Westword cartoonist Kenny Be and his paper were singled out by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and given a “Worst of the National Media” award for using the word “fag” in a cartoon. Be, who is himself gay, responded with a half-comics, half-prose cover story in last week’s issue.
Everyone should have a “Wall O’ Colleen Coover” in their house: Check out Bully the Little Stuffed Bull’s growing collection of Coover-drawn original art, including his latest, a Ben Grimm-as-Blackbeard drawing.
If you were wondering who would make the first and/or best FTC blog regulation joke, you can stop now: Joe “Jog” McCulloch has it, at the top of this review of Bryan Talbot’s Grandville.
This is the harshest review I’ve ever read: James Kochalka reports a reaction to his latest Johnny Boo book.
Peter Bagge has a lot going on: The cartoonist will be teaching a course on comics writing at Seattle University, and is developing a pilot with Fox for an animated Bradleys show.
Two good pieces about two pairs of bad comics: Here’s Tim O’Neil on Outsiders #22 and Wolverine: Origins #40 (“You could almost say that if you needed two books to stand as symbols of the problems and challenges facing the North American mainstream comics industry in 2009, you would be hard pressed to find two better examples”) and here’s Tucker Stone on Superman: Secret Origin #1 and Spider-Man: Clone Saga #1 (“Superman’s Secret Origin can’t be ‘changed,’ because Superman’s origin was stapled to the brains of Superman readers years ago, it’s why they’re still keeping up with the character now. Fixing the Clone Saga can’t be done in 2009, it can only be done in a time machine”).
He doesn’t look a day over 65: Popeye is turning 80 years old this year, and Youngstown State University paper The Jambar interviews local cartoonist Chris Yambar, who wrote a special Popeye comic book called Popeye Picnic, to be distributed at the Chester, Illinois event of the same name. That’s right, there’ s a story about a guy named Yambar in a paper called Jambar. How often do newspapers get to feature people whose names rhyme with the name on their masthead? Other than that one time the New York Times wrote about John Shmewyorktimes, of course.
“The fun part about talking talking with cartoonist and author Berkeley Breathed — besides the fact that he is funny, smart, charming and a great conversationalist — is that he makes no bones about his willingness to deviate from the truth”: That’s from a Breathed interview in the San Jose Mercury News. It’s getting so you can’t even check your Google News alerts without finding a profile of Breathed…
October 11th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Tim O’Neil gives a great description of why I just can’t give a shit about DC Comics (not counting Vertigo or Wildstorm titles) anymore:
“It is really interesting in a sad way that both the Superman and Batman lines are currently in the midst of year-plus long storylines that involve the main player for each franchise being taken off the board, and seeing all the supporting characters run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to fill in for the adults. Wow, what better way to undercut any possible interest in secondary and tertiary characters than by making all of them – every single last one of them – explicitly ancillary to their biggest properties. (I mean, yeah, obviously Nightwing and Mon-El were never more than K-Tel versions of their bosses, but wouldn’t it be nice if they pretended we were supposed to care?)”
The question at the end would make a good one for the weekly Dan Didio feature on the main page.