“There are three major legs to pop culture in America: movies, television, and comic books. One leg is doing a mission creep on the other two”: So says Travis Pullen at Filmfodder.com. Obviously movies and television are about as interested in comic books—or at least stories and characters taken from comic books—as they’ve ever been before. But are comics really a third pillar of American pop culture, akin to film and television? Not, I don’t know, music, or sport or video game?

“He was the father of political cartooning for everybody”: That’s political cartoonist Mike Peters on Herb “Herblock!” Block in this piece on the Washington Post‘s website. It’s a nice post about a show at the Library of Congress dedicated to the work of the the late, influential cartoonist, and includes thoughts on him and his work from several other cartoonists like Peters.

“Brian Azzarello’s ‘Filthy Rich’ a gritty piece of pulp”: That’s the headline of a Chicago Tribune review of Azzarello and Victor Santos’ original graphic novel for the new-ish Vertigo Crime sub-imprint. It’s weird too because I looked at the book, and I thought it was printed on rather high-quality paper that was nice and smooth and…oh, they’re using “gritty” and “pulp” metaphorically, huh? Nevermind then.

“Nathan Fillion Wants To Be The Greatest American Hero”: No he doesn’t, does he? Stop trying to get cast in superhero movies, Fillion! I like you right where you are in Castle.

Are you seeing this, Archie Comics?: If you’ve ever wondered what James Kochalka’s Sonic the Hedgehog might look like, wonder no more.

Speaking of Archie Comics…: I guarantee they’d get one thousand times more mainstream media coverage with this particular wedding than for either of the ones they’ve announced so far.

“A special comment where I draw spurious and perhaps false parallels and analogies and yet still manage to make more sense than an office full of Alaskan Prosecutors”: Remember Wednesday’s Linkarama, in which I linked to an Anchorage Daily News article about some in Alaska state government considering criminalizing sexually explicit drawings and cartoons of children as if they were actual child pornography? (It’s okay if you don’t, as I just re-linked to it again).

Well Matt Blind had an excellent post on the subject, one in which he brings up the legality of hunting as something to consider when folks want to criminalize certain things for their potential to maybe someday cause harm somehow:

Claiming that seeing offensive comics (which aren’t people) will lead to someone doing nasty, nasty things to real people is like saying shooting and field dressing animals (which aren’t people) will lead to someone doing nasty, nasty things to real people.

…

While hunters own guns and knives and have experience in, for example, stalking prey, killing, watching a wounded creature die without feeling sympathy, inserting a knife into a hip and working it to pop the joint and sever the tendons so the haunch can be removed from the rest of the rapidly cooling carcass, skinning their kills, and eating the roasted flesh of their victims.

And I’d be willing to bet more Alaskans own a rifle than a single volume of pornographic, drawn material of either Japanese, European, or Domestic provenance.

More at the link. (Via Dirk Deppey).

This is not at all what I imagined when I heard the words “adult comic books”: The Toledo Free Press takes a look at the Toledo Museum of Art’s new exhibit, the traveling “LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel.” By “adult comic books” they just mean stuff like Sandman, Will Eisner and Lauren Weinstein.

I could watch Tucker Stone getting hit by comic books all day: There’s a new episode of Stone’s “Advanced Common Sense” web video comics commentary thingee available, and if you’re a fan of the “lightning round” portions, wherein someone off-camera throws comics at him while he attempts to catch and review them before the next ones gets thrown, you’ll love this one. Towards the end there’s a few minutes worth of outtakes of him getting hit with comic books and trades. You know, I think they’re shooting those things at him out of some kind of cannon…

“…vampires in popular culture vary pretty widely in quality, which makes them the perfect unit of greatness for a given comic”: Invincible Super-Blogger Chris Sims has had a busy week, between hosting Dracula Week on his home blog and pitting the Disney version of fairy tale characters versus their Fables counterparts at Comics Alliance, but his greatest contribution to American culture this week is definitely his invention of The ISB Draculometer, which he uses to evaluate this week’s comics. It’s the only place on the Internet where you can find out how Adventure Comics #3 is like Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer or how Nomad: Girl Without a World #2 is like Count Chocula. (I look forward to a blurb on the cover of the eventual Nomad trade saying “It’s the Count Chocula of comic books!”)

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 6:15 am and is filed under linkarama, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.