“Wallace Wells Vs. The World”: At After Elton, Jamie Maurer takes a look at how Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series does with “the gay best friend” character type, ultimately giving Scott and Bryan Lee good grades.
I’m about 1000 times more likely to watch a Taco Bell-themed superhero cartoon then I am to ever actually eat anything from Taco Bell: Brandweek‘s Brand Freak offers a look at the fast food chain’s stoner-focused ad campaign featuring the Super Friends-like “Super Delicious Ingredient Force.”
Warren Ellis will have a new Marvel series, closer to Nextwave then Astonishing X-Men: And his announcement of the series, which he himself regards as a non-announcement, leads to a pretty amusing Ellis-esque post about how the post should have been better.
Is this the precise moment in which the devil first entered Lucy Van Pelt?: At his Roasted Peanuts blog, John Harris draws attention to a 1952 strip, which seems to be the first time Charlie Brown’s major antagonist shows spite, destroying the happiness on Chuck’s face in a matter of seven panels. (Via…I forget who, exactly. Probably Spurgeon, but possibly Deppey).
“I have been interviewed several times and my view is that this is not specifically a problem for comics, but for the whole of Swedish society”: Writing for The Comics Journal, Fredrik Stromberg discusses Sweden’s child pornography laws and the unfortunate ways they can be applied to comics in the country and, in fact, recently have. In addition to the standard screwed-up logic that the difference between photos of children and drawings of imaginary children means no one gets hurt in the case of the latter, Sweden’s laws have other illogical aspects. For example, in Sweden you can legally have sex at 15, but that sex can never be depicted in, say, an autobiographical comic about losing your virginity and that because it’s illegal to even look at images, it’s impossible for anyone to decide whether something is actually illegal or not. Stromberg therefore doesn’t have examples of the exact images judged illegal in the case he discusses, but offers some popular manga that would be in Sweden’s “danger zone,” like Dragonball and Love Hina (both of which feature a little nudity and copious near-nudity, but no actual intercourse).
Aw, what the hell, let’s end on an up note: Here’s more of Fake Stan Lee, this time coming face to face with Genuine Stan Lee. Naturally both of them note how handsome the other one is.
January 17th, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Aw, it was a real top quality write-up. In fact I would like to write like this too – taking time and serious energy to create an excellent posting but what could I say I put things off an awful lot and by no means seem to get things completed