Clearing out my review pile, here’s a look at some relatively (and I do mean relatively) new books for the tween-age set.

Knights of the Lunch Table: The Dodgeball Chronicles
by Frank Cammuso
Scholastic, $9.99.

The idea of grafting the King Arthur mythos onto a modern-day “boy makes good and new school” tale (a la Diary of a Wimpy Kid) seemed a bit forced to me at first, but Cammuso (Otto’s Orange Day, Max Hamm) does a good job creating an engaging, funny story that thankfully doesn’t force its metaphor the way say Tokyopop’s Avalon High series does. (more…)

– Tom Spurgeon interviews James Kochalka.

– The Chicago Tribune talks to the guy who models as Superman for Alex Ross.

– S. Clay Wilson is now out of the ICU.

– Tintin made Herge “sick” according to recently discovered letters.

– I enjoyed this LA Times piece on the legal battles surrounding the Watchmen film.

– Buy a copy of Stan’s Soapbox and get it signed by John Romita Sr.

– If you can read Polish, here’s an interview with Milo Manara where he talks about his X-Men project he’s working on with Chris Claremont.

– Finally, here’s Watchmen, the Condensed Version.

I’ve read enough bad or lackluster anthologies over the years to know it’s not something you can just slap together. It takes real editorial vision and guidance to put together a solid collection of work, whether you’re talking about new material or older reprints.

Which is my roundabout way of saying just how impressed I am with Ivan Brunetti’s two Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories. I had already known Brunetti was a first-rate cartoonist (Schizo, Misery Loves Comedy), but these books, taken together, show him to have a considerable sensitivity and thoughtfulness towards the medium, not just in his choices, but in their arrangement and layout.

While the first volume provided a strong art-comics overview for the uninitiated, the sequel casts a somewhat wider, though no less fascinating net. I was pleased, for example, to discover there were a few artists new to me, while the stories I was familiar came with a slightly new perspective due to their juxtoposition with other works.

I talked to Brunetti recently over the phone about the new collections, the challenges of putting together these anthologies in general, and the chance that we’ll see a new issue of Schizo in 2009 (sadly, probably not likely).

Q: What made you decide to do a second volume?

A: Besides insanity? At the time I put together the first book, my list of stuff I wanted to put in there got so huge I had 800 pages at one point. Actually the first book was supposed to be no more than 300 pages but I convinced Yale to let me do 400. And at some point I was thinking “500 pages would be good.” (more…)

Apart they’ve been content to merely make fun of Nightwing and Eduardo Risso (sorry, I mean Dave Johnson) … but what happens when they join forces?! That’s the stirring question that will be answered this week as Tucker Stone and Noah Berlatsky have joined forces to take on the black and white phonebook collection known as Showcase Presents: The Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups 2.

The pair will trade off reviewing three issues (or chapters if you prefer) at a time. Stone covered #88-90 yesterday, Berlatsky will examine issues #91-93 today and so on. It should make for some fun reading. Here, for example, is what Tucker had to say about issue #89:

Look, you either ride this bull because you fucking like this bull or you don’t.  It’s a metaphor!  It’s an allegory!  It’s all rife with the meaning of the Heroic Saga, as written by Joseph Campbell “The Dumbest Literary Philosopher In The Bargain Bin Of Literary Philosophy” and popularized by George Lucas, the patron saint of “If something has a double meaning, it’s clearly, oh so clearly, better then Tolstoy.”  No.  Don’t get your pretension in here.  Take it and shove it up your ass, and take Mallard Fillmore with you: those are your comics.  Not for us, for us, it’s Bob Fucking Haney, and Haney understands you, 1970.  Haney is going to teach you that when it wears spandex, and when it punches shit, that it is to scream like a housewife, worry about Dick Grayson, and entertain.  This is entertainment, it’s pure.  If Stan Lee knew that a bunch of people with way more time on their hands then they had sense were going to write terrible books about how Spider-man defined a culture, he would’ve jumped out a window and shot up the floors he passed on the way down.  And we would be a better race of knuckle-draggers for it.

Is it comics or not comics? I’ll let you make the call. Via.

– Alison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar, together at last.

– Steve Duin has some good news about underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, who has been in ICU for the past several days.

– Ada Price talks to Dave Gibbons about his new book, Watching the Watchmen.

– Looks like it’s official: Naruto Nation 2009 is totally a go.

– Sam Thielman looks at the significance of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing in light of the new super-fancy collection coming out soon.

– Over at Stars and Stripes, Gary Trudeau answers some of his critics.

– Van Jensen talks to Mike Allred about the revamped Red Rocket collection.

– Here’s my idea of a fun time: Dan Nadel, Gary Panter and CF sitting around, talking about art and comics.

– Did you know About Comics is 10 years old this year? I didn’t. Chris Murphy has a recollection.

– Sandy Bilus is giving away a copy of Alan’s War over at his blog.

– Oscar Pedro Musibay looks at the Comics Galaxy event that was held at last weekend’s Miami Book Fair.

– Frank Santoro considers the new Popeye collection.

Stripper’s Guide’s Allan Holtz provided a bunch of the strips for NBM’s new Happy Hooligan collection. He had a lot of leftover material, however, which he’s been posting to his blog over the past few days.

A Spanish version of the “Mars Attacks” cards by an artist apparantly called “Boixcar.” Via.

Evan Dorkin reports on last weekend’s National Convention in NYC:

I mean, wow. Wow. WOW. What an absolutely terrible show. Having nothing to do with how we did at the table, because we didn’t expect much, just to cover costs ($40 parking, tolls, lost brain cells) and maybe low-rent dinner out for the family, which we barely eked out. And we seemed to do better than a lot of  those around us. And not a knock on old — very old — school bargain bin/back wall o’ expensive headlights comics, hucksteriffic cons based around want lists and sweaty palms, which can be fun in a way if, like me, you like old comics, looking at original art, and eyeballing tables heaped with flea market junk that some poor schmuck still deems worth lugging all up and down the coast hoping some other poor dumb schmuck will buy. I can stand, and enjoy, these buck-bin, desperation extravaganzas, but this one tested even my Eltingville limits. This was Eltingville writ large, bulky, real, and stinktacular. I wasn’t expecting MOCCA or SPX, nor the NYCC or even a slice of the dealer’s area of the congenial, enjoyable and cool Heroes World, but I wasn’t expecting this freakshow trainwreck.

Heidi McDonald, meanwhile, provides some perspective while Valerie D’Orazio offers a pointed rejoinder:

Have a heart. I know I’m going to be laughed to oblivion for saying that, that it sounds ridiculous. But have a fucking heart. Some of these older collectors are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I grew up around these people. I’m not ashamed of it. Some have used comics as one of their only bright spots in a life that in every other respect might have been awful. If it makes them happy, let them do it. If they aren’t bothering you (other than by the fact of their very existence, offending your delicate sensibilities), stop fucking ragging on them. I can’t fucking stand this anymore.

The seminal and highly influential (Dave McKean for one) Barron Storey has been posting his work online. Via.

The Montreal-based illustrator and Canvas author has a nice art blog up.

– So Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim was named as a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award for children’s literature up in Canada, except that Tamaki’s name was left off of the official list of nominees, because technically, she’s the artist and not the “writer.” Letters of protest were written, but apparently to no avail. Tom has reactions from those involved, including Jillian Tamaki.

– Spurgeon also has an interesting interview with Slow Wave cartoonist Jesse Reklaw. I never knew, for instance, that Reklaw left Yale to pursue a career in comics.

– Some people were worried that Tribune Media might be ending the Dick Tracy comic strip. But it turns out those fears may have been premature.

– Aaron Albert talks the Hellboy talk to Mike Mignola for About.com.

– Hey, Kramer’s Ergot 7 is going on tour!

– Another day, another editorial cartoonist gets laid off.

– Finally, Vice magazine talks to Lynda Barry.

Holy Shi*T! The World’s Weirdest Comic Books
by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury
St. Martin’s Press
$12.85.

This is the comic book fan’s equivalent of the novelty gift book, the kind of slender tome you see lying by the cashier counter or near the coffee line at your local big-box corporate book store. If you have a family member who knows about your comics hobby, there’s a good chance (assuming you celebrate the holiday of course) you might get this as a Christmas present (“I saw the title and immediately thought of you.”) (more…)

Gene Yang gets the choice seat in the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s Funny Pages section with his new serialized story about sibling rivalry.

Wondering if that great Lord Death Man story in Bat-Manga! had any antecedents in the original, Western comics? Magic Carpet Burn has the answers you seek.

Man, no one did rique humor better than Arno. He made the smuttiest joke look classy.

The Simpsons go all Eurocomicky in this parody from issue #131 (I think) of (duh) Simpsons Comics.

Because everyone needs a little Basil Wolverton to brighten their work week.

The notion of comics made expressly for kids is nothing new, but Toon Books, Francoise Mouly’s new-fangled publishing line, is notably different in that it produces comics exclusively for very young readers. It’s the sort of idea that seems so ingenious you wonder why someone else didn’t think of it first.

Anyway, the line has three new books out for the fall — Stinky by Eleanor Davis, Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman and Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever by Dean Haspiel and Jay Lynch. They say that adults reviewing children’s books — be it comics or prose — is a mug’s game, as we’re not the intended audience for the material (I suppose educators, librarians and those with fancy-shmancy degrees are exempt from this declaration). It’s not a theory I necessarily ascribe to — I tend to think quality and craft shine through regardless of how narrowly focused the work is on a particular type of reader. Yet, there’s still something to be said for getting an additional perspective. To that end I asked my seven-year-old daughter, Veronica to give me her impressions of these books as well. Here’s what we had to say: (more…)

Or rather, he illustrated one. Gallery Ghost, from Birdcage Press, and written by Anna Nilsen, offers a decidedly supernatural take through the halls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

The idea is that at night in the museum, all the ghosts of dead painters like Paul Gauguin and Lyonel Feininger (hey, he did comics too!) come out and put details from their own work into other people’s paintings, a Rousseau cow inserted in van Ostade’s “The Cottage Dooryard” for example.

The reader’s job is to help intern and art student Sarah out and figure out who added to whose painting and which one added the most (just for clarification’s sake, Sala only illustrated the opening and closing pages, plus the portraits of the painters — he didn’t attempt to replicate Mary Cassatt or anything). To help you in your quest, the book comes with its own magnifying glass. How cool is that?

Sala’s art is much softer and friendlier than longtime fans of his work may be used to, but they’ll still want to track it down, if for no other reason than to his rendition of a ghostly Gustav Klmit, something I’m sure readers of Delphine have long wanted to see.