Fantagraphics recently announced that they’ve struck a deal for seven (7) new books with writer/editor Greg Sadowski, who was responsible for Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 and a couple of B. Krigstein-related works for the publisher.

The books will be published one a season, so seven of ‘em is really planning ahead, and should carry them through to fall of 2012 or so (I don’t even have my next seven blog posts planned yet).

Here’s what they have planned at the moment…

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There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, that yesterday’s issue of Blackest Night reminded me of, and intensified my curiosity about.

If you’ve been reading DC’s superhero line for long, you know that the company has been actively promoting their Blackest Night miniseries and the surrounding story event for well over a year now.

If you’ve been reading Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern work, you know that he’s been writing his way toward this story for a very long time, perhaps as long as he’s been writing Hal Jordan stories.

As the event grew closer, it became apparent that some of the high profile characters the company was killing off were being killed off precisely so that they could return as undead Black Lantern.

Certainly Martian Manhunter and Aquaman were killed for this purpose, but how far back has DC been killing their characters with the expectation that they’d come back as zombie Lanterns in Blackest Night and then, perhaps, stay back once Hal Jordan is able to harness “white light of creation”…?

But what about The Question and Ralph Dibny, killed during the course of 52? Or the Freedom Fighters, Pantha and all the Infinite Crisis casualties? Or Max Lord, Sue Dibny and Blue Beetle II?

There are two relatively minor characters, both villains, that I was kinda shocked DC actually killed off, and I’ve been wondering and worrying about ever since Blackest Night started returning the dead.

That would be Monsieur Mallah, the intelligent gorilla who wears a beret and bandoliers and speaks with a French accent, and The Brain, who is just an evil brain that lives in an evil-looking gumball machine-esque support system.

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“Spy vs. Spy vs. Alien vs. Predator”: Ryan Dunlavey has posted a bunch of mash-up comics he’s done, in which he adapts one sort of comic book or cartoon character into the style of a famous comic strip artist. Like The Thunderkatzenjammer Kids or Little Zemo in Slumberland. Great stuff. (Link via Mike Sterling)

“Because it was a sedentary, solitary activity it was seen as impure. But comics do things that a novel can’t do, that a film can’t do”: Phill Juptus talks comics—how he started reading them, what he likes about them, what he recommends—in this piece from The Daily Mail.

“Mr. Zemeckis has called the dark movie a ‘graphic novel version’ of the classic tale”: That’s an exceptionally random line from a New York Times article about the upcoming computer-animated, Jim Carrey-staring Christmas Carol movie, and the Zemeckis is director Robert Zemeckis. Unfortunately, the Times reporter didn’t follow up by asking him what the hell he meant by a  “graphic novel version.”

What?! No Merv Pumpkinhead?!: For reasons I don’t understand myself, I love characters with carved pumpkins for heads. There’s something about that element in a character design that I find really appealing. So I enjoyed the topic of this list—“Five Comic Book Pumpkinheads For Halloween”—despite the fact that it was written by someone else named “Caleb” (I don’t know if any of you not named Caleb were aware of this or not, but all Calebs are natural enemies with one another) and that it included a character from Malibu Comics instead of more obvious examples.

Cooking with Oishinbo: Derik A. Badman reviews Oishinbo…by cooking from it.

“I then realized that I would have to go beyond grassroots comics evangelism in order to truly effect positive change.”: Josh Elder from Reading With Pictures talks with The Graphic Novel Reporter.

“All Cartoonists Seem To Be Cursed Forever Globally”: Hey kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? If you said “a cartoonist,” think about this Pravda headline before you apply to art school, okay?

You probably wouldn’t know it to look at ‘em, but those little cartoons I usually draw to kick off this column so that there’s some non-comic book cover art to post each week take time to make. I spend minutes and minutes on ‘em each Monday night. Unfortunately, my schedule contained fewer minutes than usual this week, so I didn’t make one this time. I’m sorry to derpive you all of the poorly-drawn colored-pencil-on-index-card imagery you have come to expect at the top of each week’s here-are-some-comics-coming-out-this-week column.

But I did do the writing part! So join me after the jump for an all-words, no-pictures look at some of thise week’s noteworthy releases.

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“The images are shocking, yes, but…the shock is in the act, not in the portrayal”: David Hajdu reviews Crumb’s Book of Genesis for the New York Times. If you’re not already sick of reading about the book, I’d suggest reading his review, as it’s a pretty good one.

The cartoonists were riding in a Blackhawk, relatively at ease, when suddenly the copter’s machine guns were fired”: Here’s a nice write-up of a USO-sponsored visit to the troops consisting of cartoonists Mike Peters, Tom Richmond, Jeff Bacon, Stephan Pastis, Bruce Higdon, Rick Kirkman, Chip Bok, Jeff Keane, Michael Ramirez and Garry Truedeau.

“The songs and the superheroism don’t quite gel here as well as they should. Plus, Batman should never, ever sing”: That bit of blasphemy comes from Marc Bernardin, in a post on EW’s Pop Watch blog, referring to the musical episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, an extremely awesome episode of the extremely awesome series. Why shouldn’t Batman and his allies and foes sing? I saw no reason from watching the episdoe. And isn’t the very best Justice League Unlimited episode the one where Batman sings…?

Con war primer: If you missed a thrilling moment of last week’s escalating con wars between Reed Exhibitions and Gareb Shamus’s Wizard/Or Whatever Shamus’ Next Thing Will Be Called,  Heidi MacDonald has a nice thorough overview on the subject here at The Beat.

Twin reviews of Archie #602: The latest issue of Archie, the climax of the “…Marries Veronica” possible future story (Is this the Dark Knight Returns of Archie comics?) came  out this week, and both Rachelle Goguen and Tucker Stone have some thoughts about it.

“The fact that he’s wearing a shirt at all, and not wearing wings and a hawk mask, makes this a pretty good disguise”: Rachelle Goguen, the Internet’s number one rater of super-hunks, reviews the street clothes the Justice Leaguers are wearing in a panel from JLoA #89, which she calls “one of the most insane and self-indulgent comics ever written.” Ooh, that one should be in the next Showcase Presents collection. Get collecting, DC!

“Who is this movie for? And why this particular story?”: This review of the Superman/Batman: Public Enemies DC does a good job of encapsulating what has been one of the major problems I’ve had with each of the projects I’ve seen so far, that of address. They seem short and simplified as if for children, but usually throw in enough “grown-up” stuff to seem inappropriate for kids. He closes the review out by rating it in probably the most appropriate way possible, as either less than or greater than other DC direct-to-DVD movies. All of them I’ve seen—just the first three or four so far—have been poor in the exact same ways (far too short, bizarrely addressed to the narrowest imaginable audience), so that system seems to work out well.

“The superhero mode has so dominated — you almost want to say “deformed” — comic books for so long that few folks younger than 50 can remember the wonderfully diverse subject matter of the comic’s early days”: Here’s Milo Miles on the Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly edited The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics for NPR.

“‘Comic’ retells Honduran coup and Manuel Zelaya arrest”: In other news, The Guardian still using quotation marks to indicate that not all comics are actually comical.

“New graphic novel is ‘all dolled up’ to go somewhere”: Abby Denson’s Dolltopia should prove popular with headline writers. The puns practically write themselves!

“One fun thing about being an editorial cartoonist is that I sometimes get invited to strange places as a cartoon celebrity”: Daryl Cagle on his week in Algeria.

“Asterix at 50″: Time magazine looks at the career of the most famous Gaul in comics.

Library employees fired for violating library policy proceed to alert the media: Apparently, two employees of the Jessamine County Public Library in Nicholasville, Kentucky were fired last month because they refused to allow an 11-year-old to check out what a local TV news station calls “a book from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series,” which one of the employees, Sharon Cook, referred to as “pornography.” As is usually the case at public libraries, the policy states that it’s up to parents to deem what is and what isn’t appropriate for their children. I know there’s some pretty weird sex in each of the volumes, and if I was a parent I might not want my 11-year-old reading it—while being impressed that she’d be able to understand the dense, allusion-filled book enough to enjoy it—but it’s hard to imagine a grown-up could even flip through any of those volumes and decide that they are actual works of actual pornography. Here’s WTVQ’s report from Wednesday, and here’s a Thursday follow-up on reaction to the original story. You can watch the report here, if you don’t mind sitting through a twelve-second commercial first.

I can’t imagine the term “Blackest Night” can possibly be used to describe the mood around the DC offices these days.

Earlier this week, industry website ICv2.com released their initial data and analysis for comics sales in the direct market during the month of September, and it was apparently a very good month for the market’s perennial second banana, DC Comics.

According to their numbers, the best-selling book of the month was Blackest Night #3, with four other tie-ins to the “Blackest Night” event/story placing in the top-ten—Green Lantern, Blackest Night: Batman, Green Lantern Corps and Blackest Night: Superman. (It’s also noted that there doesn’t seem to be very dramatic drop-offs between issues of the “Blackest Night” books, which is also good news for the publisher.)

Of the top ten, there’s one more DC book—Grant Morrison and Philip Tan’s Batman and Robin—with Marvel claiming the other four spots, with event title Captain America: Reborn, two “Dark Reign” branded tie-ins, and Wolverine Giant-Size Old Man Logan.

That’s a pretty extraordinary showing for DC, and obviously they’re going to want to do whatever they can to try and replicate that success in the future. I’m sure they’re asking themselves, and have been doing so for a while, just what it is about Blackest Night that seems to be hitting with their audience, and what they can do to generate more Blackest Nights in the future.

I’ve got a couple of ideas.

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DC Comics have long been full of dark and evil gods, constantly making trouble for our heroes and heroines. But as bad as Darkseid, Ares and their ilk might be, you know the comic book gods that really scare me?

The ones some of DC writers seem to worship.

Now, the existence of a secret cult that meets in the basement of 1700 Broadway on the nights of full moons, their identities hidden even from one another by ritual cloaks and hoods, to chant in a secret, blasphemous language and bow before a profane, obscene stone idol of a hideous monster-god is just a theory of mine.

I have no actual proof of it, other than the suggestion that surely there must be some reason so many writers have begun their new series or new story arcs with a blood sacrifice, as if it were part of a ritual beseeching some entity for success.

It’s 2003, and Judd Winick and Geoff Johns are about to launch new volumes of The Outsiders and Teen Titans respectively. Their storyline kicks off in a special miniseries in which several characters are killed.

It’s 2005, and the pair—joined by Greg Rucka—are about to set the DC Universe on a course towards Infinite Crisis, and they kick it all off in a special one-shot in which they kill Blue Beetle II.

In 2008, Winick gets ready to relaunch a new Titans title, and he does so by slaughtering a half-dozen minor characters.

That same year, the Grant Morrison-written Final Crisis opens with the deaths of Orion and Martian Manhunter.

Surely there must be some reason for all this blood, and since it is the blood of fictional comic book characters, I can only imagine it’s a very peculiar, quasi-religious reason.

It can’t possibly be a creative or dramatic reason, because it’s been done so often in such a short span of time, and despite their occasional shortcomings, all of these men—even Judd Winick, whose work I like the very least—are talented, and have certainly read enough comic books to know that seeing a character get killed barely moves the needle of fan interest, let alone excitement.

These same writers have also been simultaneously restoring dead characters to life during that same time, even undoing some of the most “sacred” comic book deaths, like that of Jason Todd and Barry Allen, further making the act of death meaningless within the context of their fictional universe.

So they must worship an evil god that feeds on the imaginary blood of fictional characters—It’s the only thing that makes any sense.

I haven’t mentioned James Robinson yet.

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Is this the end of the the Wicomico County, Maryland controversy regarding Goku’s pee-pee?: God, I hope so. The Wicomico school district in Maryland decided to pull the Dragon Ball manga digests from school libraries, after a grandstanding Wicomico County councilman brought photocopies of one of the volumes to a county council meeting. For a very smart discussion of issues revolving around manga censorship, controversy and perception in the U.S., I’d highly recommend this piece by Jason Thompson at i09.com.

Let there be press coverage!: R. Crumb’s version of The Book of Genesis continues to capture mainstream media attention, like these two pieces in USA Today, and these two pieces from National Public Radio.

“It suddenly occurred to me that a cartoon published in 1944 might not be familiar to folks younger than 75″: A staff writer for California paper The Sun on the great Bill Maudlin.

Blah blah blah X-Men blah blah mutants blah: Here’s a nice long review of the recent X-Men story arc “Utopia” by Paul O’Brien. I’ve found that I really enjoy reading about the X-Men, even if I don’t actually read their comics. Meanwhile, Tim O’Neil has some further thoughts about the X-Men franchises fall from the top of the super-comics totem pole (And finds himself intrigued by January’s cover for Wolverine: Origins. The solicitation copy doesn’t actually say, but that is who it looks like, right? Wow.)

“‘X-Men’ Star Too Old For Four”: Yeah, I don’t thin Sir Ian McKellen, as talented an actor as he is, can get away with playing a four-year-old. Oh, wait a minute, that’s not what this tidbit’s about—it actually refers to him being in a fourth X-Men film. Ah.

It’s like Speed, but with a pigeon in the Keanu Reeves role: Mo Willems, one of my favorite artists in the world, shares some fan art, including a sweet-looking movie poster.

I am so excited about Batman Unseen by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, the second issue of which is due tomorrow (Preview here). The first issue magically transported me to a Wednesday afternoon in 1998 or so, and made me want to re-read Morrison, Porter and Dell’s JLA and Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s Hitman. Is this that feeling of nostalgia people are always talking about? Have I just never read a superhero comic book geared specifically toward my own personal nostalgia spot before?

Are any of this week’s books targeted at your personal nostalgia spot? Join me after jump to find out.

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“[T]he country’s two greatest cultural figures are both artists, and as of this year those two bowler-hat-loving Belgians…are being celebrated with their own museums. Not that they would have celebrated together, had they had the chance. The two couldn’t have been more different”: Who are Beglium’s two greatest cultural figures? Tintin creator Hergé and surrealist René Magritte, according to this article from The Globe and Mail.

Not quite comics: Here’s a nice profile of Charles Monroe Schulz Jr., who now shares a publisher with his late father, Charles Schulz—Fantagraphics. Unlike his father, Schulz isn’t a cartoonist, but a prose novelist, and his works are among the first that Fantagraphics has published.

“Nowadays it looks like Iron man is always getting hit with Photoshop effects. It ain’t the same, baby”: Cartoonist Evan Dorkin offers his thoughts on the passing of George Tuska, including his fond memories of Tuska’s work during the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“Goldsman won’t exactly apologize for the film, but he comes pretty close”: That’s from this entertaining Los Angeles Times entertainment story, profiling screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. The film he won’t exactly apologize for, but comes pretty close to is, of course, 1997’s Batman and Robin, which the president of production at Marvel Studios is quoted as calling maybe the most important comic-book movie ever made, in that it was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things.

This just in! Steve Ditko book to be awesome: Seriously, just look at this thing. Wow.

There’s no faulting The Anchor #1 (Boom Studios) for a lack of scope. It opens in Hell itself, where the mysterious title character is single-handedly responsible for beating back the hordes of hell with his big, pink fists.

It then jumps to downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, where a giant ice monster is on a rampage. The title character, referred to as God’s anchor to hell by a member of the demon horde and Clem by a volunteer worker who notices he’s wearing a symbol of Saint Clement, is there too, fighting the monster.

“My soul is in hell,” he explains. “It wrestles with demons there…the wounds my soul suffers are borne by my earthly body.”

Writer Phil Hester doesn’t delve much deeper into who The Anchor is, how he came to be, or why his memory seems so addled and he sometimes talks in psalms without even realizing they’re psalms (Actually, the fact that the ice monster hits him with a truck might explain those last two, come to think of it).

And while all that is usually welcome in a first issue (especially see this is a $3.99 comic), that all that info isn’t present certainly isn’t because Hester’s dragging his feet or anything. He does establish plenty of intriguing clues and suggestions, introduces and half-introduces some characters, sketches out a concept and, most importantly, establishes an appealing tone that teeters between supernatural melodrama and comedy.

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 The secret in the title of A Family Secret (Farrar Straus Giroux) isn’t the sort that is being deliberately kept from others as much as it simply goes un-talked about for years.

And who could blame Helena Van Dort, an elderly Dutch woman who lived through World War II and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, for not talking about the war years all the time? It makes for a pretty unpleasant topic.

Comics artist Eric Heuvel’s crystal-clear storytelling, beautiful draftsmanship and open, inviting and expressive design makes for a pleasant reading experience, however, as unpleasant as the subject matter might be.

A Family Secret is Heuvel’s graphic novel about Helena’s war-time experience, written from a scenario credited to Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol, Menno Metselaar of the Anne Frank House and Hans Groeneweg of the Resistance Museum of Friesland. That sounds like a lot of experts to have in the room, and it shows in the book’s educational focus.

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It’s not really all that surprising that someone with Matt Phelan’s background would end up making a graphic novel. Phelan’s a rather prolific illustrator, probably best known for picture book Always with writer Ann Stott and 2007 Newbery winnerThe Higher Power of Lucky with Susan Patron.

While illustrated books and comics are, of course, different media, it’s certainly possible to think of them on the same imaginary spectrum, with a comic being a little like an illustrated prose book with the dial that controls the picture-to-word ratio turned way up.

That seems as good an explanation as any as to why Phelan’s first graphic novelThe Storm In The Barn (Candlewick Press), is such an accomplished one—it’s basically just a very long picture book, with very few words, and more than one picture per page, you know?

It’s set in Kansas in 1937, during the Dust Bowl period that generated all of those sad Dorothea Lange photos in your junior high history class.

Our protagonist is Jack, an eleven-year-old boy whose family is suffering like all the other farming families. It hasn’t rained in years, and no rain means no farming, and no farming means nothing but poverty and dust as far as the eye can see.

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“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.

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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!”)

I’m surprised at the detail in John Porcellino’s face.

It’s silly to expect an autobiographical cartoonist, particularly one whose style is as abstract as Porcellino’s, to look like the comic book character you’re used to spending time with, but the Porcellino of my imagination shouldn’t have as many lines on him as the real Porcellino does. There shouldn’t be pupils around his little black dot irises, his hair should be a jagged bowl atop the oval of his head, not individualized strands. He shouldn’t have a third dimension, or have any color other than paper-white to him.

But the pioneering zinester, mini-comic maker and autobio comics creator is, of course, a human being, and thus doesn’t much resemble the John P. I’ve gotten to know over the years from the pages of his long-running King-Cat Comics.

I got a good look at him this past Monday night, at the Columbus stop of his fall tour promoting his new book A Map of My Heart (his visit to Columbus, oddly enough, occurred on Columbus day).  He was appearing at Wholly Craft, a shop that sells cool, handmade goods from a variety of local artists and designers. It’s a girly pink and blue store a few steps away from the city’s main drag, High Street, jam-packed with T-shirts, stuffed animals, magnets, pins, baby clothes, finger puppets, sock octopuses, cloth sculptures of cakes and dozens of other neat little things one could empty one’s wallet buying for loved ones if one wanted.

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As a comics critic, I’m not terribly fond of the anthology format. They’re extremely difficult to write reviews of, and I’m hardly ever satisfied with the reviews that result any time I do try to tackle one.

That’s due mostly to the very nature of anthologies (Well, that and the fact that I’m not as good a writer as I’d like sometimes, but I prefer to blame the format). Even those with strong, unifying themes will involve different creators on each story, and inevitably some creators will be better than other or, in the rare case where they’re all excellent, they will all be excellent in very different ways.

So every time I sit down to write a review for an anthology, I generally end up walking away from my laptop disappointed with the results—they always seem to be some variation of “This is an anthology consisting of stories tied together by this particular theme. Some of these stories were good, and some of them were not.”

As a comics reader, however, I’ve found that anthologies can be a lot of fun, introducing you to new creators and/or characters in rapid succession after a relatively low-risk investment of time and money.

Among my favorite to read are the sorts of holiday specials that mainstream publishers occasionally put out, for these very reasons. And for the Halloween ones, the grab-bag nature of anthologies seems particularly apropos, as reading them can parallel the experience of trick-or-treating. One stop you might get a little box of Dots or a York peppermint patty, the next you might get a Tootsie roll or one of those hard, brown blobs that come wrapped in plain black or orange wrappers and smell vaguely of peanuts.

Yesterday’s new comics day brought two such Halloween-prompted anthologies—DC/Vertigo’s House of Mystery Halloween Annual #1 and Image Comics’ The Perhapanauts Halloween Spooktacular #1—so I thought I’d try trick or treating in those two particular neighborhoods. Both books were also promoted as good jumping-on points for the various serials, and since I have yet to read a single issue of either House of Mystery or The Perhapanauts, I thought I might be well-positioned to serve as a test case for how effective they were at meeting those goals.

So grab your metaphorical costume and metaphorical treat bag and join me after the jump for some metaphorical trick or treating. (The “jump,” by the way, is also metaphorical).

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School Library Journal on that Dragon Ball thing: Brigid Alverson puts together a little roundtable regarding a Wicomico County councilman bringing up the contents of Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball at his Maryland county’s council meeting after a nine-year-old borrowed a volume of the series from his grade school library.

Meanwhile, in Alaska…: Should sexually-explicit drawings or computer-generated images of children be treated the same as actually child pornography, created by abusing real children? It’s a question apparently being considered by some in Alaska state government, according to this piece in the Anchorage Daily News (A piece which, by the way, mentions “anime” four times and “cartoons” four times, but never mentions manga or comics at all.) Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing, which specializes in erotic manga, has some thoughts. (Link swiped from Dirk Deppey)

“Lynda Barry injects some ‘Kapow!’ into comic book talk”: I read this entire article looking for the part where Barry says “Kapow!” And she never does. She does say “Goddam” once though, and in a positive reference to Family Circus, no less.

Here’s something you don’t see every day…: A feature story profiling Berkeley Breathed. Oh wait, you do see this every day now, don’t you? Well here, look at another one.

“Are Comics Like Reading with Training Wheels?”: No, no they are not.

“He was a creative talent that did a great deal in moving the Marvel Universe forward over a number of years”: Who was Marvel’s fourth most prominent superstar creator of the 1980s, following Chris Claremont, Frank Miller and John Byrne? Marc Mason makes the case that it was Al Milgrom.

What’s that? Mephisto Vs. Premiere Hardcover doesn’t deal with Marvel’s most diabolical character fighting their Premiere Hardcover format? Instead it collects a four-issue miniseries from the 1980s by Al Milgrom and John Buscema called Mephisto Vs., in which the marriage-eating villain fights the Avengers, the FF, and two X-Men teams?

Oh.

Well, that will probably be a better fight then. It’s a $20, 144-page collection.

What else is due out in shops this week? You won’t have to sell your soul and/or marriage and twenty years worth of continuity to find out. Just join me after the jump.

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Concern over Dragon Ball spreading throughout Wicomico County, Maryland: The Salisbury, Maryland-based Daily Times has another article about the Dragon Ball tempest in a teapot. Now it appears that “the 24 ‘Dragon Ball’ books at the Wicomico County Public Library have been pulled from the shelves.” According to the article, this time by the Daily Times Salisbury reporter Laura D’Alessandro instead of county reporter Greg Latshaw, “it’s not simply that they may contain nudity but also because the library staff isn’t sure in which section to shelve them.”

A quick look at the library’s online catalog shows they have graphic novel sections for youth, where Toriyama’s Dr. Slump and Cowa! are shelved, and a graphic novel section, where a graphic novel intended for adults with some nudity and actually sexual scenes in it. Fun Home, is shelved. Dragon Ball is rated for teenagers 13 and up, and the other popular manga rated for teens like Death Note, Fruits Basket and Sgt. Frog are assigned as  call numbers (that is, codes for where to find them on the shelf) “Youth Manga” or “Youth Graphic Novel, ” and shelved in the library’s “ teen lounge.”  I determined that from hundreds of miles away after spending about three minutes on the Internet, so presumably the library’s “internal reconsideration” won’t take much longer than that to just put the damn things with the other manga rated the exact same way, forcing the Daily Times to find other ways to fill space during the apparently frequent slow news days in Wicomico County.

“When twitter meets the holocaust”: That’s the headline of this article from the Irish Independent, in which the, um, Dublin Twook Club discusses Art Spiegelman’s Maus via Twitter. Isn’t “the holocaust” supposed to be a proper noun, when referring to that particular holocaust? And what about Twitter? That’s supposed to be a proper noun too, right?

“I’ve always understood this to imply that he saw a significant difference between these and The Spirit ‘comic books’ that he was more than happy for DC to keep in their catalogue”: In this blog post, Eddie Campbell says he’s been scouting around to make sure he’s “up to date on the idea of ‘the graphic novel,’” as he’s supposed to appear on a TV show on the subject soon. In this post, he talks a bit about the work of Will Eisner, one of the artists often suggested as the creator of the form and the term. I’m interested in the distinction between a “graphic novel” that’s a graphic novel and a “graphic novel” that is just a collection of comic books, although I suppose it’s impossible for libraries, book stores, publishers and readers in general to ever sift through books on a case by case basis and divide them into easy to use and understand categories, based on the intention of the creators alone (Now would it necessarily behoove the people who make and sell various forms of graphic novels to do so). Campbell’s post is, as always, well worth a read and a think.

“Parade, festivities feature superheroes, sheep”: Now that’s a headline.

More ‘O.D.O.K.s: Allow Mike Sterling to introduce you to two new M.O.D.O.K.s, a Mike Organism Designed Only for Killing and S.W.A.M.P.D.O.K.