Here’s an interesting sidelight to Google’s ongoing mission to digitize some 10 million books stored in university libraries in the Midwest. One of the treasure troves being considered for the digital world is Michigan State’s Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection, including print materials related to popular culture and its Comic Art Collection of more than 200,000 pieces with an emphasis “on graphic storytelling in the newspaper comics or newsstand comic book tradition to present a complete picture of what American comics’ readership has seen, especially since the middle of the 20th century.”

Materials in the public domain will be available through Google, but those still under copyright won’t be freely available. Among the notables in the Nye collection: The Yellow Kid strips from the late 1890s and Famous Funnies No. 1.

What do you think about Google’s plan to create digital archives for comics?

In this short video that premiered a couple of days ago on Yahoo! Movies, film director Michael Bay chides Net fans who claimed he “wrecked their childhood” for not perfectly and completely recreating the Transformers they loved as kids to film. Just remember, bad Batman movies, didn’t kill you… They only made you STRONGER!

Of course, if you watch the next video on the list — interviewing fans presumably before an early screening of the film in Austin — you’d be hard pressed to see anything but the love and nostalgia 80s folks have for “their” Transformers. Also down the list that’s worth a look: An interview with Transformers screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci answering fan questions.

Even with the expected sneak peaks of the Joker, as channeled by Heath Ledger in the Bat-IMAX sequel The Dark Knight, coming to a theater near you — possibly before the year is done — you’ll want to read this interesting piece from Dre Rivas at Film.com about a few of his alternate picks for the Clown Prince of Crime on film.

All of these actors would’ve been great choices — especially the last one on the list — and may make you feel the very same way about Ledger that many of you did when Tim Burton chose Michael Keaton against type to play the Caped Crusader. That said, I’ll take my chances with Christopher Nolan over Joel Schumacher any day…

That’s the claim made by Joel Eisenberg in a short piece he submitted to the North Hills (California) section of Valley News.com after being given a set of “never-before-seen” letters by the surviving family of Max Gaines, who pioneered pamphlet comics almost 75 years ago.

What caught Eisenberg’s attention: A letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to Gaines supporting comics, and against the prevailing assumption of the day that they contributed to the spread of juvenile delinquency. Allegedly, that letter came years before his son, Bill Gaines, achieved notoriety during a 1954 Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency for his unapologetic defense of his EC Comics line.

Just to make the wait for The Dark Knight seem a little shorter, Hannspree recently introduced the perfect 15-inch LCD TV for the Batman fan you love, that is, if you have a bank account the size of Bruce Wayne’s… And, that was merely one of many uniquely framed LCD TVs Hannspree unveiled during last January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Although there’s no sign of Batman at Hannspree’s Web site for now, you can still find a TV in the shape of your favorite NBA and MLB team.

An interesting factoid I learned about our recent star blogger, Cecil Castellucci, that I forgot to ask her about last week, came up in this fun CNN interview with the 37-year-old scribe: What’s with the cool first name? Evidently, it was a very tongue-in-cheek homage to Cecil B. DeMille she created in high school. “My real name was kind of blah, and so I would turn in school work like ‘A Book Report by Cecil B. DeMille.’ ”

Always wanted to change my name too…

You may have seen Frenchman Alain Robert scaling tall buildings in news footage before now, but you wouldn’t have heard about or remembered him unless he was wearing his trademark Spider-Man suit. Seems our reality-based Spider-climber has run afoul of the law once again, this time after climbing the 88-stories-tall Jin Mao Building in Shanghai.

Robert was thrown into the Chinese slammer for five days, but not before attracting a great many onlookers and tying up traffic in the downtown area for quite a while. I suspect our Spidey-interloper isn’t all that worried about what will happen to him in a Chinese jail (unlike what happened to Jack Bauer between seasons 5 and 6 of 24, that is), however.

In fact, a page of Robert’s Web site devoted to videos of his many climbs features snippets of his latest “joyride” up the Jin Mao.

Two new “I’m a Marvel… and I’m a DC” parodies have debuted since we last spoke to LA-based writer/performer Michael Agrusso, both nicely bending the standard formula — tenderly skewering the movie personas of each company’s high profile superheroes — to great effect.

Posted two weeks ago, the Villains Edition reveals the very same differences in perception between Supes and Spidey, this time to comedic effect with their arch-nemeses, the Green Goblin and Lex Luthor. The more recent After Hours parody features a smorgasbord of Marvel characters, rightly concerned about their futures on the big screen, from the Hulk to the Punisher and Magneto (as counseled by Blade). And, if you blink, you’ll miss Supes hitting on a rather tall Bat-Heroine too…

Speaking of movies, think the Silver Surfer and Hellboy will make appearances in these “I’m a Marvel” laughfests anytime soon? Here’s hoping…

Most cartoonists I don’t know, along with most of the ones do know, really do believe in the “curb appeal” of an attractive cover. The right touch can make even the most discriminate of readers — even ones as easily fooled as me — break down and pick it up even if they’re disinterested about the story in between the covers (full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Dave McKean, Mike Allred, Joe Kubert and Alex Ross covers).

Genius cartoonist Ivan Brunetti describes how he and his publisher, Fantagraphics, turned the tables on readers with the recent publication of Misery Loves Comedy, collecting the first three issues of Schizo, along with lots of very cool short pieces, to fill 172 pages. For the cover, the book’s title and author are embossed rather simply on a plain and dark green background. “I wanted the book to look like a psychiatric case study,” Brunetti tells Time Out Chicago writer Robert Loerzel. “I wanted to have a cover that would seem nonthreatening, and when you open it, then it would hit you.” Speaking from personal experience, folks, that it does…

And, for those of you living in the Seattle area, Brunetti will be signing Misery Loves Comedy at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, the site of an exhibit of his work from the aforementioned book, Friday, May 8 from 6-8 p.m. If you miss the signing, the exhibit runs until June 20.

Got a question for those of you who have older children old enough who really like comics (probably because you made it ridiculously easy for them to find things they’d really want to read): Has your son or daughter turned the tables, introducing you to a comic they thought you’d like? It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it did to Austin Chronicle writer Wayne Alan Brenner, in an insightful column with the appropriate subhead, Why do I love ‘Naruto’? Because I love my daughter.

This essay hit home with me because Brenner and I were exposed to many of the very same influences — Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four and Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man — during the 60s, and had transitioned to indy comics later on when the super-folks of his youth and mine had fallen into a creative sinkhole. That is, until Brenner brought his daughter, Angelica, to the awesome Austin Books and Comics, and found a more recent reboot of the FF, as scripted by Mark Waid back in 2002. He liked the books enough, but his daughter really loved them.

Not so long later, his daughter’s love for comics expanded to Runaways, Young Avengers and soon to manga which is where Naruto comes into the picture. “She handed me a collection of manga. ‘This is Naruto, Dad,’ Angelica tells me. ‘I think you’ll like it.’ By the time I’d finished the third volume, I was hooked.”

Couldn’t help but smile after reading Brenner’s essay, or the one that previews the one-time showing of Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow at 162 theaters nationwide Wednesday night.

For those of you longing for an alleged reprinting of From Hell with new material I told you about Friday, there’s no need to wait on it, says my friend Eddie Campbell who set me straight about the tentative plans.

Instead, this new material — including a second appendix — will likely show up in a separate book, with the possibility of boxing both From Hell and the newer book as a set. With a little luck, all the details will hopefully be worked out among all the participants very, very soon.

Seeing this interview with Alex Saviuk from yesterday’s Daytona Beach News-Journal brought back memories, not of the Floridian’s more recent work on the daily Spider-Man newspaper strip (inking the dailies and penciling the Sunday strips), but of his very fine run after the legendary Neal Adams on Green Lantern.

Sure, it was a tough act to follow Adams, but this was a different Green Lantern for a different time, and Saviuk’s work reminded me fondly of my days reading GL tales, as told by Gardner Fox and Gil Kane, in the hot Texas sun…

Daniel Best talks to prolific comics veteran Alan Kupperberg about his Marvel work on The Avengers and What If?.

An interesting tidbit from Kupperberg about his Avengers run that followed fan favorites like John Byrne, Barry Windsor Smith, Don Newton and George Perez: “Again, I just don’t think I’m going to be anybody’s favourite. There may be two guys. Just by the law of averages. And I’m their favourite artist. That’s fine. But by not being the fans’ favourite, you’re not going to make a large portion of the vocal readership happy. Not people who care about this stuff. A reader of comic books, just a reader, not a fan, collector or connoisseur, shouldn’t be bothered by my stuff.

“But the fans. What did the business become in that decade, the ‘80s, but merely a haven for fans. I don’t have any fans. But if comics were still a mass media, that wouldn’t make a difference. But by catering to the fans and the fan market, the comic book shops, that has helped take a mass medium and turned it into an over-priced, over-produced, niche market. Comic books are now nothing but another Hollywood farm system.”

I’d been hearing chatter about a new edition of From Hell — coinciding with the 20th anniversary of its debut in the pages of Steve Bissette’s classic horror anthology Taboo — for quite some time, but my pal Eddie Campbell confirmed it yesterday in a CBR interview. This redux would include “a compendium in which we offer a second Gull Catchers appendix, mocking recent developments in that area. We’d put a lot of other stuff in it, too, like script extracts and some director commentary type of stuff.” Read an update here.

In other Campbellian news, the Maestro spills the beans about his next book, The Amazing Mr. Leotard, to Suicide Girls columnist Daniel Robert Epstein. “The original inspiration is derived from Jules Léotard, who was the original man on the flying trapeze. He’s one of the earliest circus celebrities. He had a Victorian music hall song written about him, ‘Look at the man on the flying trapeze. He flies through the air…’

“He’s the inspiration for the book and he dies on page four.”

Wouldn’t you know it, the morning the blog I write about Austinite Alex Gray’s villain-in-training project, Villain 101, later in the day, a YouTube video appears on the site that explains the hysterical premise better than words ever could.

You’ll get to see what ordinary John Q. Public thinks about Gray’s project and watch focus groups in action, along with a quick shot or two of TokyoPop/Marvel scribe Paul Benjamin throwing his 2 cents in for good measure. One suggestion for The Anachronist: Ditch the wire-rimmed glasses. They make you look more contemplative and cuddly (see Seth Rogen) than malevolent or menacing…

Had there been a Blog@Newsarama back in 2005, no doubt, we would’ve been talking about Judd Apatow’s warm and raunchy comedy, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and for much more than Andy Stitzer’s awesome collection of action figures (think The Six Million Dollar Man’s boss Oscar Goldman or his pristine Aquaman).

I don’t know if comics culture will play a prominent role in Apatow’s follow-up, Knocked Up, opening tonight with midnight shows, but I can’t wait to see Virgin co-star, turned leading man Seth Rogen and his improv buddy Paul Rudd back in action.

If you’re as stoked as I am about Knocked Up, you’ll enjoy reading this funny interview with Rogen from USA Today and a slightly more somber one from, surprisingly, The Onion.

Many thanks to the intrepid Mr. Campbell for routing us to these cool pictures from the recent wedding of Alan Moore and his American muse Melinda Gebbie via Flickr.

My fav of the bunch: A shot of Neil Gaiman taking his own picture of the beautiful bride…

If you’re one of the growing number of folks who enjoy the work of Frank Espinosa as much as I do, we may be waiting a little longer for his next Rocketo story arc. The reason: Espinosa is illustrating a five-issue miniseries, Killing Girl, created by Glen Brunswick, whose current projects include writing and producing the live-action adaptation of Ex Machina for New Line Cinema.

Check out the wonderful conceptuals by Epsinosa, who’s been keeping busy teaching courses this past school year as a visiting scholar at MIT on character design and world-making. And, read more about the premise for Killing Girl here.

Whilst checking out yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I discovered an interesting tidbit about Georges Remi’s most popular creation, Tintin, especially for those who collect original art.

One page of original art from the hands of Remi, aka Herge, can range in cost from $107,000-202,000. What’s more, Belgian collector Gaetan Laloy (who sells Tintin memorabilia in his Bedemania shop in Brussels) owns a signed page from a long-abandoned series starring Tom Colby, valued at nearly $400,000 (200,000 pounds).

A Superior Court judge upheld the right of a suburban Atlanta school district to keep the mega-popular Harry Potter series on the shelves of school libraries in Gwinnett County, despite the protests of one mother who believes J.K. Rowling’s books promote witchcraft.

Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor’s decision, the latest setback in a nearly two-year battle between Gwinnett schools and parent Laura Mallory, upheld a recent ruling by Georgia’s Board of Education.

The argument against the Harry Potter books, the most challenged texts of the 21st century, according to the American Library Association: Witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people, thus, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state, according to AccessNorthGa.com.

Seems the news on the censorship front is getting is getting a bit better by the day…