“That’s what being a hero is all about, it’s that sometimes, you gotta take out a baby”: That’s Tucker Stone trying to look on the positive side of things in his latest Advanced Common Sense, which means Donna Troy taking out a zombie baby is actually an admirable thing, and Justice League: Cry For Justice helps teach kids about their bodies…? Give it a watch, but be warned, it may not be safe for work, depending on what you see when you see Stone’s defense of Gotham City Sirens.

“There is going to be an EXTREMELY COOL movie based on this coming out next year, and when it comes out if you’ve read this back in 2009 it will make you EXTREMELY COOL also”: Colin Panetta tries out a strategy for making people want to try reading Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series in this piece.

“Be prepared for a lecture on how the series’ mythopoeic pantheism informs its assertion of a sort of mimetic eschatalogical narrative which defies conventional exegeses. Also: Lacunae!”: Is Glen Weldon being contrary, or dumb or is this the way one reacts to a classic work if one comes to it too late? I often wonder what it would be like coming to The Sandman late. Like, really late—like, after it stopped appearing as a serial comic book, and could be experienced for the first time in trade late. (The special was my first issue, and I started reading it monthly somewhere during Fables and Reflections). NPR’s Weldon contends there is an extremely high bar of entry between new readers and The Sandman, apparently because J’onn J’onnz, Mister Miracle and Dr. Destiny are in the first volume. I’m not sure I agree at all, in the same way that you don’t need to know all that much about Calliope or Bast to understand their appearances, a thorough knowledge of Element Girl probably isn’t necessary to understand hers. But then, I think Weldon over-thinks Sandman: He takes three paragraphs to explain the premise, which can be summed up even more directly as “The story of story in the 20th century.”

Martin Eden is certainly doing something right: I’ve seen more stories about his Spandex in my Google News feed the last few days than on just about any other topic. Here’s an interview in Wired.

“Kenneth Branagh? A comic-book superhero movie? Are things really that tough? And not even an A-list Marvel hero—but Thor?”: Paid professional, film critic, author and apparent grown-up man Marshall Fine is shocked, shocked, shocked that talented directors and actors might make Hollywood superhero movies or voice cartoon animals. Marshall Fine hasn’t seen a single movie in the last ten years.

“It‘s a physics question…If she‘s falling, say, 100 metres, how fast is she going?”: Here’s a nice Chronicle Journal feature profiling comics fan and physics teacher James Kakalio, author of The Physics of Superheroes. The “she” doing the falling is, of course, Gwen Stacy, just a few seconds before physics murders her.

“I generally think in pretty visual terms when I’m writing…And so, this felt kind of natural in that way, and, of course, easier for me because I can, instead of really struggling over those descriptions, I can just say, here, you do this, you know?”: That’s prose writer-turned-graphic novel writer Kevin Baker on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, talking about Luna Park, his collaboration with artist Danijel Zezelj (and talking specifically about one of the benefits of the medium for someone used to doing all the describing himself). You can listen to it here (or just look at the pretty pictures) or read a transcript here.

Dammit. I shouldn’t have waited so long to write about Spandex: Martin Eden sent me a copy of his book about an all-gay superhero team to review, and I put it on my “to-review” stack and just haven’t gotten there yet. Now I’m missing the press roll-out! The Sun had a short piece on Spandex here, Digital Spy has another short piece here, and I suppose I should also mention that Rich Johnston has a piece over on his website, because if I don’t he’ll just show up in the comments section and let us all know anyway. You can learn more about the book here. (My three-word review of Spandex? Pretty good stuff.)

The biggest news a Moomin/Bjork fan could ever hope to hear: “Bjork Writes New Song for Freaky Finnish Childrens Movie” (Via The Beat)

Princess Diana comic book under attack in Britain: The Los Angeles Times’ Geoff Boucher defends Bluewater Productions’ Female Force: Princess Diana comic from its critic Diana Funnell of the Diana Circle UK. Now I really, really wish Marvel would have let Peter Milligan write that X-Statix story where Princess Diana comes back from the dead as a mutant and joins the team, if only to have been able to see the reaction.

“He said that the audience to him tended to look like a ‘blur of pink unicorns’ to him”: I know what causes people to see pink elephants, but what causes them to see pink unicorns? You’ll have to ask Tony Lee, but from the lead of this short feature on his visit to Calcutta, it sounds like it might have had something to do with the length of the flight.

Wow, remember when Batgirl comics used to be awesome?: The gang at 4th Letter does.

Okay, I guess I’m not sick of Obama comics after all: Check out Steven Weissman’s strip. And then explain it to me. Wait, don’t explain it—I think I like it just the way it is.

“Anyone with half a brain who had a love for Diana will hate it”: That’s Margaret Funnell, co-founder of the Diana Circle UK, lashing out against Bluewater Productions’ Female Force biographical comic book about Princess Diana. From the looks of the samples shown, and the looks of the other Female Force bio-comics, Funnell seems right on, although I don’t know whether or not loving Diana will necessarily have much to do with hating the comic. Funnell seems far more upset about the existance of the book than the quality of it, however, as she also says “Comic means something to laugh at. I don’t find it at all comical and I wish they hadn’t done it.” I thought everyone in the country that gave us 2000 AD and so many of our best comics writers of the last 20 years was pretty enlightened about comics. Bluewater publisher Darren Davis talks with Coventry Telegraph blogger David Bentley about the criticism, and defends the books portrayal of Diana and her life. Check it out here.

And on the subject of Bluewater’s Female Force bio-sploitation books…: Chris Sims reviews the latest, Female Force: Stephenie Meyer, and he does not much care for it. From the quality of the art he scanned and posted, it’s easy to see why—it’s pretty horrible stuff. It is intriguing that the creators decided to have the bio narrated by a Dracula to either fill space or make it more exciting than the bio on the jacket of Meyer’s own books. See, Margaret Funnell, the Princess Diana book could have been much more tasteless…it could have had an undead horror host narrator in it.

“If I’m to read that right, she’s a MacGuffin in a loincloth. Is this really the kind of nostalgia DC should be reaching for”: Racialicious has some concerns about how DC’s upcoming 2010 First Wave series will treat Rima the Jungle Girl, based on the little character sketch/proposal that writer Brian Azzarello had in the back of this week’s Batman/Doc Savage one-shot. Having just read Green Mansions for the first time this summer, it doesn’t sound a whole hell of a lot like the character in the book. Green Mansions isn’t exactly a terribly enlightened book when it comes to race in the first place, though. (Note: I do hope we get a Rima trade collection out of this First Wave business, though. Those Joe Kubert covers sure look great).

Next for Nancy: Drawn and Quarterly has a neat little preview of the next volume of Nancy from their John Stanley Library series.

“Will Kick-Ass be a 21st Century superhero?”: So asks The Guardian’s film blog. I’m going to say yes, unless they push the release date back about 91 years.

An important reminder from Don MacPherson: DC and Marvel aren’t the only superhero publishers with super-icky comics.

The other fantastic four: Check out PopMatters on Beatles comic books. Here’s my favorite Beatles appearance in a comic book recently, as the mentors attending Blue Beetle’s parent/teacher conference in Tiny Titans:

League of Extraordinarily Unprofessional Librarians: Amy Wilson of the Lexington Herald-Leader provides more context into the story of a pair of public library employees losing their jobs for refusing to check out The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: The Black Dossier to a patron as per their employer’s policy. I feel even less sympathy for Sharon Cook then I did before, given that it seems not to have been a case of misunderstanding or disagreeing with the policy. Apparently she thought the book unsuitable for patrons, and thus checked it out herself and kept it checked out indefinitely in the hopes of preventing anyone else from ever reading it. Whatever you do, don’t read the comments section attached to the Herald-Leader story; it will only cost you brain cells. If you must read a comments section on the issue, check out the lively one attached to The Beat’s link to the article.

“Solve the case of the missing couch first. Nobody likes it when detectives case-hop mid issue”: Tucker Stone notes a weird art mistake in the otherwise pretty good Stumptown #1. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t even notice the disappearing furniture when I read the issue. I’d make a terrible detective.

That sounds reasonable: Peter Bagge’s latest strip for Reason is entitled “Will Everyone Please Stop Freaking Out Over Ayn Rand?!?” It’ s a timely piece, given the American Right’s recent re-embrace of Rand, and a few recent new books about her. (Via Flog!)

“One in 10 Adult Book Buyers Read Comic Books, Simba Study Reveals”: But does that mean that comic books are really popular, or that books are pretty unpopular?

I thought print was dead, why do I keep finding newspaper stories on the Internet?: I got to the third paragraph of this story— “Libraries promote love of reading with graphic novels” from New Jersey’s The Daily Journal—before I was consumed with rage. Here’s the paragraph:

Graphic novels and similar genres like manga, a popular Japanese style of graphic novel that often involves science fiction or fantasy themes, and animé, also heavily Japanese, share a method. They tell stories within the context of cartoon drawings.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the story.

Tomorrow is the day we’ve all been waiting for ever since Marvel announced that their Punisher series published through their Max imprint would be retitled PunisherMax, all one word. Will they really go through with it? Will it look less stupid running along the top of the actual cover of an actual comic book than it does in writing in, say, a shipping list or solicitation or a blog post? We’ll know soon enough.

Me, I can’t think of anything but the above scene every time I hear “PunisherMax.” Anyway, the latest iteration of the series will be by Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon, so it’s probably not going to be anywhere near as bad a comic as its title might indicate.

What else is coming out this week? And will there be spaces between the words that make up their titles? Find out, after the jump!

(more…)

“I like to tell the history of Judaism through comics…When I was growing up, I never thought comics were connected to religion and culture”: That’s comics creator J.T. Waldman talking Judaism and comics in this profile in the religion section of the Pennsylvania Patriot News. The focus of the story is Waldman’s presentation on the subject with the clever title of “People of The Comic Book.” I wasn’t overly surprised to see the article spell Spider-Man’s name wrong (as “Spiderman”…come on, let’s get this in the AP Style Guide, already!). I was sort of intrigued when the article mentioned that “Waldman called Spiderman ‘a veiled story of Moses’” (they did mean Superman, with the infant in the rocket ship an analogy to the baby in the basket, right? Or are there parallels to Exodus I never noticed in the Spidey story? Is the radioactive spider analogous to the burning bush, and Uncle Ben is God and the Green Goblin Pharaoh…?). And I was pretty appalled when I saw that they got Waldman’s name wrong, calling him J.P. Waldman. It’s obviously too late to fix the print edition, but I don’t see any reason why the online version of an article has to have a pretty basic, embarrassing mistake like that up a few days after publication.

“I guess it’s truly time for me to forgive South Carolinians for firing on Fort Sumter. I hope, in 100 years or so, South Carolinians will forgive me for my own cheap shot”: Political cartoonist David Horsey talks at some length about the reaction to his cartoon mocking South Carolina.

“Early Buzz: Is Kick-Ass The Best Superhero Movie Ever Made?”: Yes, I’d definitely say that buzz qualifies as “early,” since the first trailer isn’t even due out until mid-month. I’m intensely curious about how they managed to make a whole Kick-Ass movie in the time it’s taken Marvel to publish just seven issues of the series. It’s not like artist John Romita Jr. is known for deadline blowing or drawing slow or anything, and yet Kick-Ass has been coming at about as regularly as Mark Millar’s Ultimates used to.

“Dropping a supernatural enemy into an environment that’s already so alien and strange is overkill, like setting a vampire movie on the moon”: Here’s the New York Times on Matt Phelan’s excellent The Storm in the Barn, which is covered as part of a round-up of various children’s books dealing with the Dust Bowl. Writer Jessica Bruder isn’t overly impressed, but then Bruder doesn’t think a vampire movie on the moon would be totally awesome, so I’m not sure whether I’d trust her opinion on anything else.

“Strip away the Hollywood glamour and shows like Comic Book I-Con are what the hobby are all about: Passionate fans and creators talking about the comics they love”: Joe Lawler of the Des Moines Register has a nice little write-up on Comic Book I-Con, which goes down today in Altoona, Iowa.

“What’s the most stupidly ambitious aspect of “XKCD Vol. 0,” the book based on the wildly popular yet still very underground webcomic”…?: Here’s an LA Times blog post profiling the plans for Randall Munroe’s XKCD hardcopy collection.

“These cartoons radicalized me, an impressionable young person, against the idea of conflict and the then-current Vietnam War”: That’s Craig Yoe in a feature story in The Oregonian, talking about the work collected in his new The Great Anti-War Cartoons from Fantagraphics. There are some real jaw-droppers used to illustrate the piece, so be sure to check it out. (A slideshow can also be seen here).

“Batman at 70″: Here’s a neat Toledo Free Press feature on Batman turning 70, and the way the city’s downtown library is marking the occasion.

Seattle vs. South Carolina cartoon battle: Seattle Post-Intelligencerpolitical cartoonist Dave Horsey drew a cartoon that was less-than-flattering in its depiction of South Carolina, and Palmetto Scoop cartoonist Mike Beckom responded with a cartoon making fun of Yankee unions. Alan Gardner will tell you all about it at The Daily Cartoonist.

Wanna be a successful cartoonist and/or comics/prose hybrid literary sensation?: Then you should probably enroll at the University of Maryland and get a job doing cartoons for the school’s paper The Diamondback. It worked for Frank Cho, Aaron McGruder and Jeff Kinney.

Apparently, the New York Times list-makers don’t even crack the covers of the books they put on their lists: I quit paying attention to the NYT’s goofy comics bestsellers lists as soon as I got over making fun of their dumb names and dumber press announcement, but manga expert Deb Aoki hasn’t, and she notes another reason to shake one’s head sadly at the lists. Illustrated prose book Death Note: L Change the World apparently ranked #4 on the manga bestseller list, despite not even being manga, or comics of any kind.

“I used to feel as powerful as a locomotive, but I’m running out of steam”: Augusta Chronicle columnist Glynn Moore reflects on his own mortality in relation to dressing up in Superman t-shirts and towel capes with his grandson in this only mildly depressing piece.

Great, now I’m hungry: On Drawn and Quarterly’s blog, the unlikely source of inspiration for Seth’s Nancy Vol. 1 collection cover design stands revealed.

“I cannot wait until Williams III leaves in a couple months time…I wonder how many people are going to admit that if it weren’t for Williams’ III art, this would be just one or two steps above Outsiders“: In his latest post, guy-I-link-to-alot Tim O’Neil reviews the latest issue of ‘TEC, along with several other recent releases, and discusses how muscular Reed RIchards should look.

How Seth writes: Geoff Pevere interviews the George Sprott author about his writing process for The Star.

Your anniversary-inspired Asterix overview of the day: Ben East writes about “good old Asterix and his fulsome friend Obelix” in this column for The National.

Basketball guy married to famous-for-being-famous lady didn’t work too hard on his Batman costume: I still like it better than the ones Christian Bale and the other movie Batmen have worn though

“Millar to direct superhero movie”: I hope it’s better received than Frank Miller’s was…

The single scariest image the comics blogosphere came up with this Haloween weekend: Mike Sterling had it.

“I adore what I do and don’t think of it as just a job. It is what I breathe, it is intrinsic to my being”: That’s Hana Hajjar, “Saudia Arabia’s lone female cartoonist,” talking about her profession in this nice feature on CNN.com. You can see a slideshow of Hajjar’s work there, and much more of it on her website.

“Crazy Dudes Wanted to Fly to Denmark to Murder Old Man Over Cartoon, of All Things”: Gawker had probably the best headline of all the coverage of the plot by two Chicago men to kill the Danish Muhammad cartoonist.

“Not your average wiggly things”: Check out this National Post feature on Drawn and Quarterly’s recent collection of R.O. Blechman’s work, Talking Lines. I plan on writing a full review at some point in the near future, but in the mean time I will say it’s an excellent book, and one I hope you’ll take the time to look at soon.

“Costume possibilities are endless with a simple cape”: Need a last-minute Halloween costume? This article from The Orlando Sentinel makes a good case for starting with a cape and making a simple superhero costume from there. If it was good enough for Superman…

“That’s… different”: Savage Critic Brian Hibbs did a good job of expressing why “Dark Reign” has been less than satisfying for me, in large part because it seems like a branding exercise rather than a story, a new status quo in which nothing ever actually happens—dark or light—as the whole Marvel line simply waits around for the next Secret Invasion-sized event. He did so while expressing some admiration for Dark Reign—The List: Punisher #1, in which something pretty big and pretty dark does happen. Also on Savage Critics, Sean T. Collins defends The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Let the record show: I loved that series (I could have done without all the newscaster segments, but otherwise, I thought it was pretty damn great).

Changes in store for The Comics Journal: The venerable comics magazine’s next issue, November’s #300, will be its last on the current schedule and in the current format. In the future, the hard copy of TCJ will come in “expanded semi-annual editions, each customized to fit its content.” Meanwhile, TCJ.com is going to massively beef up its content. You can read the company’s official press release on the changes here.

How often do Ivan Reis and Johnny Ryan draw the same exact thing in the same exact week?: This week’s Blecky Yuckerella strip on Fantagraphics’ Flog! Blog has Blecky doing to her pal Wedgie just what the Silver Age Atom did to the Golden Age Atom in the pages of Blackest Night #4. Weird.

Also, does it even mean anything if the artist in question has only drawn like five different stories in that career?: Heidi MacDonald finds the phrase “best work of his career” kind of annoying when its used to hype up an upcoming project.

Fantastic: Check out Johnathan of Living Between Wednesday’s Halloween costume. Here’s a hint—It’s Designed Only for Killing…

“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?

“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.

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.

“[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 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!”)

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.

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.

I think he deserves an award just for being able to cartoon while wearing boxing gloves: Westword cartoonist Kenny Be and his paper were singled out by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and given a “Worst of the National Media” award for using the word “fag” in a cartoon. Be, who is himself gay, responded with a half-comics, half-prose cover story in last week’s issue.

Everyone should have a “Wall O’ Colleen Coover” in their house: Check out Bully the Little Stuffed Bull’s growing collection of Coover-drawn original art, including his latest, a Ben Grimm-as-Blackbeard drawing.

If you were wondering who would make the first and/or best FTC blog regulation joke, you can stop now: Joe “Jog” McCulloch has it, at the top of this review of Bryan Talbot’s Grandville.

This is  the harshest review I’ve ever read: James Kochalka reports a reaction to his latest Johnny Boo book.

Peter Bagge has a lot going on: The cartoonist will be teaching a course on comics writing at Seattle University, and is developing a pilot with Fox for an animated Bradleys show.

Two good pieces about two pairs of bad comics: Here’s Tim O’Neil on Outsiders #22 and Wolverine: Origins #40 (”You could almost say that if you needed two books to stand as symbols of the problems and challenges facing the North American mainstream comics industry in 2009, you would be hard pressed to find two better examples”) and here’s Tucker Stone on Superman: Secret Origin #1 and Spider-Man: Clone Saga #1 (”Superman’s Secret Origin can’t be ‘changed,’ because Superman’s origin was stapled to the brains of Superman readers years ago, it’s why they’re still keeping up with the character now. Fixing the Clone Saga can’t be done in 2009, it can only be done in a time machine”).

He doesn’t look a day over 65: Popeye is turning 80 years old this year, and Youngstown State University paper The Jambar interviews local cartoonist Chris Yambar, who wrote a special Popeye comic book called Popeye Picnic, to be distributed at the Chester, Illinois event of the same name. That’s right, there’ s a story about a guy named Yambar in a paper called Jambar. How often do newspapers get to feature people whose names rhyme with the name on their masthead? Other than that one time the New York Times wrote about John Shmewyorktimes, of course.

“The fun part about talking talking with cartoonist and author Berkeley Breathed — besides the fact that he is funny, smart, charming and a great conversationalist — is that he makes no bones about his willingness to deviate from the truth”: That’s from a Breathed interview in the San Jose Mercury News. It’s getting so you can’t even check your Google News alerts without finding a profile of Breathed…