“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…

“I recognize Bloom County’s influence but I’ll stop short of embracing it, as I do a porcupine”: Here’s another Berkeley Breathed interview timed to coincide with the release of the first volume of IDW’s Bloom County: Complete Library, this one conducted by John Geddes for USA Today. That’s Breathed trying to answer what he calls a difficult-to-answer question.

“Is Archie Andrews a bigamist?”: Well at the very least, he’s awfully indecisive. The New York Times notes the dropping of the other shoe—Archie’s much-publicized possible future wedding to Veronica will be followed by a possible future wedding to Betty. (UPDATE: Registration now required, because the NYT are a bunch of selfish old media jerks).

Fan goes to court for reading Ultimate X-Men graphic novel: I mean Method Man, not fan. And he wasn’t there for reading Ultimate X-Men, but for alleged tax evasion…he was just reading Ultimate X-Men while he was there.

“The mild-mannered Michelin Man is about to undergo a makeover, emerging as a tire-chucking superhero”: According to CNN, the creepy, white, swollen, tire pitchman is going to take a more aggressive stance on whether or not people should use his tires. The piece is worth a look for the awesome picture of a cigar-smoking, bicycle-riding Michelin Man chucking rubbing tires from his own abdomen. Is it just me, or does anyone else see a little of Golden Age Marvel robot hero Flexo The Rubber Man in the Michelin Man…?

“Most people in the U.S. would rather watch a movie or listen to a CD or even read a book than pick up a comic”: Noah Berlatsky takes a look at how horribly the sales of the best-selling comics stack up against hits in other media. Unsurprisingly, comics don’t fare very well against DVDs, music or books of the non-comic variety. Something to keep in mind the next time you see a publisher triumphantly trumpeting news of an issue selling out.

“Coach Daniel, the gym teacher at the school where I work, spied the cover of my Teen Titans comic and said, ‘Damn! They’re not teens anymore! She’s hot‘”: Nina Stone tries to read a random issue of Teen Titans, and is largely ambivalent about what she saw in #75. But she didn’t hate it, and wasn’t totally confused by it, so it could certainly have been much, much worse.

“What impressed me was the sense of community that Belent and Golightly manage to build within the pages of the book”: Prominent blogger Cheryl Lynn reviews an issue of Tarot: Witch of The Black Rose on what seems to be a dare, and the result is an extremely fair, evenly toned review of what she thought worked and didn’t work about the comic. I found that interesting in large part because I never see anyone write anything about Tarot ever, other than Invinceable Super-Blogger Chris Sims, who has probably written more about Tarot than anyone else on earth with the exception of Jim Balent himself.

That is one tough-looking Kool-Aid Man: Check out this Houston Chronicle article on a gallery exhibit of Dawolu Jabari Anderson’s paintings, each created to resemble the cover of a comic book which doesn’t actually exist.

Jump Start just turned 20: In related news, My God, when did I get so old?

“Comic-book challenge dares artists to draw faster than a speeding bullet”: That shouldn’t be too hard. Bullets can’t draw at all.

“Not to sound like someone swinging their cane, but in the 1980s there weren’t a thousand other voices screaming to be heard at the same time…There was a quiet in the room that made being a commentator very exciting”: That’s Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed on the difference between cartooning 20 years ago and today. Geoff Boucher had a great feature on Breathed for the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, which you can read here.

I hope it includes the Green Lantern oath: From the looks of this blog, an Andrea Reid and a Maya Zeller are accepting poetry about superheroes for an anthology “tentatively titled Between Saviors and Villains: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Inspired by American Superheroes.” If they’re also accepting copy-editing, I should point out that “Spiderman” has a hyphen and a capital “M” and is thus actually spelled “Spider-Man.”

“He’s not you typical western hero, but he was a lot of fun to draw”: That’s Thomas Boatwright talking about the main character in his Zeke Deadwood: Zombie Lawman in this article about a public library’s local author’s night. Five North Carolina authors were invited to participate, and Boatwright was one of them. He was also first graphic novelist to participate in the program.

There’s a verb form of “meatball?”: One of the coolest jobs on the planet, in my estimation, must be being one of the people who gets to think up headlines summarizing weekend box office performance, as it seems to mostly entail thinking up hilarioulys bad puns based on the titles of new movies. I think this one from Time, indicating that Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs out-performed The Surrogates last weekend, is like the worst one ever though. The article stresses Surrogates‘ comics routes and that was something that should have been part of “a recipe for minting money.” I wonder how many movies based on comics that will be perceived as box office failures there will have to be before Hollywood steps off that particular bandwagon, or if the occasional Dark Knight or Iron Man will keep comics a viable source for film adaptation, even if everything from Punisher War Zone on to Surrogates is perceived as not being a hit? (I say this without actually crunching the numbers or even looking very closely at any of them,  as I’m only talking about the perception of success or failure. Fair or unfair, even when movies end up making a profit, if they fail to meet certain, often arbitrary public expectations, they seem doomed to the perception of failure).

“This book will have you thinking about your own identity and may inspire you to start carving your own path, rather than go with the flow that everyone else follows”: That’s the Daily News on Abby Denson’s Dolltopia. They sure liked it.

“Sale makes sure everyone looks great, but that can’t hide the fact that the designated writer has the proportional spunk and gumption of an actuary on quaaludes”: I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the words “spunk,” “gumption,” “actuary” and “quaaludes” in the same sentence. Anyway, Noah Berlatsky just got around to reading Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween, and he did not much care for it. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Loeb/Sale Batman stuff, so I’m not going to argue with Berlatsky or anything, but I thought his response was of note in that the conventional wisdom has always been that Loeb’s best work was his stuff with Sale, particularly Long Halloween and Dark Victory, right? No? At any rate, I still crack up every time I re-read that scene at the end of Dark Victory where Robin makes his first in-costume appearance, taking the Joker out with a bad joke and a club on the teeth.

“Of course, Geoff Johns has showed a facility for turning a weak story around with a very satisfying ending …but, well… that doesn’t make the story as a whole good”: Johnathan of Living Between Wednesdays has not been enjoying DC’s Blackest Night event as much as he thought he would, and last week he set about trying to come up with possible theories as to why this might be. Then on Wednesday, he read a Geoff Johns-written portion of the event, and realized the problem may just be the spin-offs weren’t as good as the spine.

“From Red Sonja, I learned that a chain mail bikini is appropriate attire in any situation, even the frozen polar wastes”: What have the Sequential Tarts learned from comics? Mainly that Batman is a pretty poor role model, is what I’m getting.

“The big point here is that Rankin, in literary terms, is a player”: Writing for the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard discusses Ian Rankin and Werther Dell’Edera’s Dark Entries graphic novel, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou’s Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (”This is probably the best and certainly the most extraordinary graphic novel I have ever come across”), David Small’s Stitches and the value of the medium in general. Meanwhile, here’s another article about Rankin’s Dark Entries, also from the other side of the Atlantic.

“At first I wasn’t sure how to make a whole book out of this. But … It’s something that’s totally ridiculous, but we make it so that it has some meatier elements infused into it”: That’s Nebraskan-born writer Van Jensen discussing his new comic Pinnochio: Vampire Slayer with the Lincoln Journal Star.

“Maybe the cartoonist should either have the courage to use the actual words, or else write material that’s appropriate to the medium. How is it edgy to have profanity in comic strips when it’s only pretend swearing?”: I enjoyed this post by Nelson Dewey about swearing and not-swearing in newspaper comic strips, in large part because I often find myself irritated with how some comic book writers handle swearing, and then trying to think of a better solution to the challenge. Not to pick on Brian Michael Bendis, but his Marvel scripts are the ones I tend to notice the most, wherein a character will “swear” in an extremely clear fasion so that everyone knows the word intended—”I’m going to kick your @#$” or “Shut the @#$% up!”—but the Caps-locked number keys obscure it, drawing attention to the absurdity of the tension in the dialogue. Like, the comic is so mature and grown up that it can use adult language, only not really, because it’s not really for adults. Sorry for the tangent there, but I seriously think about this a lot. Anyway, read Dewey’s post.

“If it paints the rebels as heroes, says the book’s creator, that is because his extensive research brought him to that conclusion”: A Saturday feature in the Irish Times profiles graphic novel Blood Upon the Rose: Easter 1916, The Rebellion that Set Ireland Free, about the 1916 Rising. Surely it won’t be the least bit controversial.

Christopher Borrelli of The Chicago Tribune is wrong, wrong I say!: In this well-written and rather interesting profile of the talented author Audrey Niffenegger, whose popularity recently experienced a sharp spike thanks to the film adaptation of her novel The Time Traveler’s Wife and the release of her new book Her Fearful Symmetry,her 2005 picture book The Three Incestuous Sisters is referred to as a graphic novel. It is not a graphic novel by any definition of that nebulous term. It’s a picture book. And a pretty good one at that. But it’s not a graphic novel.

“My father’s name is probably one of the most well-known names around the world, but as the brand or trademark has spread, for many, the man has become lost”: Sunday’s Morning Call has a nice feature story about their former cartoonist William R. ”Bud” Tamblyn and Walt Disney, prompted by the new Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco including a Tamblyn cartoon marking Disney’s death in their collection. That quote is from Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller, who established the foundation responsible for the museum and “telling the story of Walt Disney’s life, in his own words, and in the words of others who knew him well and worked with him.”

High on the list of things I never thought I’d say? “Aw, Lex Luthor is so cute!”: The Grand Island Independent has a feature story about a 150-superhero strong Kiwanis Kids Day Parade. Check out the photo of lil’ Lex, hanging out with a tiny little Clark Kent and a tiny little Superman. The story itself is well worth a scan to see who the kids consider superheroes, and to hear the identities some of their own made-up superheroes. I’m going to have to dock reporter Robert Pore and the Independent editorial staff for spelling Jimmy Olsen’s last name with two O’s though.

“German designer Adrian Riemann has spent the last few months illustrating 16 redesigns of famous ‘Masters of the Universe’ characters including both He-man and Skeletor. All superheroes and villians featured are immaculately dressed complete with American Apparel, H&M and Dior”: The results are even more awesome than they sound. Go check it out. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe as you’ve never seen them before—skinny!

It’s sports metaphor time again!: In a Slog blog post, Paul Constant notes a similarity between certain comics fans and the tendency of some sports fans “to rage against high player salaries when the team owners, who make exponentially more than even the highest-paid player, get away virtually unscathed.” The observation was brought on by some of the embarrassing reactions to the news of the Kirby kids’ recent legal action and the less-than-warm response to Alan Moore’s criticism of modern super-comics.

The problem with Norman Osborn ruling the Marvel Universe: Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon has been thinking about what makes Norman Osborn such a great Spider-Man villain, and why the same things mean he doesn’t 100% work in the context of the “Dark Reign” status of the Marvel Universe. Christopher Bird doesn’t buy Osborn-as-Lex-Luthor either, and details how forcing that that square peg into a round hole isn’t making for good comics (Bird is even less enchanted with Blackest Night, though, as he explains in the same post).

Speaking of Blackest Night…: I enjoyed this post at The Groovy Age of Horror, about the way readers can interact with big, huge multi-title event stories. One thing serial comics do quite well, something that can’t quite be replicated when reading trade collections, is allow readers to pick their own way through events. (Link stolen from Dirk Deppey)

The silent issue that spoke to a generation: In this already widely-linked to piece on Comixology, Shaenon K. Garrity wrote eloquently about the incredible influence of an unlikely comic—G.I. Joe #21. If you haven’t already, give it a read.

How the X-Men are like the Chicago Cubs (other than the fact that they both play a lot of baseball): I enjoyed Tim O’Neil’s latest post about the X-Men franchise’s historical popularity, and why it seems to be on the wane for the first time in so long. In it, he compares being an X-Men fan to being a fan of a particular sports team:

You liked the X-Men like a Chicago fan likes the the Cubs. Sure, the Cubs never quite make it, but you enjoy the show all season anyway. Sure, some fair-weather fans may come and go as the home team waxes and wanes, but there’s still a huge amount of people who stay committed through thick and thin. Sometimes, and this is something that is occasionally hard to comprehend for many, the franchise thrives despite the low quality of many of its constituent books. The reason for this is simple: people get loyal, and this loyalty takes buying X-Men books above the level of a simple capitalistic exchange of money for a good or bad comic and places it instead on the plane of loyalty to an idea. Ask any Red Sox fan circa 2004: there is nothing sweeter than a long-delayed victory, made even sweeter because of the turmoil wrought on the long-suffering fanbase.

In O’Neil’s X-Men-as-sports-team metaphor, there’s really only one thing the owners of a sports team can use to scare off fans, and it’s a thing Marvel decided to try around the millennium (Oddly, it was the very thing that brought me to check out the X-books for the first time, but then I didn’t stick around too long, which proves O’Neil’s point).

Speaking of the X-Men and pieces of online writing about comics I enjoyed…: Early last week Derek Halliday reviewed Del Rey’s X-Men: Misfits book, and he does a much, much better job than I did, being more knowledgeable about both the X-Men and manga. Additionally, his post has a whole bunch of imagery from the book. Check it out.

And speaking of speaking of…: What the heck, have another. Here’s Graeme McMillian on the X-Men at The Savage Critics. It’s his third post in a series about Claremont’s run on the franchise.

Catfight!: On an NPR blog, Glen Weldon checks in on the great Gotham City Sirens Vs. Marvel Divas battle of 2009. (Link swiped from Dirk Deppey). Remember all the talk about the first issue cover, the solicitation copy and Joe Quesada’s question-answering about Divas? How did all that affect sales? Apparently the impact was somewhere between “very little” and “none at all,” according to Paul O’Brien’s monthly sales data analysis at The Beat, as the first issue seems to have done less than 22,000 copies in the Direct Market. Well, actually, maybe all that attention did help sell a few thousand copies, as I didn’t expect it to sell more than 20K.

But Top Shelf didn’t even publish that book!: Gallery Books in San Francisco recommends David Small’s graphic novel Stitches (along with a mess of prose books) to the San Francisco Chronicle, as part of the paper’s feature “Top Shelf.”

“Graphic novels, which are books that are composed of consecutively ordered texts, panels and images, have brought new excitement to children’s reading”: I have not heard that particular phrasing, but that’s not a bad definition for a notoriously difficult to define term. It’s from an article about four comics in yesterday’s News & Observer by Susie Wilde. Binky the Space Cat, The Storm in the Barn, Stitches and Adventures in Cartooning are covered at the link.

No: Given Disney’s purchase of Marvel, and Boom Studios’ licensing deal with Disney for some properties, Comic Book Bin’s Hervé St-Louis asks “Should Marvel Comics Buy Boom Studios?”