“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?”

“That became my favorite toy, which then led me to the cartoon, which then led me to the comic books. From there, I got to know the characters. I mean, I really grew to like Optimus Prime. I feared Megatron.”: John Geddes of USA Today has a Q-and-A with IDW editor Andy Schmidt about the Transformers: Continum book he’s writing, as well as about Transformers and comics in general.

“Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?”: That’s cartoonist Tim Kreider reacting to getting an assignment to write about arrested adolescence for the New York Times. He discusses what he calls “The Referendum,”  which he defines as “a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt.” It makes for a pretty fun read.

“But it’s the sort of idea of that’s much funnier as a 10-second, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if this comic existed’ joke than as an actual, ‘let’s draw pictures of old naked grandmothers’ comic”: That’s the Onion AV Club on Moonstone’s comic…let’s see what was it called again…MILF Magnet. The piece picks the “most flawless” and “most troubling” book from a trio of publishers attending this weekend’s Windy City Comic Con in Chicago.

Look at how great Darwyn Cooke is: The 4thletter has a “portfolio review” of Cooke’s work available for your perusal here, and man, it is a whole lot of gorgeous in one place at one time. I was pleased to see the two-page spread of little DCU-themed newspaper comic strip and old magazine features from the Cooke issue of the late, great Solo included. I’ve been meaning to dig that out specifically to look at that spread again ever since Wednesday Comics launched. So thanks for saving me some longbox spelunking, David Brothers!

Yotsuba v. Yotsuba: What impact can a change in North American publisher have on a manga series? Check out this neat blog post comparing the original ADV Manga version of Yotsuba&! Vol. 4 with the new Yen Press version of the same volume, which was released this Wednesday.  (Via The Beat)

“Since it’s extra long, that means the other 30-odd pages are all stacks of rectangles, pages of them”: In the midst of his weekly excoriation of new comic books, Tucker Stone brings up an interesting point about the bland, static page and panel design you see in certain comics:

Because if you want interesting panel design, or you want interesting drawings, or you just would prefer—you know, comics that are trying to live up to something, as opposed to this safe ass pudding school—you can’t read these things. They don’t have it on a regular enough basis to make it any more reliable than a lottery ticket, and very few of them are drawn by somebody half as interesting as Goran Parlov. But if you just want to read something on a computer—or a PSP, or an iPhone—it’s pretty clear that DC & Marvel are getting you ready for it. All they have to do is give up completely, and they’re more than halfway there.

Damn. I never thought about that before, but he’s right, isn’t he? For more positive remarks from a member of the Stone family, check out Nina Stone’s glowing review of the latest Achewood collection.

Oh good, I’m not the only one who can’t seem to come to terms with a $4 Marvel comic: Here’s Vom Marlowe blogging at the The Hooded Utilitarian about checking out a recent copy of X-Men: Legacy out of curiosity the other day:

I picked it up and read it over coffee at the Squid Cafe, and I was….disappointed. First of all, this sucker cost me four bucks. It’s full of ads for cheesecake statues and Spiderman toothbrush holders. There’s a large excerpt in the back for some other comic. All of which is fine, except—there’s only twenty two pages of comic. For four dollars! That’s seventeen cents per page.

Well, it seemed a bit steep to me, considering I can get nearly two hundred pages of manga for 8.95 (or 5.37 if I have my Borders coupon).

This is the 600th installment of Linkarama@Newsarama: In his monthly look at Marvel’s periodical sales, Paul O’Brien brings up an interesting point about the dodgy math involved with anniversary issues that aren’t really anniversary issues:

And it gets better - because for August, Marvel solicited both HULK #13 and INCREDIBLE HULK #601. So apparently INCREDIBLE HULK #600 is the first issue of a new title which also doubles as HULK #12A. And that means the numbering of the new series is based on including issues of two completely other titles that are still being published.

So even if they’d got the maths right, this would still be perhaps the most artificial “anniversary” issue in history. And of course, on one level, that’s trivial. But anniversary issues generally sell rather well, because they’ve got an aura of significance about them. If you make a complete joke of them, as Marvel are doing with INCREDIBLE HULK, then in the long run that’ll undermine their drawing power.

Ha ha ha! “In the long run!” Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! Like they’ve ever thought about “the long run” over the course of the last 70 years!

Got a few minutes?: Then you really ought to check out Tom Spurgeon’s long, extremely well-thought out (and entertaining) thoughts on Disney buying Marvel and DC’s restructuring.

Don’t click on this link if you’re feint of heart: At Comics Alliance, Laura Hudson presents the “The 21 Awesomest Superhero Mods for My Little Pony.” They are all completely terrifying, as is the Jack Kirby Mighty Mugg.

“Yet British comics seldom get much of a look in, save for reverential nods to the Beano and the Dandy”: Johnny Davis takes a nice, long, thorough look at British comics for this article from Saturday’s Guardian. I guess it’s hard to overstate the importance of British comics, given the impact that British writers raised on and steeped in British comics had when they started doing work on our side of the Atlantic.

“Perry Announces Superhero Team To Patrol Border, Maybe Spawn Cable Series”: Hmm, I bet the Justice League would cream these guys. Ditto the Avengers. And the Outsiders, New Teen Titans, New Warriors and maybe even the Great Lakes Initiative.

“Some observers believe contemporary graphic novels, with their anti-heroes, visual appeal and edgy story lines are positioned to usurp the role that the novel once played”: That’s from an article—or press release?— on the traveling “LitGraphic: The World of The Graphic Novel” exhibit, which is heading into Toledo. You know, I like comics as much as the next comics blogger, but I think those unnamed observers are way, way wrong.

“An 86-year-old cartoonist named Stan Lee is probably too old to turn handspring”: That the first sentence of this crazy-ass guest article in the St. Petersburg Times about the Disney/Marvel deal. It is insane. Lee is one of the most influential editors and writers in American comics history, but a cartoonist? And here’s the rest of the paragraph:

But very shortly he will be a principal beneficiary in the $4 billion sale of Marvel Comics to Walt Disney Co. Marvel controls Lee’s Spiderman and other action heroes, and this huge sale puts an end to the curse of Superman, which netted its creators a mere $130 about 70 years ago.

Spider-Man spelled wrong, a weird conclusion drawn between Siegel and Shuster’s original shafting and Disney buying Marvel, and the bewildering headline of “Disney deal with Marvel recognizes value of comic book creators” (Don’t they mean “creations?” I heard a lot of talk about the valuable character catalog, but nothing about how happy Disney is to be working with Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar, John Romita Jr. and other current Marvel creators.)

“I love ‘em all…Drawing these monsters was very easy for me to do”: The Rutland Herald has a nice feature story about The Vermont Monster Guide, a non-fiction prose book by writer Jospeh Citro,  which should be of interest to comics fans because of the artist providing the illustrations—Stephen Bissette. Citro and Bissette previously collaborated on The Vermont Ghost Guide. You can find more information on the book, what Citro and Bissette are doing to promote it and some artwork from it on Bissette’s website.

It is, isn’t it?: Cheryl Lynn on the new Batgirl.

“Now, thanks to Age of Illumination, an ambitious new project from a trio of St. Louis artists, the two elements will be united with a comic book about a mythical piece of bling”: Here’s a pretty big feature story about a new comic work from a couple of rappers and artists from St. Louis.

“Now, by no means am I saying President Obama is Captain Planet, or even a superhero, for that matter”: Writer Nate Rott weighs in on the fake OMG The President Wants To Say Platitudes About School To School Children! controversy, and he does so after strolling through a pretty well-written, rather fond remembrance of the Captain Planet cartoon.  There’s one hard to overlook logical fallacy in Rott’s piece however—he refers to Captain Planet as both “ass-kicking” and overwhelmingly awesome. These are lies.

“I was struck by the fact that such similar titles were being released at the same time, and I wondered how they’d fare and how they compare”: Don MacPherson compares and contrasts two Supermen-gone-bad series, DC’s The Mighty and Boom’s Irredeemable, in this post. (He likes ‘em both). I was struck by the piece because although I liked both of the main creators on Mighty, and that I knew the book had something to do with a superhero character, I had no idea it was also a Superman-gone-bad story. So I’m either pretty dense (I do make at least a fraction of my living paying attention to comics), or Boom did a much, much, much, much, much better job of marketing their story.

I bet Orange Lantern Larfleeze wants one of these: In the course of his regular reviews of new comics, Living Between Wednesdays contributor Jonathan links to a set of photos featuring a home-made, stuffed Orange Lantern Larfleeze, made by LBW reader Elise “for cuddling purposes.” Click the link, and feel avarice growing in your heart.

What Kevin Church Has Been Writing: I enjoyed Church’s succint, one-paragraph review of Mirage’s recent edition of TMNT Collected Book One, a big, fat phonebook collecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s first comic books featuring their signature co-creation. A prior edition of that book was the first “graphic novel” I ever bought or read, and those comics ended up playing an enormous role in why I love comics so much. I’m curous how I’d receive those issues if I read them for the first time now, after years of criticizing comics and becoming much, much more demanding of them then I was as a 14-year-old kid just discovering that grids of drawings full of people hitting one another with ninja weapons could be so awesome. So go read Church’s blog. (A good way to tell you might have a problem wasting words? When you’re trying to link to someone else’s post, and your explanation of the link ends up being about the same length as the post you’re linking to. I need help, I think).

“A repellent, juvenile product—lazy in design, ignorant in preparation, and blind to the response it would create”: Check out Tucker Stone vs. Justice League: Cry For Justice, the Internet’s least favorite comic book. Specifically, Stone deals with the relatively high number of gay folks killed in the series so far, for basically no reason (That’s no story reason and no real-world reason). Blogger Dorian Wright took writer James Robinson to task for the same thing earlier in the week.

I apologize to anyone who was on pins and needles waiting for today’s installment of my thrice-weekly linkblogging. I try to get these up earlier than, like, halfway through your work day, but I was pretty discombobulated by the Labor Day holiday (Although I am proud of myself for remembering that new comics wouldn’t be on the racks until Thursday this week before driving to the shop this year).

Anyway, here are some things you can read when you’re not reading Newsarama, if you’re so inclined…

Ha  how cool would it be if Ant-Man ended up being the best superhero movie ever made?: Because if Pixar did make an Ant-Man flick, it would have a pretty good shot at the crown. Apparently Entertainment Weekly reported that the studio was looking at the least bad-ass sounding Marvel character, and folks reacted here, here, and here. Josh Tyler, who wrote the piece on Cinema Blend, lead off with this observation about the reception of the Disney/Marvel news: “the internet went into one of those all to [sic] frequent fanboy panics, in which nerds ran to their blogs and predicted a world where Marvel would be forced to make Donald Duck the newest member of the Fantastic Four.” Maybe he and I just read different comics blogs, but did anyone predict Donal Duck would be joining the Fantastic Four? Anyone who wasn’t joking, anyway?

“The comparison here is made more pitiful by the fact that Miller’s script for Born Again is hardly perfect… Yet he clearly understood the visual and structural aspects of a comics page as well as the creation of tension and suspense”: On Monday, The Comics Reporter ran an excellent essay by Ng Suat Tong regarding the disparity between the fame and influence of today’s prominent mainstream comics writers versus their artist collaborators, and the general weakness of many of those writers. The essay has sparked some sharp disagreements from other people who tend to  know what they’re talking about, including Heidi MacDonald of The Beat and blogger Sean T. Collins.

I’m afraid I don’t know enough about some of the particular examples cited in the original essay—I haven’t read enough of either Brian Michael Bendis’ Daredevil run or Ed Brubaker’s Captain America run to rate the former greatly superior to the latter, for example—to really argue with Ng Suat Tong or those that argue with him. But I think it’s hard to disagree with some of his broader points. Like, yeah, DC and Marvel often shaft the artists when it comes to collections and promotion, for example, and I’ve always believed the best comics stories are the ones that can only be told in the comics medium. So if Bendis’ Daredevil scripts and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man scripts read like they could be HBO dramas, then they’re pretty obviously not the pinnacle of the comics medium…although they are likely to be very popular and successful .

Anyway, check the piece out if you haven’t already. It’s definitely a well-written, example-filled thought-provoker and conversation-starter.

“What happens when Direct Market retailers can’t trust Diamond to keep them stocked?”: Blogger and retailer Christopher Butcher has an excellent—and kind of alarming—post about an incident in which a faithful regular  Beguiling customer requested a particular manga from “an imprint of the single largest publisher of books in the world” and he then realized that Diamond had never even solicited it. Butcher talks a bit about his experience as a retailer and the changes in the market he’s seen, and he realizes that the direct market likely won’t collapse over night, so much as gradually disappear:

With Amazon best-seller lists, and New York Times Graphic Novels Bestseller lists, and the popularity of manga, and graphic novels, and the big movie tie-ins and the rapid-fire collection of superhero stories into graphic novels, and THE INTERNET in all its forms (pirates especially), one day we’re going to look around and realize that no one really cares about the notion of a “Direct Market.” Everyone else will have moved on to the idea of graphic novels as a mass-market medium, available in all kinds of formats, from all kinds of venues.

Much more at the link. Give it a read.

Of course, one advantage or waiting until the middle of the day to post this, is it makes it easier to just steal other people’s links: For example, the aforementioned Heidi MacDonald linked to Becky Cloonan and Hwan Cho’s excellent-looking webcomic KGB (Yoink!) and an extensive Wired feature on the Covered blog (and yoink again!).

Is “decidedly different” even a dramatic enough term to describe Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot?: Speaking of Wired, their Jonathan Liu lists “6 Cool Comics With Decidedly Different Heroes,” ranging from Astro City to The Flaming Carrot.

“Megan Fox Loves the Three Comics She’s Ever Heard Of”: I love (looking at, listening to the voice of) Megan Fox as much as the next guy, who also loves (those things about) Megan Fox, but Laura Hudson’s challenge of Fox’s geek cred at Comics Alliance was pretty funny.

And on the subject of attractive actresses and comics: Apparently there’s a Kate Beckinsale shower scene in the Whiteout movie:

One scene that did make the transition is U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale)’s shower scene. To Hollywood critics, it may seem like a gratuitous moment to show off Beckinsale’s body, when the rest of the film would have her bundled up. Rucka jumped to the film’s defense.

“There was actually a story reason,” Rucka said. “It led to a flashback. There was an issue for the character of Carrie, between the cold and the heat. And you get to see her in the shower.”

Yes! Shower scenes that are there for a story reason are the best shower scenes!

Tim O’Neil asks, “Has Achewood Lost Its Groove?”: He doesn’t answer the question, just asks it, and ends up with an interesting post that deals with Charles Schulz, Nick Gurewitch, Aaron McGruder and Chris Ware as well.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s a superhero or comic book gallery exhibit being announced at least once a week now?: The University of Oregon is having a two-day conference on superheroes Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s fall exhibition “Faster than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of a Superhero.” The LA Times blogged about it here, you can learn more about the conference here, and more about the exhibit and the other neat stuff going on around it here.

How Matt Fraction made it: Speaking of the LA Times, they also have a profile of Matt Fraction that’s well worth a read.

This is what I want for every birthday from now on: Australian food blogger Johanna baked an awesome-looking comic book sound effect-shaped birthday cake for a niece’s superhero-themed party. You can see a picture and read a bit more about it here, and I suggest you give the post a look. That way you’ll know what to get me for my birthday.

Wait, what?: This dude thinks the fact that Tom Brevoort said “whenever your leads are white American males, you’ve got a better chance of reaching more people overall” means comic books are “institutionally racist” and that what Brevoort said was “a pretty damning statement.” I think it’s a pretty big jump—like, of the sort The Hulk makes to get around—to take from a simple statement along the lines of “the facts say this” to “the facts say this, because white men rule, everyone else totally sucks.”

“Not since the original Superman way back in 1978 has any superhero movie released in December has gone on to be a major hit”: Josh Tyler of Cinema Blend notes that the troubled Green Hornet movie has pushed its release day way back into December of next year, and thinks this means it’s committing “superhero suicide.” Um, did anyone actually think a Green Hornet movie was ever going to be a “major hit?” Because, if so, I woulda been happy to set ‘em straight, like, five years ago.

“Just a couple of years ago, it was tough to find good graphic novels for the K–4 crowd”: Writing for School Library Journal, Peter Gutiérrez notes how times have changed in the bound-comics-for-the-youngest-readers market, and assembles a list of great graphic novels for little kids. I read and enjoyed an awful lot of books on this list. Hopefully that means that they’re also effective all-ages comics, and not that I read at a fourth grade level.

And he drew it in just two weeks?!: This story about Kate and Jules Feiffer’s April picture book Which Puppy? is similar to earlier stories on their collaboration, but is well worth a look because a) It’s always fun to read about great cartoonists and  and b) there’s a neat little video showing the Feiffers together, and Jules Feiffer drawing.

If you thought elements of Speedy II’s story seemed like after school special material, good news!: The former teen prostitute, HIV-positive version of Green Arrow’s sidekick will apparently be appearing on Smallville this season, and producers have plans to deal with her “dark” and “sordid” past. It’s not an after school special exactly, but it is a TV drama, so there’s that. Huh. Speedy II. I don’t watch the show, but I know we do reports here pretty frequently and thus I see all the heroes who are guest-starring in certain episodes. By this point, every character in the DCU has appeared on Smallville save Angel and The Ape, Sugar and Spike, Space Cabby and The Heckler, right?

“The author says she hopes for something between the Betty-and-Veronica she grew up on and the Japanese manga of which her own daughter, Alex, is such a fan”: The LA Times talks to superstar mystery novelist Janet Evanovich about her upcoming comic work for Dark Horse, which she’s writing with her daughter. No word on an artist yet, but the book is scheduled for release next year.

“As any cartoonist knows, at some point you have to move out of your parents’ basement”: So say Jo Wos, founder of Pittsburgh’s ToonSeum, which is about to move out of it’s current home in the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and get its own place. Much more here.

You know when cartoon characters see something amazing and their eyes get real long and veiny and bug out of their eye sockets?: Did you know there was a particular name for those? Blecky Yuckarella would be happy to share it with you, if you click here; please note the comic strip has an image of a baby eating a man’s head, so if you’re at work in a place in which Johnny Ryan drawings of a baby eating a man’s head  are frowned upon, maybe don’t click on it…?

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one thinking about capturing certain Wedenesday Comics contributors in an attempt to delay them long enough that the Plastic Man strip would run: On his blog, Evan Dorkin reveals that the Plastic Man one-pager that Wednesday Comics editor Mark Chiarello comissioned as a back-up in case someone missed a deadline was by DeStefano and himself. (Damn, DeStefano was one of the creators I most wanted to see do Wednesday Comics, too!) I was hoping the final issue of the series might be over-sized to allow for the two back-ups, one featuring Plas and one featuring The Creeper, to run, but they’d need four additional pages, and I suppose at this point it’s probably too late to throw together two more pages (I wouldn’t say no to a Joe Kubert and Paul Pope splash page just to fill that thing out though, Mr. Chiarello, sir…or a Kyle Baker Hawkman-giving-the-thumbs-up poster double-page splash suitable for framing…). As Dorkin writes, it will probably appear somewhere eventually. Maybe DC can put it in a collection of all the stuff it had finished but never published, like some of the crazy story from the Elseworlds 80-Page Giant that have yet to see print…