Also, are those supposed to be scare quotes around good fight? Is God being sarcastic?: Check out Comics Curmudgeon Josh Fruhlinger on the worst political cartoons dealing with Ted Kennedy’s death this week. And that’s “worst” as in, “Wow, that’s pretty lazy, isn’t it?” kind of way.

Huh, I guess I better hurry up and read it then: Deb Aoki, who knows a lot more about manga than I do, thinks this year’s Ignatz nominations may mark the first time that a manga work has been nominated in two categories.  Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary was nominated twice.

“Until this month, the only American comic book that successfully achieved the depth and complexity of a novel was Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth“: I wouldn’t feel comfortable making such a bold statement, since it seems like one that’s relatively easy to knock down, but Paul Constant raises an interesting point about the term “graphic novel” in his review of Asterios Polyp for The Stranger. So many of the most popular and highest regarded “graphic novels” tend not to be novels at all.

“Monsters of Webcomics” is the best name for a museum exhibit ever: The San Francisco Chronicle has a piece up about a show at The Cartoon Art Museum’s featuring the work of Kate Beaton, Phil and Kaja Folio, Chis Onstad, Nicholas Gurewitch, Jesse Reklaw and others. Sounds pretty neat.
Meanwhile, Ann Taylor writes about the show for SF Station.

“They can shove it up their jacksies”: That is one of EW’s Ken Tucker’s favorite parts of Dark Entries. I like the fact that it’s a Hellblazer original graphic novel, the title of which doesn’t begin with  word “Hellblazer” followed by a colon. People telling people to shove things up other things is always cool too, though.

“Yes, Jimmy has entered a parallel universe whose main feature is a law that anyone not wearing a cape can be immediately taken into custody and sold as a slave”: Hey, anyone pick up the James Robinson-written conversation-fest that was Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen Special #2 this week? Did it seem a tad bit…what’s the word…boring as hell? Could that be because it strayed so far from the proud tradition of past Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen stories being completely insane? Mmmaybe. For a good example of how insane your average Jimmy Olsen story oughta be, check out Invincible Super-Blogger and semi-professional Jimmy Olsenologist Chris Sims’ examination of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #117.

“What makes her qualified? All I can tell is that she’s got the costume and some kind of CB radio”: Comic Book Virgin Nina Stone picks up the first issue of the new Batgirl comic book and she does not care for it. As usual, it’s interesting reading a smart, eloquent and, most importantly, completely-open-to-being-entertained-by-and-sold-on-a-comic person like Stone responding to a book like this. That is, she’s more than willing to meet Batgirl #1 halfway there—heck, three-quarters of the way there—can it manage to cover the rest of the distance? I particularly liked the reading of the scene where it appears one Batgirl has committed suicide. What seems odd to me personally about the first issue is that it seems to be setting up the exact same character dynamic and premise of the last (canceled) volume of Batgirl, which someone at DC apparently had decided didn’t work just a few short years ago.

“I figured I’m in great company with van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper”: That’s long-time Dick Tracy cartoonist Dave Locher responding to being painted into a mural of famous artists in his home town. Here’s a nice little local feature on the mural project.

Tony DePaul seems pretty confident that the American newspaper industry will survive at least another year and a half: According to The Daily Cartoonist, DePaul, who currently writes The Phantom strip, is planning a 20-month storyline instead of the regular 17-week one.

This looks neat: It’s a collectible card set featuring “New York superheroes,” although the term “superhero” seems used rather loosely. Still, even if it was called “various general New York stereotypes,” it would still be pretty neat. (Via here and here).

Completely anonymous lady to cosplayers: Don’t cosplay if you want to seduce your favorite comic book creator and/or become friends with them while at a convention. What’s that? Everyone on earth who cosplays cosplays because they like cosplaying, and not to seduce/befriend creators at conventions? Oh, disregard everything I just said then.

Finally, a fish to help Batman fight the Joker fish: Ichthyologist Pablo Lehmann has named a new species of catfish Otocinclus batmani, on account of the black markings on its tail that resemble the bat-symbol. Of course, if you read the journal Neotropical Ichthyology, then you already knew that. (Link stolen from Mike Sterling).

“Now Archie is set to marry into money, hopefully the price was worth his soul”: I love reading reactions to the Archie/Veronica wedding like this one, whether the writer is joking, half-joking or deadly serious. Did newspapers run stuff like this for every DC “imaginary story” and deliberately provocatively misleading cover in the Silver Age? Did people express outrage over Wonder Woman choosing to marry Mr. Monster instead of Steve Trevor, or Lois Lane marrying Bruce Wayne instead of Clark Kent?

“The story…is written by Michael Uslan (who produced the Batman movies), and—you might want to sit down for this one—it is not very good”: Invincible Super-Blogger, Jimmy Olsen enthusiast and regular Archie Comics reader Chris Sims covers the wedding issue here. Will Sims be able to squeeze references to both the Willennium and the Millennium Giants into a few paragraphs on the latest issue of Archie? Click the link to find out!

Oh snap!: Here’s Douglas Wolk, from his “Don’t Ask! Just Buy it!” column at Comics Alliance, talking about Wednesday Comics: “It’s great to see a lot of these artists thinking about effective, inventive things to do with a gigantic page. (Extra points to the Flash team for the marvelous split-strip effect.) It’d be even more fun to see more artists taking a similarly inventive approach to the page design of DC’s regular-sized titles.”

Was August 19th the least funny the funnies have ever been?: Josh Fruhlinger provides evidence that may support that assertion.

“I honestly can’t believe I typed that last sentence”: How great is Achewood? So great that just reading a fairly straightforward fifteen-paragraph synopsis of the current, still-in-progress storyline may make you both laugh out loud and shake your head in awe. Seriously. (Link via Dirk Deppey).

Tony Millionaire’s cover for Moby Dick: If you click on this expecting to see Ishmael about to attempt to throw a harpoon through Captain Ahab’s butthole, out his mouth and into the great, white whale, you will be disappointed.

“World’s first Muslim superheroes, the 99, out to conquer the West”: Wait a minute Times, if The 99 were only created three years ago, they can’t possibly be the world’s first Muslim superheroes.

“Polluted Streams Breed Super Strong Mosquitoes”: This article points out how remarkably comic book-y that fact is, but what happens if one of those super-mosquitoes bites a high school nerd? Is that super-strength transferable? Will said nerd gain the proportionate strength of a mosquito?

I just call them “Wednesdays”: Kevin Huizenga proposes a new holiday, “Read Comics All Day…Day.”

It’s not like there aren’t ten million Tezuka pages available: Comics adapting movies (or cartoons) that are themselves adaptations of comics are usually kinda hinky, but when the original source material is the work of one of the greatest cartoonists of all time, well, it just seems weird. It’s definitely cool for IDW and the creators involved that USA Today is promoting their adaptation of the Astro Boy movie, but it sort of bums me out a little that an Astro Boy comic by someone other than Tezuka is getting pushed by USA Today.

Two super-film notes from New York Magazine’s Vulture blog: There’s some news of a casting change in the animated Ooberman, the plot of which makes me want to reread Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s Empire, as the synopsis sounds kind of familiar (although I suppose it’s always the details and the execution that makes or breaks a riff on a familiar idea), and word on Spider-Man 5 and Spider-Man 6. Man, if they don’t put the Sinister Six in Spider-Man 6….

“Strapless and In Spandex, Models Strut Their Superhero-Inspired Looks at the Rivoli”: Only one of outfits in this blog post about a fashion show struck me as particularly superhero-esque, and the mask (kind of a sexy Grifter look) was probably meant to be more evocative of a criminal than a hero (the title of the show was “Bandits in Bows”), but using the word “superhero” in the headline did successfully get me to take a look and link to it.

“Actually, it is such a faceless profession that unless a creator has an obviously ethnic last name, a reader has no idea what nationality the writer or artist is”: I don’t really see the appeal of Marvel’s newer Noir books, which seem to focus not on straight-up superhero characters like Spider-Man and the X-people so much as characters who already have one foot or more in the world of regular old crime fiction (Daredevil, Wolverine, Luke Cage). One good thing about the Cage series though? It lead to a nice feature article and interview with Shawn Martinborough here. The quote above is in answer to a question regarding whether he’s frustrated by there being too few African American illustrators in comics. He’s certainly right about the facelessness of the profession, where in all readers really know about the creators is their byline and their work. (I remember, when I first started reading comics, for example, being surprised to learn than Kelley Jones and Cam Kennedy were men). Come to think of it, a creators byline and their work is probably all you need to know about a creator, isn’t it?

Fight! Fight! Fight!: So the other day Comic Book Bin’s Hervé St-Louis wrote an article responding to recent movement in the Who Owns What Where Superman Is Concerned legal battles. Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon said the editorial was “so wrongheaded it makes my teeth hurt” and counted nine problems with it, and then  St-Louis responded to Spurgeon’s response to his essay. St-Louis loses me pretty quickly in his second essay, as he seems to start out arguing that Superman should be public domain, an argument in the opposite direction of the DC doesn’t owe the Siegels anything position taken elsewhere. I also have a hard time wrapping my head around his statement that “The most important people in the comic book industry are the fans,” and not just because everyone knows the most important people in the comic book industry are actually us bloggers. Like, I can kinda almost see what he means from an economic perspective—that is. if no one buys comics, there isn’t an industry—but then, “industry” and “medium” are different things entirely and, more importantly, “fans” can’t be fans without something to be a fan of, and that means a creator has to create something for them first, right? At any rate, back to what I learned to do in grade school whenever I saw a disagreement among my peers: Fight! Fight! Fight! (UPDATE: As you’ll see at the third link, St-Louis’ second essay has been taken down and is currently being reviesed. Sorry; it was still up and thus a more relevant link when I wrote this).

“Richmonder sells rare ‘Archie’ comic to protest character’s wedding”: That’s what the headline to this article says, anyway. I guess that’s a more exciting hook than “Richmonder sells ‘Archie’ comic to make $32,500.” The CBC also has a story on the subject. Far sexier than either story is this one by Rachelle Goguen on her blog Living Between Wednesdays, in which she takes a close look at all the girls in Riverdale Archie chose Veronica over.

“I never knew that a person could actually be bored to tears until I read Josh Neufeld’s new graphic book about Hurricane Katrina”: That’s Newsweek’s Adam B. Kushner on Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. Kushner’s assessment of Neufeld’s book isn’t quite as harsh as it sounds—he’s using Maus as a measuring stick, after all. That is a heck of a grabby lead  though, isn’t it? (As for the tears, Kushner was actually in tears because he was affected by the content of the book). Regardless of what Kusher has to say about Neufeld’s book though, the peice is well worth a read for what he says about the medium:

One reason the recent spate of graphic novels has produced little memorable work is that, well, comics are really hard to make. Spiegelman spent 13 years on Maus; Neufeld took three for A.D. (which first appeared in a series online). But it’s not just about technical chops. The real problem is a shortage of introspection and metaphorical ingenuity… great graphic novels, a form already much harder to produce, still have to match the achievements of imagination in other disciplines. No wonder there are so few.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “little memorable work,” but if Kushner’s talking about there being too few Mauses among the explosion of original graphic novels—and comic books and strips created to eventually be graphic novels—well I suppose he has a point. Anyway, please consider giving the piece a read and a think.

“Think back to the original novel. Comic books are the only books shallow enough to go unburned, the only ones people are still allowed to read”: Sarah Boxer points out an interesting irony of the Fahrenheit 451 graphic novel adaptation in this piece for Slate:

As the end time for printed books draws near, Fahrenheit 451, the 1953 novel that envisioned it all, has just been published, again. And this time it reads like a joke—an extended, ironic, illustrated joke. Because this time, Ray Bradbury’s novel about firemen who burn books instead of putting out fires is—oof!—a comic book.

Damn, it was a good weekend for comic book think pieces in the non-comics media…

Speaking of Slate speaking of comics: Here’s Lisa Schmeiser on the curious fact that blockbuster superhero movies never seem to move the dial on the sales of the comic books they’re based on. It would be a lot more interesting a piece if Schmeiser spoke to more people who knew what they were talking about regarding the business end of comics, but then the companies she’s talking about are notoriously tight-lipped about any and all sales data, so there probably wasn’t much more she could have done.

Well I didn’t expect to see that name in an article headlined “Kinky is commonplace at annual fetish convention”: George Perez was at Fetish Con in Tampa this past week. Not on a panel about orange-skinned alien fetishes or anything, just as a con-goer. “It’s wonderful to meet these free-spirited people,” he told the Tampa Tribune, ” Everyone here is accepted for whatever their kinky bend is.” Hmm, what’s Perez’s kinky bend? I’m going to guess crowds. Extremely detailed crowds.

Kerry Callen hearts Tigra: Callen, the creator of the delightful Halo and Sprocket, is a Tigra fan, and he’s got some blog posts to prove it. This Sunday he posted a six-page Tigra strip he submitted to Marvel in the early ’90s, and, speaking of Callen and Tigra, here’s his cover of the cover to Marvel Chillers #3 for the blog Covered last month.

But the Batmobile is only a two-seater: Carpooling with superheroes seems like it would be a lot more trouble than it’s worth, what with the car chases, and the people shooting at you, and all the emergency stops and detours to answer Bat-signals or stop muggings.

Ever wonder what Chuck Dixon looks and sounds like?: Then check out this 47-second local TV news feature covering his stop at Comic Quest in Evansville, Indiana.

Local boy makes good: The London Free Press does a nice, basic feature on cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley, who’s about to get a whole lot more famous when the Scott Pilgrim movie drops.

Tom Spurgeon makes me laugh: Check out his reaction to Marvel’s 70th anniversary celeberation.

“It’s not ‘decadence’ in the proper literary sense, but then superhero comics have rarely been considered proper literature”: Check out Joe “Jog” McCulloch on three of last week’s decadent superhero comics, including Dark Reign: Zodiac, which looks pretty gorgeous. Any of you guys reading that? Is it as good as it looks? (And Jog makes it sound?)

“That’s the good news. The bad news is that the ‘Batman’ serial is racist”: The LA Times has a short piece about a screening of the 1943 Batman serial, which depicts the Japanese in ways that are…well, less than enlightened. The LA Times loses 50 points for using “Holy zombies, Batman!” as the lead to the story.

“Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor”: Steven Ellis reviews The Art of Harvey Kurtzman for the New York Times, and finds it hard to overestimate Kurtzman’s influence on our culture.

Fall can’t get here soon enough: Tom Spurgeon has a list of many of the best looking books coming out in the latter half of the year, or, as he puts it, “A Potentially Astounding Fall.” You know, even if I still had summer vacation and start a new year of school in the fall I think I’d still be looking forward to the end of this particular summer, if it meant we’d start seeing some of these books.

“I have finally accepted that, although I can enjoy the Wonder Woman comic, I have no interest in Wonder Woman as a character”: 4thletter’s Esther Inglis-Arkell just isn’t that in to Wonder Woman, and explains why. Once again it sounds to me like many of the problems with the Wonder Woman character are problems with today’s Wonder Woman (and the Wonder Woman from the last, oh, fifty years or so now). The original Wonder  Woman? None of these problems. See DC, this is why you need a Wonder Woman Chronicles reprint project stat!

Until we get a Doll Man Archives collection, these will do: Here’s a big post full of the little hero’s adventures, courtesy of Golden Age Comics Stories. Ray Palmer and Henry Pym wish they could make that outfit work like Darrel Dane could. (Link stolen from Dirk Deppey)

“Apparently, Marvel’s doing something with the Ultimate universe…”: Comics writer and blogger Kevin Church takes a look at an Ultimates—or is it Ultimate Comics: The Avengers now?—cover, and shares his thoughts about it. I kinda hope he’s on to something with his observation about Hawkeye’s costume.

A thought has occurred to me since my original reaction to Hal Jordan sexing with half the Birds of Prey: How old is The Huntress supposed to be now? And how old is Hal Jordan supposed to be? (Hal should be in his early 40’s, if Green Arrow sired Green Arrow II and Black Lightning had Thunder and Lightning by the time they were being superheroes, but whatever). Because Huntress also slept with Dick “Nightwing” Grayson and Roy “Arsenal-at-the-time” Harper, and those guys were both just teenagers when Hal Jordan was already a full-grown man Green Lantern-ing about. So, there should be at least ten years between Hal and the grown-up teen sidekicks, if not closer to 20. So was Huntress robbing the cradle with Dick and Roy, or robbing the grave with Hal? (And is it made extra-gross by the uncle/nephew relationship Brad Meltzer was depicting between Hal and Roy during his Justice League of America run?)

That’s Stardust, The Super Wizard, thanks: A guy spends all that time busting his ass to become not only a wizard, but a super-wizard, and these critics go around just calling him Stardust. Feh. Anyway, here’s Crave Online’s  Iann Robinson on You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!, and the work of Fletcher Hanks in general. I’m not sure I agree with a lot of what Robinson says about Hanks and his work (or the way he says it), beyond the fact that Hanks’ work is pretty awesome.

“The 16 graphic novels summarized below capture different facets of the era and the historic festival, which took place 40 years ago next week”: Woodstock’s 40th anniversary is next week, so Library Journal has a list of suggestions of graphic novels for librarians to display to coincide with the event. I’d just put up a bunch of Peanuts collections, as Snoopy’s little yellow friend was my first introduction to the word.

“I’ve been trying to avoid this all week… but it doesn’t seem to be going away”: Drew Friedman, the cartoonist and illustrator who drew President George W. Bush in Dark Knight Joker make-up last year for Vanity Fair, gives in and responds to that President Barack Obama in Dark Knight Joker make-up (plus the word “socialism,” for added message confusion) story. “The Obama/Joker image just doesn’t work as satire, humor or anything else,” Friedman says, while discussing what he was saying with his piece (which mentioned repeatedly during the week in conjunction with the Obama piece) and noting when he did it, which was the week Dark Knight was released.

It’s hard out there for an elf: Jessica McLeod’s Working Class Elf, one of this week’s online comics from Top Shelf 2.0, tells the story of a darling little shape-stacking elf that gets laid off from his shape-stacking job. It’s cute, timely, depressing and uplifting, in the space of 25 pages. (McLeod’s yeti comics, Bad Yeti and Yeti Party, are pretty swell too. Hooray for Jessica McLeod!)

A very variant Wednesday: It’s no secret that the Big Two and many of their imitators have embraced variant covers with increasing fervor over the past few years. It’s still surprising to see to what degree some of the major players are embracing them, though. Yesterday Johanna Draper Carlson took a close look at Marvel’s shipping list for today, did some counting and some math and, wow. Visit her site to see the exact numbers and, perhaps of greater interest, what percentage of Marvel’s releases are variant covers this week and how that compares to DC’s total week of releases.

“Rumpus mcgooo?”: Tom Spurgeon has a brief observation about a term Black Canary used in a line of dialogue in last week’s Wonder Woman #34 that’s pretty funny. Do people use that term to refer to asses in real life, or is it DCU slang, or does Black Canary just talk like that? And, if it’s just the way Black Canary talks, why does anyone hang out with Black Canary?

“It’s not that I don’t care about the way they look, but what’s most important is that they be funny”: Michael Kupperman discusses his work in a Honolulu Star-Bulletin feature.

“In the male-dominated world of comic books…it’s interesting to examine whether or not…Muslim super-heroines escape the sexual objectification and sexism that women often suffer in comic books”: Jehanzeb Dar pens an excellent examination of  Sooraya “Dust” Qadir, the female, Muslim mutant character Grant Morrison introduced during his run on New X-Men at Altmulimah.com. I can’t disagree with any of the points raised from any position other than, “Well, at least Morrison and Marvel were trying to be inclusive, and didn’t put her in a bikini or anything.” Which, you know, obviously isn’t a tenable position.

No one was murdered at Comic-Con International: Don MacPherson checked in with San Diego police to see how well comic fans behaved during their annual congregation in the city. Pretty well, apparently.

“We’re happy to do the straight adaptations, but those are less fulfilling”: That’s Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson on the publisher’s preference for prequel style film tie-ins over comic book adaptations, in a Variety story about the symbiotic relationship between comics and film, particularly as far as marketing is concerned. I found the numbers interesting in a deperssing sort of way, as writer Marc Graser says, “For a book to be considered successful, it needs to move 20,000 units per issue.” Yikes. Is the bar low enough yet? Of course, Graser also says Dark Horse published 30 Days of Night, so perhaps it should all be taken with a grain of salt.

It probably helps that the joke is like over 25 years old, too: The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna is collecting political cartoons on the Obama-sponsored Crowley/Gates beer-having that all use the exact same joke. One interesting thing about cases like this is the opportunity it affords to see how different cartoonists frame/present the same gag, and the little differences in each artist’s final product.

“I don’t know where that quest will take her, but the way I figure, it’s got to be better than being a schoolgirl by day and a rock star by night”: The New York Times has an excellent essay by Peggy Orenstein about little girls and superheroes, occasioned by Orenstein’s daughter asking if she could dress up as Wonder Woman for her sixth birthday party. It’s well worth a read, and, if you’re in the business of making or the habit of supporting superhero comic books, well worth a think (I think).

“We love you a lot, but we don’t know if we love you enough to wear spandex”: So said Sarah LaFore’s bridesmaids when they learned their friend was having a superhero-themed wedding. The Sun Journal ran a feature story on the ceremony the day beforehand. The bride was Wonder Woman, the groom was Superman, and Batman, Aquaman, Spider-Man and a bunch of Amazons made up the wedding party. There are plenty of pictures with the piece, too. You may want to check the Sun Journal again this afternoon to see if any villains attacked. At the very least I wouldn’t be suprised if Lois Lane and Steve Trevors had something to say at the “speak now or forever hold your peace” portion of the proceedings.

“You can tell that Johns is trying very hard to write something that doesn’t just lie there on the page, and in these troubled times, that counts for much with me”: Johnny Bacardi has an excellent review of the beginning of Geoff Johns’ Blackest Night event/story, made all the more interesting by the fact that Bacardi explains that he isn’t exactly a huge fan of Green Lantern, or of continuity-heavy event books, or of superhero decadence, or of Geoff Johns’ plotting, but still found himself admiring “the scope and the lurid drive of the thing.”

“Who…wants to read this crap? Whose idea of a hero is a NPR commentator in a swimsuit?”: Noah Berlatsky is still reviewing his way through the Wonder Woman catalog, and he’s really not into the Greg Rucka run, as that quote no doubt indicates (and it’s one of the nicer assessments of Rucka’s Wonder Woman-as-celebrity/political figure take in Berlatsky’s piece). I say it depends on the NPR commentator, are we talking Daniel Schorr or Kevin Kling? Kathryn Yu or Baxter Black?

Speaking of NPR…: Their Lynn Neary recently profiled artist Tim Hamilton’s graphic novel adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. You can give it a read and/or listen here.

“All of this serves once again to make the company…continue to look like a slow-moving behemoth, incapable of making decisions, compared with the new kid on the block, Marvel Comics”: In a blog post for The Guardian, Ben Child discusses Warner Brothers’ reluctance to formally, officially announce the next Batman movie, and wonders why they’re having such relative trouble making a Superman, Wonder Woman or another Batman movie. Personally, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Hal Jordan is going to end up beating Wonder Woman to the silver screen.

“The two faces of Condi and Michelle”: In a post at Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan discusses the way that former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was depicted by political cartoonists “with all of her features exaggerated in the most unflattering—and, let’s be honest, racist —way,” while First Lady Michelle Obama gets off easier. He presents some examples, but I’m not convinced there’s a double standard at work here, since there’s a much simpler explanation—as first national security advisor to President George W. Bush and then his secretary of state, Rice was a much more powerful figure than a first lady. Something interesting for political cartoonist observers to think about, anyway.

“The first female G.I. Joe action nurse is produced, which turned out to not be popular”: The Chicago Tribune offers a timeline of G.I. Joe history, from the 1941 comic strip to next month’s live-action movie.

That’s just marvelous, man: Among the “big” “news”  of this year’s San Diego Comic Con International, at least as far as Big Two super-comics are concerned, dealt with Marvel Comics and Marvelman. I assume you’ve already heard the news, right?  It seems like a really big deal, at least until you actually read the announcement, which basically just says Marvel has some of the rights to Marvelman, they’ll pursue reprints and new stories at some point in the future and they’re “talking to” creators Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham (Which presumably means they’re trying to secure the rights to reprint the only stories anyone really cares about, but aren’t there yet). So add that all together, and it basically amounts to “Big announcement! A big announcement could come in the future!” In the meantime, they’re selling a Joe Quesada poster and t-shirt of the Miracleman logo. Our own David Pepose spent some time this weekend walking us through the convoluted history of one of the most legally disputed characters in comics, and Steve Bissette has an excellent post about that convoluted history here. Also offering salient (and cynical) commentary are Alan David Doane (Headline: “Marvelman: What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Wait, It Just Did”) and Christopher Bird (“I’m sure that twenty years of lawsuits will all go away now”).

“I would like to know more about this sort of thing. But, instead, the two major comics companies seem devoted to onanism”: The Onion AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff goes off on an interesting tangent about how damn impenetrable Big Two super-comics are after attempting to understand what he saw at a DC panel at San Diego last week. Any article that includes the words “comics” and “onanism” in the same sentence is a good one in my book. Also at the AV Club is a nice “Gateway to Geekery” piece about Hernandez Brothers’ Love and Rockets comics; I particularly appreciated it as I had previously wrestled with how to approach the expansive universe of their comics, which had grown quite large by the time I started reading comics.

Cartoonist cat fight: In a previous edition of Linkarama, I had linked to a report of the rivalry between Becky Cloonan and Amy Reeder Hadley exploding into violence at MOCCA. According to The Beat, the two had it out again at last week’s Comic Con International, and, as they say in the funnybooks, Hadley got knocked the @#$% out!

Stay-at-home Diego Comic Con: The Fantagraphics employees who didn’t go to the big show this year had their own Fantacon 2009, while blogger/stuffed animal Bully The Little Stuffed Bull staged Bully-Con 2009. In other Bully-related news, check out this post about that which Daredevil seems to spend much of his time fighting (Hint: It ain’t ninjas or obese bald men who wear white before, during and after Memorial Day).

I guess that’s why Spider-Man just wears a full-face mask: Canadian pop star Skye Sweetnam demonstrates her make-up strategies for a couple different superhero looks. It looks like an awful lot of work, and a good argument for just wearing a mask

“Obama may be battling this recession one page at time, by increasing comic sales and giving those smaller comic companies a fighting chance”: So says the New York Daily News in a sad little article rounding up all of the terrible-looking comic books Barack Obama is appearing in and on this summer. The headline for the piece, naturally enough, begins with the word “POW!”

Speaking of the New York Daily News, I somehow missed this incredible headline a few weeks back: “Holy throwback to old-style newspaper strips, Batman! DC Comics unveils weekly ‘Wednesday Comics‘”

In the off chance you haven’t seen this yet: Here’s Abhay Khosla’s Abhay Khosla’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Read it and weep…with laughter. (Via Everyone and Their Mothers)