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)

The biggest announcements from San Diego that you haven’t heard yet: Unless you read Invincible Super-Blogger Chris Sims’ con report this weekend. If you haven’t, check it out—it’s one scoop after another!

“I’m of Glasgow stock so I’m pretty good at telling stories, which is a good skill to have in this line”: The Daily Record has a nice thorough feature story on Simon Fraser artist of Nikolai Dante, some Judge Dredd, online comic Lily Mackenze and The Mines of Charybdis and too many other comics to mention.

David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp still being reviewed from coast to coast: Douglas Wolk reviews it for the New York Times, while David L. Ulin reviews it for the Los Angeles Times.

Update on cartoonist David Rees’ war with Jamba Juice: The company released a statement on the controversy on Friday, in which they specifically do not endorse the opinions expressed in Rees’ work. As Rees notes, this means Jamba Juice has not decided to second his opinion that President George W. Bush is a war criminal.

I hate to use this space for anything approaching self-promotion, but…: Any Blog@ readers who are going to be in Columbus, Ohio between August 1 and August 28  should make sure they stop by the Mahan Gallery in the Short North to check out the exhibition “This is a Comic Book,” which features art by Anders Nilsen, Cole Johnson, John Porcellino, Lauren Weinstein, Matt Furie, Nate Powell and plenty of other great comics artists. And while you’re there, you should also see bout buying a copy of the small run catalog-zine being published for the show,  a catalog-zine which features an essay by me (among other, better content). More info on the show here.

“DeCarlo’s book seems out of place in today’s marketplace simply because kinky illustration has lost its footing in the mainstream American marketplace”: Noah Berlatsky recently re-posted a review of Fantagraphics’ 2005 collection The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo, which makes for a very interesting read. Berlatsky’s focus isn’t so much on the quality of DeCarlo’s work—it’s DeCarlo’s after all, which is really all the review one needs—as much as how dated that work from the 1950s reads today, and how much our ideas of what’s sexy and what’s funny and what’s acceptable have changed over all that time.

“Food and manga, then, are a perfect pairing — at least in Japan”: San Diego’s Union-Tribune takes a very interesting tack on their requisite comics coverage this week, discussing food-oriented manga and whether the genre, which is huge in Japan, will be able to make it in the U.S. market. Viz’s Oishinbo, being the most popular food manga in Japan, is apparently being seen as a test case of sorts. Extra points to the Union-Tribune for a great headline.

For a split second, I thought this io9 article was about Benedict XVI: “Pope Talks DJing, Comics And Eternal Experiences”

“The van Gogh of the Gross-Out”: Check out this New York Times article about Basil Wolverton, occasioned by a career retrospective of the influential Mad artist’s work at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery this summer.

Having just invented fire and domesticated dogs, the cavemen of B.C. wrote books about combining the two, apparently: The comic strip B.C. raised some hackles with a joke about setting a dog on fire (?) the other day. This is significant because usually when B.C. pisses people off, it has something to do with religion.

“’Watchmen’” is my candidate for the smartest, deepest, most intriguing superhero movie ever”: I know they say there’ s no accounting for taste, but…wow. This Robert Butler fellow really loved Watchmen. Or he never saw any other superhero movies. Either way, here’s a pretty positive review of the movie, and a helpful little rundown of the various way in which you can watch it now that there are several DVD versions available.

“DC Comics’ Johns: Green Lantern Could Rival Batman, Superman”: Not to be disagreeable or anything, but no, no Green Lantern couldn’t.

Matt Brady officially becomes the last person on the Internet to read Final Crisis, writes about it: The Matthew J. Brady who is an entirely different person than the Matt Brady of Newsarama fame just read the trade collection of Final Crisis, and it sure sounds like a different experience than reading the individual issues. His review is well worth a read though, coming as it does from the perspective of someone who heard about the book for months upon months before getting a chance to read it himself.

Here’s a taste:

Eh, it’s a fun book, and I’m glad I read it, but thank god for the public library, because if I had actually paid for this, I probably would have been pissed and highly critical of any incoherence, perceived or otherwise.

“It really is not a movie, in a traditional sense. And if you try to analyse it in those terms—and not in terms of its relationship to pop culture—then you kind of miss the point”: The Guardian has a nice long, wide-ranging interview with Zack Snyder about his Watchmen film. The above quote is from the Trying To Explain Why Nobody Liked It portion of the interview.

“Westlake wouldn’t entrust his favorite brand name to anyone else. That changed, though, in the final months of Westlake’s life in an unexpected way that had nothing to do with Hollywood”: Geoff Boucher has a nice long piece on Donald Westlake, Darwyn Cooke, past Parker adaptations and crime comics on the LA Times blog. It’s well worth a read. I neglected to mention it in last night’s look at what was due for release this week, but Cooke’s Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter should be in your local comic shop this week (if it wasn’t there last week). You can read a preview of it here, if for some reason the “Darwyn Cooke” part isn’t enough to sell you on it.

“Leonardo DiCaprio Does Aquaman”: Er, is a slash fan-fiction writer responsible for the headlines at Cinema Blend?

“Does a change of shorts mark a feminist shift for a comic book icon or are pants just pants?”: The Toronto Star ran a story about Supergirl starting to wear shorts under her skirt, and one of the people they contacted for comment was Toronto retailer and comics blogger Chris Butcher. Butcher provides all the good questions he was asked and answers he gave that didn’t make it into the final story on his blog.

“I was very much into this creepy, ominous first chapter that takes the revolving-door aspect of death in superhero crossover events to a horrifying extreme”: I really enjoyed reading this piece about Blackest Night by Living Between Wednesdays contributor Dave Howlet. It’s a very positive take on the book (and the Green Lantern monthly in general), which I think makes it something of an exception among the assessment a lot of my favorite critics gave the book’s first issue, but it’s also a pretty insightful one. Howlet argues rather persuasively that there’s a  good reason why Hal and Barry are front and center, and that Geoff Johns is leaning toward the sort of genre commentary few usually associate with the popular writer’s work.

Here’s a taste:

Barry Allen’s ultimate sacrifice in Crisis on Infinite Earths opened the floodgates for killing characters off as a selling point, and everything came full circle last year when he was resurrected in Final Crisis. Clearly, it’s not enough to kill characters off to sell comics anymore—now you’ve gotta shock everyone by bringing them back to life. And that’s where Blackest Night comes in, I suppose.

Not that I don’t also enjoy reading critics that take a switch to the book, though.

Here’s national treasure Tucker Stone on one scene from the book:

And Hal Jordan can’t even answer questions with words, like—he’s so bad at talking that he has to use his ring to make cartoon answers to serious questions? If you were the Flash, and you’re not, but if you were the Flash and you said “Shit, I don’t really want to know the answer, but who died?” and then the guy didn’t say anything, he just put on a laser show—that would be kind of weird right? Wouldn’t you think that was kinda weird?

Stone’s assessment is also ultimately positive though. Or positive-ish. “This isn’t a concept that will actually fail to achieve its goals,” he writes. That’s positive, right?

“No Juicetice, No Peace!“: David Reese, America’s greatest war 21st century war correspondent and also a pretty funny cartoonist, was less than pleased with Jamba Juice using the same public domain clipart and style of word balloon he used in his very popular, eight-year-long Get Your War On strip. In addition to biting off Rees’ style, the ad misses a few essential elements of what makes GYWO so appealing.

1.) There’s no swearing.

2.) There is no mention of a national politician.

3.) It’s not funny.

Luckily, Rees is at his funniest when he’s at his most outraged, and his website is currently blowing up with Rees vs. Jamba Juice content. Enjoy! (I found a link to this at Tom Spurgeon’s website, and then took it and put it here. If Comicsreporter.com were a newspaper, I would be complicit in its destruction by doing that).

“In fact, there are so many movies based on sequential art, that some of them have to be good … don’t they?”: Wired’s Geek Dad on 15 upcoming comic book movies he’s really looking forward to (and not looking forward to quite so much).

“Wizards more awesome than Harry Potter”: It’s an awful broad definition of “wizard” that includes Obi-Wan Kenobi, but I’ll second the rest of this list from the Mail Tribune. Check out who comes in at #3.

Now there’s a subject you don’t see every day…: Igor Kenk, the alleged kingpin of a massive bicycle theft ring in Toronto, will be the subject of both a documentary and a graphic novel, according to this story from the CBC.

Role-players really like playing David Petersen’s mice characters: Last month Mouse Guard The Role Playing Game, the role-playing game based on David Petersen’s Mouse Guard comics, won the 2009 Origins Award for Best Role Playing Game. Now it’s been nominated for  2009 Gen Con EN World RPG Awards in three categories, including “Best Interior Art” (which was, of course, provided by Petersen himself. The winners of the “ENnies” awards will be announced at the Gen Con convention in Indianapolis next month. More info here.

Comic strip fight!: Jeez, Pearls Before Swine cartoonist Stephan Pastis makes a mere 22 strips poking fun at Family Circus, and Jeff Keane retaliates with a vicious attack strip on Sunday. By the way, why is the mom wearing a maid outfit while doing housework?

It just goes to show that complaining about things on the Internet can lead to fame and fortune: Particularly if you’ve written and published a book featuring special effects-ready monsters prior to complaining about something on the Internet.

Zhang Ziyi to play cartoonist in new movie: A fictional cartoonist, but I think that’s close enough to excuse linking to a story about Zhang Ziyi, and thus justify the half hour I then spent looking at pictures of her on the Internet.

Cartooning for The New Yorker is a lot like cooking potatoes: So says Prisna Boonsinsukh, who doesn’t draw cartoons for the New Yorker, but does cook potatoes.

Best headline about Natalie Portman getting a role in a Marvel movie?: I think so.

“In the simplest terms, Wonderland is Alice in Wonderland without Alice”: The Girls Entertainment Network reviews Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew’s Wonderland graphic novel. Quite positively, as it turns out.

“What truly galls, though, is recent news that two of our brightest exports, Ryan Reynolds and Seth Rogen, are set to play the dullest of Yankee super dudes”: Canadian Peter Howell decides that there’s “something slightly more worthy of getting our red-and-white knickers knotted over” than the fact that the movie opening the Toronto International Film Festival isn’t a Canadian film. The slightly more worthy issue? The  “second-class status that our Canuck superheroes have been relegated to by Hollywood’s imperialist Americans.”

“Comic book artists invented some of pop culture’s most indestructible heroes. But when it comes to protecting themselves, these writers and illustrators turned out to be as vulnerable to personal setbacks…as Superman is to Kryptonite”: Saturday’s Los Angeles Times had a nice profile of The Hero Initiative and the important work they do. President Jim McLaughlin is quoted, as are creators William Messner-Loebs, Gene Colan and Ralph Reese. If the article moves you to donate, here’s the Hero Initiative’s site.

I never stopped to consider the theological implications of Johnny Hart’s B.C. before: The late Hart’s strip was about stone age cave men, right? And it was entitled B.C., which stands for “Before Christ.” Yet the cavemen were Christian, and crosses would fairly regularly appear in the strip. How could there be Christians before Christ?! This is blowing my mind—why have I never thought about this before? It blows my mind that this has not blown my mind before now! Anyway, here’s a nice little feature story on Hart and I Did It His Way, a collection of the more religious-themed strips of the popular and occasionally controversial strip.

“Generally, when you talk about a comic auteur’s ‘issues,’ you’re talking page count, not whether he has his head screwed on straight”: Burl Burlingame discusses the work of Fletcher Hanks, whose entire body of work has now been published thanks to Fantagraphics’ You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!, in this piece for the Honolulu Star Bulletin.  By the way, Fantagraphics now has You Shall Die in stock, and if you order it from them directly, you can get a neat-o looking mini-comic. More info here.

Do you find yourself sleeping too well at night?: Why not check out some of the disturbing images at Thomas Ott’s new website? That oughta give you some bad dreams.

“At least I know after another few days, this hunger will go away and the pre-death euphoria will set in”: Kevin Cannon was interviewed by KFAI radio about his new graphic novel, Far Arden (which I reviewed here this weekend), and you can hear the results here. Additionally, the station apparently “performs” a couple of panels of the book, and Cannon gives the very good news that he’s already planning a sequel. Huzzah! (Via Top Shelf’s Hey Bartender! blog)

“I’m a man- man- man- man- man- maneater/ Still you’re surprised –prised –prised when I eat ya!”: Artist Julie Morstad, whose work was featured in Drawn and Quarterly’s Milk Teeth, did a video for Caleb-approved musician Neko Case, and you can see the beautiful, beautiful results here.  (Via Drawn and Quarterly)

Attention SF-area GL fans: Blackest Night mastermind Geoff Johns will be signing at Isotope Comics on Saturday, July 18 from 4-6 p.m., followed by what Isotope’s James Sime is promising will be “the party of the year”:

The Isotope’s master bartender Kirsten Baldock, who made world-wide booze-swilling news earlier this year with her Watchmen Inspired Cocktails , will be serving up a rainbow variety of toe-curling Blackest Night Cocktails straight from her secret mixographical laboratory crafted just for this event.

That’s the flier for the event above. You can get more info here, and if you’d like to get an idea of what kind of drinks Baldock might come up with, you can see her Watchmen cocktail concotions here.

“You’re in good hands—the amazing hands of Simon and Kirby, the first rock stars of comic books”: Andrew A. Smith really liked Titan Books’ recent collection The Best of Simon and Kirby.

“Man blames child-porn possession on computer, video games and comic books”: Now there’s a headline I wish didn’t exist.

The average price of a comic book is now $3.46: According to The Comics Chronicles, that is. In this analysis of Diamond’s June numbers, $3.46 was the average price of all comics ordered, while the average price of the top-sellers was $3.50. Of the top 300, 138 are $2.99 while 116 are $3.99. I’m kind of surprised there are that many $3.99 books in the top 300, but I suppose I shouldn’t be; in most markets, you would think the product that offers the same value for less money would be outselling the hell out of that with a much higher price, but then, the direct market isn’t most markets (And it’s perhaps worth noting that some of those $3.99 books, like DC’s back-up-having books and Marvel’s reprints–in-the-back books are longer than 22-pages anyway, so the value is the same as a $2.99-for-22 pages). Anyway, go there and read their analysis, as it is more cogent than anything I can come up with, which basically just amounts to, “Why, I remember when comics were only $1.50!” It’s also worth noting that Batman and Robin #1 was apparently the highest seller in June, which is interesting (to me) in that just the previous night I had read in Marc-Oliver Frisch’s monthly sales analysis that Grant Morrison’s Seaguy sold pretty badly. Like, much, much worse than I would expect anything by Grant Morrison to sell anywhere (Warlord, Solomon Grundy and some other Vertigo series all out-sold Seaguy’s second issue). I guess that while Morrison is a huge draw in the direct market, he’s a much, much bigger draw when he’s writing Batman than when he’s writing Seaguy. Okay, I guess that’s not that surprising, but the fact that freaking Vigilante buried Seaguy still strikes me as slightly insane.

How much are you paying for your Batman comics, per square foot?: In discussing Wednesday Comics #1 here Wednesday night, I tried to summon the power of math to explain that the book was actually a better value than cheaper comics with smaller pages, given the number of panels per page in Wednesday Comics, and how long it takes to read some of those giant pages. Comics blogger extraordinaire Kevin Church shares another  mathematical proof of the book’s value. In other Wednesday Comics news, Jog writes a typically insightful review here, and—one more and then I’m done, I swear—the Source blog has some charming pictures of people reading Wednesday Comics here.

“What Can the Watchmen Director’s Cut Fix? What Can’t It Fix?”: These are the questions asked by the headline of this article at Film.com. If by “director’s cut” they mean a new edit of the movie by the director, then I answer, “Not much.” If by “director’s cut” they mean completely cutting the director out of the equations, then I answer, “Everything.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, how I amuse myself…

“When it comes to going meta, Grant Morrison has nothing on Adam Warren…and he’s now doing wonders exploring each of the characters, giving them shades and dimensions that I, for one, didn’t think they’d ever have when this started”: I like Johnny Bacardi’s “Confessions of a Spinner Rack Junkie” reviews because they’re not a strictly week-by-week thing, but include book released over a period of a couple weeks. That helps give readers a greater sense of the strengths and weaknesses of individual issues in relation to one another in a much larger pool of books than one normally sees in this types of features. Well, that’s one of the reasons I like Bacardi’s reviews. In addition to, you know, Bacardi being a good writer and comic critic, of course. That quote refers to the fifth volume of Warren’s knockout Empowered series, by the way.

Can Evan Dorkin sell ice to Eskimos?: I don’t know, but he can certainly sell comics to me. Of course, selling me a Dorkin/Jill Thompson comic isn’t all that big of a challenge. Check out his aggressive pitching for Beasts of Burden here.

“Listen, if these dudes are going to keep getting themselves into improbable pickles, they should be the ones to carry around dozens of spears that are each designed to be useful in only one, very specific situation”: Slate.com has a video slideshow essay thingee, complete with eight clips from the cartoon, about the Greatest War Of All Time—The mid-‘80s conflict between G.I. Joe and Cobra, a war which was not only totally awesome, but in which not a single combatant died. How were casualties completely, miraculously avoided? That’s the subject of the piece, sub-titled “Wonderfully absurd escapes from mortal danger in the original G.I. Joe cartoon.” It’s worth watching just to see Snake Eyes in a dress and Boy George-looking hat and wig ensemble. And the bit with Timber at the end. We’re going to be seeing a lot of articles like this over the course of the next month, aren’t we?

“Staring at my navel lets me hear the quiet inner voice that’s too often drowned out by other daily activities, like staring at my face or biceps”: Colbert Report writer Glenn Eichler contributes a column all about navel-gazing to the New York Times. What does that have to do with comics, other than, of course, navel-gazing being a popular subject for comics? Eichler is also a graphic novel-writer, although his first effort won’t be published until this fall. It’s called Stuffed, it’s drawn by Nick Bertozzi, its beign published by First Second, and I’m going to go ahead and hazard a guess that it’s going to be pretty good, since Bertozzi never really draws any bad pictures and First Second doesn’t really publish any bad books.

The holiday weekend has resulted in some super slim pickings for links. Here are the few I found…

“Each of the 50 stars on the costume of this freedom-loving champion represents a different state—and a different superpower related to that state!”: Captain America could have stayed dead indefinitely, and America would have been well covered in the patriotic superhero department, thanks to the Chris Duffy’s The July Fourth Project. It’s a collection of  YOUR democracy-loving, 5th column bashing champions of justice. created and submitted by cartoonists of all (stars and) stripes. You owe it to yourself—and your country!—to check out the results.

“Serena Williams Wants to Play Movie Superhero”: Provided she’s not talking a brand-new film superhero, but would be looking for a readymade, who have we got for her? Misty Knight in a Heroes For Hire movie maybe? Monica Rambeau in a Next Wave: Agents of H.A.T.E. movie? (Like there would ever actually be one of those).

Here’s one more thing I wish they had when I was a kid: Washington paper The Bellingham Herald has a little feature story on a local YMCA’s “Superhero Training” summer camp for kids. Children between the ages of three and six picked out a superhero identity like misspelled  Spiderman or Mopsy The Supercat and then learned wall-climbing, tumbling, swimming and suchlike.

“Carol Tyler is one of the best cartoonists currently working. She has been for years”: Tom Spurgeon’s Sunday interview is with C. Tyler, the creator behind the excellent You’ll Never Know Book One: A Good and Decent Man.

Apologies to any of you who check Blog@Newsarama every Saturday morning just to read my linkblogging. I usually try to have this up first thing in the morning (my version of first thing in the morning, anyway), but I stayed up to the wee hours of the night finishing the second season of Primeval on DVD last night and thus sleeping in obscenely late on this Fourth of July holiday. Wait a minute, Primeval’s a British series! Aaaa! I’ve betrayed my country!

Anyway, here are some links to things dealing with comics that I took note of since Wednesday morning…

“Luke did an amazing job of making the Mouse Guard RPG more than jut a typical RPG where you happen to be mice, but where being mice is the RPG”: That’s Mouse Guard creator David Petersen talking about Luke Crane and his work on the Mouse Guard role-playing game, which recently won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game of 2008.

“As far as I can tell, gods and other deities don’t have trademarks that are jealously guarded by lawyers for entertainment corporations”: Paul Constant reviews Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader for The Stranger, focusing on the superheroes-as-modern myth theme in a lot of comics criticism and commentary. The results are pretty entertaining.

This is at least part of the reason I can’t read X-Men comics: Wired’s Geek Dad columnist recently re-experienced the confusing world of the X-Men via the Wolverine and the X-Men cartoon, and in a column on the subject he linked to this completely insane relationship chart at io9. Did you know that Wolverine slept with every single member of every X-Men team ever? It’s true! (It’s not). That’s why he’s on so many teams, has so many books and is the most popular X-person. Dude totally slept his way to the top.

“Although sometimes inaccurately called a graphic novelist, Sacco is a journalist who draws”: The Toronto Star includes Joe Sacco’s upcoming work of comics fiction, Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel, in a round-up of book releases to watch for this fall.

I’m honestly not sure if having every character in a JLA comic shout “Justice!” at the end of their scene is awesome or stupid: James Robinson and Mauro Cascioli’s Justice League: Cry For Justice must be a really special comic book. Retailer Brian Hibbs’ daring highly trained special mission force of critics has been taking it kind of slow on Savagecritic.com this summer, but a half dirty-dozen of ‘em showed up to review JL:CFJ, on the week of the Fourth of July holiday. The comic doesn’t fare too well, but it was honestly pretty fascinating to see the various strategies employed to criticize it. Douglas Wolk was first out the gate with an elegant single doctored-image allusion review (sinle allusion reviews really aren’t something you see every day), Graeme McMillan noticed some Jeph Loebishness and some Brian Michael Bendisocity in the script, Hibbs himself questions the font of the subtitle and the use of the word “Justice,” Tucker Stone calls it “hardcore pornography for train-wreck enthusiasts” while determining that it is “excellent crap” and David Uzumeri offers a pretty straightforward dismantling of the issue while holding out the not-unreasonable hope that it might get better. I’m crossing my fingers that Abhay Khosla will show up before the end of the weekend to deliver a 5,000 word essay full of sex jokes about it.

Speaking of that Justice League comic…: Many of the negative reviews I’ve read of it so far have focused on Robinson’s script while generally praising Cascioli’s art. Let me help balance that out a bit. Yeah, Cascioli’s panels all generally look like nice images in isolation. His figure work is just fine, and he adds some appropriate melodrama here and there. But on a purely technical, below-the-paints-and-pencil level? It’s pretty weak work that fails at some of the most basic stuff. I’m not talking about the fact that 22 entire pages of nothing but talking occurs and yet no one except Congorilla ever actually opens their mouth—although “draw the character talking with their mouth open” is Comics Art 101, isn’t it—but the staging.

What is up with that first six pages or so, where Hal Jordan gets all teenager-y with the rest of the Justice League? The whole scene looks like a dream, with characters appearing and disappearing at random and dramatically shifting positions between panels.

This is my favorite page, as it makes it look like the table dramatically shrinks between panels, or that Wonder Woman and Roy Harper ran all the way around the table super-fast and knocked some chairs out of the way just to get all up in Hal’s face, while he tosses his head dramatically back and forth, so that different people are to the left of him:

Okay, well that’s probably enough complaining about sub-par super-comics for me today. I’m going to kick off my celebration of the Fourth of July in the traditional way, by watching the symbol of our nation punch a filthy communist across the room:

Jeff Lemire’s Question: I’ve got a question about Jeff Lemire—how is it that he draws this well when he’s just warming up? Jeez.

“Even when the rest of the comics industry was struggling to survive, the X-Men always sold…People bought the comics no matter what”: Comics blogger Tim O’Neil has been thinking about the X-Men in preparation for what will likely turn out to be a couple of think-piece posts on the franchise, focusing on the fact that for years and years it was the top of the comics heap, and seems to be in sharp decline now (Marvel’s own Avengers franchise now ranks higher than their X-books). What’s going on with the X-books, and why are they no longer as popular as they once were? O’Neil ponders, and his readers offer some input. Few (if any) comics bloggers no more about the X-Men than Paul O’Brien, and he speaks to some of the X-books’ existential problems in this review of X-Men Legacy #225.

I would buy both the Wolverine comic and the Man-Thing one: Speaking of think pieces, retailer, blogger and Sluggo enthusiast Mike Sterling has been wondering “What if the characters/teams from Marvel and DC were allowed one starring title, and that’s it?” and how that might impact the market and industry, as unlikely as it is that either publisher would ever embrace and enforce that rule. Here’s Sterling’s original post on the subject, and here’s his follow-up. They’re both well worth a read and a think, and even if Marvel’s unlikely to ever  cancel Wolverine: Origins, Wolverine: Weapon X, Wolverine: First Class and the weekly miniseries and/or one-shots starring Wolvie to concentrate on making Wolverine the greatest Wolverine comic imaginable and maybe encouraging fans to try new and different books, it’s not like they couldn’t start leaning in that direction.

“The Craziest Costume Changes in Comics”: You can probably guess what most of these are by the headline, but this Comics Alliance post is well worth checking out just for the visual gag that accompanies the last person on that list.

“No superhero or super villain name is too great or too dorky, and no costume is too skimpy, provided its legal”: If you live in or around Reno, Nevada and enjoy playing dress up and/or adult beverages, there’s an upcoming superhero-themed pub crawl there. While pub crawling doesn’t sound like a terribly superheroic activity (unless you’re this guy), proceeds go to the Washoe County School District Canine Drug Task Force, and keeping kids off drugs does seem like something superheroes would be into. Here’s the event’s official website.

This week’s cartoontroversy?: Well, it’s only Monday as you read this, so maybe something bigger will come up later. Anyway, political cartoonists seemingly had a blast drawing goodbye cartoons featuring a long-time favorite subject of theirs, Michael Jackson, most choosing either a bland “Hey, he’s dead now” sort of acknowledgement cartoon, others making jokes about his physical appearance or legal troubles concerning his alleged sexual interest in young boys. One of the more…potent cartoons was that of Mike Luckovich, featuring Heaven and Hell flipping a coin (above). Here’s a brief story in which Luckovich talks a bit about the cartoon, which proved controversial among readers, and here’s Washington Post comics blogger Michael Cavna asking readers if they think it went too far.

“You’ll be in awe of how perfect it is and certainly envious of it if you are a writer”: This guy really, really, really liked David Mazzuchelli’s eagerly anticipated Asterios Polyp.

“These two comics, for all their surface similarities, serve as almost perfect examples of How To Do It and How Not To Do It”: That’s Andrew Hickey on last Wednesday’s issues of TEC and Gotham City Sirens. Can you guess which one is which? His post reviewing the two issues is entitled “Comics Review (Guaranteed 100% Michael Jackson Free).” But that guarantee makes reference to Michael Jackson! So it’s actually just 99% Michael Jackson-free.

I’d read a comic book about a comics fan with a time machine who goes back in time and tries to deliver these messages: Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon had his readers “Name Five Decisions You’d Like To Talk The Comics-Related Person Who Made Them Out Of Doing.” Check out their responses here.  And while I’m linking to Spurgeon, this week’s Sunday interview was with cartoonist Trina Robbins, regarding her recent Nell Brinkley book.

I would also read a Marvel comic in which Ben Grimm replaced Steve Rogers as Captain America, but only if it was entitled Cap-Ben Grimm-erica: Bully the Little Stuffed Bull likes Ben Grimm a whole lot, so much so that he’s devoting a full 365 days to spending time with the big lug, but he has found one way in which it is possible to improve upon Aunt Petunia’s favorite nephew. Click here to find out how!

In your face Dr. Wertham! Batman was never really gay after all: It was just a phase he was going through, and he tried to keep it up for Robin’s sake, but his heart just wasn’t in it.  At least, that’s what I gather from Robin’s thoughts in yesterday’s Daily Batman, which has since changed, as it’s a new day, and a new day means it’s time for a new Batman. Anyway, The Daily Batman. Some day I might stop linking to it, but not today.

“As a novice cartoonist, his salary ran from $6,000 to $20,000 a year”: Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune had a brief profile of Tiny Titans writer/artist Art Baltazar, with a local-cartoonist-makes-good sort of angle.

“For better or for worse, Tim Burton’s Batman changed the movie business forever”: Scott Mendelson lists the seven ways in which the Burton’s Batman changed filmmaking and moneymaking in the film industry for The Huffington Post. The occasion? The 1989 film is 20 years old this year. In other news, Oh my God I am so old!

“Ironically, this ass-kicking lesbian is a reinvention of a character originally created in the 1950s to reassure a nervous American that Batman wasn’t getting it on with Robin”: New England paper Bay Windows devotes a healthy amount of ink to the debut of Batwoman as the new star of Detective Comics. Dan DiDio is quoted several times throughout, and man, is it nice to see a J.H.Williams spread running alongside a news story about comic books, instead of some goofy drawing of Barack Obama meeting Spider-Man or sword-fignting Sarah Palin. (Not sure about that “Pow! Bang! Dyke!” bit in the caption, though)

“Out,  out! And a gay!”: Alright, I admit it—that made me laugh. Here’s another “Hey, did you know Batwoman is a lesbian?” story, this one from The Dallas Voice. Greg Rucka is interviewed, as is Richard Neal, the owner of Zeus Comics, where Rucka is doing a signing today. Okay, just one more and I’ll quit linking to Batwoman stories: Rucka was also interviewed by The Dallas Morning News, in a meandering Q-and-A that mentioned another Dallas signing he was doing (That one happened last night though).

“Now open your eyes and think about the worst possible Michele Bachmann comic, ever”: Wonkette’s Riley Waggaman did not much care for False Witness: The Michele Bachmann Story, which he felt had too many facts, and was thus more like a “graphic adaptation of the Daily Kos.” I would question his judgment on matters comic book-ical, given that he writes for a politics, gossip and satire site, however, he did wear a tophat while reading it, and I make it a rule never to argue with anyone in a tophat. They obviously know what they’re talking about, or they wouldn’t be wearing a tophat.