– What costume to not buy your kids this Halloween.

– Express Night Out profiles Bryan Lee O’Malley.

– Brian Cronin looks at the work of editorial cartoonists Bill Mauldin and David Low.

– Eric Reynolds is apparently into fumetti now.

– The Austin-American Statesman has a two-part interview with Art Spiegelman.

– The Associated Press looks at IDW’s Obama/McCain comics.

– Chronogram talks to Jessica Abel.

– Did I link to this Steve Bisette essay on royalties? Well, I am now.

TimeOut New York talks with David Heatley about his new book My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down and explains something I had been wondering about, namely why he censored all the naughty bits out of his “Sex History” strip:

Heatley’s “Sex History”—early childhood fumblings, polymorphous couplings at Oberlin College, dating in mid-’90s New York, compulsive masturbation—originally appeared in his self-published comic Deadpan. For the version that appears in My Brain, however, he’s placed tiny fluorescent triangles and rectangles over his characters’ genitals—an act of concealment after so much confession. “I was getting fan mail from a couple twentysomething boys, saying, ‘Oh, your strip gave me a boner,’ and I thought, This isn’t what I had in mind. It’s really about longing and bad sex and lack of connection.” The bleep-outs “almost draw attention to it, but it’s like another layer of the narrative—me kind of covering up a little bit before publication.”

David Heatley: Preventing twentysomething boners since 2008.

– The new blog Comix Claptrap has a podcast interview with cartoonist Vanessa Davis.

– The blog Disorder & Its Opposite suggests 10 Ideal Books to Introduce Readers to Comics.

– Ger Apeldoorn shares some more Harvey Kurtzman strips.

– Chris Sims looks at Tom Spurgeon’s top 50 list and comes up with his own:

22. A Comic Where Somebody Punches Hitler

Because seriously, fuck that guy.

– Feel like a free Warren Craghead mini comic? Here you go.

– Seriously, what’s up with Hi & Lois anyway?

– Iron Man comes out on DVD today, and Paramount sent over a bunch of links to deleted scenes and test footage that’ll appear on the special edition. Check’em out here, here, here, here and here.

– The North Shore News talks to Peter Bagge.

– McClatchy News Service has a nice, short Q&A with Sergio Aragones.

– Just how much manga do the Japanese read anyway? Matt Thorn investigates.

– Charles Hatfield visits the Center for Cartoon Studies.

– Matt Bors sketchblogs the presidential debate.

– “Retired” comics critic Domingos Isabelinho is blogging now.

– The Daily Cross Hatch is asking cartoonists to draw how they’re getting to the Small Press Expo this year. Mei K kicks off the series.

– Damn, I forgot to add this to the TiVo; Cold Hard Flash talks to the creators of the new Adult Swim cartoon Superjail.

– Anyone want to draw a monkey? It’s for charity.

Compiled by JK and Chris.

– Comic Debrief talks to Douglas Wolk.

– Not comics, but really cool: A Babar exhibit in New York.

– Matt Thorn provides a fascinating look at the rise and fall of the phrase “shojo” in Japan.

– Here’s a rather nifty blog devoted to Frank Franzetta.

– Matthew Penney examines the nonfiction manga of Mizuki Shigeru.

– Nick Blodgett talks with Carnal Comics publisher SS Crompton about the ups and downs of publishing x-rated funnybooks.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its flagship magazine, Time Out New York interviews 40 New Yorkers, including a certain friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

By now we’re used to the wall-crawler’s wisecracks, but who could’ve guessed he was this funny? A sampling:

What’s your favorite place in New York?
Spider-Man: Well, it ain’t the George Washington Bridge, since my girlfriend Gwen died there back in issue No. 121.

If you could have a drink with our other Top 40 people—Patti LuPone, Kiki & Herb, Amy Sedaris, Jay-Z—who would you choose?
Spider-Man: I’d probably choose Jay-Z, since he’s the only one on the list who doesn’t strike me as a supervillain.

Related: Remember that Spider-Man musical? It could hit Broadway next year.

Wil Moss talks with Brian Wood for PWCW about the new Local collection and the many, many, many other projects he has under his belt right now:

PWCW: And you’re wrapping up a two-part story in Northlanders right now, what can you tell me about the arc after that?

BW: Ryan [Kelly] is drawing that as well. It is a serial killer-CSI kind of story set in Viking times, which made for some interesting and frustrating research. I had to find out what kind of investigations actually happened back then, which wasn’t a lot. I found out that there wasn’t a whole lot of that beyond like obvious common sense stuff that I think everybody takes for granted now, like foot print depth and size, that kind of thing, it’s pretty basic.

Huh, I didn’t know about this. Apparently L Word actress Mia Kirshner has put together a “collaborative” graphic novel about the displaced peoples of the world. Entitled I Live Here, it will be published by Pantheon Books in October and features such notable contributors as Joe Sacco and Phoebe Gloeckner. Laura Hudson talked to Kirshner to get some more details:

PW Comics Week: How long have you been working on this project?

Mia Kirshner: It’s been seven years. It came about because of a gradual sort of feeling that I had, that the life I was leading was pretty limited. I didn’t feel like I knew enough about how the rest of the world lived. And I also felt like I just wasn’t happy creatively with what I was doing. So I did about a year of research and put this idea together: the combination of comics and first-person accounts of survival and trauma. Joe Sacco was the first person I approached.

– Van Jensen examines IDW’s plans for the G.I. Joe franchise.

– The Comics Journal has a quick rundown of what some publishers will be debuting at SPX.

– Kai-Ming Cha looks at the new Afro Samurai manga.

– Our own Tim O’Shea talks with Dean Haspiel about his new graphic novel, The Alcoholic, among other things.

– Johanna Draper Carlson tells you how to make a career writing comics.

– Same Hat! has some nice photos and videos from a recent Lynda Barry talk.

In one of the most revealing interviews I’ve read since she decided to enter into semi-retirement last year, For Better or For Worse cartoonist Lynn Johnston talks to the Peterborough Examiner about the dissolution of her marriage and how that influenced her plans for the strip:

If Lynn can’t remember the details of the day she’ll never forget, she knows this much is true: around eight o’clock in the evening her husband of 30 years walked into the kitchen and broke her heart.

I’m leaving you, he told her.

I’ve been seeing another woman for some time. You know her.

It may not have come out in precisely those words or in that exact order, but the message was clear. He was going and that was that; he would make no amends for his betrayal.

At first Lynn was in shock, but then the pain set in — along with its more outgoing sidekick, anger.

After he left, she drove into town, bought some vodka, drank too much vodka and unleashed her fury on her husband’s jeep. Ironically, the Carrie Underwood song, Before He Cheats, was topping the charts at the time. It tells the tale of a jilted woman who takes a baseball bat to the headlights of her unfaithful lover’s car; Lynn’s weapon of choice was a rake.

Among the other revelations: Johnston is headed to Peru for awhile to work with a medical team as an intepreter.

– Check out the variant cover for Sandman: The Dream Hunters #1.

– Brian Heater posts the first part of his roundtable discussion with Mo Willems and Kyle Baker, done last week as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

– Richard Thompson’s art will grace the cover of the November issue of Nickelodeon Magazine.

– Chris Butcher has started a new weekly review column. He kicks things off with Hideo Azuma’s Dissapearance Diary.

– Looking for manga aimed at gay men (ie. not yaoi)? Start here.

Tom Spurgeon has a lengthy and fascinating conversation with Scott McCloud about the re-release of his classic series, Zot:

SPURGEON: Have you heard from anyone who’s picked this book up brand new and read it?

McCLOUD: Random people: reviewers, people that saw me talk and bought it and wrote me a couple of days later. One of my missions with this book was to erase some of the embarrassment I felt about this material. I could go back and fix the worst parts of it. When I hear back from people, people don’t just see it for its problems; they have a very balanced view of it. I haven’t yet heard the complaints I thought I would. “Oh yeah, Mr. Making Comics [laughs] you can’t do, so you teach.” I haven’t heard that.

– The Huffington Post has another preview from MAD Magazine’s political issue.

– So Dylan Horrocks has a sex blog now.

– Tom Spurgeon talks to John Pham, whose book Sublife should be coming out from Fantagraphics soon.

– Heidi MacDonald posts the complete transcript of Wil Moss’ PWCW interview with Comic Foundry creators Tim Leong and Laura Hudson.

– Bidding for the Totoro Forest Project is now open.

– As a kid, I always thought new shoes would make me run faster … so how much faster would these super shoes make me run?

– What comic should Fight Club/Choke author Chuck Palahniuk write?

– Read Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere for free.

– Beware of Batman; he brings adware. (Hat tip)

– I didn’t see the rumor about Darkseid appearing on Smallville this season, but Graeme has some tips for the producers if it does wind up happening.

Compiled by JK and Chris.

Earlier this month Action Philosophers/Marvel Adventures writer Fred Van Lente contributed one of our I ♥ Comics features, taking fans inside Rocketship Comics as he worked there for a day. Now Rocketship co-owner Alex Cox turns things around on Lente and interviews him for the Rocketship blog:

ALEX: We’ve spoken in the past about writers using themes throughout their work, and having more to say than just the details of a plot. If you had to pick one overall thematic point that pops up when you write, what would it be?

FRED VAN LENTE: I’m interested in people the most, like most writers, and what informs their decisions. I strongly believe that the most interesting dramatic struggle is the one you have with yourself: The battle between what you want to do versus what you should do; when you should act versus when it would be better to do nothing at all.

That’s why I like superheroes so much — their powers and identities allow you to take internal battles and make them literal, they let you dramatize those conflicts. Hercules is the strongest guy in the world, but bears the weight of every foolish thing he’s ever done — and in 3,000 years, he’s done a lot of them. Amadeus Cho’s mega-smarts make him his own worst enemy. Wolverine is at constant war with his own bestial nature. And so on.

As the discussion spawned by Robert Kirkman’s recent call to arms somehow morphs into an argument about who has done more to hurt comics, Grant Morrison delivers his own sermon on the subject:

I suppose I’m slightly amused by the reformer’s zeal with which each new generation approaches the problem of ‘saving’ comics. It reminds me of humanity’s charming, self-regarding notion that it’s our job to ‘save’ a planet which has survived fine without us through several mass extinction events, climactic overhauls and planetary disasters.

I’ve been listening to people talk about ‘saving’ the ‘industry’ for over 20 years while comics have continued to be published and have, in fact, become better, to the point where the only conclusion I’ve come to is that comics are best ‘saved’ by sealing them in Mylar bags! Everything else is just messianic inflation. Just do good books and stop trying to be the savior of a whole medium that’s been doing okay without you and will continue long after you’re gone.

Yes, I think Kirkman’s right, in that I’d like to see more of our creative community unleashing their wild imaginations onto the page and less of the obvious ‘movie pitch on paper stuff’ that’s come about recently as a result of comic creators chasing the Hollywood dollar but I don’t have a problem with writers and artists working on Marvel and DC properties if they enjoy it. I’d rather read a good Green Lantern story by someone who cares than work my way through a ‘creator-owned’ project that’s been created solely to appeal to lowest-common-denominator movie executives.

That comes at the tail-end of a lengthy, and incredibly interesting, interview at IGN.com in which Morrison discusses his approach to Final Crisis and the “Batman R.I.P” storyline, fixing those weird discrepencies involving Final Crisis, Countdown and Death of the New Gods, and his take on characters like Aquaman and Supergirl.

(Via Dean Trippe)

Tom Spurgeon cuts through all the crap and talks to cartoonist/editor Sammy Harkham about the upcoming volume of the Kramer’s Ergot anthology, the high price and format of which have caused some consternation in the comics blogosphere:

SPURGEON: Sammy, I know that you’re aware of some complaints about the price here and there. While I don’t want to turn this into a platform for those complaints, mostly because I don’t understand them, I don’t want to ignore the issue, either. So I was wondering if you could maybe simply list some of the factors that led to your pricing the book at $125, the way you might explain it to someone that’s interested in the price but not accusatory.

HARKHAM: Scanning. We paid for many artists to get their work professionally scanned, since the fidelity of cheap scanners doesn’t hold up when you look at the pages at print size.

* A low print run. If this was a book that had a larger print run, our price per copy would have gone down, but our readership is not big enough to warrant that. If Chris Ware ever decides to do a solo book in this format, with a print run similar to the Pantheon ACME book, I would think the cover price would be close to half of ours.

* We are using a very expensive paper, this stuff called NEW AGE. I am excited about it because it gives you the vibrancy of color you find on glossy paper, but doesn’t “feel” like magazine stock. It should make everything look really, really fantastic. We also have foil stamping on the cover, a sticker with quotes and bar code, and the books are shrink-wrapped to guard them from shipping damage. Those are not mega costs, but they add up.

* The book has to be bound by hand, since no binder at that size exists.

There’s lots more juicy information in the link, including a list of contributors. Dude, Matt Groening’s has a strip in there! That’s it, I’m sold.

In this week’s Cup O’ Joe, Marvel chief Joe Quesada and the Hero Initiative’s Jim McLauchlin talk about, among other subjects, Quesada’s tenure and whether or not he’ll leave the position “feet first”:

JM: So let’s do a little bit of retrospective here. You’ve been editor in chief at Marvel for…going on nine years now, right? You must have learned something in that interim! What’s the one greatest lesson you’ve learned?

JQ: It’s actually eight years, I’ll be starting my ninth soon. I’m sure there are plenty of people surprised about that, me included.

There have been many lessons that I’ve learned over that time. How could I not? Patience is perhaps the most important one, and the rest are too countless to list.

JM: Now you’ve mentioned in the past that with the obvious exception of Stan Lee, the job of Marvel editor in chief…usually doesn’t treat you well at the end. Most everyone leaves the position feet-first. Is that gonna be the eventual case with you?

JQ: As I said, no one is more surprised by the fact that I’ve been here this long more than me. Some may consider this a bit bleak, but I’ve always made it a point to come to work assuming that any given day could be my last. You can’t take stuff like that for granted and it helps keep me on my toes. This has nothing to do nor should it reflect in any way on Marvel, as the company has been great to me. It’s just the way that I like to approach things. I did the same during my freelance days, I may be an artist who is considered “hot” this year, perhaps next year not so much. I’ve seen too many people and have heard too many stories of folks in comics or the entertainment industry taking their station way too seriously and too much for granted. I don’t want to ever be that way. Being EIC of Marvel is an honor and a great job to have, and while there are no guarantees, what is a certainty is that I won’t be EIC forever. When that day comes, whether it be of my own volition or Marvel’s, I don’t ever want to have it come as an earth-shattering surprise.

Anything can happen in the world of business. To think that it can’t happen to you is just foolish and presumptuous.

So, the simple answer, who knows?

They also share some of John Romita Jr.’s art from his upcoming Amazing Spider-Man run, Mike Deodato Jr.’s from the Wolverine: Roar one-shot and the cover to X-Force #9, which features the return of Domino (pictured above).

– Marvel.com has a Q&A up with Zak Krefting of Shaba Games, the outfit working on their upcoming Spider-Man: Web of Shadows video game.

– The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Swallow Me Whole author Nick Powell.

– The Walrus chats up Seth.

– Dick Locher will soon draw his 10,000th cartoon.

– Here’s a video of Chip Kidd talking about his upcoming Bat-Manga book.

– Speaking of videos, here’s Cold Heat Video Special #1, courtesy of Frank Santoro.

– Oh, and then there’s this.

– Electric Politics talks to Robert Crumb.

– The L.A. Times spoke with Act-i-vate creators Joe Infurnari and Molly Crabapple at Comic-Con.

– How to make a stained-glass Spidey.

– Apparently women in England want to be like Willow.

– Henry Jenkins talks to two Comic-Con “newbies” who attended for the first time this year.

Compiled by JK and Chris.

I first heard the words “Chumble Spuzz” at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, during the SLG panel. “I like anything that makes me laugh,” SLG publisher Dan Vado said about the book, which at the time was being serialized on their EyeMelt website before the collection came out. He promised a pig possessed by Satan and an over-the-top story, which is exactly what creator Ethan Nicolle delivered in that first volume.

The second volume of Chumble Spuzz came out right before this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, featuring many of the same characters in different but equally as over-the-top situations. Heck, maybe even more so. I interviewed Nicolle over email last week about both books, conventions, poop jokes and working with his brother.

JK: So first off, San Diego … how did the show go for you?

Ethan: I’ve been going to San Diego every year since 2002. This was my first year with books published on SLG, along with a stack of books over at Bad Karma Productions in small press. I brought my brother along, who co-wrote on Chumble Spuzz book 2. We had a blast. I made some awesome contacts this year, and it was awesome how many people knew about my book. BJ Novak, from The Office, stopped my table at the SLG booth. That was cool. But I think the best part of Comic Con is always the group of close geek friends I have that I don’t get to see but about once a year. And slave Leias.

(more…)

– Wil Moss talks to the Apocalipstix team.

– Good news: IDW is going to alter the format of the Dick Tracy books in order to allow the Sunday pages to be printed at a larger size.

– Brigid Alverson talks to Templar, Arizona creator Charlie Trotman.

– The Daily Cross Hatch chats up Cory Doctorow.

– Frank Santoro on Kyle Baker’s How to Draw Stupid.

– Franklin Harris recounts the history of EC Comics for Reason.

– James Kochalka takes a stab at recreating a classic Fantastic Four page.

– Yen Press is hopping on the four-panel manga bandwagon.