–Chris takes a look at those dirty, filthy manga.

–Everything you wanted to know about Fumi Yoshinaga, but were afraid to ask.

–I don’t know what to make of this.

– If you can read French, or put up with Google’s translator, here’s a great profile of Art Spiegelman courtesy of Le Monde.

–Garry Trudeau thinks Obama will win.

–Kazuo Umezu has finished painting his house. Bill Randall has pictures.

–Ron Hogan shares a video from this past weekend’s SPLAT!, featuring the CBLDF’s Charles Brownstein and Nick Bertozzi.

(more…)

Perennial nominee Strangers in Paradise was named outstanding comic book Monday at the 19th annual Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s Media Awards.

The awards honor media “for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and the issues that affect their lives.”

Terry Moore’s long-running series, which ended last year with Issue 90, previously won the GLAAD award in 2001.

Other comic-book nominees this year were American Virgin, The Boys, The Midnighter and The Outsiders.

On his LiveJournal, Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai shares his artwork for the Hero Initiative’s “Hulk #1 Project”:

In 2006, Hero Initiative and Marvel Comics sponsored the Spider-Man 100 Project. Marvel published a bunch of Ultimate Spidey #100 with blank, card stock covers. Hero Initiative contacted artists to create original drawings on those covers. Those comics were auctioned off at various conventions and on eBay. All proceeds, including from a trade paperback collection, went to The Hero Initiative.

This year, they are doing the Hulk #1 Project. I got my copy of Hulk #1 at MegaCon last week. Since I did a Samurai Hulk short story for the Marvel Underground anthology, I thought I would continue that concept for my cover.

The back cover is pretty clever, too.

Thomas Denton over at the blog Say It Backwards is putting together a benefit auction for Candlelighters, an organization that helps out the families of kids with cancer. For Thomas, it’s personal, as his nephew had a cancerous brain tumor removed last June:

So Thomas is looking for artists to donate artwork to the auction:

Starting with official pals of SIB Thom Zahler and Jesse Farrell, I’m getting in contact with as many artists as I can for a charity project to help raise money to help the families of kids with cancer. Both of these brilliant fellows are donating commissions of their work to be auctioned off on ebay. (The candlelighters are part of ebay’s charity auction program. Ebay actually makes charity auctions really safe and easy, so I’m quite happy about that. They make it way more trustworthy than I.) I need your help in contacting other artists; professional, amateur, folks who like to doodle stick figures on post-its, to add their talents. Finished pieces, commissions, anything they’d like to contribute.

Other artists who have stepped up in addition to Zahler and Farrell include Chris Haley, Evan Dorkin, James Figueiredo and Alex Maleev.

If you would like to donate something, you can contact Thomas at sayitbackwards@gmail.com. If you send something, feel free to drop me a note, too, and I’ll do some sort of follow-up with links to your blog, website or project.

Penguin Classics’ Classics Deluxe line, which features covers by several notable comics artists, has won the graphics category in the Design Museum’s Brit Insurance Design Awards.

The repackaged classic books sport cover art by the likes of Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Tomer Hanuka, Jason, Frank Miller, Seth and Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

(Via Tomer Hanuka)

Before Steve Gerber passed away, The Hero Initiative was working with him on a project called FOOG, Too — a sequel of sorts to the Friends Of Ol’ Gerber campaign launched many years ago when he was fighting with Marvel for the rights to Howard the Duck.

Jim McLauchlin explains the concept on the Hero Initiative blog:

We were gonna create several Gerber-centric products under the FOOG, TOO! banner that would help fund Hero (and thereby, also help Steve out financially in his convalescence). The first outta the gate was scheduled to be this super-cool Frank Cho Howard-and-Beverly print seen here. Working with our pals at Marvel, we got some new Frank Cho/Jason Keith art, and got these suckers printed up. Frank and Steve were slated to sign ’em, and ¡voila! Instant fundraiser product.

The print will be available at the Orlando MegaCon March 7-9 and throughout the rest of the con season. They will also be available via the Hero Initiative online store at AtomicComics.com.

EDIT, 2/29: Changed out the image; clicking on it will give you a better look.

The Chicago Tribune reports that The Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock, Ill., will close in June due to lack of funding.

Interest in the 17-year-old shrine has dwindled since its opening in 1991. In the early years, the museum attracted more than 6,000 visitors annually; last year, just 3,464 people paid the $2 admission fee.

Gould, a Woodstock native, created the hard-boiled detective in 1931.

A few more updates on WonderCon activities …

–Our friends from Graeme’s other blog, io9, are co-sponsoring a party Saturday night for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

Speaking of which, they list their panel picks for the con as well.

–You can add Jeph Loeb to the list of comic pros visiting the Moscone Center this weekend. The Hero Initiative are bringing the writer in for a special signing with Tim Sale on Saturday.

–Brian Wood will have limited edition postcard sets for sale at the con.

–Wired puts the spotlight on local San Francisco comic shops in preparation for the con.

Jim McLauchlin posted a few updates on the Hero Initiative blog this morning, including some details on a Mike Wieringo tribute book they’re doing:

The kind folks at Marvel Comics have donated to Hero the script and eight penciled pages to the final book Mike Wieringo was working on when Mike passed away. Working hand-in-hand with Marvel, Hero has recruited a dozen all-star artists to each do a page or two and finish the book. The result will be a 48-page ’Ringo extravaganza hitting in June. MUCH more info to come. In the meantime, here’s a page from the book by Humberto Ramos.

Check out the blog to see the page, which looks nice … and is that Ghost Rider in a Fantastic Four outfit?

Rachel Edidin and Dean Trippe team up to create a new charitable organization, Sequential Heart. Sequential Heart aims to distribute comic books to disadvantaged children.

Edidin and Trippe saw the need in the community around them and responded to it. In 2007, they came up with the idea to somehow move comics from retailers, publishers, and fans in the comics community to these youth programs, who would then distribute them for free to the kids they helped. In December, Edidin and Trippe made a few test runs to see whether their plan was feasible, with the hopes of one day taking it national. It worked, and Sequential Heart was born.

“Sequential Heart was my baby,” Edidin said, “and it grew out of my frustration with the number of comics that end up wasted, destroyed, or hovering in warehouse limbo for decades. It seemed like someone MUST want these books, or have use for them. At the same time, I was reading about a huge number of families being displaced in the wake of natural disasters, which got me thinking about how rotten it is to be a displaced kid – that even if your basic physical needs are being met, it’s a tremendously tedious and dispiriting experience. Kids need fun as well as food – it’s developmentally essential, in fact. So, I was mulling over this stuff, and I ran across a thread on the message board, where someone was asking how the comics community could respond
to the SoCal wild fires, and something just clicked.

Rachel elaborates on GWOG:

An update since the article was written: We’ve now donated over a hundred comics to organizations in and around Portland and have developed ongoing relationships with several of those. With luck, our website will be up and running within the next week or so, at which point we’re hoping to see an explosion of both requests and donations.

The Hero Initiative has added a couple of T-shirts to their online store to help raise money for the cause. The first features Dawn by Joseph Michael Linsner:

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Reporting from the Sundance Film Festival this week, Prism Comics’ David Stanley was on hand for the announcement of the 19th annual GLAAD Media Awards. The nominees for “Outstanding Comic Book” include:

–American Virgin (Vertigo/DC Comics)

–The Boys (Dynamite Entertainment)

–Midnighter (Wildstorm/DC Comics)

–The Outsiders (DC Comics)

–Strangers in Paradise (Abstract Studio)

For a list of all the GLAAD Media Award nominees, which include the film Stardust and the TV show Who Wants to Be a Super Hero?, visit the GLAAD website.

– Both Occasional Superheroine and Don MacPherson compare Marvel’s The Twelve and Watchmen.

– Jenny of The Blackwing Diaries travels to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco to report on the Mary Blair Exhibit there.

– Bart Beaty looks at this year’s crop of Angouleme nominees.

– The Colorado Springs Independent profiles Walt and Louise Simonson.

(more…)

The American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association has released its 2008 list of Great Graphic Novels for Teens.

The 43 titles were selected by a committee from a pool of 138 nominations, and announced today during the ALA’s midwinter meeting in Philadelphia. The graphic novels are recommended for readers ages 12 to 18.

DC and its imprints led the list with 13 books, followed by Go! Comi with eight, Del Rey with five, Viz Media with four, and Digital Manga Publishing, First Second, HarperTempest and Vertical with three each.

In addition, the committee selected a Top 10 list of titles “that exemplify the quality and range of graphic novels appropriate for teen audiences”:

(more…)

There’s still more news from the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, where Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, Vol. 1: Tales From the Farm has received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association honoring adult books with specific teen appeal.

On his blog, Lemire says this is the first time a graphic novel has won the award.

Brian Selznick’s hybrid prose/comics children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret has won the Caldecott Medal for distinguished picture book.

The Caldecott and Newbury medals were announced this morning at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia.

Selznick’s 533-page book blends comics and prose to tell the story of an orphan who lives in a Paris train station and crosses paths with an eccentric old man who turns out to be silent filmmaker George Melies.

As the article notes, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a departure for the Caldecott Medal; previous winners tended to be shorter, more conventional picture books.

Related: Viz Media’s edition of Brave Story wins the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for best work of translation

Marvel is teaming with the United Nations to create a comic book showing the international organization working with superheroes to solve conflicts and rid the world of disease.

The Financial Times reports that the comic, set in a war-torn fictional country — I vote for Latveria or Sierra Gordo! — initially will be distributed free to 1 million schoolchildren in the United States. Afterward, the comic will be translated into other languages and distributed elsewhere.

According to the article, the script should be approved in February. The creators, whose names aren’t revealed, are working for free.

Attention all North American college students in their junior or senior year next school year and have an interest in cartooning. The Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship is now taking applications:

Along with a completed entry form, applicants are required to send 5 samples of their own cartooning artwork; noting if and where the work has been published (either print or web).
Please send copies.
DO NOT send original artwork.
DEADLINE: JANUARY 31, 2008

The applications will be judged by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF) and the number of scholarships given out and their amounts will be at their discretion of the NCSF.

Click on the link to download an application.

Valerie D’Orazio announces the Design-A-Lulu Initiative, “in which we ask artists to dream up their own interpretation of our Lulu mascot.” Here are the details:

Here are the specs & pertinent info:

* Our preferred deadline is by the end of January, but we will happily extend it where needed.

* Colored art is preferred but B&W is fine.

* Art should be scanned at 300 dpi.

* Torso-and-head shots preferred, though if you’re inspired to draw full-body that’s okay.

* Though your initial inspiration can be our original mascot Lulu, unique interpretations are welcome and encouraged.

* Who is “Lulu?” She’s the Everywoman who reads and/or creates comic books.

* A variety of ethnicities, races, and body types for your Lulu are welcome as well.

* A request will be made for original art so we can auction it all off in a Lulu fundraising event.

* Selected art will be used for a variety of Friends of Lulu fundraising/promotional purposes, including website & flyer art, T-shirts, stickers, and buttons.

* We will initially post the art on our blog as it comes in, then later set up a permanent gallery on our site.

Last week I posted about the final nominations for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s annual list of Great Graphic Novels For Teens. Now blogger David Welsh has sifted through YALSA’s nominations for Best Books for Young Adults, and plucked out all the graphic novels.

The list features titles from Archaia Studios Press, DC Comics/Minx, First Second, NBM Publishing and Oni Press, among others.