Today Joe McCulloch brings you the comics of the week.
Elsewhere:
The illustrator and illustration historian Walt Reed, best known for The Illustration House gallery and his essential and unmatched the Illustrator in America, 1860-2000, has passed away. DB Dowd has a lovely appreciation up on his blog.
Dangerous Minds has a preview of a book I'm much intrigued with: Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye's Final and Darkest Era, which collects the great pulp artist's work from the late 1960s and 70s. These spare and terrifying drawings, which call to mind contemporary artists like Noel Freibert and Carlos Gonzales, were published mostly in fanzines and small press books during the tail-end of the great rediscovery of pulp art. This was an effort led by and large by fans, with no real support except each other. It's an amazing thing... people tracking down beloved artists, many no longer producing and coaxing them back to the drawing board. Pulp history, like comics history, was largely the invention of "fans", without whom we simply wouldn't have... history. In Coye's case the results were stunning: minimal drawings of fallen flesh, demons and torture in stark black and white. Remarkable stuff.
Speaking of history, this is a remarkable memoir of Gilbert Shelton and the Texas comics scene which I'd somehow passed over.
And yesterday's Marketplace discussed the business machinations behind the current crop of Marvel movies.
