Dylan Horrocks continues his week of Diaries for us. Today, he includes everything he drew during a single day, and dreams.
Joe McCulloch has the word on this week's comic books, plus a short look at David Hine and Shaky Kane.
And Rob Clough reviews the latest issue of the surprisingly under-discussed Mineshaft, still possibly the best-kept secret in comics.
Elsewhere, I'm a big fan of most everything Tom Spurgeon writes, but even if all he ever did was put together his signature, unending bullet-pointed convention reports, like the one he just made for the Emerald City Comicon, I'd be happy.
Finally, over at the Hooded Utilitarian, Ng Suat Tong is taking nominations for the best online comics criticism of the year so far, and also explains that last year's survey didn't happen mostly because of a lack of energy among the participants. (I was wondering what happened.) I served as a judge in Suat's survey for 2010, and although I wasn't completely enamored with all the winners, I found it to be an overall enjoyable experience. It makes sense to open nominations to everyone—if I recall correctly, that seemed to be the weakest link in the survey the year I participated: most of the judges' choices were obvious last-minute picks, often not-so-coincidentally published a few days before our nominations were due (and thus, easier to remember). Anyway, Suat runs a good survey, so if you enjoy this kind of thing, I recommend it.
Suat also offers a typically bleak (though not necessarily wrong) assessment of online comics criticism today, along with mostly kind words about this site. As Suat isn't one to mince words, the compliments are appreciated. He also worries that perhaps the online comics commentariat has grown too monolithic. I suppose he has a point. But six years ago, Dan, Frank, and I felt the same way, and started Comics Comics to do something about it. There's nothing stopping anyone else from doing the same thing now. It isn't exactly expensive to run a blog. And there are ten thousand people just waiting to link to or read something, anything intelligent about comics.
