MoCCA did Dan in, so I'm stepping in to deliver the news.
First, we are publishing frequent Journal contributor Matthias Wivel's first story for the new site: an in-depth interview with the French artist Fabrice Neaud. I was not previously familiar with his work, which is not easy to find in translation here, but still found this to be a fascinating conversation. We hope you will too.
In other Journal news, the panel discussion at the Strand Friday night seemed to go well, or at least well enough. It's hard to tell from the microphone side of the table. But Gary and Kim Deitch were both in fine form, and the audience seemed happy. My favorite part came the first time it was mentioned aloud that Dan and I had taken over the website, when I could have sworn I saw a giant light bulb literally appear over Kim's head—he had apparently been too good-natured to ask what we were doing there earlier.
Several people inquired beforehand about the possibility of the panel being recorded, and they should rest easy, because by my count there were at least three devices capturing the whole thing for posterity. Thanks to all of you who attended.
Elsewhere on the internet:
Drawn & Quarterly had a limited supply of Chester Brown's instantly infamous Paying for It at the MoCCA Festival, and there are already three reviews online—from Tom Spurgeon and TCJ.com contributors Chris Mautner and Sean T. Collins—all worth reading later, or now if you can't wait for the actual book. Following the reaction to Brown's book may well end up being almost as much fun as the work itself—which, incidentally, it seems like I may have enjoyed more wholeheartedly than any of these three writers. (Why do I feel creepy saying so?) Then again, I haven't needed to take a publicly stance on the more polemic aspect of the book, which is the hard part. We'll have more coverage of Brown on the site closer to the book's release date.
Bhob Stewart investigates (with a little help from Jay Lynch) the possible origins of the term "Hoo-Hah!," a bit of slang frequent readers of early Mad will remember well. Was Harvey Kurtzman influenced by T.S. Eliot? Considering the mutual admiration society Eliot set up with Groucho Marx (one of the comedian's letters to the poet can be read online), I wouldn't put it past the realm of possibility.
Finally, via Tom Scioli, I learned of a Wired article that claims to have discovered a 1953 Otto Binder article that provided the secret inspiration for every nuclear-radiation-mutated superhero from Spider-Man to the X-Men. It's not true, unfortunately—the mutant superman has been around since at least the early '30s, when a writer named John Taine wrote a whole slew of "mutational romances." And Lewis Padgett's famous "Baldy" series of the 1940s, gathered in Mutant!, featured a race of persecuted bald telepaths, and provided an obvious reference for Professor X as well. But anyway.
Finally—Not (or at least only tangentially) Comics: Over at the great film site Mubi, our own Joe McCulloch writes about Frank Miller's The Spirit and Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch. Check it out.
