Today on the site, our friend Joe McCulloch would like to mention some comic books, including the latest issues of Ganges and Berlin.
Elsewhere:
The excellent Heather Benjamin gives a good long interview over at the Vans web site.
On Sunday my wife and I had the distinct pleasure of babysitting for Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski. That is one cute and well-mannered baby. I love babies. Though my son is only five, having a baby strapped to my chest was still pretty novel. We strolled around the neighborhood. I talked to her about bricks. Old people looked kindly at me again. We tried to teach her the cha-cha. We got all the fun with none of the trouble. Who knew that her father once took shrooms and watched anime and has now written about it in a public forum. Sigh.
What else... Simon Hanselmann's new zine, Portraits, arrived in the mail. I like that Simon is chronicling the mostly-inane comics subculture that he's a part of, partly because he's getting at various "issues" that have been around whatever-we-call-this-comics-world for a while (and which used to be discussed on members-only message boards), like (not) Nobrow's alleged behavior or the intentional misreading of Robert Crumb. And partly because he tells familiar anecdotes (creepy festival organizers; self-aggrandizing hacks) but doesn't spare himself. His earlier Truth Zone comics were like talk show panels... here it's more anecdote and story-based. I like seeing this kind of thing because, well, few people are keeping track of what's going on now. I would like to see it to cut deeper, to not spare his friends for a gags, and, as he did in TZ, name names, which is something really only artists can get away with. It's refreshing.
