Ah, how bittersweet: the final entry of Brian Ralph's week-long cartoon diary, in which he says goodbye to his friends at Comic-Con and returns triumphantly home. Also: photos. Read it and weep.
Also, yesterday we rolled out a major interview with Brandon Graham, creator of the cult favorites King City and Multiple Warheads (and former Cartoon Diarist himself), conducted by Ian Burns and covering a lot of territory, including but not limited to: childhood, manga, graffiti, porn, Meathaus, Vertigo, New York city bars, Tokyopop, and surviving cancer.
We also neglected to highlight Joe McCulloch's weekly column this Tuesday, and even if you've already been to your local comic shop this week, it's still worth checking out, including as it does his thoughts on Peyo's Smurfs and Captain America (the movie).
Of course, you may be planning to join the boycott of Kirby-derived Marvel product called for by Stephen Bissette, in which case McCulloch's review will let you know what you're missing. That boycott gained traction with several online comics reviewers and commentators this week, including Bryan Munn, Christopher Allen, Matthias Wivel, and Matt Seneca.
Douglas Wolk has just released a 99-cent "Kindle Single" about his experiences at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. I haven't read it yet, but it's undoubtedly worth a look.
I think the reviewer may be taking R. Crumb's self-deprecating comments a bit too much at face value, but there is a pretty funny review of the new Comics Journal at the SF Weekly.
Cartoon Brew has dug up an old video featuring Terry Gilliam, instructing viewers on his own idiosyncratic methods of animation.
I'm pretty sure neither Dan nor I ever posted a link to Rich Tommaso's autobio comic about moving to Seattle and working for Fantagraphics.
And the legal battle between Archie Comics and its co-CEO Nancy Silberkleit gained a new dimension this week, as Silberkleit has filed a motion to dismiss.
Finally, the Hooded Utilitarian has posted the results of its poll regarding the greatest international comics of all time. No real surprises in the top ten, other than the fairly high rankings of Calvin & Hobbes and Watchmen. It's a very North American (and very male) list, but that's no surprise either. In the larger 115 comics list, superhero and sci-fi adventure stories generally score higher than you might expect, and newspaper strips from before the time of the voters' births (aside from a few gimmes by people like Herriman and McCay) score very low. Some of the appended short essays are pretty good (others are pedestrian but not actively painful), and the comments thread under Watchmen is actually fairly nuanced and interesting, as these things go.
