Today, Joe McCulloch has your guide to the Week in Comics, with spotlight picks from Bobby London and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
It is also day two of Mike Dawson's tenure at the Cartoonist's Diary column. This time, he tries to go outside.
Elsewhere:
—Commentary. Brigid Alverson noticed something odd about that New York Times story on comics apps that Dan linked to yesterday—it included a strong recommendation of an app that runs on pirated manga. ["There are more digital manga services on the horizon, but as long as serious outlets like The New York Times can’t (or won’t) make the distinction between a legitimate manga app and a bootleg app like Manga Rock, the publishers will continue to have an uphill climb."]
When retailer Brian Hibbs bought a second store, it came with around 75,000 back issues. Now he's making a go at selling them. ["So, my first job was to 'part the Red Sea,' and separate the wheat from the chaff, which meant physically going through all (approximately) 300 long boxes and seeing what was in each one."]
Ben Towle reports from the Bill Watterson/Richard Thompson ehxibition at the Billy Ireland library. ["One of the most interesting displays showed Watterson’s early strips he did for his college newspaper as well as some submissions to newspaper syndicates. Including a rejection letter was a nice touch. I was really, really curious about the middle strip here which appears to have been deliberately obscured with an overlaying piece of bristol board. Did Watterson not want it shown for some reason?"]
—Interviews. CBR talks to Mike Mignola on the 20th anniversary of Hellboy. ["With China, yeah, there's photo reference. But in between those photos, what happens? What goes on? There's nothing worse, for me anyway, than being a slave to photo reference. I did one story set in Japan and I had photo reference for the exterior of a house and for a great little cemetery and things like that, but I didn't know things like how the doors worked. I could've gotten this out of Akira Kurosawa movies. I could've studied the interiors from various films, but that seems like an awful lot of work. I always felt that if I'm drawing the real world, I need to get it right."]
The same site also talks to former DC publisher Paul Levitz. ["Years ago I wrote an article for The Comics Journal titled 'Call for Higher Criticism', and looking back at it I think it was very naïve and immature in many ways. The argument was that there’s more to talk about than if the Thing can beat the Hulk, but there was broader things to talk about. I’ve seen it evolve over the years, with an army of professors now bringing scholarly knowledge and wisdom to the field."]
Kurt Andersen has Gene Luen Yang on as a guest on Studio 360.
—Reviews. Andrew Wilmot reviews Diane Obomsawin's On Loving Women. ["The collected stories feel strangely complete and incomplete at the same time; they’re first paragraphs to larger narratives the author has decided to leave off the table, choosing instead to focus on the discombobulating first steps of girls exploring their sexuality."]
J. Caleb Mozzocco reviews Sam Henderson's Scene But Not Heard. ["Most of the gags revolve around the rule-less physics of comic strips and cartoons, and, read all at once, this book seems like a grand symphonic performance of the unique possibilities for jokes in the comics medium."]
—Misc. This Susie Cagle story is more about freelancing than cartooning, but there's a reason everyone is linking to it. ["Almost eight years ago, a week after my 22nd birthday, I graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia’s journalism school. I didn’t know what having an Ivy League master’s degree in journalism meant, besides an overinflated sense of young self-worth and a collection of very expensive bills. I was about to find out: nothing."]
—Video. On this weekend's 60 Minutes, Morley Safer profiled The New Yorker's cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, who has a new book out. A slew of the magazine's cartoonists (Gross, Chast, etc.) are also briefly featured.
