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On the site today: Good news: Frank Santoro is back with a new installment of his column. This week Frank remembers 2009 and has some thoughts on the lifespan of a comic. Stay tuned for more.

Elsewhere:

Sean T. Collins on Gabrielle Bell.

It's SDCC-time and The Beat has some announcements and here's a LGBT guide to the con.

Here's a local profile of Jim Rugg.

A review of Ulli Lust's Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life.

A remembrance of cartoonist Jackie Ormes.

Brandon Graham has been reading some Terminator comics.

After the success of the most recent Superman film (and made hundreds of millions of dollars), Michael Dean has written "Who Owns the Man of Steel?", a history of the rights battle over the character to show who exactly is getting paid, and why, and a good primer for those who haven't followed the situation closely:

You may be forgiven if you’ve lost track of who owns the rights to the protagonist of Man of Steel. On the other hand, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the legal seesaw between the heirs of Superman’s creators and Warner/DC landed solidly in favor of the corporation earlier this year, just before the release of its big-budget tent-pole movie.

An appeal of a ruling against the heirs of Joe Shuster is pending, but it is before the same appeals court that ruled against the Siegel heirs in January. Warner Senior Vice-President of Corporate Communications Paul McGuire told the Journal a ruling on that appeal is expected soon.

Marc Toberoff, attorney for the heirs, vowed to continue the fight. Warner, however, considered itself the winner of not just the battle but the war. “This is a great day for Superman, for his fans, for DC Entertainment and for Warner Bros,” the company announced, following the court’s latest ruling against Siegel’s heirs. If this is the end of what has been an epic struggle over control of one of the world’s most valuable properties, how happy an end is it? Is it really a great day for Superman, his corporate owners, and his fans? And what kind of day is it for comics creators?

Elsewhere:

—The Harvey Award nominations have been announced.

—Journal columnist Jared Gardner has launched a series of articles exploring Franco-Belgian comics translated into English.

—Matt Madden, fresh off his entry into the French Order of Arts & Letters, files another long report from his and wife Jessica Abel's life in Angoulême.

—Michael Dooley previews the "Wonder Women: On and Off Paper" exhibition being held at the Women's Museum in San Diego concurrently with the upcoming Comic-Con.

—Michael DeForge was interviewed for the Your Dreams My Nightmares podcast, and Maris Wicks was interviewed by Tom Spurgeon.

—The Comics Internet®'s "favorite" French cartoonist, Boulet, goes to Vermont and CCS.

—Brian Michael Bendis answers a reader's question about Orson Scott Card.

Well ok, it's Tuesday so Joe McCulloch has things to tell you about this week's comics. And we have added a tribute to Kim Thompson by Steve Brodner to the post.

Elsewhere:

Domingos Isabelinho wonders "Did Comics Criticism Ever Exist?"

MORE Joe McCulloch, this time on late (recent) Steve Ditko.

Wired has some Comic-Con etiquette tips for you.

And the A.V. Club has a list of 17 superhero stories by alternative cartoonists.

Good morning, folks. Today we have another review from the indefatigable Rob Clough, this time his take on Thomas Herpich's White Clay. Here's a sample:

"Mensch" and "The Wedding Cauldron" are examples of just how comfortable Herpich is working in a fantasy milieu, even if both go way beyond the scope of a typical fantasy story. "Mensch" is about a soldier in some ancient war who falls and is replaced by a different version of himself, a better version who had been the better nature of himself that he had long ignored. Once again, the idea that there's a better version of one's self that's lurking out there, waiting to take over comes to the fore in this comic. The real kicker is that Herpich convinces the reader that this other self deserves to take over. "The Wedding Cauldron" is about a man discovering these impish little shape-changing creatures who perform mischief at a wedding he doesn't really want to be attending. The melancholy fellow feels his spirits lifted by following them into the forest, even as the imps are terrified that he will kill them, especially since one of their disguises works so poorly. Once again, Herpich is interested in people hiding and literally changing their identities, only it's from an outside perspective this time around.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews Dept.Journal writer Chris Mautner interviews Journal writer Marc Sobel about Sobel's new book, The Love and Rockets Companion. ICv2 interviews the indescribable Jack Katz on the republication of his First Kingdom.

—History Dept. No one's going to beat this series of posts by Todd Klein on the history of DC Comics for a while. Start here and keep going. And Ladies Making Comics does a short profile of the under-appreciated Dori Seda.

—Miscellaneous. The Lambda Literary Review gathers comics recommendations from LGBT cartoonists, including Harold Cruse, Ellen Forney, Roberta Gregory, and Justin Hall, among others. The Projects festival has announced their upcoming lineup. Jacob Canfield compares Steve Ditko to Jack T. Chick.

Hi, it's Friday, but no Tucker today. We have Robert Kirby on Theo Ellsworth's latest.

And now I direct you to these fine places on the internet:

I'm always proud to make an appearance.

SDCC: The academic side.

Jared Gardner on Franco-Belgian comics.

PW on the state of comic book retailing.

Alex Dueben interviews Joe Sinnott.

And Joe McCulloch gives us, and the world, a Steve Ditko checklist.

Tributes to Kim Thompson are continuing to come in, most recently from Paul Baresh, Bob Burden, Drew Friedman, Francesca Ghermandhi, and Jim Woodring. Here's a bit of Woodring's:

Kim was a master of social jiu-jitsu. When a well-known sci-fi writer gratuitously insulted him, publicly and in terms that would have driven most people into a vengeful rage, Kim absorbed it with his well-known chuckle, effectively neutralizing the venom and making the writer look like even more of a jerk. But his unruffled exterior masked a passionate nature and a gift for lethal invective. Like Mark Twain, when he had a grievance he would sometimes express his true feelings in a self-gratifyingly unrestrained letter that would never be sent, followed by the calm, rational, and eminently professional response that was his official reply. In my archives is a copy of a magnificently unpublishable screed he wrote but never sent to a business acquaintance, a letter which still makes my head spin with its relentless onslaught of caustic virtuosity. He could have been a polemicist as good (and as savage) as Philip Wylie or Christopher Hitchens if he had chosen to.

Elsewhere:

—Columbia University's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has acquired the archives of Al Jaffee. This is excellent news. I once had the opportunity to look at some of that work in person, and it was among the most impressive original comic art I've ever seen.

—Sky is Falling Dept. At Editor & Publisher, Rob Tornoe writes about the current difficulties facing aspiring syndicated newspaper cartoonists, and ICv2, Rob Salkowitz worries about the Amazon comics announcement.

—Philip Nel has conveniently gathered many of the best video interviews and other links related to Maurice Sendak.

—Clowes does Dragnet.

—Salon interviews Alan Moore, but not about comics. Mostly he just talks about why Dan is wrong about crowd-funding.

—Burgin Streetman has posted the rest of her Tomi Ungerer interview.

—Sean Howe, the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, talks with Dan Patterson about Marvel.

—Not Comics: That Dustin Hoffman video going around is very moving and all, but I prefer the one Martin Short made thirty years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuXYyc9UNv0

In his latest "Grid", Ken Parille closely examines Acme Novelty Library 19:

Ware, who has often compared comics to music, uses the red circle as a visual leitmotif, a “short, repeated musical theme” that he associates with Brown and threads throughout the comic’s two narratives. It first appears as the razor’s cap and then as a pushpin holding up photos of the astronaut and his “first and only true love.”

Elsewhere:

Amazon is jumping into the comics publishing game. So far, so shitty.

On the bright side, here's a Gary Panter curriculum in pictures.

Paul Karasik draws the story of his local ferry.

Lists are more fun to make than to read, but here's one from a whole web site devoted to lists, and it's about comics, too. Go to it.

Al Jaffee roughs are better than most finishes.

Sort of comics -- or at least cartoon characters: Wrigley's Spearmen.

It's Tuesday, which means Joe McCulloch is here with his regular guide to the Week in Comics.

Also, if it's been a while since you checked in with our collection of tributes to Kim Thompson, you'll want to take another look at it soon. New additions have continued to roll in, most recently from Kim's Fantagraphics colleagues Jason T. Miles and Kristy Valenti, as well as an essay-length remembrance from Gary Groth.

I’ve sketched the highlights of Kim’s “career” (he would understand and appreciate the quotation marks — neither of us thought of this as a “career”), but it barely scratches the surface — it’s impossible to adequately convey his devotion to specific projects and to the goals of the company generally, the all-nighters we pulled to get books to the printer, the tens of thousands of hours hunched over typewriters and computer keyboards and manuscripts, his above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty proofreading. What I’d like to do, though, is to offer a few words about something I’m uniquely qualified to talk about: the intersection between our personal and professional lives.

As a publisher of cartooning, Fantagraphics Books was an outgrowth of The Comics Journal, so a polemical chip-on-the-shoulder was built into its DNA. As recently as the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the whole notion that comics was a bona fide art form was still alien not just to the culture at large, but even to the fan sub-culture, most of which inhabited this bland, gray area between a connoisseurial love of great cartooning and the worship of pure drek (often both at the same time). The only way to break this critical complacency, I thought —and it may not have been the most effective strategy (because it was less a strategy than a compulsion)— was to confront the artistic status quo head-on with the best criticism we could muster — and Kim was right there with me in this Quixotic endeavor, as his reviews of Ronin, Detectives, Inc., The Death of Captain Marvel, and other books attest. Without this zeal, I don’t think we could’ve made a difference.

.
Elsewhere, lots of catching up to do:

—The long nightmare surrounding Dragon Con and Edward Kramer is apparently over. (Context here.)

—If you read the two-part Peter Bagge/Zak Sally discussion we ran a few months back, you recall how much of it had to do with the difficult economics of comics publishing today. Sally is now releasing the second volume of his Sammy the Mouse series, and talks a lot more about all of that in his announcement, in which he suggests ordering the book direct.

—Longish Reviews. Occasional Journal contributor Sean Rogers has a typically excellent piece on Michael DeForge at the Globe & Mail, and Michael Kammen writes about Victor Navasky's The Art of Controversy for LARB. (I think I have to read this book.)

—Frequent Journal contributor Chris Mautner has a roundup of recent books from Hic & Hoc. So does Rob Clough. Sarrah Horrock writes about Jiro Matsumoto. Impossible Mike writes about Gengoroh Tagame.

—Whenever I link to Bleeding Cool, I seem to get at least one irritated e-mail from readers, but they've got a couple fun recent posts up, including one on the time S. Clay Wilson worked for Marvel, and another on Jim Steranko's colorful Twitter account. (Gary's eventual essay-length tribute to Steranko will be a sight to see.)

—As with most (all?) art forms, the history of comics is perhaps most efficiently grasped as the history of the technologies involved with its production. Pioneering underground artist Justin Green is figuring out how the current technological changes affect his work in a brief blog post here.

—Robert Boyd has an excellent piece on the sad end of Domy Books in Houston.

—British sf author Alastair Reynolds remembers growing up on Eagle.

—And finally, Gary Larson on 20/20 in 1986 (via):

Today: Rob Clough on Eamon Espey's Songs of the Abyss:

Songs of the Abyss, which likewise collects a number of mini-comics he's published over the past few years, is in many ways a more mature and cohesive work. At its heart, this book is about worship. It's about what we choose to worship, why we do so and the implications of this act. The essential point that Espey gets across is that what we choose to worship as a society and a culture has a savage component that is not unlike the way the Aztecs went about their ways: a vast civilization built on blood sacrifice, spectacle, hierarchies, false mysticism and degradation.

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon on Aquaman.

Rob Steibel on Tom Scioli's masses of humanity.

If you can't get enough of me, here I am on the Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast.

Here's a lawsuit closely related to similar events in comics.

And the New York Times profiles the new Fox programming block ADHD, which has content adapted from comics and Ben Jones as its creative director.

Today on the site, we are reposting three of Kim Thompson's most memorable early pieces for The Comics Journal, which, added to his review of Ronin and his famous 1999 manifesto calling for new "crap," may serve as a sort of miniature Best of Kim Thompson. These five pieces are just the tip of the iceberg, of course, and I hope that eventually we might see more of his critical writings (and possibly interviews—here's a good one he did with Sergio Aragones back in 1989) collected into print.

First we have Kim's 1978 review of the then-ongoing National Lampoon's presentation of the French cartoonist Claire Bretécher, much of which revolves around translation issues:

Translation is a difficult craft (or art). If the translator is less than fluent in the language of origin but fully conversant with the target language, the result is frequently a grammatically, idiomatically, and dialectically “correct” translation, but unfaithful to the original and in some cases downright nonsensical. On the other hand, if it is the target language that is the weaker of the two, awkward and ruptured translations abound. Upon buying the book and noticing the name of the translator, Valerie Marchant, I expressed some concern that it might be one of Bretécher’s cronies with an M.A. in English and that the book would boast a conflagration of massacred pseudo-colloquial English with gallicisms running rampant. (“I demand pardon of you.” “Oh, that makes nothing,” for instance.) Happily, I found this not to be so, and with a few awkward exceptions, particularly when coping with the labored ironic politeness that is the staple of French argument (“Quit it with this shit, please.”—“Mood Music”), the English dialog flows nearly as well as the original. Sadly, several strips are rendered pointless or even unintelligible because Ms. Marchant’s command of French was shaky enough for her to misunderstand the originals. A few examples will suffice.

Our second selection, Kim's 1979 review of a collection called Masters of Comic Book Art, displays more of Kim's theoretical side, and is also just fun to read for sections such as the following:

Undoubtedly the worst chapter is the one on Barry Windsor-Smith. Smith rose to fame in the early to mid-’70s not only for his highly illustrative approach to comics and his tremendously effective mood in Conan and a handful of other books, but also for his unique pacing and continuity (involving, in particular, successions of high, thin panels), derived in part from Steranko. The book communicates none of this. Smith’s entire comic book career is encapsulated in two comic book panels (which aren’t even in sequence); then, having done his duty by establishing Smith as an artist who once worked in comics, Garriock proceeds to offer what looks like a catalogue for Gorblimey Press, all posters and prints and paintings. This is absurd; while the latter are undoubtedly better in terms of draftsmanship and polish, they are utterly irrelevant to the comics medium.

In our third selection, 1980's "Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial", Kim gets right to the heart of The Comics Journal and its critical philosophy:

The question was thrown at me in person by Jack Harris, who then wanted to know why DC should help the Journal with news and cover reproductions when all the magazine does is denigrate his and his peers’ efforts; it was posed to the readers of The Buyer’s Guide by two of that paper’s most persistently lowbrow columnists; and it has surfaced in various guises in a number of letters of comment to the Journal.

The question is: “Why, if you have such contempt for the medium, do you publish a magazine about comics?”

If that one confounds you for a moment, as it does us, you can probably rally your faculties and mouth the predictable answer along with us: “Damn it, we don’t have contempt for the medium—we just have contempt for the vast quantities of dreck and drivel that deface it. The medium we love.”

Now this seems to me a pellucid answer to a question that was poorly thought out to begin with. Unfortunately, it appears not to be so. Generally, reaction to it is something along the lines of, “Well, yes, I understand that, but if you have such contempt…” etc. Clearly, a few words of elaboration on the subject are needed.

A note to our readers outside the States. Tomorrow is a big national holiday here, so we'll be on vacation until next week. Elsewhere:

—A new documentary about Tomi Ungerer has been made, and the Alsatian artist talked to NPR for the occasion. The Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves blog has the first part of another interview with Ungerer here.

—Publishers Merging. Dennis Kitchen's venerable Kitchen Sink Press is becoming an imprint of Dark Horse. Ross Richie and Jackie Cummins talk about the Boom!/Archaia merger here.

—Comics Enriched Their Lives! #22

—The upcoming Daniel Clowes Reader (which looks a-mazing) has a worthwhile promotional Tumblr.

—The popular Star Wars cartoonist Jeffrey Brown talks about his autobiographical work with Tim O'Shea.

—Paul Gravett profiles the French illustrator, editor, and creator of silent comics Marion Fayolle.

—Rob Clough picks out two worthy crowd-funding projects.

—Ng Suat Tong writes about Graham Chaffee's Good Dog, a book pretty much guaranteed to appeal to (and possibly addle the critical faculties of) all dog people—amongst whom I count myself. Even the notoriously cranky Suat himself seems to have been softened up.

—I missed this back in June, but Gerry Conway is asking for crowd-sourcing help to get DC creators fair compensation for their creations. (via)

—Finally, here's a very short interview with Sergio Aragones about Mad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIy3GCVddUU

(via)

Hey it's Jog's Day here with this week's new releases and gems of bygone years.

Elsewhere:

Speaking of gems, here's a profile of cartoonist Julia Gforer. And also at The Beat, a two-part look at the Grant Morrison comic Zenith.

Here's Tom Scioli on Keith Giffen and there's profusely illustrated interview with Howard Chaykin over here.

Brian K. Vaughn talks comics and digital platforms over at CBR.

Good morning. Today we introduce a new occasional column from Paul Tumey, "Framed!" In the first installment, "The Lost Comics of Jack Cole", Tumey tackles Cole's very early years, after explaining why the exercise is necessary:

Jack Cole kept secrets.

When he was in high school, Cole would quietly sneak into his family’s kitchen in the middle of the night where he would assemble and wrap a sandwich for his school lunch the next day. Back in his room, he would hide the sandwich inside a hollowed out book.

His boyhood room contained cabinets Cole – a sort of small town Buster Keaton -- built, complete with hidden compartments. One of these compartments held electronic gear Cole had assembled that allowed him to eavesdrop without detection on his family’s telephone calls. Much like his 1940-41 comic book character, Dickie Dean, a boy inventor (who lived in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Cole's hometown), the young Jack Cole was endlessly resourceful.

Smuggling a sandwich to school allowed Cole to secretly save his lunch money to invest in his passion: cartooning. Cole eventually saved up enough quarters and dimes to buy correspondence courses from the Landon School of Cartooning -- courses that his father, a small business owner, had refused to subsidize.

A career born from such stubborn resourcefulness and playful secrecy is bound to hold some surprises. Over half a century after Jack Cole’s life abruptly ended, we are still discovering his secrets.

[...]
A study of Cole’s lesser-known –and mostly forgotten – comics and cartoons sheds light on his greatest work, his Plastic Man stories and Playboy cartoons. It also reshapes in fun, manic Plastic Man fashion our current narrow understanding of this secretive, influential 20^th century pop artist who was never interviewed, never profiled in his lifetime, and rarely even photographed.

Elsewhere:

—Tom Spurgeon has written the most thorough obituary of Kim Thompson to appear yet. You ought to read it.

—The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library's Dylan Williams Collection is looking for help identifying the creators of minicomics.

—The Daniel Clowes MCA show in Chicago has gotten more coverage, in the Chicago Tribune (with another look at Clowes's Chicago landscape I linked to last week, only with newer, more in-depth annotations), and a review from Noah Berlatsky in the Chicago Reader, and gets in an argument in the comments with a representative of Pigeon Press.

—I missed Ted Rall's recent column announcing the death of editorial cartooning after before the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention. Matt Bors, a young cartoonist mentioned in Rall's column, wrote about the same AAEC event, including a great Pat Oliphant anecdote. Then Tom Spurgeon interviewed Bors yesterday, which I haven't read yet, but it's top of my list for today.

—Fuel for true believers & haters: The New Yorker's cartoon editor Bob Mankoff did a TED Talk.

—Box Brown talked to the Beat about changes at Retrofit Comics.

—The Guardian has an interview in comics form with the family behind The Phoenix.

—Not (exactly) comics: The Splitsider tells the story of the National Lampoon magazine.

—Not comics at all, except tangentially. Last week, a woman claimed that she was sexually harassed at a science-fiction convention by a prominent member of that community, and chronicled what happened when she tried to report him. The post went viral, which led to further developments. Seeing as comics is similarly dependent on a convention culture, this seemed worthy of note.

Hey it's Friday and Tucker is back to enliven your weekend.

Elsewhere:

Rutu Modan has a Culture Diary up at The Paris Review.

The great Ron Rege is selling a print from one my favorite strips of his (which I also happened to publish 10 years ago).

I missed this Alex Dueben piece on Congressman John Lewis and his new graphic novel, March.

This is a day of missed: There's a new book out edited by Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester? Sign me up.

Have a good weekend.

Today we bring you Robert Kirby's review of the new Ulli Lust book, Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, which has proved itself very popular in my household. Here's a bit of Robert's review:

Thus begin her adventures as a 17-year-old Austrian punk rock girl ambling her way across Italy in the summer of 1984 with her newfound friend in tow, a tall, gangly girl named Edi. With no money or passports they forge ahead by sheer force of will, armed only with the invulnerability of the young and rebellious. Though Lust’s youthful exuberance and energy are severely tested by the inevitable pitfalls an attractive young woman will encounter hitchhiking in a country bound by traditional (i.e. highly sexist) cultural mores and traditions – and by the personal betrayals of certain fair-weather friends – this is no glib Live-and-Learn morality tale. One of the reasons the book is so successful is that Lust let the experience gestate over years, allowing for a certain distance and detachment. She captures perfectly and without judgment the complex social, cultural, and personal maelstrom she willingly entered into that summer, offering readers a wonderfully vicarious thrill in the process - especially readers like me, whose travelogues are generally limited to the “what I ate that time I went to Reykjavik” category.

I spent a very long day yesterday in Storybook Land, New Jersey, so may have been too discombobulated when I got home to recognize interesting news, but in any case I wasn't able to find quite as many links as usual. Here's what I've got:

—As you may have heard, a group of scholars have changed their minds about which is the first "true" graphic, now nominating something called the Glasgow Looking-Glass from 1825 Scotland (and thus prior to Töpffer's Obadiah Oldbuck). Here's a selection of images from the publication.

—Hogan's Alley has a ton of photos from the most recent Reuben Awards.

—A promotional video for Art Instruction, Inc. featuring a cameo from Charles Schulz.

We hope you're following the ongoing Kim Thompson tributes. Here's a new one by Jeet Heer about Kim the critic.

The mark of strong critics is that you take their views seriously even when you most sharply disagree with them. Or as F.R. Leavis once said, the essential critical sentence is “Yes, but—“ There were many occasions where my own impressions diverged sharply from Kim’s. I’ve tried to like Dave Sim’s Cerebus because of Kim’s eloquent advocacy, but I’ve never been able to quite see in that work what Kim did. Kim was also dismissive of Jack Kirby’s 1970s work in ways that I thought were unfair. (! generational divide might be at work here. In my experience it helps to be born after 1965 and not grow up with Stan & Jack era Marvel comics to appreciate 1970s Kirby). The mental arguments I’ve had with Kim are as much a part of my education as the words he wrote.

And Chris Mautner brings us an interview with Carol Tyler.

Loss is a very big part of the book and I experienced loss while finishing the back part of the book. I think one of things I’ve learned this year — I’ve never seen anyone . . . I watched my mother die this year, being attentive to the end of her life and now my sister’s got this disease. When I drew “The Hannah Story,” I had just lost my job. The emotion of loss is powerful and one of things I recently come to realize. You actually do go through a period of mourning that’s physical.

There were lots of other losses too. In fact, last year was the suckiest year ever! I had to put my dog down. You name it. All the worst shit you could deal with I had to go through. Everything from my house being robbed twice to my daughter’s car being stolen. Justin & I got invited to [Europe] and I got sick on the trip. Some weird virus that lasted two months. Twenty-two days of fever and being bedridden, unable to move. I had a reaction to the virus and ended up with reactive rheumatoid arthritis. I couldn’t move. It traveled around different joints in my body. Couldn’t roll over. Couldn’t walk. I remember when I could finally move my foot one day, “Wow. There’s hope.” After the fever broke, I had lost 25 pounds and weighed 119. This was in November.

Elsewhere:

Ben Schwartz remembers Kim Thompson at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Hey, new books in the works from Jim Woodring and Dan Zettwoch, respectively.

An NPR review of Rutu Modan's The Property and a CAKE post from her publisher, D&Q.

And finally, an interview with Benjamin Marra.

Tuesday is the day before new comics come out, and Joe McCulloch has your weekly guide to the most interesting-sounding new releases.

We are continuing to add to our collection of tributes to Kim Thompson. New additions include those of Mike Catron, Helena G. Harvilicz, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and Tony Millionaire.

We also have a ten-minute video from the 2001 San Diego Comic-Con, in which Gary Groth, Kim Thompson, and Mike Catron discuss the early days of Fantagraphics.

—A nice off-site tribute to Kim Thompson from Matthias Wivel and a very funny one from the inimitable Bully.

—Greg Hunter at Big Other reviews David B's Incidents in the Night, and Impossible Mike at HTMLGiant reviews CF's Mere. It's nice to see some of the smaller literary sites engage with more ambitious comics instead of just slumming.

—Chicago Weekly interviews Ivan Brunetti, Gil Roth interviews both Brunetti and Michael Kupperman, Inkstuds interviews Cathy Malkasian, and Tell Me Something I Don't Know interviews John Porcellino.

—Dan Clowes draws Chicago, and explains the picture.

—Mark Waid explains why he isn't getting any money for the incredibly successful Man of Steel movie, which apparently uses some ideas from comics he's written.

—I don't advertise too many of these kinds of thing on here, but tomorrow Last Gasp is having a huge underground comics sale.

Today we have tributes to Kim Thompson from David B., Peter Bagge, Daniel Clowes, Al Columbia, Mark Evanier, R. Fiore, Sam Henderson, Paul Hornschemeier, Eric Reynolds, Joe Sacco, and Chris Ware. Here is Daniel Clowes:

Kim had, from my vantage, what appeared to be an enviable life: a happy home, and an unending pride in his calling. He was truly a gentle, kind soul, though he always thought of himself as a bit of a punk, I think. I don’t remember ever seeing him angry, and he treated even the lowliest of adversaries with good-natured acceptance. Dave Sim has probably lost his only sane defender. Kim knew he and Gary had done something beyond what anyone could have ever imagined and he seemed continually giddy over what turned out to be an astounding and indelible achievement.

And we've also dug up his original review of Ronin from The Comics Journal #82 (July 1983).

Elsewhere in comics:

Tom Spurgeon offers a Kim Thompson primer and 5 for Friday.

Stefan Kanfer on Will Eisner.

And an interview with Jim Rugg by TCJ-contributor Chris Mautner.

Today we bring you Michael Dean's affectionate, funny, moving obituary for Kim Thompson.

[Gary] Groth and Michael Catron had formed Fantagraphics in late 1974 and had begun editing and publishing The Comics Journal out of Groth’s apartment in College Park, Md., in 1976.

“Within a few weeks of [Thompson’s] arrival,” Groth said, “he came over to our ‘office’ — which was the spare bedroom of my apartment. It was a fan-to-fan visit. Kim loved the energy around the Journal and the whole idea of a magazine devoted to writing about comics and asked if he could help. We needed all the help we could get, of course, so we gladly accepted his offer. He started to come over every day and was soon camping out on the floor. The three of us were living and breathing The Comics Journal 24 hours a day, as scary as that might sound.”

Thompson not only stepped into the breach of the ongoing workflow, he bailed the company out of the first of its occasional financial crises by turning over a $1,000 educational nest egg from his grandparents. According to Catron, “I’m sure we were up to our eyebrows in bills as usual, and he offered to tap this fund to get us out of it. I’ve never thought of it as Kim’s buy-in of the company.” He was already working for free and when he perceived that the magazine needed the money to survive, he handed it over, no strings attached.

It was soon clear that Thompson had become an integral part of the Journal and Fantagraphics. Groth said, “At some point, maybe a year after he arrived, we simply gave him a third of the company. I remember the three of us discussing it in the living room of my apartment. He was putting in as many hours as we were and was as fully involved in the magazine as we were. He was, as [Joseph] Conrad, said, one of us.”

I met Kim Thompson a few times, but mostly only knew him through e-mail, and through the many, many amazing books he edited, translated, and/or championed. For the most part, it has been a wonderfully convenient thing that Dan and I have been able to edit this site from our homes on the East Coast, but at the same time, I have always regretted not being able to work with the team at Seattle more directly, especially Kim, one of my earliest publishing heroes and someone whose wise and cant-free advice and opinion has always been extremely influential on me; even when I disagreed with him I learned a great deal from how he expressed himself. I always assumed I'd have the chance to get to know him better. Over the past couple of days, as Dan and I have been exchanging e-mails with Gary, Kristy, and others back in Seattle about how to cover Kim's passing, I kept irrationally wanting to wait and see what Kim would have to say...

Kim changed the life of everyone involved in comics for the better, in ways large and small, direct and indirect, and many tributes and remembrances to him have been published online. I am sure I have missed many, but a few that have stuck out to me include those of Blake Bell, Robert Boyd, Rob Clough, Simon Hanselmann, Charles Hatfield, Domingos Isabelinho, Jason, Chris Mautner, Heidi MacDonald, Dean Mullaney, Chris Oliveros, Ken Parille, and James Vance. This does not include the many words on Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms, too many to sift through. It looks like Tom Spurgeon, who wrote some particularly touching words about Kim on Twitter himself, is collecting some of the most notable Twitter and Facebook entries here.

We are gathering tributes of our own to post on the site soon, as well as some of the highlights from Kim's writing for the Journal over the years. In the meantime, a few examples were published on the old incarnation of this site: Kim's excoriation of Don McGregor's Detectives, Inc., and a roundtable on translation that he participated in. I also love this e-mail debate between Kim and Gary Groth over the merits (or lack thereof) of Dilbert, which is actually very revealing about the differing, complementary attitudes that made the Kim/Gary team such a formidable and well-rounded editorial collaboration. And it makes me laugh.

By coincidence, our other offering for you today is an excerpt from Incidents in the Night, the new book by David B., one of many cartoonists who Kim helped introduce into English. His legacy lives all around us.

Jaime Hernandez said it best yesterday on Twitter:

"While Gary's the in-your-face ballbuster, Kim was the quiet ballbuster. Both were needed to save comics. Good job, Kim."

Kim Thompson passed away yesterday. He'll be sorely missed. Kim's contributions to comics, not to mention to TCJ, are too numerous to list here. We'll have much more writing about him in the days to come. For now, I urge you to check out a great series of blog posts he ran over at the Fantagraphics site. These "Editor's Notes" are invaluable mini-essays on European comics. Here he is on Gil Jordan. And on Trondheim's Approximate Continuum Comics.  And on Marti's The Cabbie. Finally, check out the two best English-language essays on Jacques Tardi (and read his TCJ interview, too)

Would any other publisher write like this about his own books? No, not really. Kim's devotion and articulate passion set him apart.  There's more on the FB site. Just click his name and read on.  There is also a nice interview with him about European comics over at Inkstuds.

Today on the site we have Tom Scioli's look at the very first published comic book work by Jim Steranko. Tom investigates the story panel by panel like a comics archeologist.

According to the Grand Comics Database there is one story in issue #1 of Double-Dare Adventures, "The Legend of the Glowing Gladiator," that at one point was credited to Steranko. The database has since been corrected by "Manny Lunch". Now the story is credited to Red Skull co-creator Eddie Herron and penciller Bob Powell .

I'm not interested in making the case that these two men did not work on the story. In the multiple-hands assembly line of comics production, I don't doubt that these seasoned professionals did their part. The case I'm making is that this work bears the indelible mark of one Jim Steranko, and is the first published comic book story he wrote and drew.

And elsewhere:

This has been circulating around the web: Milton Glaser and Lee Savage from 1968. Check it out while you can.

Kim Thompson passed away this morning. He was an immensely important figure in comics history. On a personal note, he was very supportive of me and Tim, and we were thrilled to know him just a little bit over the last couple of years. We'll miss him. Gary Groth wrote his friend and partner's obituary at the Fantagraphics site.

Today, we bring you part two of Zak Sally's enormously entertaining interview with Peter Bagge. This time around, they talk Bagge's recent work, politics, piracy, and how selling convention sketches resembles prostitution. Here's Bagge on editing Weirdo:

While I was the managing editor of Weirdo for that brief period, the harshest criticism I got was from the other contributors, who would be offended by the work of other artists I ran. For example, I reprinted a three-page comic strip by S. Clay Wilson that originally ran in Screw magazine. Screw magazine probably told him, "Be your S. Clay Wilson-est, go crazy and break every taboo." So he just went nuts, drawing the most sexist and racist and scatological comic he could possibly think of. He really went overboard, and I loved it. [Laughs] So I reprinted it.

You see, one of the things that was great about early underground comics is the way they gleefully and compulsively broke every societal rule imaginable. It was very cathartic to see that, and it was one of many things that helped loosen up our culture. But by the '80s, those rules started to tighten up again, largely from the left, surprisingly, and under the guise of political correctness. The false notion of direct causation—that, say, a depiction of rape causes someone to commit rape—was gaining a lot of traction again, which made it easy again for people to demonize and ban material that they didn't like.

The S. Clay Wilson strip was obviously meant to fly in the face of this new political correctness, yet artists who were offended by it kept saying, "It's been done before, time to move on." To which I said, "No, it's obviously time to do it again." [Laughs]. I felt that critics of the strip were being disingenuous when they said "Wilson isn't funny anymore," since I don't think they ever thought he was funny. They simply felt that now was the time to say it out loud, and over and over again. A number of artists said they'd no longer contribute if I ran a strip like that again. So I ran another strip by Wilson that was even more offensive. [Laughs] That may sound childish and spiteful on my part, which it was to some degree, but I also thought those strips were very, very funny, so it wasn't solely about making a point.

Elsewhere:

—Missed it: Mark Millar got an MBE.

—Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season was reviewed in The Guardian, and Jaime Hernandez was interviewed at the BD and Comics Passion festival.

—Tom De Haven has reposted a 1986 essay on Dick Tracy he wrote for Nemo.

—Anne Ishii profiles Taiyo Matsumoto for the Japan Times.

—Darryl Ayo starts a rambling but interesting and probably necessary discussion on the state of independent comics and who exactly is reading them, anyway.

—This is still a hoax, people.

—New Al Columbia!

It's the second day of the business week and Jog is clocking in.

Joe also reviewed the new Superman movie, and writes about violence and director Zack Snyder in general, over here.

Brian Hibbs on Kickstarter and the retail biz. And Alan Moore on Kickstarter looking for funding.

Looks like The Smurfs will get the archival larger format treatment.

And Dean Haspiel debuts a new local hero web comic.

Today marks the return of R.C. Harvey, who in his latest column takes a long look at George McManus's classic Bringing Up Father. A sample:

In the strip, McManus never explained how Jiggs gained his wealth. In most histories and newspaper accounts over the years, it was said that Jiggs, who had worked as a simple laborer, got rich by winning the Irish Sweepstakes. But not according to McManus, who, in 1920, related Jiggs’ “autobiography” to a newspaper reporter, to wit: Jiggs was born in Ireland. He came to this country expecting to find gold on the streets of New York, but found bricks and cobblestones instead. He became a hod-carrier. Romance came into his life when he met Maggie, a waitress at a small café, who put heaping dishes of corned beef and cabbage before him. They were married, and Jiggs became thrifty. Instead of carrying bricks, he bought and sold them on commission. Then he manufactured them. Street brawls in the old days in New York provided a great market for Jiggs’ bricks, which were harder than ordinary bricks. He grew rich. (In another telling, Jiggs grew rich selling bricks to Ignatz in George Herriman’s strip, Krazy Kat.) At this point in his career Maggie and their daughter Nora acquire social aspirations. And that’s when the trouble began.

Zeke Zekley, McManus’ assistant since the mid-1930s, regaled me with yet another origin of Jiggs’ wealth. McManus told him the story, tongue-in-cheek no doubt. It went like this: When Jiggs was working as a hod-carrier, his employer was another Irishman named Ryan. Ryan liked Jiggs. He liked him so much that he gave Jiggs a dime every time he, Ryan, made a thousand dollars. Ryan got very very rich. And so did Jiggs.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. Tom Spurgeon talks to James Vance, and Brigid Alverson talks to Lucy Knisley.

—Profiles. Paul Gravett writes about Enki Bilal, and Adam McGovern writes about Wally Wood.

—Too late for this year, but Chris Mautner has six comics to read on Bloomsday. You should really be reading Joyce instead anyway.

—I don't quite understand how this comic book for the blind is supposed to work.

—Hannah Means-Simpson reviews "Alan Moore's" Fashion Beast.

—This looks like it will be a good exhibition.

—It's never a pleasure to agree with Tom Spurgeon, but I have to admit he's right on this one.

—It's 2013 and people are still discovering the comics of Jack Kirby. His granddaughter Jillian Kirby remembers the cartoonist for Father's Day.

Tucker returns this week. I'll let him do the heavy lifting. Let's dive in.

Elsewhere:

CAKE is this weekend and Chicago magazine has some tips.

Should you happen to be in Westminster, BC this weekend there's a comics conference going on.

It's a Tom Kaczynski process post.

Tom Scioli explains a Superman story and does a nice compare/contrast with an Alan Moore story. And The Awl looks at how Superman has changed.

Finally, here's a trailer for a book I'm eager to check out, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island: