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Today Joe McCulloch brings us news of the Week in Comics, and extends his recent streak of being especially amazing with a look back at a little remembered Alan Moore Vampirella story from the late '90s. Here's an excerpt:

Moore, in keeping with the genre, plays up the sexual aspects of these encounters, with a queasy emphasis on acts of violence inflicted upon the sexual-and-therefore-lethal women populating his story; a two-page sequence preceding the image above sees Jack’s slaying of Dracula’s wives intercut with the vampire bursting in on disaffected Lucy & Mia (“So what? I mean, it’s that kind of world these days. I read about Bosnia or Romania, or wherever, and I’m just, like, bored, you know?”), seizing them by the face and hair and ‘taking’ them in a shadowed but distinctly connoted manner not unfamiliar to several Alan Moore works. Yet as Jack gradually reveals to the reader that he’s aware of how shallow this little update seems to be, Moore’s true target comes into view: the purposeless banality of modern society and its pop culture, a full 15 years before the similarly situated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, except with an American focus, and the tv sensation Friends standing in for Harry Potter as avatar of all that’s hopelessly shit.

Also, Rob Clough reviews Karrie Fransman's The House That Groaned.

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In less welcome news, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has abruptly closed its doors and canceled many of its upcoming events, so far limiting its public discussion of this development to a brief notice posted on its Web site and Facebook page. Here is the full text of the announcement:

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA), New York City’s only cultural institution dedicated specifically to celebrating the comics medium, will be closing its physical location effective immediately.

The SoHo museum, currently at 594 Broadway, recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. While the physical space is closing, plans are afoot to continue MoCCA in a new and exciting incarnation. An announcement of MoCCA’s future arrangements will be forthcoming by the end of July.

Current memberships will be honored at the new venue, as will table renewals for MoCCA Fest 2013.

They have also claimed on Twitter that they will announce a new venue by the end of the month. (via)

Michael Dean recently reported on the museum's status for its tenth anniversary on this website. Obviously these new developments bear watching.

Elsewhere...

—The cartoonist Seth has recently branched out into barber-shop design, mapping out the look for his wife Tania Van Spyk's new Guelph establishment, Crown Barber Shop. Bryan Munn and Brad Mackay have photos.

—Barry Moser's essay on Flannery O'Connor's cartoons has been excerpted in The New York Review of Books.

—Mark Waid talks to the A.V. Club about his new digital comics venture.

—Robert Boyd, who was recently named the best arts blogger in Houston (he'd certainly have been my vote), has just posted reviews of the latest books from Joe Sacco and Joost Swarte.

—James Romberger has just penned (or keyboarded) a post briefly reviewing a whole slew of books, including titles featuring Mort Meskin, R. Kikuo Johnson, Richard Corben, Brandon Graham, Michael DeForge, and Josh Bayer.

—The Mindless Ones have posted their third and final marathon group reading of Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 2009.

—I don't post links to webcomics very often on here, but I'll always make an exception for Justin Green.

Welcome to the new week. Over the weekend, Frank Santoro posted an interview with Ed Piskor, author of Wizzywig. And we're leading off with the great Bob Levin. Join him as he revisits Ed the Happy Clown:

Drowse-inducing scholarship aside, footnotes can be fun. They can provide hilarious counterpoint to the text (Will Cuppy), an entire alternative narrative (Vladimir Nabokov), the ruminations and reflections of an over-flowing intelligence (David Foster Wallace), or the opportunity to shoehorn in anecdotes one can’t find space for otherwise (Not infrequently, me). In Louis Riel, Brown’s footnotes amplified his text, explained his choices between competing “facts,” afforded voice to others’ differing views, and revealed what he had made-up, overlooked, exaggerated, got wrong, guessed at, can’t explain, and flat-out falsified, wonderfully illustrating the unreliability of historical “truth.” I hoped Ed’s footnotes would provide insight into Brown’s magic. I wanted his thoughts on from where those pygmies and perversions,  plot loops and dimension jumps had come. I hoped to have his genius, wars-and-all, self-investigated.

Elsewhere:

Frank Santoro is giving a talk tonight at 7 pm in NYC as part of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium.

Tom Spurgeon has an interview with Rob Salkowitz, who wrote a book about Comic-Con and the pop culture biz.

Here's an interview with cartoonist Jason Karns, who we featured early this year.

Fred Guardineer did some awfully nice work back in the 1940s.

Why does a week that's so short feel so long? Holidays on Wednesdays are just wrong. In any case, we have a your standard comic-book-related Friday distraction for you, with Tucker Stone's weekly column. His guests this week include regulars Nate Bulmer and Abhay Khosla, along with a special visit from this week's holiday-defying MVP, Joe McCulloch! Here's Joe on the old (and new) Ozymandius story:

It’s a commentary on very act of staring into multiple television screens, positing a means of discerning some meaning from contemporary media overload; William Burroughs’s cut-up technique is cited, and, insofar as a wall of television screens is analogous to the stern grids of artist Dave Gibbons’s page layouts, the alert reader is duly congratulated for having sifted through the unorthodox POV shifts and fragmented character histories of the past ten issues to arrive at this point of a nefarious master plan’s gala revelation, though [Alan ]Moore, being Moore, slips in a final puckish joke through the issue’s title: a statement of bravado which the English majors among the readership will know is the last-standing legacy of a doomed ruler’s supreme plans. Basically, Moore is giving away the book’s ending, beyond even the seeming ambiguity of the famous corporate-owned ketchup dripping onto the world-renowned corporate-owned smiley face t-shirt of that fat guy whose childhood I am dying to explore.

Len Wein, in contrast, spends his opening page basically explaining the concept of ambiguity to the slower readers, via a block of metafictional rib-nudging wherein Ozy goes on about how very nearly flawless his crazy plan is, though history will be the judge in the end — because his plan totally might not stand up to history at all, that was the ending of the original book, remember? It’s dramatic irony!

Elsewhere on the internet, many things have been posted. Including...

—Our own Tucker Stone again, this time gushing over Carl Barks.

—The New York Post tracked down Steve Ditko for an article, in which he makes it clear that he has not shared in the profits for the gajillion-dollar Spider-Man juggernaut:

“No,” he tells The Post, when asked if he was paid anything for the four recent Spider-Man movies.

“I haven’t been involved with Spider-Man since the ’60s.”

Whatever the case, the artist doesn’t seem much interested in money. Although he could make thousands doing commissions for fans, he consistently refuses. Instead, he forges ahead on black-and-white, self-published books with titles like “The Avenging Mind.”

“I do those because that’s all they’ll let me do,” he tells The Post, suggesting big publishers aren’t interested in his work anymore.

—The regular Alison Bechdel links are slowing down from daily to weekly, but here's an interesting one: Lee Konstantinou at The New Inquiry.

—Your regular Jack Kirby link comes by way of Rodrigo Baeza's look at Kirby's Davy Crockett strips.

—Daniel Best has posted the transcript to an entertaining (as always) 1979 interview with Jim Steranko, which includes the new (to me) information that Steranko designed the sets and production for an unfinished Alain Resnais film!

—The magazine Guernica has an excerpt from Harvey Pekar & JT Waldman's Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me.

—Donna Barstow is braver than I am. [I'm not taking a side on the argument, for the record.]

—Chris Pitzer has announced that AdHouse will no longer be in the distribution business.

—Part two of the Mindless Ones' extraordinarily thorough crosstalk on Moore & O'Neill's LOEG: Century.

Welcome back. While you were having weenie roasts and throwing firecrackers at neighborhood children, Joe McCulloch was sweating over his computer to bring us a Richard Corben interview and preview of the artist's upcoming projects. Here's Corben on his recent process:

I had been drawing some Hellboy projects and it dawned on me that if I ever wanted to do some projects I wanted, it was time to do it or forget them completely. I decided to promote projects of my own design or choice. I wanted them to have a good start which meant a good writer. Margopoulos’ ideas about Poe horror and mine no longer seemed to mesh well. Jan Strnad would be an excellent choice. I told him I wanted a Poe-esque story that could be a one shot. He agreed and Ragemoor was the result. It came out well, but now it’s over and I wanted more. And to have more control, I would have to do more. Doing a short adaptation of a Poe story wasn’t too difficult and it was a sample of my goals. This and a project outline was sent to Dark Horse and they accepted.

Elsewhere, as you might imagine, it's been slow, but here goes:

-Here's Tim Marchman attempting to talk to Len Wein about Before Watchmen. Marchman found the Ozymandias comic book more interesting than I did. I mean, they're all incredibly dumb, but that one, with it's bullying tropes, faux-risque sex, and barely-there artwork, was allllmost as bad as Silk Spectre, which was the worst (that Darwyn Cooke thing is technically probably the "best" but also the worst because he tries so hard with the cutesy 1950s bullshit that it just seems sad. Loosen those drawers, son! In fact, maybe pity is the new anger in reaction to BW. Like, holy shit, this stuff is so bad it's sad? No, I know, the moral aspect trumps all. Just trying it out.) But then again, they were all "better" than the last DC comics I read -- all of the 52 first issues. But all much worse than any given run of, I dunno, Power Man and Iron Fist. Basically just bad comics. Oh wait, I forgot, I also read (perversely) Batman Earth One, which I guess is some sort of practical joke? Right? Someone dared someone else to make a movie pitch into a book, and include lots of bromancing and Deer Hunter stuff, right? Because I've never seen bromancing like that before. Oh, and yes, I will read superhero comics that arrive in the mail. Dog-like behavior, I know.

-And here's a palette cleanser: A fine C.F. interview on Inkstuds.

So, I swear, that's all I have. It's all I should have. It's that kind of week. And really, all I can say about yesterday is contained in this video of Albert Brooks exploring our national heritage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7JBrN_R6es&feature=share

I'm not sure how I got from there to here, but nevertheless, here's a video of a Commodore 64 Howard the Duck video game. Huh.

It's a holiday week. Fair warning: We are taking the day off tomorrow. Bank holidays are TCJ holidays. Speaking of... us... we're very happy to have received a Harvey nomination for Best Biographical, Historical, or Journalistic Presentation. Thanks very much.

Today on the site:

Joe McCulloch brings us The Week in Comics, because that's his job.

Elsewhere:

-Bookslut interviews TCJ-contributor Michel Fiffe about fan fiction and his Suicide Squad comic.

-Comix Claptrap features an interview with Dan Zettwoch about his new book, Birdseye Bristoe.

-I've enjoyed Ed Piskor's Wizzywig in its various iterations. I'm really glad it's getting a full release.

-The Believer has an interview with Brian Chippendale on music and comics and art, many months in the making.

-In the history column, Bhob Stewart takes a look at the transforming daily comics page while Daniel Best examines some recent Superman-related legal developments.

And finally, Frank Santoro writes about an Aircel comic. Y'know, it's a funny thing, the surge in interest in 80s-glut action/superhero comics. Surge might even be an exaggeration. In this Twitter/Tumblr feedback loop it's hard to tell what's actually generating lasting interest and what's just a passing click. Anyhow, the point is, most of this interest is from artists -- and really, that's almost the only way these things can be enjoyed -- as material for influence. Frank writes:

The stuff that holds up, to me, sometimes reads like some gang slang. Kinda cool. I'm not trying to convince anyone that these "throwaway" comics are actually any good. I just really like them for the airbrushed tones - real airbrush, none of this Photoshop airbrush crap [...] I doubt any of it is future Art Out of Time material but it is interesting. Even if only for historical reasons. And airbrush coloring.

He's right, it's probably not future Art Out of Time for material, in the sense that it won't, like a lot of the AOOT stuff, broaden and enrich the "canon" (if you'll forgive the term. It's late.). These aren't lost masterpieces, but they contain blips that are almost best seen through, say, Frank's eyes. They're almost impossible to enjoy as they were meant to be enjoyed -- as comics. I mean, they might provide a visceral thrill, but the function has changed. Now they're repositories of technique and attitudes, and ones that have mostly been left unexamined, like a lot of 1980s independent comics, both because of how close we are to that period and because comics was supposed to have transcended that stuff, too. I'm sure there are analogies to be drawn between these comics and z-level horror/SF movies, of course. And... that's all I have on the subject for the moment.

Hear that? No? Me too. It's quiet out there in comics land. I mean, there is a gentle humming of the usual controversies and complaints, but really, it's summer and there's a slow-down afoot. I mean, unless you count SDCC, but I'm not going, and really, why go when I can just read Tom Spurgeon's reports. Soooo much more satisfying. Anyhow, on with the day I guess?

Tucker Stone slows down for no one, and so here he is to get you through the weekend.

And Rob Clough reviews Nelson, the enormous British comics project.

Elsewhere online:

Here's David Brothers on Garth Ennis. Everyone tries to get me into Garth Ennis, but so far I think I only liked his Punisher series. R. Fiore has me wanting to read The Shadow, though. See, I'm susceptible. Oh, and holy shit, did you all read Funnybook Roulette on Wednesday? It's nice to publish one of the all-time greatest writers about comics. I mean, he went from Chester Brown to Alex Ross without skipping a beat. That's just goooood.

And the great R.O. Blechman was recently inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame and here's a fine profile on The Atlantic site. Blechman's work is worth seeking out in any form, whether the recent short story collection that D&Q released or his incredibly fun monograph, Behind the Lines, which is now out of print but really important. Jeet Heer interviewed the artist for us last year.

And finally, hey, it's Vern Greene! I love to read about Vern Greene, one of the great personalities in comic strips. Not a major talent, but an important figure and I guy it woulda been fun to chat with.

Today Jeet Heer is back again with a new column, using examples from Seth's latest release, The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, to make the case that the cartoonist has been largely misunderstood. An excerpt:

I’ve written in the past about the process whereby cartoonists invent their ancestors. I meant by that something very banal and literal: the cultural recuperation of Frank King by Chris Ware and Doug Wright by Seth, both cases where the cartoonist being recovered can now be seen as a predecessor of their later-day champion. But Seth has been engaged in the task of inventing ancestors in a more imaginative way as well. In both A Good Life and in The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists (or The G.N.B. Double C) Seth very convincingly makes up cartoonists who serve as role-models for the type of work he wants to do.

And Sean T. Collins has a review of Gabriella Giandelli's recent graphic novel Interiorae. An excerpt:

Using a mystical cartoon white rabbit as a sort of spirit-slash-tour guide — half Virgil, half Harvey — Interiorae depicts the discrete, discreet lives of various residents in an apartment building, whose dreams fuel a big, whiny black blob called the Great Dark One that lives in the basement and serves as the building’s heart and soul. The patina of magic realism enlivens the slice-of-lifey material: an old woman dreams of making a grand exit with the help of her immigrant caretaker, a bored housewife makes a big show of cheating on her workaholic husband where everyone can see, a teenager dreams of running off to meet a rock star, a misanthropic horticulturalist alternately accepts and rejects the advances of a promiscuous and attractive neighbor, a boy whose parents are freshly and unpleasantly separated escapes into superheroes and visions of the rabbit himself. It's familiar material.

Elsewhere, there be links:

—Speaking of Jeet, he has a new review of Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? at the Globe & Mail, and recommends another one of Chester Brown's Ed the Happy Clown at Maclean's.

—The always-worth-reading Christopher Butcher reacts to the disconcerting new trend of professional publishers resorting to online fundraisers such as Kickstarter. [Argh. I forgot that Dan mentioned this yesterday. But two can play at this game, because yesterday, he stole my Sendak/NYRB link from Friday. So... I guess that's twice as bad, actually. Anyway, the Butcher post is still definitely worth a look.]

—Salon has reprinted a Steven Heller article chronicling the history of Italian comics, with a particular emphasis on photo-comics.

—John Adcock digs up another valuable find, this time from a dusty 1917 issue of Cartoons magazine: "How the Comickers Regard Their Characters".

—Matt Seneca, whose enthusiasm is never set lower than 11, praises the genuinely underappreciated Greg Irons, and his Light.

—Missed it/not comics: Terry Gilliam has listed his ten favorite animated films.

Today we bring you the latest from R. Fiore, who not only discusses the new edition of Ed the Happy Clown, but also has a lengthy disquisition on variant comic book covers for The Shadow, and actually quite a bit more. This one'll keep you busy for a while. Here's a bit about The Shadow:

The prime beneficiaries of the alternate cover come on opposite sides of the consumption spectrum. At one extreme is the collector-loon, who likes nothing more than to have something more to collect. For this buyer Dynamite supplies not only 4 or 5 evenly distributed variant cover designs, but God’s own number of hyper-rare “retailer incentive” variants for collectors to war over. On the other end of the spectrum is the buyer of the collected edition, which will contain all the variants as an appendix. For the buyer who wants to read the comics as they come out but will be damned if he’s going to be gulled into buying more than one copy of the same comic book, it becomes a matter of dubious consumer choice. You are called upon to choose how your comic book is going to be decorated in the same way you choose what color car you’re going to drive. Or more charitably, you are promoted to a practical art critic through the act of choosing.

Elsewhere:

-He brought us some attention this week... here's a fine appreciation of Maurice Sendak from the New York Review of Books.

-Prompted by a recent Tezuka fundraising campaign, Christopher Butcher posted a series of thoughts about Kickstarter. Last week Tim mentioned the ongoing Kickstarter discussions. I'm glad there's some public debate about it.

-Mike Gartland's Failure to Communicate, a series of close readings of the Jack Kirby and Stan Lee comic book stories focused on the tension between Kirby's intentions and Lee's published versions, is now online at the Jack Kirby Museum.

-Cartoonist Brandon Graham checks in with one of his extremely fun updates on all things in his world.

-And finally, via Jeet Heer and Michael Tisserand comes news of sad cutbacks at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Here's a petition should you wish to get involved.

Today, Joe McCulloch brings us word of the latest comics, and somewhat troublingly continues his ingenuous focus on the work of Sammy Harkham favorite Tim Vigil. (Well, the folks at D&Q will be happy.)

The lobrow yu(c)ks continue in Brandon Soderberg's review of Pat Aulisio's Bowman 2016, a loose riff on/rip-off of/sequel to 2001. An excerpt:

Bowman 2016 has a warts-and-all approach to science fiction that recalls films like Alien or Silent Running as much as the heady, sophisticated Kubrick classic. The Bowman series’ brilliance comes from the way that Aulisio attacks 2001 like an adoring slavish fan of the originals, and a snarky jokester, who deflates the whole thing with Porky’s-esque dick jokes and gritty, autobio comics emotion.

Elsewhere:

—The animation historian Michael Barrier reviews a new Thomas Andrae & Carsten Laqua book on Walt Kelly.

—Chris Mautner remembers Matt Groening's Life in Hell.

—Tim O'Shea interviews Mike Dawson about Troop 142 (and Mike explains why he had to stop producing podcasts for this site).

—Michael Shelley's WFMU program this past Saturday included a brief interview with Mark Newgarden about Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy. (It starts at about an hour-and-a-half in, if you don't feel like listening to the music.)

—Famed convention reporter (and cartoonist) Brian Ralph has photos and stories from the just-past Heroes Con in Charlotte.

—And Kramers Ergot contributor Shary Boyle was chosen to represent Canada in next year's Venice Biennale.

Welcome to the new week. Yesterday on the site Frank Santoro put up his latest New Talent Showcase, this time with guest writer Ariel LeBeau.

And R.C. Harvey comes in with his latest profile, this time of the underrated adventure cartoonist Zack Mosley. Mosley had a great feel for the grotesque, which, as you'll learn, he came by via the great Chicago cartooning school, not to mention a serendipitous hiring of Boody Rogers. Here's a taste:

While waiting for an appointment, he wandered in to Walter Berndt's office, and after canoodling a little about Berndt's strip, Smitty, Mosley heard some startling news: Patterson was about to double the Sunday comic section to sixteen pages. Before Mosley had time to rejoice at the timing of his errand, Berndt went on to explain that the new strips would be selected from 400 candidates already on exhibition awaiting the Captain's decision. Mosley decided to enhance the odds in this 400-1 shot: he would go ahead and see Patterson in order to show his strip personally.

The Captain was not impressed. "You're a lousy artist," he said when he saw Mosley's samples. "But you seem to know a lot about aviation. How much pilot time have you had?"

And elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon has an excellent interview with Ed Brubaker, in which they discuss Marvel, Before Watchmen, and ownership. It's your essential read of the week.

The Mindless Ones has a fine installment of its podcast, Silence!

Over at our kind publisher's site, Kim Thompson has notes on the latest Tardi book, New York Mon Amour.

And finally, here's "The Impudent Excursion" by Edward Gorey, from the May 1962 issue of Holiday.

Today on the site we have Rob Clough on some selected periodical comics of all shapes and sizes.

Elsewhere:

The big news is, of course, the end of Matt Groening's long and excellent comic strip, Life in Hell. Here's TCJ-contributor Richard Gehr's interview with the artist, and here's a short appreciation by Tom Spurgeon.

Benjamen Walker has a wonderful radio report on the gathering of the comic book tribes last month in Chicago. Two more from Chicago, this time from last weekend's inaugural CAKE: A wrap-up from Secret Acres and a very funny travelogue from D&Q's Jessica Campbell.

Elsewhere in the midwest we find this interview with Joseph Remnant and Jeff Newelt on Harvey Pekar's Cleveland.

And a couple of excellent image-based posts: Who knew that the great Seymour Chwast took a crack at redesigning the Bazooka Joe graphics? And Greg Cook visited Brian Chippendale's studio; I can tell you that these pictures are real.

Today we are pleased to bring you "Jovial" Jeet Heer's lengthy and considered review of Spain Rodriguez's latest collection, Cruisin' with the Hound. It's really great to have Jeet back and writing for us semi-regularly. Here's an excerpt:

Several times in this book, Spain alludes to EC comics as the taproot inspiration for comics. While Crumb internalized storytelling lessons from Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Harvey Kurtzman, all of whom were masters of integrating visuals and text for story that had a headlong rush, Spain was shaped by the clunky text-heavy mode found in EC horror and science fiction comics (what I like to call the “picto-fiction” tradition). The strength of these comics often came from the power of single images of violence and decay, and the stern morality of revenge found in the story (vengeance continues to be a Spain obsession with many of his characters curling their lips in anticipation of exacting retribution). The weakness of the picto-fiction tradition is that the images rarely flow easily from panel to panel as they did the works of Barks, Stanley, and Kurtzman.

Many of the traits of the picto-fiction mode show up in Spain, notably captions which fill-in readers on information missing from the pictures and relatively static images that require time to decipher. Still, because he controls both the writing and drawing, Spain manages to avoid the major pitfalls of picto-fiction, notably the heavy redundancy that the EC stories possessed with pictures simply repeating the information already provided by the captions.

—Jeet is also an expert link-spotter, and pointed me to the second part of Kevin Plummer's wonderful profile of the Canadian cartoonist Jimmy Frise.

—After some tech problems that temporarily shut down his site over the weekend, Tom Spurgeon is back with a vengeance. I am especially glad to see him reviewing so much again. We've already linked to a few of his "Comics I Read In Series Form In The 1980s" pieces, I believe, but I particularly liked his new one on Miller & Seinkiewicz's Elektra: Assassin, and this review of the new Ed the Happy Clown collection.

—Spurgeon also has analysis of the recent speculation/belief that Walking Dead #100 is set to become the single biggest-selling issue in July, beating all of the titles released by the so-called "Big Two." Whether or not that happens, Spurgeon's thoughts are worth reading. (Perhaps fittingly, the situation in general can't help but remind me of Kim Thompson's still relevant 1999 pseudo-manifesto, "More Crap Is What We Need".)

—Your Alison Bechdel Interview of the Day comes from The Advocate.

—Does anyone in the world think the second image in this comparison looks better?

—Tim Kreider talks to the Good Man Project in support of his new essay collection.

Well, another day is here. I went to Frank's comic sale over the weekend. My major find was Joe (brother of Tim) Vigil's Dog #1. Luckily, Joe "Jog" McCulloch covered it over in our old neighborhood. Like so many comics, the Jog description is better than thing itself, which is, as far as I'm concerned a time saver, allowing me to just page through, absorbing the essence of the shit without actually stepping in it. Frank manfully comped me that issue and then took a ten dollar bill off me for assorted other comics.

And so you can read more of Jog's thoughts (thusly avoiding reading more comics, which is a goal of mine) this very day since he mightily brings us a bunch comics coming out this week.

Elsewhere:

Daredevil artist Paolo Rivera announced he's leaving the title and Marvel to make his own work, and own it too. His and Mark Waid's Daredevil is a great superhero effort, and he's proven himself a very inventive cartoonist in the fine David Mazzucchelli-influenced lineage.

And lots of things are being previewed and people interviewed. Here's the great Brendan Burford, of King Features, interviewing editorial and Mother Goose & Grimm cartoonist Mike Peters. Noah Van Sciver talks about his Fantagraphics release, The Melancholic Young Lincoln at MTV. Over at Drawn & Quarterly there's a nice looking preview of the company's Pippi Longstocking graphic novel, Pippi Moves In. Apparently an artist has made a comic entirely by painting on walls. And Dave Sim reflects on his Kickstarter success. I didn't know he was working on a graphic novel about Alex Raymond's death. Finally, Tom Gauld comments on Ray Bradbury.

And on the history front, Steve Bissette on Tijuana Bibles and Richard Samuel West on post-Punch American cartoon weeklies. This time it's The Jester:

In the prospectus, Williams declared that The Jester’s contents would be "entirely original, both in letter press and embellishments, furnished expressly for this work, by the first authors and artists of the time.  In these days of general Copydom, and distorted locality, The Jester deemeth it not too presumptuous to advance that he will be the first to cast off the second-hand garments of European literature, which however excellent when ‘worn in their newest gloss’ must perforce lose, not only much of their fashion, but of their freshness, from the circumstance of travel.  He therefore, with a justifiable degree of pride, announceth that he will appear in a thoroughly new suit.  Home manufacture, both in weft and woof.  American in make, look and feeling!”

Now that's an intro.

Today brings us the second installment of Ron Goulart's column of correspondence with great cartoonists of the past. This week, his subject is Sheldon Mayer, of Sugar and Spike and Scribbly fame. Here's an excerpt:

Always an editor at heart, Mayer would give me advice for Gil [Kane], mostly about his interpretation of my copy. Then we’d get to talking about his days with M.C. Gaines and DC. He’d talk about staff members, about the ones who gave him a pain in the ass, about some long-ago secrets. A few times, about ten minutes after hanging up, he’d call back and say, “About that business I was talking about, don’t use it in any of your books. I don’t want to jeopardize my pension.”

We also have Sean T. Collins's review of Guy Delisle's Jerusalem, about which his feelings are mixed:

Delisle is not Joe Sacco, as a joke near the end of the book drives home, and he’s not out to tell a “story” in either the sense of a storyteller or a reporter. His M.O. is to record his life when that life is placed in an unfamiliar and (to put it midly) politically problematic environment, under the assumption that the result of that recording will provide a useful window on the interaction between the personal and the political. That’s all well and good when you’re in such underreported environments as North Korea, China’s designated Special Economic Zones, or Burma. But unlike those sealed-off locales, Jerusalem (even the out-of-sight out-of-mind Palestinian areas) is arguably the most reported-on location on the planet, as befits its centrality to the current Ocenania/Eurasia/Eastasia arrangement of fanatical Islam, Judaism, and Christianity as they attempt to draft the rest of us into their divinely ordained assaults on one another. As such, unless you’re as much of a tyro to the entire topic as Delisle portrays himself to be — not realizing Yom Kippur is anything other than a war, or that Gaza residents can’t leave, and so on and so on — you need a reason to revisit this material that you can’t get anywhere else.

And then of course there's Frank Santoro's Sunday column. This week he went into "blind item"-mode.

Elsewhere ...

—The Swedish Supreme Court has ruled that certain Japanese manga depicting children in sexual situations are not child pornography, reversing the earlier conviction of a translator in that country.

—Coincidentally (but not unrelatedly), Neal Gaiman writes a defense of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, after a reader wrote in expressing qualms about supporting figures like Christopher Handley, an American manga collector convicted of possessing "obscene" manga depicting children in sexual situations.

—To keep this pornographic comics ball rolling, Stephen Bissette continues his illustrated exploration of early gay-themed sex comics and other Tijuana Bibles.

—Ed Champion has a long audio interview with Alison Bechdel, and I believe we neglected to link to MariNaomi's earlier illustrated interview with Bechdel for The Rumpus.

—You of course have already heard of Ray Bradbury's death. Michael Dooley has collected images from the EC Comics work based on his writing.

—Trevor Von Eeden has disowned the art to at least two issues of the 1990s series Black Canary, due to what he regarded as editorial interference. Daniel Best has posted scans of his original artwork next to the finished pages here so you can judge for yourself.

—Finally, Grant Morrison was given an award.

It's the end of a long week here in sunny Carroll Gardens. This weekend I plan to go to Frank's comic book sale, where you can tell me which version of TCJ was better than this one, and why. What better way to spend a beautiful Saturday than inside a sweaty inferno of back issues? No kidding!

You know who doesn't kid around? Tucker Stone. He is a serious, intense man. And he has words he'd like you to read now. These words will be about numerous new comics about which the less said the better.

Elsewhere, things are, as Tim mentioned yesterday, quiet.

-Great cartoonists Dan Zettwoch and Kevin Huizenga are making a couple of appearances in support of their excellent new books Birdseye Bristoe and Gloriana. One of them today in Chicago! Go see these guys.

-If you need just a little more Tucker to carry you through the weekend, then check out his podcast with Joe McCulloch and Matt Seneca. I listened to the whole thing! This week it's all about Otomo and Kidd.

I really enjoyed Chip Kidd's Batman: Death by Design. The story was wonderfully structured -- a kind of architectural whodunnit designed like a deco building: Elegant, with a bunch of surprises, some wonderfully strange moments, and loopy personal touches. Naturally it's also an awfully attractive object. Worth tracking down.

-This is a cute comic book store/Ray Bradbury anecdote.

-Evan Dorkin tells us about the time he almost published a Rocketeer story.

That's it. See you at the con!

Today, we present Eric Buckler's interview with the Swiss cartoonist Frederik Peeters, probably best known for his graphic HIV memoir, Blue Pills. An excerpt:

I’m not the author in Sandcastle. I see it more like metaphysical fairy tale if you like. The reader is not much involved as in Blue Pills, where you live things through the main character point of view. In Sandcastle, you’re more like a distant spectator. Blue Pills talks about two persons, Sandcastle talks about the whole world. But you could say that the aspects that appealed to me in the Sandcastle script, the deterioration of the flesh, time, what we do with our lives, why and who you desire and love, couple as an antidote to loneliness, etc., are already present in Blue Pills. But I guess they’re present in all my books, because they’re present in my head.

Elsewhere, comics links are fairly light today.

—Dept. of Interviews. The National Post has a short interview with Gabriella Giandelli, the Gainseville Sun talked to Tom Hart (about SAW), and, for those who like to read between the lines, Robot 6 has a q&a with Dave Gibbons.

—Ng Suat Tong has a long post analyzing the original art from Howard Chaykin's Time².

—Letterer Todd Klein has posted the first leg of a "tour" of DC's production offices, circa 1979.

Today on the site we bring you another pearl from the archive: Alan Moore interviewed by Gary Groth in 1987. This one's about Moore's decision to cease working for DC Comics amidst the ratings controversy of the day. What's interesting here is how thoughtful and articulate Moore is on his moral and ethical concerns. And that will more or less conclude our Before Watchmen coverage. Although! I will say I found this article at Hooded Utilitarian particularly silly, even by the high standards of silliness set by this whole debate. The author for some reason includes me in a list of writers ("us"?) who somehow maintain a moral high ground because of the artists involved in these comics. Let me be clear: The list and corresponding argument makes no sense, in that, (a) I've never stated a moral position on BW and nor do I intend to; (b) the idea that different artists that the writer thinks are closer to my taste would make the project more or less palatable, is a serious misreading of the whole issue; and (c) I don't think the writers on that list would agree on a whole lot when it comes down to it. That's all. Sermon over. And no, I won't be responding in comments my excitable little trolls.

On a happier site note, we have Rob Clough on beloved former TCJ-podcaster Mike Dawson's Troop 142.

Elsewhere:

Frank Santoro is in NYC. I know this because I saw him (twice!) and he's texting me with greater frequency. We even went to the comic book store together. He's having another comic book sale at his palatial West Village studio in a building that should be seen regardless of what you may buy. Anyhow, the sale is on again this Saturday, June 16th. Don't miss it. For less than the cost of a sandwich you can be entertained by Frank AND take home a really good (or "good") comic.

MORE New York news... Friday is the final day for exhibitors to apply to The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, which I co-organize and exercise my terrifying moral high ground upon.

But it's not only about New York, I'm told. One Tom Devlin continued his comic book world tour with a stop in Oslo involving stilts, Canadians, non-Canadians, and, yes, nudity.

And finally, this dive into personal and comic book history is mind-boggling and lovely.

Today is Tuesday, and that means Joe McCulloch has your Week in Comics! New Sacco, new oversize reprints, new this, new that.

We also have Sean T. Collins's review of Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B.'s history of U.S./Middle East relations, Best of Enemies. An excerpt:

[David B.] is one of contemporary comics’ true visionaries, the speaker of a visual language of his own devising. Despite personal, cultural, and surface-visual connections (all that high-contrast black-and-white) that might make it look otherwise, as an image-maker he has much more in common with, say, Jack Kirby than with Marjane Satrapi. This gives everyone and everything he depicts a hyperreal aura, and in Best of Enemies he goes full-throttle on it. The headdress of an imperious ambassador becomes a globe the pirate ships whose attacks he permit circumnavigate. A stand-in for the WWII-era British government becomes a three-faced Janus-like figure, issuing contradictory proclamations about the future of the region out of every mouth. The chronically bedridden Mossadegh becomes a disembodied set of pajamas, wielding a scimitar against the floating Sauron-like eyes of British spies and provocateurs. America’s chief goon in Iran, spymaster Kermit Roosevelt, is a virtual gremlin, his rictus-like grin affixed to his diminutive frame as he hides beneath a blanket to conduct clandestine meetings with the Shah. Bought-off officials open their jaws like Hungry Hungry Hippos to swallow American dollars. Even as familiar a figure as FDR himself has his eyebrows transformed into a cigarette to demonstrate the gravity of his banning smoking while negotiating with the Saudis.

Elsewhere there are many comics-related things worth your time, if you're so inclined. For example...

—Jeet Heer takes to the Globe and Mail to report on what made superheroes gay even before recent developments.

—Derik Badman points out a recent essay by comics scholar Hannah Miodrag on literary comics. I haven't read it, but based on his description, she seems to be using an argument similar to the one I used to make a lot over on Comics Comics over the past few years—it's not theme and subject matter that makes a comic "literary," but rather the use of text itself. It's the definition that makes the most sense to me, and one that avoids the problems that come along with the more standard one.

—Tom Heintjes has a roundtable with several people carrying on the family business, in this case comic strips, including Brian and Greg Walker, Jeff Keane, and Mason Mastroianni.

—Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows's Neonomicon has been challenged and pulled from a South Carolina library. I don't think any books should be off-limits for libraries, and hope that it is restored soon. But that book... it's not hard to imagine that presumably unprepared mother's reaction.

—Paul Pope links to his own 1996 interview with art theorist Rudolf Arnheim, which I plan to read post-haste.

—Two unusual reviews of Before Watchmen, from the Mindless Ones-affiliated Andrew Hickey, and from Alan Moore biographer Lance Parkin, reporting in from an alternate dimension.

—Not comics. Via Sean Howe, the secret history of Lisa Lyon, the bodybuilder used by Frank Miller as a model for his Elektra character, and her "connections to Robert Mapplethorpe, voodoo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, PCP, Huey Newton, cocaine, Jack Nicholson, and Day of the Dolphin."

Today on the site:

Shaenon Garrity has the fist installment of her Webcomics Capsule Reviews, in which she writes about the many and various webcomics sent in by readers of this very site. And yesterday Frank Santoro wrote about his comic book blowout sale and promises more to come.

It was a slow news weekend, but herewith some links:

-Kate Beaton's Walrus cover is very nice.

-Comics-related: A Peter Blake pop music-themed retrospective.

-John Buscema covers are fun.

-And the latest "What Are You Reading" over at Robot 6 includes cartoonist and TCJ-contributor Matthew Thurber writing about Ron Rege and Frank Stack.

Ok, more later in the week!

Today, Tucker Stone and his pal Abhay Khosla take you on another wonder-filled journey through the funhouse world of genre comics, with a particular interest in the internet reaction to the corporate announcement that one of the many DC Comics characters named Green Lantern is about to be revealed as gay.

And Sara Varon offers the last day of her week in the Cartoonist's Diary chair. Thanks, Sara!

I'm sick, and have been all week, so the rest of this blog post will be a bit bare bones, but here's the news.

—Paul Gravett has a nice Posy Simmonds profile up on his site.

—Bill Kartalopoulos reviews Clowes, Krazy Kat, and Rory Hayes for Print.

—Christopher Allen has an amusing Freudian reading of the latest Darwyn Cooke cover. (Related.)

—Jim Woodring's thoughts on "Bimbo's Initiation" won't be news to anyone who read our interview with him last year, but it's a great cartoon to revisit.

—Rob Clough tackles the influence of movies on cartoonists from a different angle, namely how his screenwriting career has affected Daniel Clowes's approach to comics.

—Domingos Isabelinho looks at M.S. Bastian and Isabelle L.'s Bastokalypse.

—Bad news for independent publishers up North: the Literary Press Group was just denied funding by the Canadian government.

—The Archie Comics executive suit/soap opera has ended (for now) with a settlement.

—Finally, propaganda comics from 1950s Communist China.

On the site today:

Ryan Holmberg continues his march into history with a look at the great cartoonist Sugiura Shigeru (you can read translated comics of his in The Ganzfeld 4 and 5, as well as Raw 7) and his pre-WWII sources. NOTE: Ryan is looking for your help in identifying some of these sources -- please comment!

The history of comedy is a notoriously nebulous and difficult subject. Especially when the laughs are half in a foreign tradition. At any rate, it’s more than I can handle competently just now. So what I put together instead was a “visual essay” on Sugiura and Shin Seinen’s cartoons. What follows on the next pages is the result of combing the magazine from 1929 to 1937, at which point it turned strongly pro-war and increasingly anti-Western. This period overlaps with Sugiura’s debut (1932) and early work for Kōdansha’s major youth periodicals (particularly Shōnen Club, Shōjo Club, and the Picture Book series beginning in 1937) as well as his occasional work for Shin Seinen’s junior edition, Shin Shōnen, as well as Shōnen Shōjo Tankai, published by the same Hakubunkan. Some of the comparisons I make are specific, with exact cases of swiping. Others are more general. You can tell me if you find them convincing or not.

Sara Varon takes through another day of her excellent visual diary.

The major news everywhere else is the passing of Ray Bradbury. The NY Times has a fine obituary.

Elsewhere around the internet... there is the good news that Drawn & Quarterly will release Shigeru Mizuki's classic Kitaro material. Mizuki is a first class cartoonist -- I can't wait.

More good news -- a new comic at Study Group by a young cartoonist I know very little about Sean T. Collins profiled, but whose work I've really enjoyed -- Julia Gfrorer.

Excellent cartoonist, late of Conan, Becky Cloonan is interviewed about a recent self-publishing effort over at The Beat.

Daniel Best has a 1975 Jim Steranko interview with some fine nuggets, like this one on Frank Robbins...

I know Frank; he's a terrific artist, but for some reason he doesn't seem to have the fan following that he warrants. But believe me when I tell you that there are very few artists who have the cinematic approach of Robbins, especially in his Johnny Hazard strip. I collect Robbins stuff, the forties right on through. His cinematic approach is incredible. Even more perhaps than Milton Caniff, even though he works in that Caniff or Sickles style. I think he deserves more credit than most fans give him. Sometimes fans think a lot of little lines makes good artwork, but it doesn't. He's a guy who really knows how to tell a story. Maybe like you I've been disappointed with his comic book work, but you have to remember you can't turn out a masterpiece in a week.

And finally: Vintage Ogden Whitney (I'd never heard of this one) and vintage Daniel Clowes. Together at last.

Today Charles Hatfield returns with a review of Bernie "The Jam" Mireault's latest self-published book, To Get Her. An excerpt:

My own knowledge of Mireault dates to his collaboration with Matt Wagner and Joe Matt on Comico’s Grendel, way back in 1987 (an arc later collected as The Devil Inside). That collaboration put Mireault on my radar, and so I dug into his quirky, low-rent superhero pastiche The Jam, a generally lighthearted riff on the genre but laced with semi-autobiographical, underground-flavored elements. The Jam began as a backup serial in the Canadian series New Triumph back in the early mid-'80s, then began to find its own way after 1987 (Comico published a one-shot after the Grendel run that I glommed onto very happily). By the mid-'90s I thought of The Jam as a humorous but soulful alternative to superheroes-as-usual, a project that, despite its fitfulness and its caroming between publishers, promised what Mike Allred’s Madman also seemed to promise at the time: life, energy, and homespun storytelling within the straits of that oh-so-familiar genre. I dug it the way I dug Allred’s work, and Mike Gilbert’s work on Mr. Monster, and the way I still dig Paul Grist’s myriad superhero comics.

Sara Varon continues her week contributing the Cartoonist's Diary feature.

And we've also opened up the archives to bring out a 1986 panel discussion with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons about Watchmen, moderated by Neil Gaiman. Here's an excerpt:

FROM THE AUDIENCE: Do you actually own Watchmen?

MOORE: My understanding is that when Watchmen is finished and DC have not used the characters for a year, they’re ours.

GIBBONS: They pay us a substantial amount of money. ..

MOORE: … to retain the rights. So basically they’re not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural life span and DC doesn’t want to do anything with them, then after a year we’ve got them and we can do what we want with them, which I’m perfectly happy with.

GIBBONS: What would be horrendous, and DC could legally do it, would be to have Rorschach crossing over with Batman or something like that, but I’ve got enough faith in them that I don’t think that they’d do that. I think because of the unique team they couldn’t get anybody else to take it over to do Watchmen II or anything else like that, and we’ve certainly got no plans to do Watchmen II.

Also, I thought I'd draw attention to one other part of the interview, regarding the comic's connection to Charlton comics. Moore explains:

I started mapping out a few ideas, and originally it was just a murder mystery, “Who killed the Peacemaker,” and that was it. We sent all this stuff to Dick Giordano and some of it was extreme. We were going to treat the Question as a lot more extreme than he’d been treated before. Dick loved the stuff, but having a paternal affection for these characters from his time at Charlton, he really didn’t want to give his babies to the butchers, and make no mistake about it, that’s what it would have been. He said, “Can you change the characters around and come up with some new ones?” At first I wasn’t sure whether that would work, but when Dave and I got together and started just planning these things out, it all really snapped into place and worked fine. I’m much happier now doing it with original characters. It’s worked out much better than it would have done if we had used Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and all the others, and I’m pleased with it.

Emphasis mine. The whole, depressingly common argument that Watchmen is just a ripoff of Charlton characters, and thus everything is now fair game is risible. The Question and Rorschach are not the same characters. If DC were planning a miniseries featuring characters who were sort of reminiscent of the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan and Sally Jupiter, etc., no one would be batting an eye right now.

Anyway, speaking of which, David Brothers has an enjoyably vicious editorial on the publication of Before Watchmen here. His thesis?:

Buying Before Watchmen is a vote for:

-A comics industry that prizes properties over creators
-A comics industry that will effortlessly use its legal muscle to screw over creators
-A comics industry that strip-mines the past at the expense of the future

Brothers draws attention to a recent USA Today story on the series in which DC co-publisher Dan DiDio offers the following mind-boggling quote: "The strength of what comics are is building on other people's legacies and enhancing them and making them even stronger properties in their own right." An inspirational way to start the morning! Maybe it's best if we moved on to other topics ...

—Such as DC's sales figures, which Marc-Oliver Frisch analyzes here, and more or less convincingly finds (albeit with less than ideal information), that the New 52 initiative gave only a temporary positive push to sales.

—Dept. of Interviews. James Sturm talks to Julie Delporte. Graeme McMillan talks to Jessica Abel and Matt Madden. Ashok Kondabolu (!) talks to Ben Marra. And finally, an interview with the late Harvey Pekar from close to his passing has come to light.

—I don't think we've yet mentioned Tom Spurgeon's annual head-exploding guide to attending the San Diego Comic-Con, and it's probably because neither Dan nor I wants to come to terms with the fact that we won't be there.

—Stephen Bissette reveals the secret cinematic origins of Ben Grimm.

—And if you've ever wanted a chance to talk (and buy) comics in person with our Sunday columnist Frank Santoro, this weekend in NYC is the time and place to make your dreams come true.