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Austin English is here with the latest installment of his column, in which he wrestles with the difficult-to-explain legacy of Stan Lee.

When Lee passed away last week, non-comics world friends reached out to me to express condolences. They knew I loved comics and that I'm interested in the history of the medium... Clearly, this was a loss, right? A melancholy day? When I responded by trying to explain what a strange and confounding figure Lee was, and that he didn't exactly create the characters the media was saying he did, I found myself at a loss to explain why. Lee wasn't standard, he didn't just take credit for something that he had nothing to do with, so it couldn't be explained in a black and white way. He did have a large role in what Marvel was (and is), much of it positive. Why was he not what he claimed to be? It wasn’t easy to summarize and it felt exhausting, even ridiculous, to try.

My genuine love for people like Kirby and Ditko made that confusion seem cruel, intentional, a lasting way to obscure the work of actual creativity in the collective consciousness—a comic-book-villain type of crime. To get at the subversion, one had to bring up the 'Marvel Method,' which no one with a passing interest in these things should be expected to understand (although journalists covering Lee's passing could certainly do a little research). The Method is an odd system to base a major media company on, and yet the strangeness of it, the counter-intuitiveness involved, served Lee well in regards to his legacy. I’m sure, at the outset, it was simply a way to produce comics faster and cheaper by letting the artists be cartoonists. But no one really understands what cartooning is, and so Lee becomes a figure in people’s minds, the idea of the absolute heights a comic book can contain. True embodiments of the forms potential, Wood or Everett, exist as cultural foot notes in comparison, as if André Derain is the first name and Matisse the second.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Françoise Mouly talks briefly to Roz Chast about her recent Thanksgiving cover for The New Yorker.

I grew up in an apartment in Brooklyn. My mental image bank is basically lamps, sofas, wallpaper, dishware, TVs and accessories, an infinite number of tchotchkes, books, household appliances. My nightmare is having to draw something like “the woods” from memory. Not enough tchotchkes.

At Civlized, Ben Hicks profiles the infamous Air Pirates.

...this certainly wasn’t the Mickey Mouse club. This was the 'Air Pirates'—the notorious group of underground cartoonists who took on one of the largest media corporations in history…and lost. Kind of.

It begins with a boy—Dan O’Neill, who, at 21, became one of the youngest syndicated cartoonists of all time with his strip "Odd Bodkins," which began its run in 1964. Over time, however, O’Neill’s sensibilities began to shift as he became more politically and socially involved in the emerging counterculture scene, leading to more pointed and subversive material in the strip. The audience, he told Civilized, loved it. The syndicate? Not so much. "There were three firings," he said. "By the last one I knew I was finished, so I thought I might as well try and get my copyright back."

He figured that if he engaged in copyright infringement, the syndicate would surrender the strip back to him out of fear of a lawsuit. So, he incorporated nearly 30 characters into the strip "before they brought the hammer down." It didn’t work. The paper let him go, but opted to retain the copyright anyway.

Mike Lynch points to a recent interview with Liza Donnelly:

—Misc. Lynch also found a speech by Signe Wilkinson.

And Ben Towle writes about the influence of Steve Ditko.

A large part of any artist’s legacy is their effect on the art and artists that follow them–their influence–and indeed the headline from that NY Times obituary refers to Ditko as the, “Influential Comic Book Artist.”

But here’s a curious thing: the word “influence” or “influential” appear five times in that article, but in every instance other than its use as a general accolade in the headline, they all refer to people who Ditko was influenced by–Ayn Rand, Mort Meskin–not anyone being influenced by Ditko.

Compare this, for example, to the NY Times obituary of Ditko’s contemporary, Jack Kirby, who died in 1994. In just the first few paragraphs there are specific mentions of things Kirby influenced–how superhero comics post-Kirby are different than superhero comics pre-Kirby. Indeed, Kirby’s aesthetic influence on superhero comics is as ubiquitous as it is self-evident. Grab any modern superhero comic off the rack at your local comics shop and you’re looking at something that’s been shaped by Kirby’s influence.

A casual flip through a few issues of a contemporary superhero comic, though, is unlikely to yield any sign of Ditko’s visual style. Why is this? I think, because despite the tremendous regard in which Ditko is held by most comics people (myself included) his stylistic influence–such as it is–falls outside the genre in which Ditko’s best-known work falls. If you want to see Steve Ditko’s stylistic influence on comics you need to look not at superhero comics, but at indie comics–specifically indie comics of the late 1990s.

Today at TCJ, it's time for the latest installment in Michel Fiffe's ongoing evaluation of his inspirations: The Fiffe Files. This month's chapter is on The Flash, as depicted by a motley crew led by Mike Baron and William Messner-Loebs. 

"Random weirdness" --! His Flash is definitely a weird read, but you gotta lock into it. You have to be open to unsentimental, almost disjointed storytelling. Baron packs the book with new concepts, but not in a flimsy way, like emptily sprinkling scenes with ideas to show how clever he can be. Baron actually tries to get in there and explore some of those ideas. Having Guice be the straight man who only draws what is required with no fluff, no fanfare, no oomph is a good balance.

Our review of the day comes via Jake Murel, and it's of Nora Krug's remarkable (and demanding) new book, Belonging. Is it a comic? A visual memoir? What does all that stuff mean, anyway? Jake's on it:

But her diverse assortment of visual material raises a question about Belonging’s connection to comics and the nature of comics writ large. In short, is Belonging a “comic?” The back cover—at least of my review copy—advertises the book as a “visual memoir,” a term I initially assumed to be a semantic device for distancing an essentially comic text from the supposed low-brow, commercial escapism often attributed to comics. But the more I read, the more I wondered whether this might be a valid distinction. Is Belonging distinct from comics, not because of its content, but its form? It utilizes few structural elements typically of comics, such as panels or word balloons. Krug includes several interstitial comic sequences throughout her book, but she tells the majority of her narrative through stylized, handwritten text accompanied by an array of images. Though every page contains some sort of image, nearly all of the pages are so text dense that the singular included image could be removed and not much would be lost in the reading experience. The images become little more than decorative illustrations, a feature that opposes what most cartoonists and comics scholars consider (good) comic art.

And that's not all--not by a long shoot. Dig in, because we've got a rock solid interview with Stan Lee, from 1968, which we originally published in Comics Journal #181. There's a whole lot of meat on this one, friend. Here's a taste.

WHITE: Well, you’re getting more competition all the time, of course. New companies keep coming into the superhero field all the time. There are the Tower people … and Harvey Comics … Those are the most flagrant imitators. How do you feel in general about the imitators?

LEE: I wish they would peddle their papers elsewhere. The flattery kick — we’ve gotten over that years ago. We realize that we are rather popular now. We appreciate it. But the thing that bothers me … corny as it may sound … We really are trying to make comics as good as comic can be made. We’re trying to elevate the medium. We’re trying to make them as respectable as possible. We … our goal is that someday an intelligent adult would not be embarrassed to walk down the street with a comic magazine. I don’t know whether we can ever bring this off, but it’s something to shoot for. At any rate, we try to do this. Now when other companies come out, and they try to make their books seem like our book as if they’re all in the same class, the same milieu … and yet the quality is inferior, the art is inferior, the writing is inferior, the plotting is inferior. I feel this does nothing but hurt us. The adults who don’t read comics, but who … whose youngsters try to convince them that comics are really pretty good. You know, who may read ours and like them, say “Why don’t you read one? They’re really good.” And the people who are uninitiated but who have heard about comic and might want to pick up one of those imitations, look at them and say, “Aw, I knew it That fellow who told me comics are good is really an idiot. They’re as bad as they ever were.” In this way, I think we can be hurt by imitators.

WHITE: The imitators make themselves look so much like your line that many readers may think they’ve gotten hold of a Marvel comic.

LEE: Exactly. Now … silly as this may sound, or hard to believe as it may sound, I wish our competitors did better books … If they put out books of comparable quality to ours. Now, I don’t like this to sound as if I’m an egomaniac, but I think you see what I mean. If … if I felt myself that the art and stories were as good as our books, I would be happier because I would feel that we’re all elevating the field … and we’re all going to benefit by it.

WHITE: It would put more pressure on you to get even better …

LEE: Right. But as it is, at this particular moment, I still think that we are doing the only somewhat significant work in this field. There’s the occasional exception.

That's a great fucking interview. Thanks, 1968 TCJ contributors!

Over at Women Write About Comics, Wendy Browne has the most detailed write-up on Library Journal's Virtual LibraryCon, which took place a few weeks ago. I also attended that event, and my main takeaway was that there's probably going to be a lot more of those types of online conventions to come--the structure and interface of the whole thing has a very clear appeal to a type of fan who is only becoming more and more common. 

Over at Popula, they continue to publish comics by a murderer's row of recognizable names, like Mimi Pond, Lauren Weinstein, Meghan Lands, Tom Hart & Trevor Alixopolus.

Over at the New York Daily News, they've got the latest update on the bribery trial involving an ex NYPD officer, who recently testified he got a gun permit for Ike Perlmutter in exchange for tickets to Marvel movie premieres. I love reading about this story and don't care how true it is or not: who doesn't want to read a screwed up news story about dumb nonsense that doesn't correlate to hyperclimate chaos or hardcore alt-right racism or anything other than some rich creep allegedly getting a gun permit he couldn't possibly need from some rando goon who isn't creative enough mentally to say "give me a lot of money" but instead says "I want to be the first in my circle of friends to see a Benedict Cumberbatch motion picture". There's so many awful, upsetting reasons people get in trouble and so many awful, upsetting people who get away with trouble: it's always a treat to see assholes being roasted in public for the dopey things that assholes do. 'Nuff said!

Tegan O'Neil is here with an essay on Stan Lee, using his Thor comics as an entry point.

I picked up a volume of Tales of Asgard strips, from the original Lee & Kirby run recently. Those back-ups started about a year after Thor first debuted – if you’ve read the early run of Thor, it took a bit for the character to gel. He wasn’t unusual in the Marvel stable for that, and it’s certainly true that he gelled a lot faster than Ant-Man and the Hulk. The Asgard back-ups began with adaptations of the original Norse myths, which are pretty fucking metal even in Comics Code Approved form, and they’re interesting for being a rare example of Lee & Kirby collaborating on someone else’s story.

As you might expect Kirby takes to myth like a duck to water and much of the earliest episodes are spent giving him an opportunity to draw things like Ymir roaming the ancient frozen universe with only his cow buddy for milk and company (the cow isn’t named in the comics but her name is Auðumbla). That’s in the myths, and it’s in the Marvel universe, and Jack drew that primeval cow like a motherfucker. What Lee does is translate the stories into his invented Asgardian argot, the faux Shakespearian bombast that served as one of the character’s signatures until quite recently. One of the reasons that works for these characters in particular is that gods and goddesses by their very nature have outsized motivations and personalities. Adopting a bit of that old Shakespearian rag gives them a vocabulary to describe what are some very recognizable and familiar bits of human drama, such as: my dad doesn’t think I’m ever going to grow up and he doesn’t want to give me a chance, my brother’s an asshole, and I cannot turn around for five fucking minutes without having to worry about frost giants and me-damned Geirrodur the me-damned King of the Trolls.

Today is the grand finale of Marc Bell's Cartoonist's Diary. Thanks, Marc!

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Slate has another adapted excerpt from Mark Dery's new Edward Gorey biography.

Child abuse was Edward Gorey’s métier, in a manner of speaking. Gorey, who died in 2000 at 75, was the author and illustrator of a hundred or so little picture books whose pen-and-ink illustrations flawlessly counterfeit Victorian engravings and whose lugubriously amusing nonsense verse, equal parts Edward Lear and Samuel Beckett, spins black comedy from murder, mayhem, and existential malaise. Gorey’s books look at first glance like children’s books, or at least children’s books from the Victorian or Edwardian ages in which they’re often set, and his tongue-in-cheek takeoffs on children’s genres like the Puritan primer or the 19th-century morality tale make them sound like them, too. But as with Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedies, Gorey’s darkly droll tales touch—lightly—on weighty matters: the death of God, the meaning of life, and, always and everywhere, our impending mortality. Emblems of innocence and naïveté, children make perfect victims, as Gorey told the New Yorker. “It’s just so obvious,” he said. “They’re the easiest targets.”

No title epitomizes that point better than The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Gorey’s 1963 parody of abecedaria—ABC books—that uses the deaths of 26 mites as punchlines in life’s existential farce: “E is for Ernest who chocked on a peach/ F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech … ” It’s Gorey’s best-known book, grist for hipster tattoos and for countless takeoffs, from Mad magazine’s recent “Ghastlygun Tinies,” a pitch-black commentary on school shootings, to a Game of Thrones spoof to the inevitable Harry Potter version (The Hogwarts Tinies) to a Game Over Tinies that casts video game characters like Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers in the roles of the doomed tots. A witheringly satirical version appeared during the 2016 presidential race, The Ghastlytrump Tinies, a nightmare vision of what would happen if Trump won the White House.

—And the latest guest on Inkstuds is Peter Bagge.

Today at The Comics Journal, we're pleased to share a new review from Matt Seneca. Last time, it was an elongated dip into Moebius--and now he's returned to these pages with a look at a different heavy hitter: Alberto Breccia!

Breccia's art just about demands cliche descriptors. It really is eye-popping. Constructed with dense gnarls of absolutely brutal, slashing brush marks, every panel manages to cohere into a piece of realistic cartooning in the Norman Rockwell mode, with faces, figures, and lighting that startle with their dead-eyed accuracy. Imagine the sober Alex Raymond of primetime Rip Kirby inked over by Bill Sienkiewicz at his most manic and you're close; but honestly, neither of those guys' best work speaks to pure drafting skills as finely honed as Breccia's. Again and again the panels' flair for expressionism carries them to the brink of what looks like chaos - ink and wite-out splatter across the pages, furiously scribbled (and gorgeously reproduced) brush marks envelop blank space with black, and texturing effects that Breccia employed toothbrushes and razorblades to achieve spackle across surfaces. Again and again that chaos reveals itself as tidily observed compositions of light and shade - a group of dry-brushed gouges resolves into a birch forest, an elaborately marked scribble into a wrought-iron sign and its shadow, obsessive masses of ink flecks into a herringbone pattern that recedes perfectly into the light source. 

We've also pulled another Stan Lee piece from the print archive--a brief recap of a panel appearance Temple University back in 1978 from Comics Journal #47.

Lee spoke with considerable candor on the subject of television shows based on Marvel characters. He opined that the Hulk series was more intelligently written than the Spider-Man series, but that the constant "message" every week might send the ratings into a nosedive. He felt that an occasional super-villain and fantastic situation would relieve the boredom of the stories told by TV writers.

And of course, today is Marc Bell's fourth installment of the Cartoonist Diary!

Over at Counterforce, Aug Stone interviewed Typex about his Andy Warhol graphic novel with SelfMadeHero.

Over at Time, Gord Hill was interviewed about the Antifa Comic Book.

Over at PopMatters, there's a review of Mickey Z's Space Academy 123.

Over at Chicago Reader, there's an all too brief excerpt from Anne Elizabeth Moore's interview with Julie Doucet surrounding the publication of Moore's Sweet Little Cunt, her in depth look at Doucet's comics work.

Yesterday, this site's publisher Gary Groth wrote a quick note about Stan Lee.

Who —or what— was Stan Lee? Editor, hustler, hatchet man, corporate player, shill, writer, frustrated novelist, success, failure, catalyst, front man, self-parody, hack, exploiter, innovator. He was, probably, all of those things.

What he was, improbably enough, for at least one brief moment, and what he may have become if he had had the stomach for it, which he obviously didn’t, was a truth-teller.

Marc Bell is here with Day Three of his Cartoonist's Diary. Landlords and Halloween parties.

Finally, Annie Mok has a review of Kelsey Wroten's Crimes.

Crimes follows the creative and romantic exploits of Willa, a 30-year-old gay painter and barista, who has a crush on Bas, a 22-year-old poet who's dating Willa’s friend Simon. A meditation on grief, lust, point of view, and communication, the story begins with the death of someone close to Willa, with images of a coffin, and the internal monolog, “Putting people in boxes [...] and so begins my first year without you.” Confident brushwork, pacing, and writing marks this tale of loss and longing. The unruled borders underscore the sense of anxiety vibrating throughout the work.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Stan Lee. There has been an unsurprisingly and appropriately large outpouring of texts written in response to Lee's death, too many to include here. A few worth noting include Lee biographer Tom Spurgeon's initial thoughts, Jeet Heer's article at The New Republic, and Charles Hatfield's blog post.

Douglas Wolk collected some of Lee's cameos from Marvel comics, and Drew Friedman gathered the drawings of Lee he's made over the years.

—Etc. Vulture has the latest in a long line of articles about new Nancy cartoonist Olivia Jaimes.

Today at The Comics Journal, we're sharing with you Michael Dean's obituary for Stan Lee, whose passing yesterday has already resulted in hundreds of articles by a multitude of publications worldwide. We will have more to come on the man, his work, and his legacy in the coming weeks.

It would be hard to overestimate Lee’s impact on the art, business and cultural image of comics. His noteworthy creative work emerged during a roughly 10-year period, but his comics career spanned more than 75 years — very nearly the life of the comics industry itself. During that time, atypical among comics creators, he had only one boss: Marvel (aka Timely and Atlas Comics). In the 1960s, Lee ignited and oversaw the greatest burst of creativity the superhero genre had seen since the invention of Superman. As Marvel’s editor-in-chief, he infused the line with a recognizable house style built upon the prolific Jack Kirby’s solidly dynamic art. As Marvel’s head writer, he created a world where super-heroic tropes stumbled ironically and engagingly among the petty details of everyday life. As Marvel’s spokesperson, he made readers feel they were part of an elite club and shepherded comics out of the kid-lit ghetto and onto college campuses.

But his willingness to toe the company line meant that his name and smiling face became corporate logos that were routinely stamped over the credits of other comics creators. Because his name became shorthand in the media for the multitude of creative efforts that had breathed life into the Marvel universe and because he allowed a “Stan Lee Presents” blurb to introduce even comics he had no involvement with, many in the fan community accused Lee of hogging the limelight and obscuring the work of Marvel artists.

We've also got Marc Bell's latest installment in his Cartoonist Diary! Airports: 'nuff said!

Our review of the day comes from Martin Brown, his first for the site. He's taking a look at Cranklet's Chronicle #1, a zine by Ellen Lindner focused on "true stories of women in baseball". 

Lindner and her mother are both Mets fans, and Mets fans occupy a very specific place within the baseball fandom hierarchy – one in which any hope for the team or joy for the players is consistently undermined by the current owners, the Wilpon family, who were famously swindled by Bernie Madoff for hundreds of millions of dollars and have seemingly been taking out their financial frustrations on the team in increasingly arbitrary and humiliating ways ever since. In an interview in the back of The Cranklet’s Chronicle’s first issue, Marisol Cruz (“a nice, normal person who likes the Yankees”) frames Mets fandom perfectly: Lindner asks Cruz what it would take for her to switch teams and root for the Mets. “There’s no chance,” Cruz responds, “I refuse to be sad.”

Today on the site, Mark Newgarden returns with an interview with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, granddaughter and biographer of one of the most important and colorful early publishing figures in comics, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson.

As Jim Steranko points out in his introduction, Wheeler-Nicholson’s heroic, larger-than-life background still left him singularly ill equipped to do battle with his business associates in the underbelly of the depression-era magazine business. How did Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz enter and exit the Major’s life — and what happened in between?

That question is worth at least two chapters in the biography! I’ve seen various scenarios posited about when Donenfeld and Liebowitz got into business with MWN, but I’m still not quite certain and I’ve been tracking every tiny clue of where they overlapped for almost twenty years. Most historians place it at the point where Donenfeld took over the printing of the magazines but I suspect it was earlier. The pulp publishing community in New York was not huge. People in the industry knew of one another and about one another. I think there are a number of factors that led to their connection. Just as today in New York City anyone who works in the business of construction knows they are going to be dealing with payoffs. It’s part of the cost. It seems from what we do know that a similar situation existed with distribution of magazines on newsstands. My guess is that MWN knew he would have to shell out cash payoffs as part of going into business.

We also present the Cartoonist's Diary of one of my favorite working artists, Marc Bell. He's currently in residency at the Struts gallery in New Brunswick, and as mentioned last week, is crowdfunding a new issue of Worn Tuff Elbow.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Alex Dueben interviews Jordan Crane.

It took many months to come up with the initial structure for the book. I didn’t set out to make it a children’s book, I wrote it as a comic trying to be as clear and simple as possible. For me that meant using pictures and very few words as a handrail to find your way through the pictures. I first made it as a little tiny 2×3 inch black and white mini comic, packaged along with a sewn patch that had the flag design on it. I gave that to friends and stapled it to telephone poles, just wanting to put it out into the world. The comic still didn’t quite feel right though. I had to rework the story a few times after that original version until I thought it expressed the idea in a very clean and pure way. Specifically, I wanted the story to not assume anything of the person reading it, for it to be a simple and truthful statement. When I finished that second version of the mini-comic, I sent one to Françoise Mouly.

—For The Baffler, Yohann Koshy writes about the republication of How to Read Donald Duck.

The Disney comics reportedly claimed over a million readers in a country of nearly ten million people. For the Chilean intellectual Ariel Dorfman and Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart, such cultural hegemony needed to be countered. And so they wrote How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Its claim, delivered with rigor and irreverence, is that Mickey and Donald’s harmless fun is suffused with counter-revolutionary thought. Para Leer al Pato Donald was published in 1971 by Chile’s newly established state-run publisher Quimantú (“Sunshine of knowledge” in the language of the indigenous Mapuche people). It became a bestseller and was translated into over a dozen languages. John Berger called it a “handbook of decolonization.”

—James Sturm on the history of comics (via):

Today at The Comics Journal, we're pleased to share an interview with...Warren Ellis? Well, why the hell not? Welcome our newest contributor--we've had a few this week so far!--John Maher, who is visiting from Publishers Weekly and had a chance to shoot the shit with Ellis during the window of time allotted for such shooting. They're supposed to just talk about something called Cemetery Beach, but it being Ellis, things got broader.

What do you think comics can do in today’s media-saturated climate that no other form can?

Comics, at their best, have purity of intent. There is no visual narrative form that has so few people between the creators and the audience. Depending on how you're publishing, there are few or no filters. In comics, for better or worse, what you get is what the creators intended to say to you. And you have to engage with the comics page, for it to work -- you can't just sit back and expect comics to just do it to you in the way that tv or film do.  

Our review of the day comes to us via Chris Mautner, and it's of one of the best comics you'll read this year: Lauren Weinstein's issue of Frontier. 

Oh, we’ve had comics about parenting before. Keiler Roberts certainly comes to mind, as does Lynn Johnston, Guy Delisle and let’s not forget Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues. But these comics tend to document the frustrations and foibles of parenting (albeit often from a humorous perspective). I can’t, however, recall any cartoonist that documented the process of becoming a mother with such love and warmth while avoiding any cheap sentimentalism.

For the first time in a very long time, i'll be missing Cartoon Arts Brooklyn, which is going down this weekend in Brooklyn at Pratt Institute. As per usual, the guest list is fierce--Olivier Schrauwen, Decadence, and Kutikuti would have been immediate stops for me, but generally speaking, it's a show worth hitting 'em all. Generally speaking, I prefer that things conclude immediately after I no longer have the ability to attend them or enjoy them, but for this year, I'll wish those of you heading over a good show. More info here.

Unexpected dental surgery means this blog is going to be a little no-frills.

First up, Kim Jooha is here with an expanded version of her essay exploring an artistic movement she calls French Abstract Formalist Comics.

In the mid-2010s, a group of young French artists began creating wordless comics with geometric and minimalist style and little or no narrative. What they show instead is more of a "process."

The emotionless and mechanical style and lack of narrative and words lead the reader to focus on the formal qualities and abstract concepts of comics, visual art, and printed media, such as space-time, movement, body, sign, texture, representation, transformation, repetition/variation, etc.

I call this new budding movement French Abstract Formalist Comics. They are “Abstract” Formalist comics not because they do not show representational images — they do, and this is a critical difference between them and Abstract Comics — but because they show abstract narrative and study abstract and formalist themes, concepts, and motives.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—The New Yorker excerpts an upcoming book from Olivier Schrauwen.

—Nicole Rudick writes about Julie Doucet for the New York Review of Books. (I lent Nicole a few books to help research this article, and stupidly only now realize that was kind of a self-defeating move for an editor to make. But reading the essay makes it all worth it, even if it was published somewhere else.)

Each issue of Dirty Plotte occupies that peculiar nexus of cringing and giggling. At the moment when a gag comic might end, Doucet pushes further, into uncomfortable territory. The step-by-step instructions in the four-panel “Do It Yourself: Laugh!” conclude not with a lively chuckle but with an unhinged, sputtering roar. But in calling out her fantasies and fears with words and pictures on the page, Doucet uses transgression to carve out a space of power and freedom. She revels in the joy of unfettered exploration, and her enthusiasm buoys otherwise dark subject matter. A trio of strips called “If I Was a Man” begins by conjuring aggressive male sexual behavior (when male Julie muses dumbly on “the great mysteries of nature” after ejaculating on his girlfriend, it’s hard not to read it as a pointed commentary on the outsize male fantasies present in so many comics). But the series ends with idiosyncratic fantasy: the “useful” penis that can store small items like pens and rolled-up magazines and the “romantic” penis that begets flowers.

—Alex Jones and Infowars now (very implausibly, imo) claim that the Pepe the Frog character they appropriated was not the one created by Matt Furie but an obscure Argentine cartoon character named Pepe the Toad that doesn't look very similar...

—The original art for Bernie Krigstein's classic "Master Race" is going up for auction next week.

Today at The Comics Journal, we've got the latest installment in our Retail Therapy column. This time around, we spoke with Menachem Luchins, the man behind Escape Pod Comics.

I think publishers know exactly what I want them to know- that a change is coming and the readership is shifting and growing in ways they can’t control or guess. That’s why the super-tights single issue markets is in so much trouble and desperate to sell as many books to their dwindling market as they can. DC seems, at least, to see the emerging market with their new Ink and Zoom Lines but considering how reactionary most of their moves have been for the last few decades we shall see how long it lasts. Quite frankly, single issues are the biggest detriment to people’s entrée into comics and these companies, from Marvel to Boundless, know it- they just don’t really know what to do about it.

Today's review is the first from our newest contributor, H.W. Thurston. Historically, the Best American Comics collections have been dismissed by critics as being collections intended more for the curious reader than for...well, "critics", who tend to have their own comics interests pretty well figured out to the point that the book doesn't serve as much more than a catalog of they already know they don't like sandwiched alphabetically between things they do, but have already bought. So this year, we brought on an arts critic new to (but interested in) comics to see if they, as members of the intended audience, might give us a different perspective. Mission accomplished.

There are two obvious bents in The Best American Comics 2018. First, towards the auto and semi-autobiographical (nearly half of the 33 comics fall into this category). Second, towards the non-narrative, or otherwise “art”-y and experimental. Those are perfectly fine genres, and there’s no reason that they couldn’t happen to comprise the plurality of the year’s best comics, but the fact that their exemplars were simultaneously overrepresented and underwhelming left me with the distinct feeling of bias.

Over at Women Write About Comics, they dropped in another one of their always-interesting group discussions, this one on a comic at The Nib that seemed to be attempting to be all of the things for all of the people all of the time, a balancing act that, even when accomplished, impresses absolutely no one.

Over at The Great God Pan Is Dead, Robert Boyd delivered a classic installment of bullet point reviews of major and minor label comics. Round ups done right: I'm always on board for that.

If you're just not feeling it today, throw this on: it was introduced to me by Uncivilized's Tom K, which is enough of a comics connection for me.

Today on the site, we present the 33rd episode of Greg Hunter's excellent Comic Book Decalogue podcast. In this installment, Hannah Blumenreich (The Immortal Bro, Spidey-Zine) talks Mildred Louis, Stuart Immonen, Go For It, Nakamura!, and more.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. At Publishers Weekly, Meg Lemke talks to Rina Ayuyang.

I've always wanted to do a kind of cheesy homage to the Hollywood musical. It's challenging in a format that's not live-animated, because it requires movement. The looseness of the drawing helps. Musicals were a way for me to escape from reality as a kid—and from what's happening today, too, though I didn't want to bring in as much negative energy from current events to the book. But from my childhood, to dealing with depression, pregnancy, and motherhood, the theme of musicals linger organically [alongside] my personal experiences.

The Virtual Memories podcast talks to Mark Dery about his new Edward Gorey biography.

—Reviews & Commentary. At the Smart Set, Chris Mautner reviews Julie Doucet's new complete Dirty Plotte.

Right from the get go Doucet made it clear she was taking no prisoners and offering no apologies. The title, she explains on the very first page of the very first issue, is a Quebecois slur for vagina (or a woman with loose morals). After a few examples of everyday usage, Doucet glares at us with a sultry look, drooling lips, and a razor blade necklace, saying, “You know, plotte is a very dirty word . . . ”

Other strips push boundaries even farther. One very early comic shows her performing a strip tease that ends with her ripping off her breasts and slicing up her midsection, as her dog and cat leap hungrily toward her entrails. Another has a stalker murdering a child and then letting his dog devour the body (“dog is truly man’s best friend”). In issue three, she takes a hatchet to a naked man, cuts his body with a razor blade, cuts off his penis, and then uses the bloody stump to write “fin” on the wall.

Robert Boyd reviews an assortment of recent comics, including works by the Coin-Op Studio, Pat Aulisio, Laura Lannes, and Baudoin.

New York Review Comics is the best publisher of comics in English today. Almost every comic they publish is a classic. No other publisher has a better batting average.

Piero is a comic by a great French cartoonist named Edmond Baudoin. Much of his work has been autobiographical, which is (in my humble opinion) the most interesting genre in comics. It took quite a long time for comics to embrace such personal stories. Although there were a few examples of autobiographical comics prior to the 1970s, as a movement it can be said to have begun with Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green in 1972. After this searing depiction of the artist's OCD, autobiographical comics became a deluge, and not just in the USA. Baudoin started producing his autobiographical comics in the early 1980s. His career has been highly unusual--he was born in 1942 and worked as an accountant until he was 33, when he quit to become an artist. This story is explained in this volume. Piero is the nickname of his brother Pierre, who like Edmond was a prolific childhood artist. Both brothers were gifted and loved to draw together, but their parents could only afford to send one of them to art school. The book is about how the two brothers shared an imaginative life.

Noah Van Sciver recommends a short selection of books at Shelf Awareness.

—Crowdfunding. The great and inimitable Marc Bell (Shrimpy and Paul) has launched a Kickstarter for a new issue of Worn Tuff Elbow.

In 2004 I published WORN TUFF ELBOW #1 with Fantagraphics and now, 14 years later, I have produced a follow-up, WORN TUFF ELBOW #2, to be published under my own imprint NO WORLD BOOKS! I love creating “floppies”, in other words, saddle-stitched or stapled periodical comic books. There is an informal quality to the process which I find interesting. It was great fun to put this comic together!

—Misc. If you are a U.S. citizen, then today is a day when you are allowed to vote for which people will run the government.

Today at TCJ, it's Monday: the best day of the week. We're launching it with Dave Nuss, who sat down with Alex Deuben to talk about Revival House Press, the publisher responsible for one of the best comics of the last twenty years, (Men's Feelings #1,) about how he got started, what he's been doing, and where he's going next.

The perception I have after doing this for nearly a decade is that some form of immediate financial success generally requires a shift to the middle. It may mean publishing artists and work that appeals to a broader audience. Not to knock anyone doing this but it’s just not right for our press. I like challenging work that may not fit a conventional framework and that forces the audience to contend with it on a formal level. I think it’s one of the virtues of being a “micropress” publisher. You can publish on your own terms and at your own pace. I respect Austin English from that vantage point and what’s he done with Domino. He releases books when he’s able to do so, and of artists he specifically admires. Going back to the curatorial idea, I think publishing along these lines serves the purpose of bringing important or meaningful yet potentially overlooked artists to some degree of greater prominence. Another worthy example is the book Robyn Chapman released a few years ago, the Deep Girl collection. Those mini’s were so vital in the '90s and it was wonderful to see Ariel Bourdeaux’s name on the shelves again.

Today's review comes to us from Keith Silva, who took a look at It Will Be Hard--a cheekily titled interactive comic from Hien Pham.

Cartoonist and writer Hien Pham wants It Will Be Hard to be many things: a story about queerness, sex positivity, gray asexuality, polyamory, people of color, body image, love and relationships; it’s also a comic and an interactive choose-your-own-adventure, sort of; readers are also warned up front that the story contains a section of “explicit sexual content,” which, in the gameplay aspect of the story requires a reader’s consent or it can be skipped altogether.

Over at Diversions of the Groovy Kind, you'll find one of the best Mike Zeck covers of all time. (Bobo!)

Over at Bleeding Cool, you'll find the most complete round up of recent developments in the Mark Waid/Richard Meyer defamation case, most of which involve competing crowdfunding campaigns.

Finally, i'm writing this blog post from the airport after attending the wedding of two TCJ contributors--congratulations to Geoff & Tessa, who both made crazed wedding promises to return to us soon, promises I aim to hold them to.

As something of a followup to the story this site published on Tuesday, we have an interview with Dead Reckoning publisher Gary Thompson. I have to say, the appeal of this kind of comic completely eludes me.

We also have day five of Summer Pierre's very well-received run creating our Cartoonist's Diary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. The Paris Review excerpts Mark Dery's new biography of Edward Gorey.

On the evening of April 23, 1964, the New York City Ballet opened the doors to its new home, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, with a gala performance of George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Stars and Stripes. It was, for all practical purposes, Edward Gorey’s new home, too, five months out of the year.

As in all the rituals that governed his life, Gorey was compulsive in his devotion to routine, arriving for eight o’clock performances at seven thirty, when the doors opened. Yet he sometimes spent long stretches in the lobby if he didn’t like one of the evening’s offerings. Gorey “had to be there on time, partly (he would say) because maybe they would change the order of the program, but I think it was just his compulsion—he had to be there,” says Peter Wolff, a ballet friend of Gorey’s who now sits on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation. “It was all part of his insane routine.”

Art in America writes about a new show featuring work by artist (and TCJ columnist) Austin English.

The fifteen single-page original panels of English’s wild comic book Tanti Affetti (2017) provided a marked stylistic contrast to [Sam] Spano’s work. Recalling the grotesque oil paintings of Claus Castenskiold, the series depicts a rag doll–like character’s hellish journey through a menacing urban realm that fractures apace with the figure’s own dissolution, page by page. English’s use of colored pencils is distinctly smudgy and grimy, while his attacks on perspective, sometimes aided by collaged insertions of additional material drawn by the artist, untether us from the picture plane. The aforementioned protagonist, whom I’ll refer to simply as the man, is first shown descending a staircase as various ghoulish figures look down from windows. The man, by way of a speech bubble emitted from his rictus, hints at the existential terror to come: looking forward to a day of half-heartedly negating myself.

—Interviews & Profiles. Nadja Sayej talks to Ralph Steadman.

“I prefer Nixon to Trump. I think anybody would because Nixon was at least a politician,” said Steadman. “A proper or improper one, doesn’t matter. Trump just isn’t, Trump is a lout. He’s a godawful disgrace to humanity, really.”

In his book, Between the Eyes, Steadman wrote about the need for optimism. “We live in a time when the world needs a powerful injection of hope and personal achievement,” he wrote. “Nothing cynical will serve our purpose now.”

Today, he feels the same way. “It has brought out the #MeToo generation, hasn’t it?” asks Steadman. “In general, people are more conscious of other people. It’s more of a world of universal acknowledgment. We’re actually there.”

—News. In an unfortunate but not shocking turn, the Chicago Sun-Times announced that it is greatly reducing the amount of space it devotes to daily comics.

Today marks some changes to the comics and classified pages of our Monday-through-Saturday print editions. Rather than three dedicated pages of comics, we’ll be publishing one comics page with the New York Times crossword and interspersing other comics and puzzles throughout the classifieds section. The Daily Bridge Club column will run on the weather page.

We earlier mentioned her nomination, and now Jillian Tamaki has won her second Governor General's Literary Award.

The Governor General's Literary Awards, one of Canada's oldest and most prestigious prizes, annually acknowledge seven English-language and seven French-language books across several categories. Each winner receives $25,000.

—RIP. Hardy Fox.

Today at TCJ is a day that ends in "y", which means it's one of the days we like to spend talking about Junji Ito. This time around, the duty falls to Austin Price: he's into it.

The truth is that Ito's work scares us because we know they shouldn’t. We know there is nothing so laughable as people being mauled by fish with mechanical spider legs; the idea of people contorting themselves to fit into custom-made holes on a mountainside should deserves not much more than a giggle. And yet when we read his work we shiver. And yet we also know that these things we dismiss so easily in fiction would make mince of us in the real world. Humans are weak and vulnerable and at the whims of forces we delude ourselves into thinking we’ve mastered; millions have lost their lives to a bite from a plague-carrying fleas, to malaria-toting mosquitoes. I once had neighbors who were under such siege by a gang of rabid raccoons that they could not leave their house for days for fear of their very lives. Why then shouldn't a plague of mechanically enabled fish monsters cut us down like wheat at harvest season? Similarly, we commonly hear about formerly sane people who wake up one day so obsessed with the idea of cleanliness they'll scrub their own skin off or so paranoid they'll murder their neighbor for some imagined slight; is the idea of a woman so horrified by spirals that she rips off her fingerprints and gouges out her eardrums really so outlandish?

The fourth installment in Summer Pierre's Cartoonist Diary is here, and it's time to follow up on the DMV story she began on Monday. (We call that a "callback" in the biz.)

Today's review is of Jules Feiffer, whose Ghost Script graphic novel saw release by Liveright earlier this year. J. Caleb Mozzocco has that comics criticism you need, as well as a reminder that Feiffer turns 90 (!) in January.

Regardless, how remarkable is it that an artist who will turn 90 in just three months has released another 160-page graphic novel, the conclusion of a trilogy that ultimately followed a large cast of characters for several decades through what became an almost 500-page epic of film noir and crime fiction homage turned great American (graphic) novel?

Despite its place as book three in a series, it’s well worth noting that The Ghost Script reads like--and therefore can be read as-- a self-contained work. Important, defining moments in the lives of the characters that occurred in the previous books, Kill My Mother and 2016’s Cousin Joseph, are revealed here, either in dialogue or in flashback, with several pages from Cousin Joseph reused and repurposed as those flashbacks. The cast’s motivations are clearly delineated between the covers of this single volume. The plot, as elaborate as it is, begins and satisfyingly ends here, and some of the more important elements of the story as a literary work are specific to this book.

Over at Shelf Awareness, Noah Van Sciver gave his own spin on their "Reading With..." feature.

Over at Popula, Trevor Alixopolus is holding it down with a spicy werewolf comic for ya.

Over at Comicosity, the hardworking Chris Hernandez is back at it again with another Comix Latinx interview; this time, he's talking to Lester Ray.

Over at Your Chicken Enemy, John James Dudek dives into Patrick Kyle's Roaming Foliage, taking up the challenge from Kim Jooha in our recent interview. (Maybe? Go with it!)

I had intended to post the following video the day we ran our Jamal Igle interview (unlike me, Jamal is a Man of Steel hater) but Tim got to be the lucky guy at the helm yesterday. Here, then, is my favorite trailer for one of the top five super-hero movies ever made.

Another big day here on TCJ. First, Alex Dueben talks to artist Jamal Igle about rethinking his career, getting older, why historical sales numbers may be misleading, and getting into arguments on Twitter.

The last time we did a big interview was right before The Ray dropped, which was when you were coming off Supergirl. I feel like you had a great experience on those two projects, but you didn’t want to be an employee in the same way afterwards.

Yeah. That’s the thing, especially on something like Supergirl, if you’re on a book for a year or two, the only way is to become emotionally invested in its success. Sterling and I on Supergirl became very very very emotionally invested in her longevity as a character. I walked away from the book because Sterling decided he was going to leave and I decided I can’t stay because it won’t be the same for me. When I walked away I started working on The Ray and I had a lot of fun working on The Ray, but that was done with the express intent of going out with the bang. This is going to be my last DC project so let’s show people what I can actually do with the brakes off. We invested so much time and energy on Supergirl between having to deal with the internal politics and then the attention that we got, especially in the first six months, and how we were doing in sales, and how that created tension internally, and having to deal with crossovers, and waiting for other people to do their part, and trying to align all that. It’s a lot. You put that much energy into something and it becomes emotionally draining if you don’t see not just a financial but an emotional return on investment.

Your run really influenced the TV show in different ways. I know that you and Sterling Gates have been name checked, but do you guys get anything?

They just mention us. I don’t get jack. [laughs]

At the same time, that’s the nature of work for hire. I’ve been in this business for almost thirty years and I completely understand. It’s the thing that makes people working in the business working at a larger company very hesitant about creating new characters for whatever company that they’re working for. Knowing the history of this business and knowing how many incredibly talented people either got screwed or weren’t keen enough businessmen to fully take advantage of the opportunities that they had at the time, I don’t want to ultimately end up that way. Having a background in advertising and marketing and editorial and production and knowing the realities of what it’s like to work in a business environment, I know that what your managers consider to be in the best interests of the business itself has nothing to do with your longevity as a creator. When you’re a freelancer you are a business unto yourself. It’s not Marvel or DC’s job to promote you per se outside of whatever you’re doing for them. That is not the relationship that you have with them as a creator. Their only responsibility is to exploit whatever talent they can get out of you for as long as they can and when you’re no longer of use to them, I won’t say that you’re discarded because everybody has to make their own decisions on that. Some people do get discarded. Some people leave by their own volition. Some people get forced out. Some people are just giant assholes and get pushed out because nobody wanted to deal with them no matter how talented or connected they are. I’ve always kept that in mind over the years.

We also have Day Three of Summer Pierre's Cartoonist's Diary.

And in our only explicitly Halloween-ish content for the holiday, Matt Seneca reviews the latest book from Al Columbia.

The valley between art and audience that the comics medium traverses is far less uncanny than the one facing animation. Before the terrain was road-graded by computers at least, cartoons could carry an unnerving vibe, the forms and movements so vivid and lively but still so alien, herky-jerky or a touch too slow or both in varying degrees, possessed of a lunatic enthusiasm in their every step. The weirdest Depression-era cartoon shorts, like Grim Natwick and Fleischer Studios' "Bimbo's Initiation" (much beloved of Jim Woodring), seem animated less by human hands than some evil spirit; windows into fictional worlds that somehow live, subject to none of the rules and sanities that mercifully govern our own. 

Al Columbia has built a comics career in territory as close to this uncanny valley as pictures that don't move can get. A superb draftsman, Columbia can pull on the smooth white gloves of the Fleischer house style with ease. But where actual old cartoons only hint vaguely at their evil spirit's existence, Columbia's work gets down on the floorboards and slithers along in the wake of its bloody trail, marrying a legitimately iconic American idiom to content as ghoulish and ghastly as anything comics has ever played host to. His latest book, Amnesia: The Lost Films of Francis D. Longfellow Supplementary Newsletter no. 1, spotlights a cartoonist who has identified exactly what's most powerful about his own work building himself an elaborate metafictional theater to project it in. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Steve Kurutz at the New York Times writes about Mark Dery's new biography of Edward Gorey.

He spent seven years on the project, time he needed to wrap his head around “the panoramic sweep” of his subject’s mind.

For Mr. Dery, and for anyone else, plunging into Goreyland means becoming acquainted with Diaghilev’s “Ballets Russes,” with French silent films, the surrealist collage novels of Max Ernst, Victorian children’s literature, the ancient Japanese novel “The Tale of Genji” and so forth. It means looking through a pre-Stonewall lens, when many gay men and women led closeted lives and their sexuality didn’t necessarily figure in their expressed personal politics.

It means trying to solve the riddle of a man who was outwardly gregarious — “As beguiling a conversationalist as Oscar Wilde,” as Mr. Dery put it — and flamboyantly fashionable, walking the streets of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in floor-sweeping fur coats that caught the attention of the photographer Bill Cunningham, yet forever enigmatic.

Slate has published an excerpt by Jami Attenberg, in which she writes about her personal experiences with the work of Julie Doucet.

I remember when I first read this book in 1999, new to New York City myself, I wanted to slip into the pages with her and experience her life. It was not terribly different from my own. I was new in town with just a few friends; I was a struggling artist, a feminist, a substance abuser, a night owl, and completely mystified by male behavior. (I am still many of these things, if I am being honest here.) Her energy practically vibrated through the book. She took all those things that I was merely contending with and turned them into a piece of art. She cracked open my universe a little bit. Here was how to take control of your own narrative.

Reading it now, 19 years older and wiser, I want to reach into the pages and pull her toward me and tell her to chill out on the whippets and get an apartment in the East Village immediately—not that it was any safer there, but at least she’d have some friends. As much as anything else, the book feels like a historical document. Doucet talks about seeing Karen Black perform on the Lower East Side. She goes to art parties and hangs out with Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly, and Charles Burns. She sees New York City through fresh eyes, capturing every detail of this compelling moment in its history. There’s lots of letter writing in this book, not an email in sight. I used to send beautiful letters. Did you?

Anime scholar Susan J. Napier recommends and discusses five books to help readers understand manga and anime.

[In Japanamerica, Roland] Kelts talks about the late twentieth-, early twenty-first-century moment when Japan and America were influencing each other. He compares this influence loop to a Möbius strip where things come from Japan and then they come to America, and return to Japan. He uses the movie The Matrix as an example. It was inspired by the manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell, which the Wachowski sisters, the directors, acknowledge having seen.

Ghost in the Shell inspired major sequences in The Matrix, and The Matrix inspired many anime. So there’s this continuous loop of Japanese and American cultural influence. Roland explores the excitement about this cultural transmission, how we are in a time when we can go back and forth between and among cultures and get inspiration and even products and art from another culture.

—Interviews. The aforementioned Alex Dueben talks to Noah Van Sciver about his latest Fante Bukowski book.

I love the design of the whole series. This one in particular plays with the layout, has a fake author photo and bio. How much of that was you?

None of that was me. That was all Keeli McCarthy’s genius. She’s the designer at Fantagraphics that I work with. Basically I just finish the story and send them the files. She had this whole conceptual idea for the series. She said I’m going to goof on these generations of self-important male writers in the designs. The first book was a very small paperback like the early beatnik novels. The second book jumped ahead twenty years and looked like something from Black Sparrow Press. The third one jumps ahead another twenty years and playing off the nineties male writers, books like Infinite Jest and those. I think she did a really good job of that. A lot of people didn’t pick up on it, but I hope they will.

—Misc. Michael Dooley has put together a visual tribute to the various "Treehouse of Horror" issues of Simpsons comics over the years, which is a nice reminder that it's been way too long since I pulled out the issue edited by Sammy Harkham...

Today at The Comics Journal, we've got a packed day for you. First up, we've got Daniel Schindel's look at a couple of Dead Reckoning's launch titles to see what they have to say about this new comics publisher. Later this week, Daniel will return with an interview with the publisher.

Since Dead Reckoning is an offshoot of the Naval Institute Press, the publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute, one might peruse these graphic novels with a suspicious eye. What’s the angle? Where’s the propaganda? The USNI isn’t part of the government or military, but a good deal of its leadership consists of retired Navy or Marine members. War comics have experienced a boom in first-person accounts and journalistic ventures in recent years, but comics coming from an “official” source will for many conjure images memories of Superman hawking war bonds and Captain America punching Hitler. But both Trench Dogs and The ‘Stan are aware of and in conversation with this history. They aren’t dashed-off efforts, but involve talented artists not previously known for working in this genre. Dead Reckoning, then, is asserting their seriousness as a comics publisher.

Meanwhile, Summer Pierre's Cartoonist Diary continues, with today spotlighting the feelings that curse an exercise routine. Pro tip: make sure you're keeping up with Pierre's title design!

Today's review comes from Rich Barrett, and he's taking a look at nbm's recent translation of Annie Goetzinger's The Provocative Collette. Like the rest of us, he's curious to see more of the artist make its way to English.

With a background in costume design, Goetzinger always focused on complicated, beautiful women and in Colette she found an ideal subject, one who was both a fashion icon and an early prototype for modern feminism. We see her depicted in a variety of fashion-forward outfits that range from shoulder-baring ball gowns (racy for the bourgeoisie at the time) to demure school girl outfits to breast-baring stage costumes. Colette is responsible for creating some iconic looks including the “Claudine Collar” worn by the protagonist of her first novel and Goetzinger seemed to relish rendering every last swatch of fabric.

Over at Popula, there's new comics up from Meghan Lands and Beatrix Urkowitz, both of which are excellent.

The latest in the Cómix Latinx interview series is up at Comicosity, this time around, it's with Ale Juvera. 

Diversions of the Groovy Kind gears up for Halloween by digging up some a collection of some very specific advertisements.

Over at Your Chicken Enemy, Kim Jooha takes an insightful dip into Conor Stechschulte's Christmas In Prison. And I just correctly spelled Conor's last name from memory.

Over at Pop Matters, there's another review of Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte to be found. You can never have enough Doucet, if you ask me.

New John Carpenter! 

A new week, and a new Cartoonist's Diary. This week sees the debut of Day One from Summer Pierre.

We also have Rob Clough's review of a biographical comic, Dominique Osuch and Sandrine Martin's Niki De Saint Phalle: The Garden Of Secrets.

Writing a biography in comics is tricky. How does one cram the essence of a life into under two hundred pages? Is it possible to get across just why a person is important? Furthermore, how is the task complicated with a separate writer and artist? In Niki De Saint Phalle: The Garden Of Secrets, writer Dominique Osuch and artist Sandrine Martin are able to avoid some, but not all, of the pitfalls of comics biography.

De Saint Phalle, born in 1930, was better known outside the US, despite her half-American heritage and the number of years she lived in the country. She most often simply went by Nike, a name she gave herself as a child as a kind of guardian spirit and playmate that watched over her. She was a multi-media genius and self-taught artist who worked with huge sculptures, performance art, film, and other media, and her works were frequently considered to be shocking and controversial at the time. She was an artist who boldly and directly addressed feminist issues. Her work was bright, colorful and direct. Of her many achievements, her greatest may have been The Tarot Garden in Italy, which features sculptures of varying sizes of all the Major Arcana. Niki made sure the structures and the garden itself were an integrated whole, which was a frequent theme of her work. She wanted her art to be open and available for all to see in public spaces, not stuck in a museum.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Massachusetts outlet Malden Wicked Local interviews Keith Knight.

I’ve been on panels with cartoonists who have to leave the country because their government was going after them for a cartoon they did. So, I’m fortunate that it’s not gotten to that point here yet. But the way things are going, it wouldn’t surprise me if it did.

[It’s a scary time] for everybody. I think not only not only for people who are direct victims of this, but also the indirect reality of people who never considered themselves to be racist or fascist, but are looking around and justifying what’s going on, and saying to themselves, “Oh, OK, maybe I am fine with this. Maybe I don’t want any of this taken away” -- even though none of it will be taken away!

But if you scare people enough, saying, “Oh, you know, this caravan of people are coming and they’re gonna take YOUR job.” It’s such silly bullsh--.

—Reviews & Commentary. The Paris Review excerpts Anne Elizabeth Moore's new monograph about Julie Doucet,

D&Q released Dirty Plotte #1 in January 1991, and it was one of the more enduring titles to come out of the black-and-white boom, a period of rampant experimentation in independently published comics, when no title seemed likely to fail and thus no risks were too big for publishers. Doucet won a Harvey Award for best new series, appeared in Diane Noomin’s Twisted Sisters anthology from Penguin, and was interviewed by The Comics Journal that same year. She moved to New York shortly thereafter, relocated within a year to Seattle, then to Berlin. Lève ta jambe, mon poisson est mort! (in English, “Lift your leg, my fish is dead!,” although the title remained untranslated for the English market) came out from D&Q in 1993, compiling work from the minicomics and elsewhere. A collection of dream and fantasy stories, My Most Secret Desire, came out in 1995, also from D&Q. Doucet returned to Montreal in 1998 to complete Dirty Plotte #12, which turned out to be the last in the pamphlet series. My New York Diary came out in 1999, The Madame Paul Affair the following year, and Long Time Relationship in 2001, all from D&Q. Dirty Plotte came in at ninety-six on The Comics Journal’s 1999 list of top comics of all time. This year, D&Q released a two-volume set of her work, The Complete Dirty Plotte, including several strips previously unpublished in English, selections from her diaries, both runs of Dirty Plotte, work that was published contemporaneously with the series but appeared in other venues, and the entirety of My New York Diary and The Madame Paul Affair.

—News. V.T. Hamlin's Alley Oop strip is being relaunched with writer Joey Alison Sanders and artist Jonathan Lemon.

Sayers said she hoped to add more humor to the strip, which has created by V.T. Hamlin and focused on Alley Oop and his life in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo since its debut in 1932. In 1939, it introduced Dr. Elbert Wonmug, a 20th-century scientist who sent the cave man on time-travel adventures. “I want to make it a little zanier and just have a little more fun and draw readers in,” Sayers said. The Sunday installments, she said, would likely not involve time travel. They will be a little more slice-of-life and coming-of-age-type stories, she remarked.

The strip is preserving its history, she noted. “It’s not that the stuff in the past doesn’t exist,” she said. “It is still the same characters, but circumstances have changed. I definitely don’t want to alienate the old readers, but I want to create a starting point for new readers.”

Workers at a Goodwill in New Jersey found a 1774 newspaper with the original "Unite or Die" snake cartoon from the U.S. Revolution. (History.com also wrote about the cartoon.)

“These were very important propaganda tools,” Snyder said of newspapers and pamphlets of the era. “The viciousness then in some was as much or more as it is today. . (But) the language was more powerful in putting down the other side.”

Snyder estimates the newspaper’s value at $6,000 to $16,000. Goodwill Industries hopes to sell it to help funds its educational and job-training services, according to Heather Randall, e-commerce manager of the regional operation in Bellmawr, New Jersey.

Writer Mark Waid has been sued by one of the main people associated with ComicsGate, and is raising legal funds.

Today at TCJ, we've got Austin Price on Nathan Gelgud's House in the Jungle. He did not care for it.

Yet to give it a pass would be worse, because endorsing Gelgud and his hypothetical future imitators’ experiments would be to sabotage the exact kind of oddities I’d sooner trumpet. While it is, yes, a welcome slice of strangeness that Gelgud trots out in A Home in the Jungle, it’s insubstantial. This is a book that announces its ambition on every page but musters none of the profundity or mystery it positions itself worthy of, a civics lesson on the importance of political engagement masquerading as a slice of Lynchian weirdness which yields only easy answers without ever honestly engaging the uneasy wondrous that frustrates explanation in favor of deeper pleasures.

Over at Popula, Trevor Alixopoulous deliver his take on disaster preppers, along with some autobiographical details for some spice. And you know what they say about he who controls the spice.

Over at PEN America, Whit Taylor's most recent editorial comics call was to Katie Fricas, and it was an excellent choice.

Over at Facebook, Charles Vess posted the endpapers art for his Spider-Man graphic novel from 1990. Pretty unreal.

Today on the site, Rob Clough returns to review the latest from John Kerschbaum, Pete & Pussy: Puppy Love.

The surface simplicity of John Kerschbaum's work has always belied the complexity of its underlying structure. To be sure, the humorist is first and foremost a gag man, dating back to his Xeric grant-winning series The Wiggly Reader back in the 1990s. His drawing style is pleasant and almost bland, as he rarely sells gags simply by drawing funny pictures. Instead, he prefers to lure readers in with this approachable style and spring bizarre, visceral, and sometimes horrifying gags on them. There are few cartoonists who integrate word and image in such a commanding fashion, as his gags depend on that fusion in order to succeed. He's not primarily a funny writer or funny craftsman (though he is both of those things); instead, he's a funny cartoonist.

His high level of craft is sometimes not immediately discernible. Working with a standard nine-panel grid, no single page or image really stands out on an initial flip-through. One can only see what he's doing upon immersing oneself in the rhythm of each page, because he will frequently set up a gag several pages in advance, while at the same time advancing a series of smaller jokes in the grid set-up. Take the beginning of Kerschbaum's new book, Petey & Pussy: Puppy Love, where the senile owner of Pussy the Cat and Bernie the Bird is at her computer. She's punching it and poking it in order to make it work and even talks into the mouse like it was a CB radio transmitter. At the same time, we hear someone screaming "La La La" and interspersing it with "Kill Me!" That buildup continues for a couple of more pages and reaches its end three pages later, as we first see Pussy, in his usual pose outside the mouse hole. Kerschbaum has created not only his own rhythm but his own reality as well, as the three main pets have human heads and speak English. None of this is ever addressed, nor is it necessary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Paste has a discussion between cartoonists Mike Mignola and Geoff Darrow.

Mike Mignola: Do you remember the first time we met?

Geof Darrow: I do. I do. That was at San Diego Comic-Con when it was in that convention center that was near the Grand Hotel. And I remember vividly that you were working on, or you done, Cosmic Odyssey and I told you how much I liked it and you were like, Ah, well… [laughs] I wonder if you had any idea like, Who is this guy?

Mignola: I don’t think I did because I don’t think—it was before Hard Boiled, right? I don’t know that I had seen anything of yours before, and I don’t know if you were with Frank or who you were with, but I remember somebody pulled out, you pulled out, a page you were working on—which I don’t think was ever published? I don’t know if it was a page from Hard Boiled, all I remember is it seemed like it was a really complicated, amazing street scene and I always seem to remember that there was an alligator walking up the middle of the street. I might be completely wrong and maybe it was an actual page from Hard Boiled?

Darrow: No, no, that’s funny. The only thing I could think that could be was at the time, I was working on an insurance job, one of those things where they hire you to draw whatever you want. We’re going to pay X amount of dollars, it seems like a lot of money and you can just draw whatever you want. We’re going to hand this out to people to buy the insurance.

The science fiction website Strange Horizons interviews the novelist and comics writer Saladin Ahmed.

I like to write from the point of view of monsters. I’m a Muslim-Arab man, and I think a lot about demonization—who gets turned into monsters and who gets viewed as monsters. And one of the most compelling narratives to me in all of fiction is that of the misunderstood monster. I’m going all the way back to Shelley—actually did a lecture on Frankenstein earlier this year. It was cool to talk about Frankenstein because I’m really interested in the monster, and I think Marvel is a great place for that, right? You have this history of characters like The Thing, but also for me taking some of these characters who have been villains, traditionally, and asking questions. The supervillain is the monster of the superhero comic, right? And I’m asking why are they monsters, what made them monsters, who gets to classify them as monsters.

The latest guest of Virtual Memories is Eddie Campbell.

—Reviews & Commentary. Stuart Jefferies writes about a London exhibition of artworks inspired by Peanuts.

Peanuts became an obsession for [Mel] Brimfield at an early age. Her grandmother would cut strips from the newspaper for her to read. And so, when her school planned a musical called Good Ol’ Charlie Brown, she auditioned to play Lucy. “My mum made me a bonkers black wig, bless her,” she says. But why play the strip’s monstrous bully? “Because she had the best songs and the biggest role.”

Lucy has haunted Brimfield, who is based in London, ever since. “A few years ago, I was working in a hippy clinic where the people who came in – with real pain – were only offered shamanic soul retrieval from charlatans. There was something about how easy it was to set yourself up as a therapist that made me think of Lucy. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised the move to wellness and the licence to complete selfishness in our society is fed by people like Lucy. She only set up her booth because it was another way of exercising power. She’s a huckster.”

—Misc. The Paris Review (?) has a selection of original EC horror and science fiction comics art up on its site, in conjunction with a new show at the Society of Illustrators.

Looks like Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor are starting a new podcast:

Today at TCJ, our comics retail column Retail Therapy returns, this time with a visit to Philadelphia's Amagalm Comics & Coffeehouse.

What's changed the most for your business in the last five years?

Amalgam has had a really interesting start. Two weeks after opening our doors we went viral in the truest sense of the word. With that came a whirlwind of interviews, special appearances and speaking engagements for me. As a brand new business I felt it was important to get as much media attention as possible, so for the first 6 months or so of our existence much of my attention and energy went into promoting the business and building our brand. The biggest change thus far has been me taking step back from the promotional piece and really spending time with the store, my staff, and my customers.  

Today's review comes to you from Helen Chazan, and this time around, he's taking a look at Junji Ito's Frankenstein, a recent hardcover release from Viz. He's into it.

Junji Ito’s Frankenstein is a comic chasing a feeling, a vibe, one great impression gleaned from Mary Shelley’s novel and essentially nothing else. When Ito is not chasing this feeling, the comic falls slack, stiffening into the straightforward retelling of a Classics Illustrated, where pages upon pages unfold of men and women in stodgy Victorian dress and upright posture, discussing plans for weddings that I couldn’t care less about. Maybe I have a short attention span, but it often seems that Ito does as well. These pages are light, literally so - daylight leaves little room for Ito’s oppressive hatching, and it leeches away the distinctive character of his art. Without that gloomy labor, Ito could be any mangaka, and this is just a comic book of Frankenstein. But not for long.

Back At The Bronze Age put together another one of their perfectly satisfying posts of comic book ephemera, this one focusing on floating heads. Look at all those ding dang floating heads!

Abhay Khosla put together a random look at some old Frank Teran covers of the Punisher and The Terminator, which is the Punisher's spirit animal. I'm good with that.

A comic I really enjoyed this year was Young Frances, and I'm just catching this interview with the creator now. Good stuff.

Today at The Comics Journal, we welcome back our world traveling Matt Seneca, who stopped by the country of France to see what's been going in the land of late period Moebius. The result is a insightful delight:

The computer is very much in evidence here, its voice autotuning its creator's imagery into a place as different from "classic Moebius" as it is inextricable. The most noticeable change can be seen in the colors. I think the sublime flatting combinations Moebius assembled in his prime are at least as big a contributing factor to his enduring popularity as his rendering style itself. Without them, he's a talented psychedelicist with technical chops and a Crumb influence. With them, he was something else, something bright and glowing you always sensed should exist but no one else was able to show you. (Should you require more proof of the contribution color made to Moebius's career highs, and possess a strong stomach, check out the absolutely hideous recolored version of The Incal that DC put out in the early 2000s.) Moebius's hand-coloring approach (often in concert with the work of assistants) was never too complicated: establishing a striking color as a ground, he would build up shape and depth with darker and lighter values of the same tone before marking out the essential information a picture contained with a strong contrasting hue, usually combined with areas of white or black. In a modification of this approach, he would form a ground with pastel tones before using a bold color for pop. 

And today's review comes to you from Tegan O'Neil, who took a chance on the most recent installment of Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips long running partnership, My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies. It didn't go super well.

I struggle with noir precisely because the moral tone is unwavering and inescapable: these are stories about people who make the wrong decisions, consistently, and then hurt others as a consequence of their wrong decisions. Crime stories implicate the system that directs people into the arms of the carceral state. It’s hard not to read a story like My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies and not be distracted by the ways in which the world has failed these people, or in which the world has failed by enabling them, in the case of the rich folks shipped off to rehab as opposed to prison.

Over at Women Write About Comics, there's a solid interview with Jocelyne Allen, a manga translator behind multiple titles that readers of this site will have come across.

Over at Dominic's house, you'll find an all-too-brief look at Summer Pierre's All The Sad Songs from Mr. Umile himself.

Over at Popula, you'll find their comics output increasing. I would recommend Lauren Weinstein's latest Normel Person, for a bunch of obvious reasons.

Over at Spiral Bound, you'll find their comics output at about the same. The new Gabrielle Bell comic "Manifestation" is exceptional.

It's time for your Trevor Von Eeden alert!

This is the most upsetting thing I can recall happening to a fictional comic book character when it was brought into another form of entertainment that I can recall in my lifetime. 

This put me in a better mood.

Today on the site, Cynthia Rose is back with an in-depth interview with the Flemish artist Brecht Evens, who has a new major book out in Europe (which will be released in English next year), and a Paris exhibition opening this weekend.

The book's real gamble, Evens suspects, is its plentiful text. This includes long and fantastic disquisitions, almost all of which are voiced by secondary characters. These work in tandem with the reactions they elicit. But, from an artist with less confidence in his writing than his visuals, they constituted a leap. "Maybe it was risky to have put some of that in. For instance, starting Victoria's story with a four-page dialogue – more like a monologue – where one of her friends is relating a dream... What he's saying doesn't matter in any narrative way, it's there to bring out the characters of those who are listening."

Most of the longest soliloquies come from a taxi driver. "Those are little, contained nuggets of fiction-in-the-fiction. While the characters listen to them they are protected, they're safely ensconced in the carapace of that cab. But they're soaking in what we think adventure is. The build-up to it is almost like a joke, because every protagonist ends up asking the very same question... and it provokes the taxi driver to improvise."

Evens' chief concern was balance, maintaining the book's pace while preserving its equilibrium. "I paid attention to how I drew every character. That isn't necessarily a matter of — for example — whether they are listening or not listening. If you take a trick like making the face disappear, that will have some kind of closed and distant effect. But, in different contexts, the same trick will mean different things. What kind of detail I put forward or hold back…by the moment of drawing, I've consciously thought it all out."

Some of the book's characteristics are less about the stories being told than about the author's view of reality. "When you see characters hearing or not hearing each other, that's not necessarily some kind of theme. It's more about the way I understand conversation. Even in a really good, focused interchange, if you listen back to it, you're probably talking through one another, each thinking of what you're going to say just as much as 'listening.'"

"A lot of people, when they write dialogue, just go 'A, B', 'A, B', 'A, B.' They'll have the characters neatly wait their turn. Whereas I don't think our brains really work that way. In reality, it's more of a constant traffic jam – even when we like each other and we're interacting well. When we're interacting less well, it's more extreme."

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—At Vulture, Abraham Riesman profiles Julie Doucet, on the eve of the release of Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, one of the most significant reprint projects of the year.

By chance, she came across a periodical called Factsheet Five, which advertised underground comics. It was a cornucopia for the curious young Doucet. She resolved to make her own comic and sell it there. “Factsheet Five had these tiny little ads and it was a world in itself,” she says. “I guess it felt like I was a part of something then.” She dropped out of school, went on welfare, and got to work.

The result was the first run of Dirty Plotte, which took the form of 14 short, mimeographed, stapled-together collections of absurd and obscene strips, released roughly once a month, beginning in 1988. “Right off the bat, she created a unique, fully formed world to explore,” says comics creator John Porcellino, who was one of her earliest readers. “She’s just a natural-born cartoonist.” Those early works covered a wide range of topics: you were just as likely to see surreal fantasies about women murdering men as you were to see a cute short story about a couple selling a dirty mattress as a work of art. These mini-comics also featured what is perhaps her most famous work, a strip called “Heavy Flow,” in which Doucet imagines a particularly copious bout of menstruation causing her comics counterpart to become a rampaging giantess.

—At the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler profiles Eve Ewing.

In the past year, she has also published an acclaimed book of poetry; collaborated on a play about the poet Gwendolyn Brooks; and co-hosted the Chicago Poetry Block Party, a community festival she helped create. She also sold a middle-grade novel, coming in 2020; signed up as a consulting producer on W. Kamau Bell’s CNN series, “United Shades of America”; and began hosting a new podcast, “Bughouse Square,” inspired by the archives of another Chicago gadfly, Studs Terkel.

And then there’s her gig with Marvel Comics. In August, Dr. Ewing caused minor pandemonium on the internet when she announced that she had been hired to write “Ironheart,” the first solo title featuring its character Riri Williams, black girl genius from Chicago.

—And at his blog, Robert Boyd reviews some comics he's recently read, including titles by M.S. Harkness, Austin English, Summer Pierre, and Sara Lautner, among others.

I had never heard of Summer Pierre until I heard an interview with her on a podcast talking about All the Sad Songs. She described it as being about making mixtapes, which is a thing that people of a certain age used to do, me included. She depicts herself now (a woman in her 40s, I think) with a streak of white in her hair. (I looked up her photo online, and while she has some grey, she doesn't have a streak of white--that was presumably an artistic device to help the reader distinguish now Summer from young Summer). She talks about how she made mixtapes for herself, her friends, boys she had crushes on and even her parents while she was in college. She lists the contents of some of them, and her tastes were eclectic but unformed. But in 1994, she hears Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville and Hole's Live Through This and they change her world. She becomes obsessed with girls with guitars and gets one herself and teaches herself the rudiments. Shortly after that, she meets Tom, who becomes a serious boyfriend for her. She's living in Boston and going to open mic nights to play her songs, becoming familiar with the singer-songwriters on the scene. She does a great job depicting this subculture, but what she really does well is depict her terrible relationship with Tom, who is kind of a cad.

Today on the site, Kim Jooha returns with the first installment (or second, depending on how you look at it) in a series of interviews with Toronto-area cartoonists and other members of what is called the comics community. This time, she speaks to artist Patrick Kyle.

I have been frustrated with reviews of Don’t Come In Here. People say, “Oh, it’s about being alone and sad in modern society!” Yes, it is, but also there’s much more-

People will either get it or they are not going get it. It doesn’t bother me.

I mean, your work is unique in how you present your ideas visually, but I think you don’t get enough credit for it. I worry that critics don’t have enough or good understanding. It's sad because we should cultivate this kind of work that studies visual language and representation. I want to see more work that takes care of these aspects of comics.

Thanks, I appreciate that a lot. I think a lot of people who follow me are more interested in me as an artist or an illustrator, and maybe don’t really know me for my comics work, and I don’t often feel like a comics artist. I’m part of that world, but I feel like most of the artists that inspire me are making fine art or illustration and are not completely comics work. Honestly, I haven’t been reading a lot of comics recently. I feel a little disconnected from the comics world, but also it doesn’t bother me.

I was wondering if you get frustrated—

No, not at all. I’ve been really lucky in my career. I’m not the most famous or popular artist or whatever but I don’t know, who is? It doesn’t matter. I would still be super-lucky to be in this situation I’m in.

I have such an amazing publisher, mentor, support from Annie [Koyama]. I’ve just been really lucky in the school I got to go to; the space that I live in; the peers I came up at the same time with. I feel so thankful for all of that. But if that support system wasn’t there, I’d still be doing all this stuff. It'd just be in a different way I guess. I don’t know if I would’ve found a publisher necessarily if Annie hadn’t known me.

We also round out the week with Day Five of the Cartoonist's Diary of Vassilis Gogtzilas.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Over at the New York Times, George Gene Gustines writes about Paige Braddock's decision to put her strip Jane's World on hiatus.

The comic ... culminates with Jane and Dorothy sealing their union with a kiss. It ends on a note that shows how much times have changed since the strip first began. “When I started the comic, two women could not have been married; it would have been pure fiction,” Braddock said in a telephone interview. “This shows how much has changed for the L.G.B.T. community in 20 years. It’s sort of staggering.”

Braddock’s strip faced early rejections. One criticism was that “it wasn’t gender-specific enough,” she recalled. “Back in the ’90s, a comic about a woman had to be about topics that women would be interested in: kids, family, husbands and bathing suits,” she said. Undeterred, she began posting her cartoons on her own website as “See Jane” in 1995 and it built a following as it evolved into “Jane’s World” in 1998. The strip was published in some alternative weeklies and received a tryout in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Braddock once worked as an illustrator. In general, however, “mainstream papers considered ‘Jane’ too radical,” Braddock said. “I sometimes think I was just 15 years too soon.”

—At the Nation, David Hadju writes about Jason Lutes's Berlin.

Jason Lutes dedicated over 20 years to the making of this work of more than 550 pages of nuanced, exactingly rendered pen-and-ink drawings and dialogue. (According to Lutes, he was inspired to write about Germany between the wars after reading an advertisement for a photography book dealing with the period in The Nation.) He was not yet thirty when he started the first volume, and he was over fifty and the father of two when the final book was published this fall. Lutes spent the time well, crafting multidimensional, true-feeling characters in a set of stories connected by the unstable circumstances of their time and place. The events surrounding them are historically factual: the fall of the kaiser, the launch of the Hindenburg, the debates over Marxism in Marx’s homeland, the sexual and cultural freedoms of the Weimar age, and the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. What Lutes contributes to the exhaustively documented, utterly familiar history of this time is a set of fictional characters from everyday life who ground the period with such intimacy and so much veracity that we feel as if we’re seeing it through new eyes, observing it so closely that we feel it directly.

Today on the site, we present a look at recent work by underground legend Dan O'Neill, from the writer who literally wrote the book on him.

To answer the most frequently asked question by people who have read my saga of [O'Neill's fight with Disney] (The Pirates and the Mouse (Fantagraphics)) but have not kept up with O'Neill since: “No, he isn’t dead.” The rootin’, tootin’ embodiment of outlaw cartoonist, whose Odd Bodkins was the first syndicated strip to oppose the Vietnam war and champion drugs, who besides standing up to the Disney Death Star, rode with the Mitchell Brothers against Dianne Feinstein, dropped in on Wounded Knee and Belfast, and egged the Queen of England’s flagship, still lives in Nevada City. He has contributed to fringe publications here and there, The Anderson Valley Advertiser, Berkeley Daily Planet, and Downieville’s Mountain Messenger, for three. He has had his personal papers collected by the University of California. He is prepared to relaunch Odd Bodkins “in whatever newspaper has the nerve to print it.” And in a bit of real life surrealism that makes Salvador Dalí's watches look like they were manufactured by Timex, he has served on the board of directors of America’s oldest gold mine.

This last experience shapes his book. Write (and/or draw) what you know is a useful instructive, especially when you mince this knowledge with a consciousness as outrageous, original, and damned funny as O’Neill’s.

We also have Day Four of the Cartoonist's Diary of Vassilis Gogtzilas.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Abraham Riesman talks to Marv Wolfman and Klaus Janson while writing about the evolution of Marvel's Bullseye.

I call [Wolfman] up to discuss Bullseye, the iconic supervillain he co-created for Marvel Comics with artist John Romita Sr. in the mid-1970s. “I’m writing a piece about Bullseye,” I tell Wolfman over the phone. “He’s one of the lead villains in the new season of Daredevil, so …” Before I can finish the sentence, Wolfman interjects: “He is?”

“Yeah!” I say. “No one told you?”

“No, no,” Wolfman replies, matter-of-factly. “Nobody told me. I mean, several fans said that, but they’d been saying that for months, so I assumed that was a rumor. I’ve been away for the last two weeks at conventions, so I haven’t been able to check the boards. I assumed it was a rumor.”

—A statistician named Bethany Lacina took to Twitter to make a mathematical case that the intuitive understanding of why Chuck Wendig got fired by Marvel is probably correct: that he was targeted by Comicsgate-affiliated accounts.

—One of the great translators, Anthea Bell, who worked on Freud and Kafka as well as Asterix (the relevant title for TCJ purposes) has died.

She first began translating Asterix in 1969, coming up with some of its best jokes and puns. In her version, Obelix’s small dog Idéfix became Dogmatix, and the druid Panoramix became Getafix. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation describes her work on Asterix as ingenious and superbly recreated, displaying “the art of the translator at its best”.