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Today, Ryan Holmberg is back with a longer look at the comics rental libraries of Mumbai:

Upon publishing the interview with Leaping Windows Comics Café, I was informed by an elder Indian that rental bookstores – locally called “circulating libraries” – are not uncommon in Mumbai. There used to be more, I was told, but there are still some out in the suburbs, though they deal mainly in books in Hindi and Marathi (the local language) rather than in English.

Online searching turned up more than a dozen scattered across Greater Mumbai, some of which are actually in the heart of the city, near railway stations and major intersections. These latter seem to be mainly older businesses, hanging on since the 1950s and 60s. I am also told that, out in the suburbs, a number of “paper marts” – paper recycling shops – have begun doubling as lending libraries, redirecting not only junk books and magazines that come their way, but also cartons of cheap remainder books. I have heard – though I haven’t seen them – that there are book vans that show up in certain neighborhoods once every three days or so, with blinking LED lights and megaphones tootling jingles.

All of which is to say: borrowing books for a fee, beyond the familiar institutions of private and municipal libraries, is neither a new nor rare thing in Mumbai.

Elsewhere:

—News. Responding to the recent online controversy Dan linked to last week, Brian Wood has released a statement. His accuser Tess Fowler responded soon after.

The opening of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum seems to have been a huge success, at least judging by reports. Sean Kleefeld has a three-part post on it.

Retailer/columnist Brian Hibbs has written an editorial on the disquiet he and many felt upon hearing about the Fantagraphics Kickstarter that quickly gets derailed into a rehearsal of an old Hibbs hobbyhorse regarding serialization vs. books. Matt Wilson at Comics Alliance wonders if the fundraiser was the start of a new trend and wonders if it's workable.

The Autoptic festival in Minneapolis is having a crowdfundraiser of its own.

—Reviews & Criticism. Robert Boyd reviews Jim Woodring, Gilbert Hernandez, and minicomics. Whit Taylor on Noah Van Sciver's Saint Cole. Bilge Ebiri is disappointed by the new Bill Watterson documentary. Mary Kinney writes about the bewilderingly popular Homestuck. Erik Davis has a short & sharp appreciation of Alan Moore up at Hilobrow. Holland Cotter at the New York Times reviews the Art Spiegelman Co-Mix show at the Jewish Museum and calls for more museum comics exhibitions. (If you're in the New York area, I strongly recommend attending that show.)

—Interviews. David Samuels has a long, very good interview with Art Spiegelman at Tablet. The Atlantic talks to Alison Bechdel about her reaction to the Fun Home musical. Tom Spurgeon talks to Gene Luen Yang. The Allie Brosh/Hyperbole and a Half media juggernaught makes it The Hairpin

Today on the site: Shaenon Garrity has written an obituary of Joey Manley.

“He was that rare kind of person that comes along in the comic industry,” says Cat Garza, one of the first artists Manley recruited to Modern Tales and one of many for whom that business relationship developed into a permanent friendship. “The kind that publishes newcomers without thought to whether or not the work is lucrative, the kind that puts people together and builds connections.”

Dirk Tiede, another longtime Modern Tales artist, says, “He gave so many young, talented, yet previously unknown creators a chance and a voice in what has always been a difficult and sometimes hostile industry. He put a professional face on webcomics at a time when they were laughed at by the mainstream comics scene. He stood up for us.”

And we have a review by Daniel Kalder of The Strange World of Your Dreams.

And elsewhere:

Zainab Akhtar reviews a bunch of new comics.

D & Q previews a fetching new comic.

Heidi MacDonald on harassment and the comics industry.

Sheila Keenan and Nathan Fox talk about Dogs of War.

The cover of Mad #21: Dissected.

Oh, and no Tucker this week, but here's a little Comic Books Are Burning in Hell: A special Neil Gaiman episode.

Finally, what I  have long waited for: A Wigglemuch Tumblr.

We've got two columns for you this morning. First, R. Fiore, who contemplates Jeet Heer's Françoise Mouly biography, In Love with Art. Here's a snippet:

At this point is there any more important editor in periodical illustration than Françoise Mouly? With so many erstwhile venues for illustration being driven online, where any illustration is rendered into spot illustration, The New Yorker could be the big time all by itself. Unless Spiegelman comes into the office with her we have to assume this is an adventure without him. The New Yorker cover of the William Shawn era was essentially wallpaper, the perfect decoration for the better kind of dentist's office. (Not least because it didn't matter how old the magazine was.) The New Yorker cover of the Mouly era is not only more topical than it used to be, but is also frequently a one-image narrative. The ultimate Mouly-era narrative cover is Adrian Tomine's November 8, 2004 cover: A young man and woman spot each other reading the same book in subway trains going in opposite directions, and not only have not encountered but will lose each other in a second's time. (Though it would have been a hell of an advertisement for Chance Encounters classifieds if they had them.) The effect is to put the cartoonist at the center of the world of illustration.

And then Frank Santoro stops by to reflect on last weekend's CAB show, and then very briefly interview Alex Schubert, the creator of Blobby Boys:

Frank: How was CAB?

Alex: Man, I was in a bad mood the whole time. I stayed in an Airbnb, and it was the fucking shittiest place I've ever seen. I opened the door, and the doorknob fell off. Broken glass and cigarette ashes everywhere. I'm not joking when I say that I cried a single tear.

Elsewhere:

—CAB Reports. There are too many of these to link to, but three that you might find interesting can be found by Mary Kinney, Andrew White, and Secret Acres (who have cleverly capitalized on their always-popular con report posts by sneaking in ads for their upcoming books). There's also a comics-con exhibitor survey taking place right now at Devastator magazine, for those interested in participating.

—Miscellaneous. CBR interviews Trina Robbins about her latest (and apparently last) history of women in comics, Pretty in Ink. Richard Bruton reviews Oliver East's Swear Down. Bill Everett biographer Blake Bell picks his ten favorite Everett covers. And not-comics but potentially interesting to those readers familiar with modern-day manga, James Polchin reviews an exhibition of Japanese Edo-period erotic art at the British Museum.

Today on the site: Rob Clough reports on the MCAD and the Minneapolis comics scene.

I was excited to attend Autoptic this year in part because it gave me a chance to meet and sample the work of a number of cartoonists in the burgeoning Minneapolis scene. Certainly, I was already well aware of the work of cartoonists like Zak Sally, Anders Nilsen, Rob Kirby, JP Coovert, Max Mose, Tom Kaczynski, and Will Dinski. I’m also quite familiar with small publishers like 2D Cloud (helmed by Raighne Hogan and Justin Skarhus) and Grimalkin Press (run by Jordan Shiveley). It’s not a coincidence that most of these cartoonists were part of the show’s steering committee. I was most curious to delve into the work of lesser-known local artists, particular current and former students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD). Sally and Nilsen both teach at the school, which boasts about fifty students majoring in cartooning out of about seven hundred undergraduates.

And Sean Rogers reviews Rage of Poseiden by Anders Nilsen, also from Minneapolis.

To be curious about human life, but to abjure human actors: Nilsen revisits this technique in his latest book, Rage of Poseidon. Rather than birds, however, this time out the artist uses mythic figures to inquire into the peculiarities of human behavior. Nilsen culls his cast of characters from Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, but he endows these deities and patriarchs with all-too-human failings, and thrusts them into the contemporary world. So in these stories, Poseidon rages, God sulks, and Athena goes on a bender, while Jesus drives a pick-up and Bacchus holds court in Vegas. Where Nilsen’s birds were trivial creatures with weighty concerns, his gods are ponderous beings with trifling cares.

Elsewhere online:

The Atlantic talks to Alison Bechdel about the transformation of her book, Fun Home, into a musical.

Robert Boyd on some recent books from Drawn & Quarterly.

Publisher Ryan Sands talks to illustrator Sam Weber.

Here's a nice interview with cartoonist/artist Leif Goldberg.

PW has a photo gallery from last weekend's CAB, weirdly serious picture of me included.

It's Paul Karasik's current comics reading. In Italian.

The great Hayao Miyazaki is apparently drawing a samurai manga.

The Beat reports on the latest comic-related graphics on Uniqlo garments.

And finally, there's another major comics show in Manhattan, this one of cartoons by the artist Ad Reinhardt. Here's a walkthrough with the curator and teacher Robert Storr.

Joe McCulloch has the highlights from the Week in Comics for you today, attached to an essay on two comics he picked up in Brooklyn last weekend.

Elsewhere:

—Reviews & Criticism. Martin Wisse looks at Joe Keatinge & Ross Campbell's Glory. Janean Patience continues his series on Matt Wagner's Grendel. Richard Bruton on Isabel Greenberg's Encyclopedia of Early Earth. Bob Temuka looks at the new Sandman. Wait, what decade is this?! Pádraig Ó Méalóid plumps for Lance Parkin's new biograpy of Alan Moore, Magic Words. Finally, Ng Suat Tong entertainingly comes out against plumping in all forms, making his customary move of preceding one of his own brief reviews with a lengthy list and condemnation of other critical takes on the same subject. This time, it's Michael DeForge. He definitely has a valid point or two: I was just coincidentally thinking myself the other day that there had been much less in-depth criticism of DeForge than you'd expect, given his stature; and the tendency for reviewers of all kinds to use language reminiscent of publicity blurbs has been rightly lamented for a century. That said, it is amusing to note that once again, Suat is undisturbed by imagery that literally every other human commentator finds gross, and then blithely assumes that their disgust must be feigned. Different strokes indeed. Anyway, I always enjoy and learn from Suat in myth-puncturing mode, no matter how clinically, narrowly he practices his iconoclasm.

—Interviews & Profiles. Matt Bors, the preeminent political cartoonist of his generation (and about whom I expect a consensus-skewering examination from Ng Suat Tong any day now, gets a short tribute at Time magazine. Joseph Glass talks to Paul Pope. The New Yorker blog talks to Gene Luen Yang. Tom Spurgeon talks to Gary Groth about the Fantagraphics Kickstarter.

—Unclassified. On her blog, Alison Bechdel responds to the recent stories about four Swedish movie theaters instituting an official version of the Bechdel test.
—Miscellaneous.
—

Today on the site:

A 2006 interview with the late Joey Manley by Dirk Deppey.

DEPPEY: You started with Modern Tales and you’ve got a core of, I believe, four or five sites, depending on how you want to classify Webcomics Nation, but I’m not really sure how. Is it more of a portal, or is it a service to cartoonists?

MANLEY: Webcomics Nation represents me trying to get out of the middleman business and get into the service-bureau business, because it’s (A) more profitable, (B) less work and (C) more useful to more cartoonists. Modern Tales was constructed along traditional magazine-publishing lines where, you know, there’s an editor who selects content, pulls it together in a meaningful package and then charges customers to read it and takes the money that the customers pay and splits it among the creators. Now, that last part is a little untraditional because a traditional magazine just pays a flat rate for the use of something. But the Modern Tales model is a lot of work, a lot of accounting and managing and picking and poking, especially because the business grew much more quickly than I ever thought it would, and became a much more important part of everybody’s life who is involved with it than I ever expected. The day before we launched, I hoped that maybe we would have 150 subscribers in the first year. We had 700 subscribers at the end of the first week.

DEPPEY: Really?

MANLEY: Yeah. It’s not growing at anything like that pace anymore, for a lot of reasons having to do with the price of bandwidth dropping, and with the explosion of more comics. You know, when I launched Modern Tales, it was still possible to name all the creators who were doing high-quality, interesting work online within a 10-minute period. That’s no longer possible. There’s been this explosion. So the elitism of the Modern Tales brand isn’t really sustainable in the current environment, which is why we’re shaking things up again. The Webcomics Nation model works much better in the new environment — there doesn’t have to be this middleman in there touching everything all the time, cartoonists can just do their thing. Modern Tales couldn’t possibly grow as fast as webcomics is growing. Webcomics Nation can.

And Dominic Umile reviews The Fifth Beatle.

Brian Epstein glides about in artist Andrew C. Robinson’s era-appropriate composite of cinematic framing and psychedelic overtones, clad in conservative blue or brown pinstripe suits. Each panel’s impossible Valley of the Dolls-like gloss — occasionally dressed in an effect that reproduces a color camera filter — owes to Robinson’s paint-first, digital studio-second methodology. He sets Northern England in a striking rain-blanketed swirl of blues, mossy green, and unfriendly damp alleyways, and The Fifth Beatle’s first few pages unfurl near the River Mersey, where an early Beatles gig is cross-cut with a harrowing encounter along the Liverpool South Docks. Epstein approaches a young seaman under the misconception he’d been flirted with and is “beaten…badly,” as recounted in the novel. Robinson’s whirlwind of punches and sharp kicks comes to a head with Epstein limping away, bleeding all over a discarded issue of Mersey Beat.

Elsewhere:

Well, it was a busy CAB weekend and I'm exhausted. I had a good show. It was smooth and sales were solid. There are a couple of brief reports up here and here. And here's Tom Spurgeon on the highlight of the weekend for me: Art Spiegelman's retrospective exhibition.

Self-interest alert: Brian Nicholson on INFOMANIACS.

Philip Nel on the Fantagraphics Kickstarter campaign.

And here's another worthy Kickstarter campaign: Mould Map 3.

Joe McCulloch is back for another round this week, with a lengthy interview with Jean-Pierre Dionnet, the comics writer and co-founder of Métal Hurlant and Les Humanoïdes Associés. They discuss the gamut of his career. Here, Dionnet discusses the very early days of Métal Hurlant:

So suddenly, everybody in a new generation is connecting. I didn’t know that a new generation was waiting to do the next thing. They came from everywhere. As said the Nietzschean philosopher Bruce Willis, about his movie Die Hard, you only come at the right place, at the right moment, one time. An all-new generation, mostly in science fiction at the beginning, but after, some of them were singers, artists, whatever. Some came with dirty drawings, and I took them the same way I used some sex to sell; then we stopped showing sex, because we knew it was suddenly okay – we were kids. Some were waiting for the flying saucers to come to earth.

Me, I had no point of view. In my head, I was like Elric of [Michael] Moorcock, a servant of the chaos. Some were communists, but they were Stalinians. Some were near the right – I mean the extreme right, but not in what they brought me. It was funny. So my idea was that my taste was not important. What was important was that the stories were well done, that those people were convinced - I would publish them. The tone of the magazine would come from a mix of everything.

And here's where he discusses how US editors adapted Métal Hurlant into Heavy Metal for the American market:

I made a big mistake, because I said I don’t want to colonize America, so let’s say that it would be good if you can put some American stuff in also, maybe 10 or 20 percent. What I didn’t know is that all the editors – Julie Simmons was the daughter of [National Lampoon co-publisher] Matty Simmons, and Ted White – were great with science fiction, but had very bad taste in art, like a lot of science fiction people. They began to have stories by people I don't like. Aside from [Richard] Corben, who I published first. Aside from Kaluta. I was very naïve, I'd say maybe you could give stories to Spiegelman, to Crumb, to Moscoso. And they didn't want to work with those people. Art was starting RAW at the time, and didn't need to, but I think that most of them would have accepted to have, let’s say, a comics section in Metal at the time.

One fun thing to do with this interview is to count the number of actual questions Joe asks. This is great stuff.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. The San Francisco Gate talks to Joe Sacco about The Great War. Paul Gravett talks to Hong Kong alternative cartoonist Chihoi. Dan Wagstaff talks to Gene Luen Yung. Mike Lynch interviews Brian Moore. At CBR, Paul Pope talks Battling Boy. Ryan Cecil Smith stops by Inkstuds.

—Reviews. Sarah Horrocks reviews Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios's Pretty Deadly. Tom Spurgeon reviews Hellen Jo in Frontier #2. Colin Smith lists 27 comics that fail the Bechdel test.

—News. Tom Spurgeon asks some questions regarding Fantagraphics' first digital-only comics release, Richard Sala's Violenzia. Middle East scholar Juan Cole ponders the possibilities of Marvel's planned reboot of their Ms. Marvel character into a Muslim-American superhero.

[UPDATE: It is being reported that Joey Manley, the founder of Modern Tales, passed away last night. Many people are leaving tributes on his Facebook page. Shaenon Garrity wrote about her own experiences with Modern Tales on this site earlier this year.]

That's it for today. Time for CAB.

Oh my goodness it's a busy day here.

We have Frank Santoro with an abbreviated column. Then on to Shaenon Garrity with a full column of web comic capsule reviews, and then Dominic Umile with a review of Look Straight Ahead:

The Canadian comics writer and artist began putting rough concepts together for a webcomic before she was awarded one of the last self-publishing grants from the Xeric Foundation, which has since shifted from bestowing grants upon the comics community to a strict diet of charity donations. In her now-print story, Will follows seventeen year-old budding artist Jeremy Knowles through the halls of his high school, where he battles a swiftly deepening identity crisis, hallucinations, and the detrimental sense of ignorance of his mental illness that awaits him at every turn. Owing to the struggles that Will has experienced since she was a kid, the wealth of hurt in Look Straight Ahead gathers like a storm in the frames dominated by Knowles’s shouting, frustrated father and in his dealings with typical schoolyard bullies. “It’s bad enough that everyone I go to school with hates me and wants to kill me,” Jeremy explains when finally ushered to a medical facility. His serial defeats, under the great weight of a disorder, are palpable and heartbreaking while Will’s pens dazzle.

Phew. What else is out there?

The Fantagraphics Kickstarter as covered by The New York Times and some commentary on it from Tom Spurgeon.

Sean T. Collins on a page from a comic by Leah Wishnia.

A nice think piece on digital lending and Charles Burns.

Thoughts on Alan Moore from his biographer, Lance Parkin.

Here's a good list for any purpose -- this one for what to look for at the upcoming Short Run Festival in Seattle.

Incidents in the Night reviewed in The Washington Post.

Finally, a bit about The Brownies.

Today, we have Bill Schelly's obituary for Nick Cardy, the artist perhaps best known for his work on Aquaman and Bat Lash. Here's a sample:

Probably Cardy’s most critically lauded work was for the Bat Lash series from DC, launched in Showcase #76 (August 1968) and Bat Lash #1 (November 1968). The unorthodox Western series was conceived by editorial director Carmine Infantino, editor Joe Orlando, former editor Sheldon Mayer, and cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. The protagonist of the tongue-in-cheek series was a self-professed pacifist, ladies’ man, and gambler, so Cardy adopted a looser visual style to better accommodate the pronounced humorous elements in the book. (Some have compared it to the James Garner episodes of the TV series Maverick.) The stories, dialogued after the first issue by Denny O’Neil, were engaging, and immeasurably enhanced by Cardy’s inventive story-telling techniques (experimenting with the way the pictures flowed from panel to panel) and expressive inking. Produced when Cardy was 48 years old, Bat Lash benefited by work by an artist with decades of experience, who was also able to bring a remarkably youthful spirit to the pages. It represented a creative peak, and cemented Cardy’s position as an important interpreter of the sequential art form.

We also have the most recent column from Rob Steibel (not long after the comments-thread war from his last column finally died). This time, he looks at documents uncovered by Sean Howe, the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Throughout the entire letter notice Lee emphasizes the fact that they are all under crushing deadline pressure. I think that’s true and I’m sure it was hard work, but I bet making comics sure beat working in a coal mine. Joe Sinnott was actually a real coal miner at one point in his life.

Elsewhere:

—Kickstarter & Criticsm. Probably the first thing worth noting today is the Kickstarter fund-raising event announced by Fantagraphics in order to support its 2014 spring season. As of this writing, the effort has reached nearly half of its $150,000 goal. Gary Groth explained the decision in more detail to Kiel Phegley at Comic Book Resources.

Since this site is published by Fantagraphics, I don't know that any further comment is appropriate here (other than to say that some of those rewards are pretty amazing), but I have noticed a few commenters here and there online either amusedly or angrily referencing my co-editor Dan's famous blog rant from a year or so back regarding the Retrofit Kickstarter for Secret Prison 7. (Phegley asks Groth about it, too.) I have two things to say about that: 1) It's important to note that there's nothing monolithic about The Comics Journal. Gary is fairly hands-off regarding the day-to-day operations of TCJ.com, and except when we ask for his opinion or advice (or on special occasions such as our tributes to Kim Thompson earlier this year), Gary is rarely directly involved with the articles and reviews we publish on the site. He undoubtedly disagrees with and/or rolls his eyes at multiple things we publish every month. For that matter, I do too. In my mind, TCJ is ideally a place where questions about comics as an art form and a business are debated, not answered definitively. The point is that readers shouldn't assume that any particular point made on the site by one writer is something agreed to by other writers and editors here; it just as likely isn't. 2) People forget that there were multiple angles to Dan's anti-SP7 rant. Some of it was about using Kickstarter, but the more cogent part of his argument (as I wrote at the time) regarded their announcement's slapdash appeal to poorly explained and misunderstood manga history. When the book finally came out, it was clear that Dan had hit the right nerve, because the editors made an obvious effort to strengthen the historical foundations of their argument, which in turn strengthened the book as a whole. The uproar from Dan's post also seemed to lead directly to increased donations to Retrofit's fundraiser. So in the end, the outcome of the exchange was elevated publicity and funding and a more solid final editorial product. Criticism should always be so productive.

This is one reason why I am not too dismayed by the multiple articles and flame wars appearing online this week attacking this site and its writers over Sean T. Collins and Frank Santoro's discussion about comics criticism. (For those curious, two of the most noteworthy come from Ng Suat Tong here and Heidi MacDonald here.) It is important to recognize what we are doing wrong (and hear what readers perceive as us doing wrong) in order for us to improve, and to the extent that the critiques are legitimate they can only guide us in our our attempts to do so. (I do wish that more effort was taken by critics to accurately assign responsibility for arguments and decisions—just as Gary might not agree with any given argument made on TCJ.com, Dan and I have nothing to do with editing the print version of TCJ, and Frank and Sean have even less—but that's a minor issue.)

—News. Diane Nelson takes to the Wall Street Journal to explain the reasoning behind DC's move to California. Publishers Weekly profiles the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Bleeding Cool reports on a baffling Apple decision. At Print, Michael Dooley talks to a cartoonist in a trademark dispute with Starbucks. Believed Behavior, an intriguing looking new art-comics subscription service has been launched.

—Interviews. On Too Much Information, Benjamen Walker will get you psyched up for this weekend's CAB show in Brooklyn (the Gabe Fowler-run successor to BCGF), interviewing Fowler, Art Spiegelman, and Peter Bagge. Memoirist and star Twitter-er Rob Delaney explains his admiration for Phoebe Gloeckner. D&Q creative director Tom Devlin shares some of his favorite books. Frank Santoro talks to Chris Mautner at Robot 6. Tell Me Something I Don't Know features Farel Dalrymple as a guest.

—Reviews & Comment. Chip McGrath explains Joe Sacco's The Great War. The New York Times compares online comics reading services. Jared Gardner reviews Dash Shaw's New School. (People coming to New York for CAB might want to visit the show at Adam Baumgold which is featuring Dash Shaw among many other artists, by the way. Art Spiegelman also has an exhibit up at the Jewish Museum, which is previewed here at the Times. And Charles Burns is being shown at Desert Island.) The Guardian reviews Isabel Greenberg's Encyclopedia of Early Earth. Janean Patience revisits Matt Wagner's Grendel. Finally, this Huffington Post best comics of the year list is weeurd.

Hello! Today is the second day of the working week and so we bring you Joe McCulloch for his first of two contributions this week. What's the second one? That's a surprise.

Kristy Valenti brings us a recording of a recent discussion at Geek Girl Con with Donna Almendrala (Bingo Baby), Jen Van Meter (Black Cat, Hopeless Savages), Jen Vaughn (Cartozia Tales, Adventure Time) and Karin Weekes (Bioware: Dragon Age, Mass Effect)

And Rob Clough reviews Zak Sally's Sammy the Mouse vol. 2.

What all this means for Sally in this volume is the possibility of action and motion. These are all cartoon characters, after all. They’re all living in the same city as every cartoon character ever, and that city is grungy, strange, and not all that friendly. So when Feekes hops from bar stool to bar stool and then “sproings” up to sit next to Sammy, it’s a perfectly natural Looney Tunes sort of moment. That sense that every cartoon character from Dr. Seuss to the present is reinforced when Peter Bagge’s Goon on the Moon pops up at the bar to annoy Sammy and when Kim Deitch’s Waldo is the one who pays Urbanski (a sort of grown-up version of Charlie Brown, down to the zig-zag-striped shirt). The world of Sammy the Mouse is not unlike Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: What are the characters doing when they’re not in adventures? What are they doing on their days off? I imagine for Sally, a former professional touring musician, this had to be a question that constantly dogged him. That’s why this comic feels so personal, even as it’s filtered through an anthropomorphic comics lens that bends reality when the narrative needs it to be bent.

And a load of links to be found around town:

Steve Bissette on an early encounter with Fletcher Hanks.

Kim Deitch interviewed.

DC Entertainment president Diane Nelson on the company's move to Burbank.

The aforementioned Mr. McCulloch, along with TCJ-contributors Tucker Stone, Chris Mautner and Matt Seneca perform the latest Comic Books are Burning in Hell podcast.

Here's a nicely psychedelic Steve Ditko strip.

It continues to warm my heart that Arnold Roth has a blog.

The Huffington Post has a slightly wonky Best of 2013 post up.

The time Little Orphan Annie discussed the comics.

And School Spirits author (ahem, a PictureBox book) Anya Davidson interviewed at CBR.

Hello, friends. Today, Chris Mautner is here, catching up with Bone creator Jeff Smith on the occasion of the final, full-color collection of his sci-fi noir followup, RASL. Here's an exchange:

When you started RASL you had a couple different publishing things going. You had the pamphlet, you had the oversized collections and you had the pocket collections. Why so many different versions? What worked, what didn’t work and what did you take away from that experience?

The reason we did more than one version, quite honestly, is that RASL didn’t get a lot of traction after the initial burst of publicity that “The Bone guy is going to do something new!” It was not really taking, I could tell. So we got the first oversized trade out, that was the size I wanted to do it in, but again, I didn’t really feel like it was getting traction. I didn’t hear it being talked about or hardly even being reviewed.

This is one of the advantages of being a self-publisher: You can move fast on your feet. You don’t have to give up. I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to fix it. So we thought maybe that first trade has 115 pages in it but it might not be enough of the story. Maybe we should have waited until we had a little more story. So that’s why we did the pocket book version, which was – it wasn’t the size we were interested in. We wanted to get two of the larger books, so we’d have double the story and see if that would catch people’s attention. And that in fact did work. We started seeing reviews and began to get a bit of traction.

And then, o boy, Dan Nadel himself has decided to open his trap and opine on the first issue of Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III's The Sandman: Overture. Has his old love stayed true? I don't want to spoil things, so I'll just share his review's first observation: "It's an awfully well-constructed comic book." Later, he says this: "This is pedantic and cloying prose."

Elsewhere:

—First, the sad news: Silver Age artist Nick Cardy passed away last night at the age of 93. Mark Evanier has an early memorial. A lot more are sure to follow, including a full obituary from this site.

—Reviews & Criticism. Adam McGovern reviews Frank Santoro's Pompeii for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rob Clough is using the month of November to profile a different CCS-affiliated cartoonist every day. Ng Suat Tong reviews a child's comic available on online auction and compares it to later art comics.

—Interviews. Tom Spurgeon has a long interview with Jeet Heer, regarding his recent monograph on François Mouly, and a recent critical anthology he co-edited. On a comedy podcast that I haven't listened to yet, the always-funny Julia Wertz is a guest.

—News. Anyone aspiring cartoonist who hasn't yet read Megan Rosalarian Gedris's explanation of why she's taking down her popular Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space webcomic really ought to. Via Kevin Melrose comes news that a family in Kitchener, Ontario complained to the press after their 3-year-old daughter received Jack T. Chick comics for Halloween.

Tucker is here to ease you into the month of November.

Elsewhere online:

Julia Wertz is interviewed on a podcast.

Hey, that American Masters Charles Schulz episode is now online.

Various comics reviewed at the AV Club.

Lots of press for the Sandman prequel. Here's an interview with Neil Gaiman and one with artist J.H. Williams.

Paul Levitz does a brief Q &A over here.

Nice local piece on the new digs for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Today on the site, Frank Santoro is pondering the state of comics criticism, and discusses it at length with Sean T. Collins. I think their analysis will provoke some disagreement on a few points, but debate is healthy. Here's a brief exchange:

Frank: It might be hard to phrase this question - but about 2008-09 it seemed like that's when 1000-word reviews were common. And there was a "healthy" comment section in places like Comics Comics, the TCJ board, Study Group, etc. Then I noticed no one commenting anymore. Then I noticed that I wasn't taking the time to read long reviews or blog posts. I'm sure that's partly due to Facebook and Twitter and the conversation getting dispersed around, but it seems to me that there are less "longish" reviews and blog posts about new comics.

Sean: Yeah, I think the rise of social media leveled not just interactions of comparable length in "traditional" outlets like comment threads and message boards, but also larger reviews. It's exceedingly easy to type up your strongest single impression of a new work and post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, and receive feedback almost immediately. And since your strongest single impression could be nothing more complex than "This is SO GOOD, you guys," and the feedback can just be a like or a fav or a reblog or a retweet or a share, it's tough to build up a thoroughgoing interrogation of a comic. The energy is diffused.

Elsewhere:

—Bloomberg BusinessWeek has an article on the myth vs. the reality of selling comic-book collections for big money, featuring our own Frank Santoro.

—Charles McGrath at the New York Times previews the new Jewish Museum Art Spiegelman exhibition at length.

—For Entertainment Weekly, Sergio Aragones draws an illustrated tour of Mad magazine history.

—Toyokazu Matsunaga, the creator of Bakune Young, has reportedly been arrested for allegedly making threats against a local politician.

—Can Allie Brosh's work be considered comics? It's certainly popular. Salon interviews her regarding her first Hyperbole and a Half book.

—Milo George looks at an old Al Wiseman Dennis the Menace story for Halloween.

Here on the site we give you a second day of Joe McCulloch. Here is reviewing Jim Woodring's Fran.

The truth is, all you really need to understand the Frank comics — those wordless exploits of a quintessential Funny Animal Character set loose in a “closed system of moral algebra,” per his creator — is to understand virtually anything of our long, shared cultural history of Silly Symphonies and Looney Tunes. And if Frank is not so cuddly as the rest of the menagerie (though still cuddlier than some), it’s because Woodring is less interested in replicating popular cartoon formulae than in distilling the fraught concept of “antics” itself into a sort of linguistics – observing, again, a reality of intuition.

Lately, Woodring has been concerned with what the book dealers call graphic novels, and it was to my delight that these latter works did not come across simply as longer Frank stories between hard covers, but rather as works of mythopoeic sweep, in ready dialogue with one another. In 2010′s Weathercraft, Woodring revised one of his crueler gag shorts (1996′s “Gentlemanhog”) into a study of cyclical mechanisms, in which a corpulent, ignorant humanoid beast becomes an enlightened and empathetic individual, only to find himself reduced again to a bestial state as the story concludes with everything reset for further exploitation later on. Frank is just a supporting character, “adopting the attitude that will bring him the most fun,” and occupying the book’s final panel by sitting down to peruse a magazine, as if eager to get the next story started.

Elsewhere:

Our own Frank Santoro interviewed by James Romberger about Pompeii over at Publishers Weekly.

And the big publishing news of the day is that DC Comics is going to move its editorial offices, and everything else, to Burbank, California.

Sean Howe features some of Jim Lee's early career rejection letters over on his Tumblr.

Josh Neufeld contributes a comic strip reportage piece on the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy.

It's Tuesday, which means Joe McCulloch is on the scene, with recommendations for the Week in Comics.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. Seth fills out a questionnaire. Al Hirschfeld's last interview was apparently given to a ten-year-old boy. Xavier Guilbert discusses things with Marc Bell. The latest guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is Roger Langridge. Paul Gravett has a short profile of Michael DeForge. Lance Parkin talks a little bit about the behind-the-scenes for his new Alan Moore biography. Keith Knight appeared on Kamau Bell's Totally Biased (via):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZmGQi5AoOA

—Reviews & Commentary. Over at the L.A. Review of Books, David M. Ball writes on Ivan Brunetti's Aesthetics: A Memoir. Ng Suat Tong excavates The Trigan Empire. Rob Clough looks at the evolution of Jeffrey Brown's autobio comics. Tom Holland reminisces about Asterix.

—News. Dylan Horrocks appears in this Auckand newspaper story about the banning of Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls from area libraries. Brigid Alverson caught a New York Post story I missed, about Al Plastino and his surprise upon discovering that original art he thought had been donated to the JFK Memorial Library was up for auction by another seller.

—Money. Two fund-raisers you might be interested in: a revival of Neil the Horse and the fourth-year subscription drive for Mothers News.

—Finally, Lou Reed, R.I.P. There are many strong pieces out about him now, but keeping it at least somewhat comics-related, here's Neil Gaiman's very well done 1992 interview with Reed, plus Robert Guffey's anecdote about meeting Reed in 2005 that also surprisingly involves Gaiman. Gaiman wrote more about Reed for The Guardian yesterday. Sean Howe has proof of Reed's one-time brush with the Marvel universe. And of course there was his collaboration with Mattotti.

Today Bob Levin is back with a conversational essay on Black Eye #2. You'll just have to read it, but here's the beginning:

I met Renee Blitz twenty years ago in the hot tub of our health club, where she discussed Kafka while others planned vacations in Tuscany or weekends at Squaw.  Renee is eighty-two and a grandmother. She grew up in the Bronx, the tomboy daughter of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews. She graduated Hunter College and married a stand-up comedian who, after moving them to Berkeley, the laughs not coming, became an ass-chasing social worker.

Renee passed her time hanging at dives with a jazz pianist who’d 4-F’d the army and on-the-roading with a salesman whose best attribute was how much fun he was to get stoned with.  The surrealist poet Nanos Valoritis recruited her into the graduate writing program at San Francisco State after reading her self-described, stream-of-consciousness “typewriter plays.”  (“Get your ass in here,” he said.)  He declared Renee the only of his students destined for a career in the theater.  She thanked him for the flattery but spent her time raising three daughters.

Elsewhere:

The New York Times on the enduring appeal of EC Comics.

A fun interview with Marc Bell.

Cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider on not working for free in the NY Times.

A brief look at Jack Davis.

Some Superman/JFK art that was supposed to go one place went somewhere else entirely.

The last part of The Beat's Marvelman/Miracleman Alan Moore interview.

Sean Howe shows us some Falcons.

And it's the final week for Jeffrey Brown's show at Scott Eder Gallery.

It's been a good week for alumni of The Panelists; first, we posted Charles Hatfield's very nice review of Battling Boy on Monday, and now Craig Fischer hits it out of the park with a piece you could call twenty-six short essays on Dave Berg. Dave Berg, of course, is the cartoonist behind Mad magazine's time-defying "The Lighter Side of..." feature, and Fischer's article examines him from multiple angles, in fact one angle each for every letter of the alphabet:

Happiness

The characters in a typical “Lighter Side” strip believe themselves to be normal and well-adjusted, with personalities and behaviors that remind me of Eric Wilson’s description of Americans in his book Against Happiness (2008): “They tilt their heads to the side, feign amusement, and nod knowingly. They clinch their eyes in looks of concern. They blink a lot, bewildered. They murmur truisms about overcoming adversity. They say that they love their parents and puppies and all babies. They devour bestsellers about the wisdom of children or coaches. They can be smarmy war-mongering conservatives or passive-aggressive peace-loving liberals. They can be Christians hiding their meanness or New Agers hungry for power. They adore the Lifetime channel. They are happy campers. They want God to bless the world. They want us to ask them about their children. They believe that a hug is an ideal gift; one size fits all. They think that kind words make good echoes. They join Book-of-the-Month clubs and identify with sympathetic characters. They sign their e-mails with chirpy icons. They swear by the power of prayer. They swear by the power of positive thinking. They dream of having Norman Vincent Peale as a dinner guest. They would eat Jell-O and Cool Whip. They would eat turkey too and make an endless Thanksgiving.”

And they are, of course, all hypocrites. “The Lighter Side” was a central reason why teenagers love MAD: teens realize that all adults are two-faced, and saw that fundamental truth in Berg’s cartoons.

Elsewhere:

—Talk. The latest guest on Inkstuds is Jim Woodring. Alex Deuben has an interesting report from a panel featuring Jules Feiffer and Darwyn Cooke at NYCC. Michelle Pauli interviews Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad, the creative team behind the relaunched Asterix series. And talking to the New York Times about books, J.J. Abrams elaborates on his enthusiasm for Chris Ware (and Mo Willems).

—Criticism. Ware gets the academic treatment as Paul Williams at Comics Forum compares his work to literary modernism. Rob Clough briefly reviews three independent adventure comics.

—News. The CBLDF blog reports on a Kickstarter-funded anti-military comic book being refused by multiple UK printers. I missed this Jonathan Guyer piece on "blasphemous" cartoons in Egypt.

—Misc. J.J. Sedelmaier shares a huge gallery of Mad paperback images. Herb Trimpe on 9/11. And finally, I didn't realize this Osamu Tezuka documentary was online. It's well worth watching. (via)

Today we re-present Gary Groth's 1998 interview with Peter Bagge.

GROTH: Well, we don’t know for sure what the demographics of people reading alternative comics are. I mean, we’re guessing between 18 and 25 predominantly, but it’s hard to say with any certainty.

BAGGE: I would say with considerable certainty that our readership drops off fast once you get beyond age 25. But I have some ideas of how we could at least try to reach older readers. One idea is to format it like the [Fantagraphics Books] catalogue, and I wanted to do everything that we can to sell as many via mail order, and really play it up on the Net, which is something that we haven’t really tried yet. I’ve been intending for like a year to get a web site going, that’s where people do a lot of their “shopping and strolling” these days, on the Internet. The Journal and the Fantagraphics web sites haven’t been up that long, but it’s a pretty sizable number of people who have at least checked it out. So as long as it’s on there, there are people who would still be buying our comics, except for the fact that they’ve got families and careers. They can’t be bothered to go all the way down to the “hip” comic shop and pay for parking, or find a parking space, but if they see the stuff on the Net, or get it into their hands somehow, maybe even sending it out mail order. You know, like maybe putting out one, a test one, that is most like a catalogue. Or we could take one issue of the Fantagraphics catalogue and kind of introduce “Let’s Get It On!” within the pages of that, because the problem of why people buy comic books, and why they don’t is logistical. I think it’s a geographic problem, as well as a cultural one.

GROTH: Is it your opinion that people drop off from reading alternative comics at a certain age, that they just move into other things at a certain point of their lives —

BAGGE: Yeah, I think that what’s going on in their lives has a lot to do with it, then it just carries on physically and time-wise. Takes them away where they just can’t afford to invest the time and money —

GROTH: But they don’t stop watching movies, or stop watching TV —

BAGGE: No, that’s right, because you can do that without leaving your home.

And elsewhere, the world spins 'round:

Tom Spurgeon has commentary on the latest Kirby estate legal go around. And more commentary is at The Beat.

Peter Bagge's Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story, excerpted on Flavorwire.

I missed this Brendan McCarthy interview last month. Here it is.

Robert Boyd writes about Zinefest Houston 2013.

Robert Stanley Martin has published the second part of his examination of his Jim Shooter: A Second Opinion.

Matt Madden spends a week in Helsinki.

Yet more of an interview with Alan Moore on Miracleman.

It's an unplanned theme, but today appears to be all about political activism on TCJ.com. First, Ryan Holmberg has an interview with Vishwajyoti Ghosh, the cartoonist behind Delhi Calm, set during India's "Emergency" of 1975 to 1977. Here's an excerpt:

It seems like you have always been interested in political topics.

I just find myself drawn to them. I don’t claim that I have a particular interest in politics, but I find myself very drawn to discussing issues in a visual framework. I have never been a big fan of speculative fiction or science fiction. Most of my comics haven’t moved beyond the twenty meters of my own universe. I find that universe itself quite enough to deal with.

If that’s true, your personal universe includes more political and historical issues than most other cartoonists. One could say that a lot of people who draw graphic novels or manga-style comics are focused on their immediate universe, their everyday life, but devoid of politics and history.

Well, in my case, even when I do something not political it gets perceived as political. The moment I open my mouth, everyone thinks it’s political. But that might not necessarily be the case. I did a comic two years back for Time Out, a special issue on food. I did a piece about an Iraqi restaurant in Delhi, just a nice conversation piece with the Iraqi manager of the restaurant. The way the magazine put it out made it sound like it had less to do with food and more with politics.

Rob Kirby is also on the site today, with a review of John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, & Nate Powell's March.

Presenting the story in the form of a graphic novel makes it that much more accessible and immediate for the targeted YA audience; March is a showcase example of the power of the comics medium as an educational tool. As a teenager himself, Lewis drew great inspiration from a ten-cent comic book called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, published in 1956. He recently told an interviewer that this humble comic was “like a Bible” for him and his fellow activists back then, an indispensable tool for learning how to implement non-violent activism and protest techniques such as passive resistance and sit-ins. Though March deals with important, weighty themes, it never feels didactic, remaining immediate and engrossing throughout. Lewis and his co-writer, congressional staffer Andrew Aydin (who convinced Lewis to present his narrative in the comics format), keep the proceedings simple and linear.

Elsewhere:

—Criticism. Joe McCulloch and Janean Patience finally present the fourth and final part of their long, fascinating dialogue on Mills & O'Neill's neglected Marshal Law. Tom Gill writes about a hard-to-find collection of newly translated Tatsumi stories.

—History & Background. Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean tell The Guardian how they made Sandman. A selection of New Yorker cartoonists reveal the autobiographical basis of some of their cartoons. MLive has a short profile of Randy Scott, the man who oversees the largest library comic-book collection in the world.

It's that time in the week when we break and say hello to Joe McCulloch.

Elsewhere:

Hey, Bob Fingerman is bringing back Minimum Wage through Image. Here's an interview.

Johnny Ryan has Ten Rules for Drawing Comics he'd like to share with you.

Reprints of Miracleman are coming to Marvel, sans Alan Moore's credit (at his request), so here's Moore on his history with the character at The Beat.

And finally, Tom Spurgeon comments on his group-think list of under-appreciated 2013 releases.

Today, Charles Hatfield tells readers about Paul Pope's long-awaited Battling Boy:

I’ve always enjoyed Pope’s cartooning (his series THB was one of my happier comic shop discoveries of the nineties), but haven’t always been on the side of Pope the writer, who has sometimes succumbed to dithering or affectation. Reading Pope has been a matter of seesawing between grateful wonder and head-scratching befuddlement. I confess I’ve often thought that his writing couldn’t keep up with his drawing: his habit of lovely, obsessive, kinetic mark-making, all swoops, flecks and spatters, whirling, febrile, alive. Often I’ve enjoyed the voluptuous style, the grotty worlds and gorgeous characters, without liking the ways the stories turned, or sputtered, or collapsed. I’ve dug his wild flights without thinking he had a solid book-length story in him. Battling Boy promises to prove me wrong.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. Xavier Guilbert at du9 talks to Jaime Hernandez. Michael Cavna talks briefly to Bill Watterson and Richard Thompson about their upcoming show. Steven Heller talks to Seymour Chwast. And Will Self (!) interviews David Shrigley:

At art school, the stuff I was excited about was by Duchamp, Warhol and many others, but it was ideas-based art, and that's where you find my form of ideas-based art. When I left, I didn't have a studio, and it was just a practical thing: I thought: "Maybe I should just focus on these drawings, because I actually like doing these a lot more than trying to make the difficult sculptures and doing the large-format photography that I'd made at college." I felt I could say what I wanted to on a sheet of paper, sitting in my shared flat. And I thought: I'll make a book, so I just made the book on a Xerox machine and gave it out at the pub, and that's how it all started.

—Reviews & Criticism. Rob Clough reviews groups of new minicomics here and here. Qiana Whitted has an interesting post and inspired an good comments discussion on race & cartooning at the Hooded Utilitarian.

—Miscellaneous. As many of you probably know, Marvel has finally decided to start re-releasing the Alan Moore-written Miracleman comics, and are honoring his apparent request to keep his name off the books. But a credit for "The Original Writer" isn't all that's strange about the reprints, and retailer Mike Sterling ponders other aspects here. Luke Pearson shares info & art from his participation in a Hari Kunzru-inspired group show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Yesterday's Papers has a nice selection of Frans Masereel. And finally, I know Dan already linked to this Jeet Heer profile on Friday, but he neglected to mention the writer's wonderful headline calling him "the Derek 'Jeet'er of comics", and I think it is important that we recognize that happened and hold it close to our hearts.

Tucker Stone returns to our little web site today, and not a moment too soon. He's retitled his column. Let it now be known as "The Corrections."

Elsewhere online there's all sorts of stuff percolating:

The big comics story of the day is a new interview with Bill Watterson, previewed over here.

The full programming slate for Comic Arts Brooklyn has been announced, and it's a doozy.

TCJ-contributor Jeet Heer's In Love With Art is profiled.

Chris Randle on Battling Boy.

Peter Bagge gets the local-paper treatment.

Comics Alternative looks at Comics and Narration by  Thierry Groensteen.

I always love a Dan Zettwoch process post.

And in business news, the publisher IDW is expanding into television and movies.

Frank Santoro's on deck today, with another diary from the road of his Pompeii tour. This week, he visits the legendary Fantagraphics office in Seattle, and then heads up to Vancouver. Here's a sample:

Then we drove up I-5, got off at exit 171, made a couple turns...and thar she blows! Ye olde warship known as the Fantagraphics office. There is an "art installation" next door - and I mean that respectfully (seriously). There is this awesome older woman who has decked out her house and yard in a way that makes it a very satisfying "art experience" (below):

And then we have Rob Clough's review of the anthology Black Eye 2:

Black Eye 2 is an almost painfully personal statement by its editor, Ryan Standfest, despite the fact that very few of the pieces present in the book are his. The first volume of this anthology was outstanding in a number of ways, but it also felt flabby and self-indulgent at times. In some ways, that first volume was Standfest's personal manifesto regarding Black Humor and comics in general, and his desire to draw a line between EC horror comics, Black Humor, and today's cartoonists saw him tenuously stretch those connections. The second volume feels tighter and sharper. There's less of an editorial preoccupation on telling the reader what Black Humor is and more of an interest in actually showing them.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. The latest guest on Inkstuds is Paul Pope on the occasion of his new Battling Boy. Bleeding Cool talks to Nobrow co-founder Alex Spiro after they opened up their New York office. Laura Hudson talks to Kate Beaton about her new fat pony project.

—News. PRI reports on Syrian cartoonist Akam Raslan, who was recently reported dead by other outlets. PRI says that his death is currently impossible to verify.

—Reviews & Comment. Probably the must-read for today is Charles Hatfield's very disappointed take on the bad history in PBS's Superheroes documentary. Mike Rhode also writes about the documentary, in three parts. Then, Rob Clough reviews Ulli Lust, Sean T. Collins reviews Cameron Hawkey's Nux Yorica, and Neil Cohn reviews Hannah Miodrag's Comics and Language.

—Finally. A newish site called 10 Rules for Drawing Comics collects cartooning codes from cartoonists like Mike Allred and Lucy Knisley.

Today on the site: Part two of Paul Tumey's epic exploration of the life and work of George Carlson.

George Carlson’s sensibility comes not from comic books, nor from newspaper comics – but instead from a rich mix of early 20th century commercial art, book/magazine illustration, game design, and advertising. Much of Carlson’s work is primarily concerned with appealing to and nurturing the minds of children with an emphasis on stimulating the imagination.

Generally, when we read golden age comic book stories, we have – I think – a predisposition toward a certain context that one could say mainly revolves around the myth of the hero’s journey, issues of morality and justice, and the shadow side of sexuality – a context that is very much alive and well in current American culture.

This 1917 war-time poster by George Carlson shows a mastery of early twentieth century graphic design styles

The “quirky” Carlson’s “genyoowine” sensibility emerges from a completely different context, one that is grounded both in early twentieth century graphic design and in classic children’s literature from Lewis Carroll to Edward Lear to Mark Twain (all of whom Carlson illustrated). What seems quirky in the world of comics is utterly mainstream in the larger world of classic children’s literature. It makes perfect sense, then, that Art Spiegelman said that Carlson’s work was one of the raisons d’etre for the creation of the TOON Treasury, a book that is intended to frame kid’s comics as part of the continuum of “classic” children’s literature.

The only other early comics work I know of that shares Carlson’s grounding in children’s classics is the late 1930’s comics published by David McKay, who published such literary giants as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Beatrix Potter. Founded in 1882, David McKay’s Philadelphia-based publishing house was rooted in a different context than most comic book publishers based in New York.

Elsewhere:

Forbidden Planet reviews Love & Rockets: The Covers.

Gil Roth interviews Peter Bagge. Brian Heater interviews Kim Deitch.

A nice photoset from last weekend's APE.

Two reports on NYCC. One from The Beat and one from Wired. And further reporting on harassment incidents at NYCC from The Beat and commentary from Tom Spurgeon.

Chris Mautner reviews three recent books.

And here's a video of the Jeff Smith Q&A from this year's SPX.