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Joe McCulloch is back with the Week in Comics column, in which he highlights the week's most interesting-sounding new releases, and this time, he warms up by putting on his movie-reviewer hat (and shoes and cape):

Contrary to popular belief, I don't just sit around watching cartoons all day; sometimes, I watch live-action films that are sort of about cartoons. You may have heard of writer/director Randy Moore's Escape from Tomorrow - it was a *huge* thing in movie critic circles at the Sundance Film Festival, insofar as much of the film was shot in secret at Walt Disney World in Orlando and Disneyland Park in Anaheim via actors performing their scenes in the midst of actual crowds, filmed with concealed cameras at certain preplanned times of the day to ensure adequate lighting. Nothing quite aggravates the hothouse scene of a film fest like a movie that looks like it might find itself suppressed outside of Park City, and hype built accordingly. However, Disney has not made any legal challenge to the film, which seems to have performed rather poorly on its formal release this past weekend, grossing less than 1/10th of its $650,000 production budget.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. Chris Ware talks to The Guardian, and Maria Scrivan talks to Mike Lynch.

—Reviews. Abhay Khosla doesn't like Greg Rucka and Michael Lark's Lazarus. Rachel Cooke loves Isabel Greenberg's Encyclopedia of Early Earth. Amelia Moulis reviews Rutu Modan's The Property. Chris Mautner mini-reviews Ed Piskor, A Treasury of Mini-Comics, and Bill Everett. Rob Clough reviews so many comics. Cefn Ridout reviews Ben Katchor and Gilbert Hernandez.

—Misc. Jason T. Miles shares many things.

And finally, Dash Shaw:

Today on the site it's R.C. Harvey profiling the great Sergio Aragones.

Astonishingly, he draws directly on the paper with a pen, relying upon barely penciled roughs for only the vaguest guidance. And he seldom re-draws anything: “I see the gag in my head and it goes directly to the finished drawing stage.”

Again and again he successfully pulls the same stunt: he presents a puzzle, often building it in a succession of pictures in strip form, and then, in the last picture, he “explains” the puzzle. And we laugh at the ingenuity of the contrivance.

Sometimes though, he draws a picture that is, simply, in-and-of-itself, funny. The people in the picture look funny: Sergio’s typical humanoid begins with a big-nose visage and doodles down through a squat body to the stilt-like legs that seem grafted on at the bottom of the body, all balanced on flat not necessarily large feet. His anatomy is cartoon anatomy, but his cartoony people are doing ordinary human things, and they are being forever fooled and flummoxed by their fellow creatures or by circumstances over which they have absolutely no control. And we laugh at their endless frustrations. And then, a second or so later, we realize that we’re laughing at ourselves.

Syrian cartoonist Akram Raslan has been reported killed.

Anya Davidson interviewed at Bad at Sports.

Tom Spurgeon interviews Ben Catmull.

Paul Gravett interviews Enki Bilal.

A Joe Sacco primer.

And a fascinating glimpse at the problems entailed in writing about Shel Silverstein for an academic press.

Today, for any of you tired of the Lee/Kirby debate that continues to rage, Rob Kirby (no relation, I assume) tells us all about the Latvian comics anthology, š! #14. Here's a sample of his presentation:

The theme for this latest issue is sports, which at first seems surprisingly conventional, coming from an anthology with past themes such as “Female Secrets” and “Midnight Sun.” Happily, the comics inside are anything but ordinary. Many of the š! creators seem to delight in presenting warped or heightened realities that veer from lighthearted whimsy to dark and downbeat.

I’ve slowly become familiar with the work of many of the contributing artists, some of whom have become favorites. It’s a treat to see König Lü. Q. and Lai Tat Tat Wing included here (I believe the former is in every edition), two artists who couldn’t be more dissimilar in style and content. Lü. Q. traffics in silly or non sequitur one-page strips with simple, childlike drawings, a type of comics I’ve always found irresistible. His “Real Quidditch” strip is a deadpan take on the Harry Potter series sans the “magic.” Meanwhile, “Taken” by Lai Tat Tat Wing, features another of the artist’s delightfully trippy identity-swapping, reality-changing narratives, drawn with a playful rather than stuffy formalism. His work would have fit neatly in RAW back in the day, no problem.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. Jeet Heer appears on Inkstuds to discuss his monograph on Françoise Mouly. The Guardian interviews Joe Sacco about his new WWI book, The Great War. (They have a preview of the book, too.) And Michael Cavna at the Washington Post asks Jeff Smith about his new place on the CBLDF board.

—History & Profiles. BK Munn writes an obituary for the Canadian editorial cartoonist Roy Peterson. Mike Lynch has a few links regarding a new book on Archie cartoonist Bob Montana. Daily Ink has a short post on Mandrake artist Phil Davis. And I don't know why, but I'm getting major deja vu vibes off this Slate article on the history of swearing in comic strips.

—Other Stuff. Tom Spurgeon reviews the new Bill Everett collection. It is fun to read an article in mainstream media going on and on about how well comic books handle ethnic and sexual diversity compared to movies. If true, this is kinda hilarious, too, though in a different way. Finally, Rob Kirby, today's reviewer, is trying to fund a new LGBT-themed anthology via Kickstarter.

Frank Santoro files his column from the road.

And James Romberger reviews In the Days of the Mob.

Elsewhere:

A new book on Bob Montana outside of Archie. Mike Lynch's announcement of the book includes this quote, which is the best I've read about comics in a long while:

"Bob didn't want his friends to think he was all about the comic strip," said Anderson. "One of his friends told me that he used to say, 'What kind of person would you think I was if my ego and self worth were wrapped up in a comic strip?'"

What kind of person indeed?

Comics repression in Egypt.

Writer-about-comics Gene Kannenberg, Jr. podcasts.

A preview of Brandon Graham's new Multiple Warheads rarities collection.

Darryl Ayo Brathwaite on cartoonists as human beings.

Rob Liefeld on the halcyon days of the X-Men.

More love for Ed Piskor from his hometown paper.

Not comics: The great film critic Stanley Kauffmann passed away and James Wolcott and David Denby pay tribute to him.

Paul Tumey is back today with a new column trying to make sense of the long and varied career of George Carlson. Here's a snippet:

In the year 8113 A.D., the most remembered cartoonist of our time may not be any of our currently revered comics creators. Not Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, or Chris Ware. As incredible as it may seem, long after the last comic books of our time have crumpled into dust, the cartoonist of our era that People of The Future will dig (perhaps literally) could be a guy named George Carlson -- an under-appreciated, largely overlooked cartoonist, illustrator, game designer, and graphic artist extraordinaire who will finally get his due with the forthcoming release of Perfect Nonsense: The Chaotic Comics and Goofy Games of George Carlson by Daniel Yezbick. The spirit of George Carlson's playful, surreal world can be seen in everything from Pee-wee's Playhouse to 24-hour comics.

People of the distant future may know about Carlson not because of Yezbick’s book (although it’d be nice to think so), but more likely because of the Crypt of Civilization, a room-sized time capsule that lies underneath what is currently known as Oglethorpe University, in Atlanta, Georgia.

When future human beings pry open the rusty door of the Crypt, they will see plaques on the walls created by George Carlson. The bold, Art Deco graphics on the plaques, barely visible in the photograph of the Crypt’s interior, are presented in a manner that looks back in time to the hieroglyphs seen on the walls of ancient Egyptian burial chambers. In 1940, the Crypt’s creator, Oglethorpe University president Dr. Thornwell Jacobs set the year for the time capsule’s opening at 8113 A.D. - exactly the same amount of years into the future as the number of years spanning backwards in time from 1940 to the oldest known Egyptian tomb.

Elsewhere:

—Profiles & Interviews. Steven Heller profiles Sunday Press publisher Peter Maresca. Rebecca Meiser at Cleveland magazine profiles Joyce Brabner about her handling of Harvey Pekar's legacy, her sometimes prickly relationships with collaborators, and her own upcoming work. I can't wait to listen to Gil Roth's interview with Drew Friedman. Missed this earlier, but Last Gasp has begun a series of Weirdo: Where Are They Now? mini-profiles of Weirdo contributors.

—Fangoria's Philip Nutman, who also worked as a comics writer and editor, has passed away.

—JC Menu has sent in his tribute to Kim Thompson. We've added it to the Thompson tributes page here on the site.

—Anime News Network reports on the cancellation of Barefoot Gen translator Alan Gleason's appearance at a Japanese school, apparently partially due to ongoing political controversy over Keiji Nakazawa's work.

—Jessica Abel & Matt Madden have released the longlist of Notable Comics for Houghton Mifflin's Best American Comics of 2013.

—The Columbus Dispatch reports on the expansion of the Billy Ireland museum.

—Tom Spurgeon has posted an early review of Joe Sacco's The Great War.

—And finally, Peggy Burns and the D&Q store appear briefly in this video:

It's Tuesday, so Joe McCulloch is here to give you the goods on the week's more interesting releases.

Guess who has a Tumblr? The aforementioned Mr. McCulloch, that's who.

I didn't know about the YouTube channel for the forthcoming book The Secret History of Marvel Comics.

The great Al Jaffee's archives are going to Columbia University.

Tom Spurgeon reviews The Best of EC volume 1, Artist's Edition. And Treasury of Mini-Comics, reviewed.

Finally, we've all felt this way.

Today our webcomics columnist Shaenon Garrity writes about a new favorite of hers, Dana Simpson's Heavenly Nostrils.

Elsewhere, the comics internet is filled almost entirely with interviews.

Prairie Dog talks to Jeet Heer about his new book on Françoise Mouly:

I wrote an article for the National Post about 10 years ago where I was trying to describe Art Spiegelman’s career as an editor. I had written: ‘Leaving Françoise Mouly aside for a moment, Art Spiegelman’s achievements are blah, blah blah’. My partner, quite rightly, called me on that, and asked ‘Why are you leaving Françoise Mouly aside? She was as important at RAW magazine as Art Spiegelman.’ And that really got me thinking because I had been aware of Françoise my whole life, and respected her and the magazine that she did, but I’d never written about her. For every one article that anyone has ever written about Francoise, there are at least 500 to 1,000 articles written about her husband.

Alex Deuben at CBR talks to Rutu Modan and Ramona Fradon.

Here's Fradon:

I believe that Marie Severin and I were the only women drawing superheroes at the time. It's funny that she was drawing Sub-Mariner while I was drawing Aquaman. People always used to ask me if I knew her, but I didn't meet her until years later, at a convention. I didn't work in a bullpen like Marie did so, aside from being uncomfortable with male fantasies and the violent subject matter. I never really experienced what it was like being the only woman working in a man's world.

The School Library Journal talks to Hope Larson. And CBC talks to Miriam Katin.

And Michael May at Robot 6 had the bright idea of talking to retailer Mike Sterling in the aftermath to DC's Villains Month:

I was generally okay with it, with my reaction split between the comic fan in me (“Oh, those sound like fun!”) and the retailer in me (“Gee, great, can’t wait to figure out my order numbers on these”). That latter reaction sounds more serious than I actually felt. It’s more like, well, there go the publishers, making my life more difficult again! Whaddaya gonna do?

Dan is out of town, so I'm filling in today. Rob Kirby is here with a review of Brendan Leach's Iron Bound:

On a rainy night, two young gang members in black leather jackets, Eddie and Bento (aka Benny), are arguing on a bus traveling from Asbury Park to their hometown of Newark, New Jersey. Another young man seated in front of them unwisely asks them to "speak more softly." This prompts a vicious attack from the hair-trigger-tempered Benny, despite Eddie's attempts to rein him in. Blood is shed; Eddie and Benny are thrown off the bus and beat a hasty retreat. With this prologue, Brendan Leach ushers us back to 1961 and the criminal underworld of Newark's Iron Bound section. In this pitiless arena, any attempt to get ahead faces obstacle after obstacle, trust comes at a premium, and good intentions are likely not good enough. Iron Bound reads like a delicious amalgam of a vintage Jim Thompson crime noir novel with illustrations reminiscent of (mutant) Ben Katchor fused with a hint of Lynda Barry’s early punky-scrawly-scratchy style.

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. Whenever you start to think that mainstream media coverage of comics has greatly improved, you come across something like Metro's interview with Isabel Greenberg. Veteran newspaperman Chris Mautner shows how it's done talking to Brian Ralph. And Inkstuds plays host to Jess Johnson.

—Reviews & Commentary. Sean T. Collins writes about Sophie Franz's "Andy". Sean Kleefeld speculates on the first black comic-book hero.

—"News." Ulli Lust has a huge photo-blog post of her recent trip to the United States, in which many other cartoonists are featured. Rob Clough writes about the new comics show in Durham he's helping to set up. The Archie Comics/Nancy Silberkleit legal drama continues to provide copy for the New York tabloids. Jason T. Miles has revamped his Profanity Hill online store. MoCCA has announced their 2014 special guests, including Howard Cruse, Alison Bechdel, Fiona Staples, and Robert Williams.

—Misc. I love that Sean Howe's Marvel Comics Tumblr is still churning out great curiosities like this. Mike Lynch writes about the big comics movie of 1948.

Today Frank Santoro takes a look at comics press history by way of three magazines from the mid-1990s: Indy, Feature, and Destroy All Comics.

Elsewhere:

—News. Pioneering comics scholar Sol Davidson has passed away. Jeff Smith has joined the CBLDF's Board of Directors. In a move that tempts bloggers to make statements on what it means for the direct market's future, Dark Horse has dropped its distributor Diamond for Random House. In a move that tempts bloggers to resurrect old posts, after 63 years, the military newspaper Stars & Stripes has dropped Beetle Bailey, apparently for budgetary reasons.

—Reviews & Commentary. James Romberger reviews Dash Shaw's New School. Derek Royal and Tof Eklund discuss Dash Shaw's comics career to date. Kevin Huizenga reviews Seth's new Palookaville. Sarah Horrocks discusses the coloring of Brendan McCarthy. Rob Clough reviews the Chris Duffy-edited Fairy Tale Comics. And in The Caravan, Rakesh Khanna discusses Vishwajyoti Ghosh's This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, as well as graphic novels in India more generally.

—Misc. Mark Waid gives advice to comic-book freelancers. Jim Rugg remixes Dan Clowes. And Time talks to Ed Piskor:

Dominic Umile reviews Ramsey Beyer's Little Fish.

Ramsey Beyer's spirited, often warm chronicling of her real-life journey through her freshman year at college is as much driven by the familiar trappings of teenagedom as it is punk rock, against-the-grain sensibility. Little Fish: A Memoir From a Different Kind of Year is a mixed media affair, with Beyer employing an intimate DIY approach honed in her adolescent zine-making days as often as she does black and white comics art, melding list- and poetry-driven prose with personal comics. Humble as it may seem, Beyer's blend of rough, zine patchwork-styled pages and graphic memoir is marked by a bold perspective on diary comics and the graphic storytelling medium.

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon briefly on health insurance.

Lovely sequence by Leslie Stein.

Tom Scioli talks to Ed Piskor.

CNN on Archie.

Craig Thompson on his contribution to Fairy Tale Comics. 

And Gary Panter at CCAD

Joe McCulloch is here on This Week in Comics!

Elsewhere:

—Interviews. The London Telegraph talks to Joe Sacco. USA Today talks to Ed Brubaker. Agenda talks to the KutiKuti collective. Bleeding Cool translates a Brazilian interview with Chris Ware.

—Reviews & Criticism. Paul Gravett writes about Marc-Antoine Mathieu. Brian Cremins writes about Bill Mauldin's Back Home. Rob Clough recounts Karl Stevens's Failure. Sarah Horrocks looks at Kyoko Okazaki's Helter Skelter.

—News. Stephen Bissette explains on Facebook about compensation (or the lack thereof) going to the creators of John Constantine from the new television series. An exchange between Darryl Ayo and Ormes Society founder Cheryl Lynn on the small number of black female cartoonists.

—Misc. Forbidden Planet has a gallery of new BCA Hall of Famer Leo Baxendale. Bully has begun a month-long celebration of Dell/Gold Key horror comics.

Robert Steibel is back with another installment of his column about Jack Kirby: Behind the Lines. Here he looks at pencils from Fantastic Four # 61.

I’d like to do a little group participation experiment with you first. Let’s go ahead and look at an enlarged scan of each Kirby penciled panel one-by-one in sequence (I broke one horizontal panel in half so each image has the same size). When Stan Lee received this entire 20-page story (plus the cover) this is how the art would have looked to him before he added text to Jack’s story – first Stan would read Jack’s entire book (looking at Jack’s art and referring to Jack’s directions in the margins to get the gist of the entire book) then in the next phase Lee would go back and add his own text to Kirby’s story. You can see when these photostats were made Lee had already completed that phase of the process – notice where Lee added empty word balloons. The letterer would have worked off a Lee type-written script and filled in those spots.

I encourage you to look at Jack’s artwork and read Jack’s notes for yourself; think about how you would add text to this imagery if you were the “Guest Editor of the Week” when this book was published in 1967. Or better yet, imagine Marvel is reprinting this material in 2014 and you won a contest and have been selected to add the captions to the story for a nice pile of money. Reflect on how long it takes you to come up with the captions for each panel, and you can compare your own ideas to Lee’s text later.

Elsewhere:

Tom Spurgeon on MIX 2013.

A good "where are they now" blog on the great Weirdo magazine.

Two from Chris Randle. First on Co-Mix by Art Spiegelman and then on the anniversary of Comic Book Confidential.

Denis Kitchen on Gweek.

Nobrow is opening a US office and has a mission statement.

And MTV Geek, which covered a good amount of comics, has closed its doors.

Ryan Holmberg attempts to uncover the roots of the word "Garo", the title of perhaps the most important underground manga anthology:

Not ten years ago, manga and film scholar Yomota Inuhiko noted that it was regional dialect for kappa, a water imp who abducts children and horses and drowns them in the river.

Speaking with Japanese fans and scholars, it seems that many accept Yomota’s theory. I’m not sure why. While indeed “garo” can be found in books dealing with the kappa – it is derived from “kawa tarō,” River Tarō, the latter half a generic boy’s name – none such that I have seen were published prior to the naming of Garo in 1964. Of the major sources on the Japanese supernatural that would have been available to Shirato at the time – the writings of Inoue Enryō, Yanagita Kunio, Ishida Ei’ichirō – in none of them is that specific pronunciation for kappa to be found. Of course, it is always possible that Shirato heard it directly from someone from the countryside. Or perhaps from a colleague more versed in Japanese folklore, like Mizuki Shigeru. After all, Mizuki did publish an eight-volume rental kashihon series between 1961 and 1962 titled Sanpei the Kappa (Kappa no sanpei), about a human boy that looks like a kappa and as a result has serial run-ins with yōkai. Towards the end, his kappa stand-in is named “Kawa Tarō,” but no “garo.” The title of the manga might seem suggestive, but Sanpei is a common enough name for it to have nothing to do here with Shirato. And since Garo was Shirato’s magazine, not Mizuki’s, it seems to me highly unlikely that the former would title his greatest publishing venture after a creature that has (as far as I can recall) never made an appearance in his work. Shirato was greatly indebted to Japanese myth and folklore. But the cosmologies of ghosts and monsters are at best minor ones in his pantheon.

Elsewhere:

—As you're probably noticed from links on this blog and elsewhere, this week is "Banned Books Week". The CBLDF's Charles Brownstein talked about it with a radio show called Project Censored. And here is a map of post-war comic-book burnings in the United States.

—Reviews & Criticism. Comics of the Weak may be on a short hiatus, but Abhay Khosla's still thinking comics, and reviews a slew of them over at Savage Critics. Dave Coates has a profusely illustrated post on Pat Oliphant. Rob Clough takes on Jim Rugg and Supermag. Tom Spurgeon reviews Sam Gaskin's Goblins. This guy loves the Fantastic Four.

—Interviews. Dan Wagstaff talks to Luke Pearson. J. Caleb Mozzocco talks to Chris Duffy about his new fairy-tales anthology.

—Fantagraphics unearths an unmissable note from Kim Thompson to a printer.

—Sean Howe puts some recent Rob Liefeld tweets about Marvel in context.

—It's the last day of the Top Shelf $3 sale.

Frank Santoro returns this week with a tour diary packed with adventures.

Elsewhere:

As usual, D&Q does travel reports in the very best way.

A new David Mazzucchelli short comic previewed over here.

TCJ-contributor Ken Parille's The Daniel Clowes Reader, reviewed.

More on Frederic Wertham from Michael Dooley at Print.

Apparently yesterday was National Comics Book Day.

Today, we bring you Gary Groth's 1991 interview with with one of the truly great raconteur cartoonists, Arnold Roth. Here's one of many excellent exchanges:

ROTH: I wanted to do humor. I was frothing at the mouth to get in The New Yorker and they were very interested in what I had. An editor there went through my stuff, sort of giving me a critique. Finally, he said, “You know you keep making wise cracks. Are you sure you understand what I’m telling you?” I said, “Well, I think you’re telling me I should draw more like Cobean.” Sam Cobean was a terrific New Yorker cartoonist who had recently died in a car crash. He said, “You have to make up your mind if you want more than anything in the world to be a New Yorker cartoonist.” I said, “No, I want to screw and drink and smoke and cock around.” He looked at me and he was really serious. He repeated the question. I told him no and I never went back. That was the end of me, there.

GROTH: Why did you do that instead of giving him the “right” answer which would have been, “Yes, sir.”?

ROTH: I knew what their system was and I knew it was a system I didn’t like. I don’t like to do sketches. I don’t like to do things over and over. I don’t like it when they say things like, “If this guy’s finger was a little blunter, or this eye was straight …” I don’t work well under those circumstances. That doesn’t mean that I’m always right and they’re always wrong — but it’s my work. I have to make my mistakes my way, and when I make it good, make it good my way. Other people can work that system and they do terrific work. I would be miserable. I’d rather work in a grocery store — but I’d like to say where the cans go. [Laughter.]

Elsewhere:

—Lots of great-talker cartoonist interviews out right now, actually. Los Bros Hernandez talked to Bleeding Cool. Evan Dorkin & Peter Bagge talk to TMSIDK. I haven't read it yet, but Colleen Coover talked to Toucan.

—A truly enthusiastic Charles Hatfield is something to see. Here he enthuses about the upcoming anthology Cartozia Tales.

—Bart Croonenborghs compares Judge Dredd to Lt. Blueberry. Tom Spurgeon reviews Monster 2013 and Ullman & Brown's Old-Timey Hockey Tales.

—Only Tangentially Comics. The idea of "geek" or "nerd culture" may be the most purely corrosive force posed against us in the battle for truly relevant comics. Though their argument doesn't approach the idea from that angle, on the leftist journal Jacobin two writers are having a debate on the larger politics of geek culture.

—Not Comics. I missed this, but Lynda Barry reviewed Kathryn Davis's Duplex for The New York Times Book Review. She is as individual a critic as she is a cartoonist.

Today on the site Joe McCulloch will lead the way with a discussion of this week's funny book delights.

Elsewhere:

Plug alert: Tonight I'm interview Art Spiegelman live on stage at Housing Works in downtown NYC. It kicks off at 7 pm and Art will be signing books afterwards.

A report from the Jeff Smith/Paul Pope/Faith Erin Hicks panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Michael Dooley on Frederic Wertham's source material.

Heidi MacDonald and Calvin Reid's latest More To Come podcast is up, this time from SPX.

Today we bring you Rob Clough's review of Leslie Stein's second volume of Eye of the Majestic Creature:

Leslie Stein's fastidious, beautiful line continues to be put to good use in the second volume of her loosely connected semi-autobiographical stories, Eye Of The Majestic Creature. Indeed, this book is simply a collection of individual issues, though many of them were never actually published prior to this book. Stein works best in a short-story rhythm, and the covers and other artwork for individual issues work nicely as natural stopping points. For a work of magical realist autobiographical comics, having that kind of break makes sense for the reader. However, there are themes and through-lines in the book that make this collection a surprisingly coherent single package, documenting Stein's restlessness and search for identity.

Elsewhere:

—Reviews & Criticism. Chris Randle reviews the recently reissued keystone text Martin Vaughn-James's The Cage. Rob Clough looks at minicomics from Cara Bean. Brian Berger takes a short, sharp look at Drew Friedman.

—Interviews. Kim Deitch speaks. Alex Dueben talks to recent Ignatz winner and Oily Comics founder Charles Forsman.

—Festivals. Tom Spurgeon has turned in his usual report from SPX in twenty-six volumes. Bully the Stuffed Bull restrains his report to a few paragraphs. MIX is coming up this weekend, and video from some of last year's panels just went online. Here's Charles Hatfield talking Jack Kirby:

—Robert Boyd wonders why there isn't a comics department at MoMA.

—John Porcellino found some stuff in a box.

—Tom Devlin on Peter Bagge: now that's how you promote a comic on a promotional blog! Frank M. Young is no slouch on John Stanley, either.

Walter Biggins reviews two recent Rocketeer books and how looks at how they expand on the original.

For all of The Rocketeer’s failures as a comic, it’s perhaps the most successful icon of the 1980s creator-owned boom. There’s so much promise and pizzazz in that chrome mask and jaunty pose that cartoonists return to Steven time and time again. Stevens built his comic on a flair for nostalgia—for a past that never was—which is a heartache that artists and readers have and long to feed. The nostalgia, I think, helps us glide over the comic’s narrative gaps and characterization issues. Those caesuras allow room for others to fill in the iconography with their own visions. The Rocketeer’s incompleteness and flaws become, then, a boon to a talented writer/artist team.

That leads us, finally, to the newbies: Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom and Roger Langridge and J. Bone’s The Rocketeer: Hollywood Horror. These Rocketeer graphic novels extend the brand—and what is an icon but a really successful brand, after all?—by improving on the source. These teams have fashioned two remarkably rewarding adventure comics, and honor Stevens’s creation by bettering it.

Elsewhere:

The Beat has a report on the SPX "Influence" panel.

Alan Moore on the BBC.

And Iron Bound reviewed at Paste.

Frank Santoro is all about SPX this week:

I've read a bunch of reports that point out how there are smaller scenes within scenes. A show for every taste. I think this feels new. Or newer. As someone who has done the show every year since 2005 that part is different. It was usually the usual suspects with some slow growth. For the last two or three years though we've seen things spread out and multiply. Exponentially. Not just more people but more representation from different genres of comics. League expansion. Like I said, a ton of new faces.

And all that is good. Great. However, I did have some conversations with smaller publishers and retailers about whether there may be a glass ceiling of sorts. Meaning there are more people vying for eyes and dollars from the same relatively small readership. Let's remember the number one buyers of small press comics are small press makers. Those new faces may be making but they all might not be buying, know what I mean?

We also have the latest High-Low column from Rob Clough, who's devoted his space this month to the work of students during the first year of the Sequential Artists Workshop:

The Sequential Artists Workshop, or SAW, was founded just over a year ago by Tom Hart. After a long stint at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he struck out on his own to Gainesville in order to start teaching workshops as well as a year-round curriculum. In a small, intimate setting with a teacher as passionate about the art as Hart, his first class of students became akin to a comics tribe. Indeed, many of the artists went out with Hart to get SAW tattoos! As at the Center for Cartoon Studies and many other comics schools that don't focus on mainstream comics, there's an emphasis on self-publishing. Hart sent me a variety of minicomics from four of his students.

Elsewhere:

—Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat talks to REORIENT. Paul Gravett talks to relatively new British cartoonist Isabel Greenberg.

—I'm not completely sure why this open letter to DC from an unhappy fan is resonating so strongly on the internet, as little of it is really new, but for whatever reason, whether good timing or good writing, it's struck a real nerve, and might strike yours too, if you haven't been paying attention already.

—Gilbert Hernandez has won an award for Outstanding Body of Work from PEN Center USA.

—Something that happened at SPX: Kate Beaton and Jeff Smith discovered they may be related. Also, Smith talked to Galleycat about self-publishing comics.

—For Hazlitt, Jeet Heer looks back fondly at Ron Mann's documentary Comic Book Confidential.

—Ben Towle reviews three semi-recent comics biographies. I can't believe I still haven't gotten to that Capp bio.

—Brad Mackay and Seth discover what may or may not be Jack T. Chick's first published cartoon.

—The Hooded Utilitarian is having a good week, with a nice recap of SPX and an interesting contra-Morrison reading of The Killing Joke.

—Finally, Samuel R. Delany and Mia Wolff at the Strand, talking about their collaboration on the recently re-released Bread and Wine:

Ken Parille has a new column focusing on mini-reviews of twelve comics:

The internet tells us that comics criticism and reviews typically ignore a comic’s art, focusing only on the story. Even if this is true (and I’m not sure it is), I see even less talk about words. This neglect should surprise us given that definitions of ‘comics’ almost universally grant text and image equal billing: e.g., ‘comics is a medium of words and pictures.’ The great cartoonists — George Herriman, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and many others — have been masters of language. So why give words short shrift? Are plot and pictures truly King?

In Part I of this review survey, I look at twelve comics, most of which were published in 2013. Many are great, a few are not, and several are included because they use words in interesting, if not always successful ways. Though I often discuss the comic’s text (i.e. narration and dialogue), I also consider drawings, plots, characters, color, productions methods, text/image interaction, and anything else that seems worthwhile.

Elsewhere:

It's still SPX-fever out there. Secret Acres has a report and so does Mike Dawson. The Beat has a round-up.

And Sean Howe points out a rare Vaughn Bode / Marvel connection.

It was SPX last weekend, and our own Joe McCulloch was there, on assignment from the Library of Congress. He's got a report on his progress for you, plus notes on the week's most interesting-sounding new releases.

The suggestion had been made some time prior to SPX that I would succeed Rob Clough as guest curator for the Library of Congress, in accordance with a partnership facilitated between the entities in 2011, "where representatives from that institution would comb the floor and select[] minicomics, self-published comics, original art, flyers, Ignatz Award nominees and other publications that otherwise would skip the LOC and be lost forever after their initial print run." I greatly admired this impulse, the idea of preservation - for a long time, that was a stated goal of scanlators, of pirates, of varied unscrupulous types on the internet who'd 'curate' selections of lost, gone comics, without permission, for the edification of all. Now, of course, everyone excerpts images on Tumblr and reblogs them all over, the process having gained legitimacy by honing itself down to details tiny enough to curl within some community understanding of fair use.

In contrast, I can scarcely imagine anything more legitimate than the Library of Congress. So legitimate, in fact, that the first time I entered the LoC's hotel suite, I (not literally) (mercifully) ran into an interview in progress with Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). Congress itself was right there!

We also have a review from Joe's predecessor, Rob Clough, of Anna Bongiovanni's Out of Hollow Water.

Her work is an exemplar of a style of cartooning that's dense, dark, scratchy, and unflinching in its willingness to confront pain, trauma and horror. The obvious comparison for Bongiovanni is Julia Gfrorer, who in fact blurbed this book. They tap into different emotional and psychological veins in their work, even if their styles and rawness are similar. Both frequently make comics set in a timeless, nameless forest environment where darkness and the supernatural are real, lurking concerns; it's just that the two set their comics in different parts of that same, primal forest.

Out of Hollow Water explicitly deals with the trauma of violation, as well as the reality of surviving that trauma, in each of its three stories. While Bongiovanni has noted that these comics are personal and a way of working through her own issues, she's also careful to make the stories vague enough that one can fill in any number of blanks as to both precisely what happened and what each person is doing as a result. That's why using a fantasy/mythological setting makes so much sense, because it provides a buffer between real life while simultaneously creating a larger-than-life sense of dread and even suffocation on the page.

—Speaking of SPX, the links related to it are flying thick and fast and will probably continue to proliferate over the coming days. I'll spare you most of the con reports and direct you to Tom Spurgeon's usual Collective Memory post gathering them. Bleeding Cool of all places has the best panel coverage, with reports from the panels for Jeff Smith, Gary Panter, Frank Santoro/Dash Shaw, and Michael Kupperman/Sam Henderson, among others. Michael Cavna at the Washington Post wrote a brief write-up about the Ignatz Awards, which were hosted by Liza Donnelly (and in which Michael DeForge dominated, pulling off three separate wins).

—Interviews. Just before SPX, Mike Rhode interviewed local cartoonist Michael Wenthe. Tom Spurgeon talked to show attendee Warren Craghead. The National Post talked to our own Jeet Heer about his new book on Françoise Mouly. NPR talked to Art Spiegelman about his new book. Steven Heller talks to Randall Enos. And James Sturm did one of his CCS "exit interviews" with outgoing Fellow Connor Willumsen.

—And the Rest. Lynda Barry did a comic on reading for the Washington Post. (Warning: An annoying commercial may automatically start playing when you hit that link.) The New York Times did a lengthy profile of the popular children's book artist Sandra Boynton. HiLobrow did an extremely short profile of Seth. And Dave Sim once wrote in to The New Yorker to take issue with an Art Spiegelman piece pitting Bernie Krigstein against Will Eisner. (FYI, as many Cerebus fans maybe already know, Sim's co-artist Gerhard is currently selling prints.)

Today, Brandon Soderberg interviews Raw Power creator Josh Bayer about covering ROM Spaceknight, this spring's Tumblr controversy, Retrofit, working with his music-video director brother, and the overrated nature of originality. Here's a sample:

SODERBERG: Basically, covering Rom allows you to do autobiographical comics that don't suck? Issue one has a frame of Seth reading Rom, and issue two has a back-up story that focuses on Seth at school.

BAYER: Yeah, doing the Rom cover comics is just some weird device that measures how uncomfortable I am with telling a real autobiographical story. Each time I do a Rom story, I let whatever fragments I remember from around that time enter the story. But not like an episode of Seinfeld where everything ties together. More like an Italian neorealist movie, where it’s just two pieces standing side by side – the comic and life during that time periods – and readers can make the connections. So, if I did an issue from 1985, I'd probably write about something that happened when I was 15 years old. Originally, when I was working on this issue of Rom, I wanted to write about December 1980 when John Lennon was killed, because that was a really weird period of my childhood. But the longer I worked on issues #31 and #32, the more I felt like I needed the whole thing to come together on every level. Even that conceptual level of having the fact and fiction match up chronologically. And the issues I was covering came out in 1983. I couldn't have "Seth" reading that issue in 1980. Even though most people wouldn't know or care, it would bother me.

We also have Robert Kirby's review of the crowd-funded anthology The Big Feminist BUT!, which features Gabrielle Bell, Vanessa Davis, Barry Deutsch, Justin Hall, Angie Wang, and Lauren Weinstein. Here's a bit of that:

The Big Feminist BUT: Comics About Women, Men, and the Ifs, Ands and Buts of Feminism features comics touching on a wide spectrum of contemporary feminist issues. The title is a clever play on two familiar caveats: “I’m not a feminist, BUT…” and “I’m a feminist, BUT…” Editors Shannon O'Leary and Joan Reilly make it clear that feminism isn't solely concerned with women’s issues, but rather promoting and embracing gender equality for all. The comics here take on gender roles, sexual identities, body image, marriage vs. singlehood, polyamory, motherhood and parenting, domestic responsibilities, and self-defense and safety, among other subjects. Some creators take a subtle, naturalistic approach (Barry Deutch, Vanessa Davis with Trevor Alixopulos, Joan Reilly w/ Suzanne Kleid), while others are direct, even polemical, addressing feminism head on with all its gender and identity complexities (MariNaomi, Angie Wang, and Andrice Arp with Jesse Reklaw).

Elsewhere:

—Festivals. While I was away, I missed Rob Clough's report from the first Autoptic festival. Lilli Carré writes about her experiences at the Helsinki Comics Festival. Chris Butcher has a lengthy wrap-up of TCAF 2013 and announcements for next year's festival.

—Those of you who can't attend SPX this weekend can console yourself with Top Shelf's annual $3 sale.

—Derf is auctioning off an appearance in a future strip, with proceeds going to Parkinson's research.

—Reviews & Criticism. Tom Spurgeon reviews Humbug #9. Dangerous Minds notes the William S. Burroughs Ah Pook Is Here books. Jeff Newelt picks Heeb magazine's best comics of 5773. Richard Baez on the underappreciated Pete Morisi. Michael Vassallo previews the Atlas-era Venus Vol. 1.

—Interviews. Inkstuds welcomes back Josh Simmons. One of the all-time great interviewees Daniel Clowes does it again in a short one with Cotton Candy Magazine. And Frank interviews Wowee Zonk member Chris Kuzma.

—The Beat catches that Bob Layton has also settled with Marvel.

—Calvin Reid has a short profile of Josh Frankel's upcoming Z2 Comics.

—Illogical Volume at Mindless Ones takes on the Jason Karns comments-thread kerfuffle.

Today on the site:

Frank Santoro reports on his Comics Workbook contest and Tumblr in general.

And Chris Mautner reviews Russ Manning's Tarzan.

Elsewhere:

A Kim Thompson remembrance from Robert Boyd.

The Atlantic excerpts a passage on the iconic New Yorker 9/11 cover from Jeet Heer's new book on Francoise Mouly.

Glen Weldon on Superman and 9/11.

There's a new resolution in the Marvel/Ghost Rider case.

Sarah Horrocks interviewed.

Sean T. Collins on an older bootleg Batman comic.

Alan Moore's Fashion Beast, reviewed.

And a new Lisa Hanawalt web comic debuts.