Today Joe "Jog" McCulloch is here again with another column on the Week in Comics, to which he has attached an essay on the great and mysterious Gerald Jablonski. I'll leave it to Joe to explain Jablonski, other than to say that reading his work will cure the attentive reader of any certainty she might possess about "rules" that must be followed when creating comics. And also that there are very few times I have laughed as hard as I have when reading Cryptic Wit #2 out loud.
Elsewhere:
—As you no doubt have heard, last week a dispute erupted over whether or not the Chicago public school system would be pulling Persepolis out of 7th grade classrooms. Here is an article at the Chicago Tribune, and here is a recent roundup of reaction at Robot 6. Search around if you want more -- there's plenty of commentary out there, though it's pretty repetitive. Usually in these cases I can sort of understand the rationale for censorship, even while almost always disagreeing with it, but this time around, I'm at a total loss.
—In the department of reaction to The Comics Journal: Glen Weldon raves at The New Republic over issue 302's Maurice Sendak interview, and a reviewer at the A.V. Club uses the occasion of a Fantagraphics-published book on popular music to flail at a tiny straw statue of Gary Groth he'd apparently built for himself in the early '90s.
—Stephen Bissette and Richard Gagnon are trying to use media coverage of the next Spider-Man movie to draw attention to Marvel's treatment of co-creator Steve Ditko.
—Lisa Hanawalt racks up an unusual accomplishment for a cartoonist: being nominated for a James Beard Award.
—Gil Roth interviews Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Matt Wuerker.
—Chuck Austen tells his fellow Tokyopop creators to "move on."
—Finally, via the entire internet, a short PBS video on webcomics:
