I have promised much, and delivered little. But I swear (sort of) that Monday will bring some good pix and fun facts on this here blog. In the meantime, here's the best I can do.
Today on the site: Rob Clough reviews the latest Harvey Pekar book.
And if you haven't already read Sean Rogers’ epic Walt Simonson interview, you should. On that note, IDW has just announced its next "Artist's Edition": Wally Wood. It'll present the best of Wood's EC stories at their original size, in full color. That's good news, and those originals are truly spectacular. Which reminds me, if you haven't already, head over to Heritage Auctions to get a gander at the stunning original art for one of my favorite Wood stories, the vicious, scathing and sad "My Word", published in 1975. And on my final IDW tip, I greatly enjoyed Howard Chaykin's review of Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Chaykin draws a solid parallel to Phil Spector in his review:
To convey the irony and contradiction of the place that Alex Toth commands in popular culture in general and comics in particular, we might step away from the Orson Welles-Citizen Kane metaphor, and go instead to Phil Spector and the three-minute miracles of early rock ‘n’ roll that are his artistic and creative legacy. No one — at least no one I know — would ever mistake the lyrics of Spector’s best known material for anything but teenaged pap and drivel, while his orchestration, presentation, and arrangement of this junky doggerel never fails to elevate it to the level of unequivocal genius. I still get a goose pimpling shudder of delight at the first notes of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and The Crystals’s “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and it’s that same reflexive joy I experience at the sight of Alex Toth’s execution of the primitive, barely pulpy scripts that make up so huge a percentage of the work every cartoonist is asked to delineate.
The whole piece is worth reading, in the ever-worthwhile interest of reading one cartoonist on another.
And finally, I'd be remiss not to mention this, the latest from Frank Miller, now complete with an animated trailer. Should be interesting.
