Okay, now Joe McCulloch is really here with his usual guide to the Week in Comics! Spotlight picks this week include new books by Yeon-sik Hong and the Sunday Press.
The focus this time around is on works by Rube Goldberg, notably the 1909-10 color Sunday iteration of his Foolish Questions feature, in which snappy retorts are offered in face of thoughtless queries; Al Jaffe did stuff like this later in MAD, along with innumerable comedians looking to puncture the inflated chumminess of passerby in hindsight from the mic. I always feel kind of bad for the dummies in these things; they're just trying to be sociable. It's hard sometimes.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The Guardian profiles Jillian Tamaki.
Half Life is metaphorical of ageing, she ventures. “Not that I’m old, but you can already see, at 37, that the body starts changing in ways that feel very inevitable, and they link you to broader humanity – you think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why old people are they way they are.’ It feels inevitable, like you’re joining some sort of weird club. But as we face ageing, we don’t want to do it with fear. Ageing is death, right? That’s why we all freak out about it, but we want to deal with it calmly. That’s what we all would like – you lose control over your body, and you’re doing it with a degree of grace.”
The women in Boundless are smart and self-aware, reflective and angry; diverse in age, race and body shape – but their characters seem almost interchangeable. “I feel like they are possibly conceptual,” Tamaki says. The stories [are about] a fantastical element, always butting up against reality. I wonder if the women are incidental. Maybe it’s the same woman at different times in her life, or something like that.”
The most recent guest on Virtual Memories is Arnie Levin, the most recent guest on the CBLDF podcast is Ed Luce, and the most recent guest on Inkstuds is Ben Sears.
—Misc. Michael Cavna writes about the recently announced inclusion of webcomics in the Library of Congress.
The first phase of the webcomics online collection will include nearly 40 titles, including such long-running works as Josh Lesnick’s “Girly” and Zach Weiner’s “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.”
“Webcomics are an increasingly popular format utilized by contemporary creators in the field and often include material by artists not available elsewhere,” Megan Halsband, a librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division, says in a statement.
Mark Evanier speculates about recent rumors that Mad magazine may be closing shop or otherwise making major changes.
Rumors abound that the magazine known as MAD — an institution that's been around exactly as long as I have — will soon cease publication. I'm pretty sure this is not so, though it is about to undergo some massive changes and no one is saying quite what they'll be. One biggie though is that its office of operations is shifting from New York, New York (across the street from where Stephen Colbert does his show) to Burbank, California (across the street from where Ellen DeGeneres does her show). With this migration will come a brand-new editorial staff consisting of…
Well, if the folks in charge of DC Comics have decided who the folks in charge of MAD will henceforth be, they've kept it a lot more secret than anything in the Trump White House. I don't know and no one currently involved in the production of MAD seems to know.
