As on every Tuesday, today is the day that Joe McCulloch gives you his rundown of interesting-looking comics new in stores.
And it's also day two of Lucy Knisley's week as our cartoon diarist.
Elsewhere:
—Bob Clarke, RIP. Tom Richmond and Mark Evanier have reminiscences. I'm sure more are to come. Clarke was one of the great finds of the Feldstein era of MAD, with a gift for pastiche that helped him create many memorable covers and parody ads into the '90s.
Here's a Peanuts parody by Clarke from around 1961 (found here):
—Another sad death: Paul Williams. He has no direct connection to comics that I am aware of, but as the founder of Crawdaddy (the first serious magazine of rock criticism) and as a promoter of (and later literary executor for) Philip K. Dick's writing, his cultural impact looms large. (Here's his 1975 Rolling Stone article on Dick that really got the ball rolling.)
—Stefan Kanfer writes about George Herriman and Krazy Kat for City Journal, and Robert Boyd reviews six semi-recent comics on his art blog.
—Sean Kleefeld posts an old Life magazine story explaining why Al Capp finally decided to let Lil' Abner get married.
—If you frequent more superhero-centric parts of the comics internet, you may have heard that Valiant is planning to relaunch the old Quantum & Woody series, without the original creators' involvement. Prompted by this, V.R. Gallagher reposted some old thoughts of Q&W writer Christopher Priest, and offered some of her own on working in superhero comics as a minority.
—Chip Kidd has created some images to use as memes in support of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis in the ongoing Chicago schools case.
