* Ben Schwartz and Tom Spurgeon talk B.P.R.D., the best ongoing superhero comic of the decade. It’s a rambly thing that talks as much about Otto Binder and Alan Moore as it does about Hellboy, but you won’t mind much. What’s fascinating to me is that Schwartz got into the series as recently as the Black Goddess arc, which was the most recent one (until today’s release of King of Fear #1). I played catch-up with Hellboy in, oh, 2002? 2003? and then started following all the Hellboy-verse books from there, so it’s interesting to see the impact they can have on someone who reads a big chunk in a short time frame. After all, it’s been telling one large story since Davis and Arcudi came aboard, so it’s probably like plowing through an HBO show on DVD. Two things I wish they’d gotten to are 1) the degree to which both BPRD and Hellboy have become about the characters’ failure to do what they’re trying to do, and 2) that wonderful scene in The Black Flame where the evil CEO enters his boardroom in full flaming-skull supervillain regalia and calmly tells the board of directors “You’re all fired”–one of my all-time favorite comics sequences, up there with the end of the World’s Fair issue of ACME, the beach scene in Diary of a Teenage Girl, the locust sequence in Skyscrapers of the Midwest, the lizard-tail sex scene in Black Hole… Also, Tom, I don’t suppose Ben convinced you to count B.P.R.D. and Hellboy (and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) as superhero comics for your best-of-the-decade shortlists, did he?
* A Masters of the Universe art show? Oh, indeed. The world of He-Man is deathlessly weird, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink amalgam of stuff that’s cool to eight year olds. It’s the closest this country’s come to the bizarre childhood entertainment franchises of Japan, I would say. (Via FarePlay.)
* Three things that are cool-looking enough that I’m not even going to show you a sample image, you’ll just have to click for yourselves: Kevin Huizenga’s “Famous Ghost,” Josh Cotter’s Xmas commission, and Tom Neely’s “I just figured it all out…”
* Matt Maxwell’s latest decade-in-review installment tackles the history of his reading and writing about comics. I’m second only perhaps to Heidi MacDonald in getting a kick out of trips down comics-blogosphere memory lane.
* Poor Curt Purcell. Curt, if I’d known you’d gone into your project of reading each and every event-comic tie-in title actually expecting to be entertained more often than not, I could have warned you, like the wizened old local at the end of the first reel of a horror movie.
* Rob Bricken’s review of Avatar makes me feel like maybe he and I linked up the neurons in our respective headtails. Now we’re bonded for life.
* Only problem is that I’m clearly already ponytail-to-ponytail with Tucker Stone, if his Best Comics of 2009 list is any indication. Sample quote: “There’s scary, and then there’s horrifying. After reading Cockbone, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a third thing that’s even worse.”