* Fort Thunder reunion! Much more at Tom Spurgeon’s place.
* Here’s a long, fun interview with Jim Woodring by Jason Heller of the Onion A.V. Club:
I had an experience when I was in my 20s. Someone read the I Ching for me. No one had ever done that for me before, and I didn’t know anything about the I Ching. I still don’t very much. But at this one reading, the couplet was, “Dragons wrestle in a meadow / Their blood is black and yellow.” That and the explanation that accompanied it made me realize something about a conflict that had been raging inside me ever since the age of reason. I had never, ever identified it before, or had it identified for me. I’d never seen it before. All of a sudden I realized there were these two aspects of myself that were completely unintegrated, and that that was the source of virtually all of my trouble. It was a huge, eye-opening experience for me. That interests me a lot, the question of people being at war with themselves.
(Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* Chris Ware writes an essay on book design for GQ:
As far as real book designers go, I’ve only met a few, but they strike me as thoughtful, well turned-out, and desperately cutthroat people. What surprises me the most is how shamelessly art directors rip each other off; a clever cover will sometimes be imitated as quickly as two or three months after originally appearing. Book designers, you should know, have to be ready to create something new, exciting, and original almost every day in order to eat, and a certain degree of burnout smokes out the weaker specimens; I can’t imagine coming up with cover after cover without at some point resorting to an out-of-breath take, intentional or not, on someone else’s great idea. This urge toward ever-freshness brings the profession perilously close to that of fashion, and the worst examples of such greet us at the grocery store checkout among the tabloids, gum, and ring pops.
(Via Tom Devlin.)
* Lex Luthor faces off against Death of the Endless from Sandman, written by Paul Cornell? Sure, I’ll eat it.
* Jason has a blog! (Via Fantagraphics.)
* Paul Pope draws the Beatles.
* Here’s a fun new Fight or Run comic from Kevin Huizenga. Shoulda ran!
* I’m glad to see Matthew Fox of Lost get an Emmy nomination. He was pretty fabulous.
* More comics-blog posts should begin with the sentence “Have you been fretting about what to get Sean T. Collins for his birthday?” I accept cash, of course.