Carnival of souls: Tom Spurgeon’s modest proposal, early Kramers Ergot for sale, new Henry & Glenn, Ryan Cecil Smith, Frank Santoro, more

* Last week Tom Spurgeon made a modest proposal: Any time you talk about one of the major corporate superheroes, mention their creators. I will be doing this from now on.

* Kramers Ergot #1-3 are busting out all over! Last week, a small number of copies of these early, extremely hard to find issues of Sammy Harkham’s no-way-to-describe-it-but-seminal art comics anthology (the less artcomixy ones) went on sale at Secret Headquarters in L.A.; I bought the bundle via the Secret Headquarters web store, where it looks like all three individual issues are still available, believe it or not. This week they’re also on sale on-site at the Beguiling in Toronto. About the only downside to all this is that awkward moment when you’re all excited to read and write about the first three Kramers Ergots and then Joe McCulloch does it first and renders anything you’d say redundant. Read that review, though, seriously — such a pleasure to read Joe combine his recent beat of off-the-beaten-path stuff with his old alternative-comics stomping grounds.

* How the hell did the announcement of the sequel to Henry & Glenn Forever escape my attention??? Well, no longer: Tom Neely has announced Henry & Glenn Forever & Ever, featuring him and the rest of the original Igloo Tornado gang, plus Benjamin Marra, Ed Luce, COOP, and more.

* Tom’s also drawing lovely nudes now and then, it seems.

* Local boy makes good! Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith is now a part of Jordan Crane’s peerless What Things Do webcomics portal — they’re currently serializing his Kazuo Umezo/Blood Baptism horror-manga tribute minicomic Two Eyes of the Beautiful.

* The Comics Grid’s Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, and the memory of cities. I think that if you were forced at gunpoint to make an argument on behalf of the irreducible necessity of the comics form, Katchor’s work would be one of the first things you would reach for.

* Last time we visited Bruce Baugh’s newly resurgent World of Warcraft blogging, he was investigating the possibility of playing the game without dying. Now he’s examining the potential of playing the game without killing. Amazing how these entirely self-imposed rules can totally alter one’s experience, even mindset.

* Eve Tushnet warns against “evil comes from people who have been hurt! Fear the weak, not the powerful!” horror movies. A fascinating framework I’d never before considered.

* My favorite t-shirt maker, Travis of Found Item Clothing, interviews my favorite nerd blogger, Rob Bricken of Topless Robot.

* I know there are any number of reasons why people do this, but I’m always baffled when the creators of television shows leave those television shows before the shows end. It’s your show! (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Frank Santoro has discovered that people are wrong on the internet. I imagine him staying up four, five days at a stretch, reblogging and correcting every tumblr post that doesn’t properly credit an artist.

* Speaking of Frank, it’s amazing how clear his imprimatur is on the comics made by students in his comics-making class.

* And still speaking of Frank, I think this post may have been posted and deleted before, but here’s his valuable run-down of all the major formats and dimensions available to comics-makers today.

* I don’t believe I’d ever seen this lovely piece by Jonny Negron, who can and does work in a lot more styles than the one or two that made his name. (Via Lisa Hanawalt’s inspiration tumblr. Oh, right, Lisa Hanawalt has an inspiration tumblr.)

* This is a very pretty bit of Becky Cloonan art.

* Lovely and intriguing work from Jackie Ormes, a Golden Age cartoonist who was an African-American woman.

* Fabulous picture of a young Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly from Mouly’s new mostly-New Yorker-cover-themed tumblr. (Via Robot 6.)

* Real Life Horror: You know, when you think about the clearly illegal surveillance of virtually all aspects of Mulsim life in the tri-state area by Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly’s NYPD, it’s not as though history isn’t littered with instructive examples of what becomes of a society when its politicians and law-enforcement authorities start to routinely and relentlessly scapegoat and persecute a religious minority for no good reason, and when other politicians and the news media line up to support this, and when the public either doesn’t notice or says “Hey, good job.”

* Here’s the latest trailer for Game of Thrones. Surprise! It looks good. The location shoots in Iceland are added-value city, man.

* Finally:

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7 Responses to Carnival of souls: Tom Spurgeon’s modest proposal, early Kramers Ergot for sale, new Henry & Glenn, Ryan Cecil Smith, Frank Santoro, more

  1. James says:

    I think the “Via Whitney Matheson” link is broken? I’m never surprised when someone steps down from the ridiculously all-encompassing all-consuming job of showrunner, especially after five years on a successful show that shows no signs of slowing down (if I may wildly speculate for a second, the show is so hugely successful for HBO right now they might not have allowed the show to end, even if Alan Ball wanted it to).

    And as the story you linked to says, it is “stepping down” as opposed to “leaving”: much of the time, including here, the original guy is still around in some advisory consulting capacity while someone else takes charge of the day-to-day grind. Also, the show being based on a book series, I totally understand wanting to do something new after loosely adapting someone else’s work for so long.

    • Yeah, I mean, when I think about it, especially in a case like this, it does make sense. Mostly it’s just such a gearshift from the way I typically think about art and artists, in other artforms I mean. But of course it’s also quite impossible to imagine the Sopranos/Wire/Deadwood holy trinity without their respective Davids, or Mad Men without Matthew Wiener, or Breaking Bad without Vince Gilligan, or Battlestar Galactica without Ron Moore (though David Eick keeps taking runs at it), or even Lost without Damon Lindelof. For that matter, we saw what happened to the Lynch/Frost-less Twin Peaks during their absence in the second season.

  2. Countless thanks for the information about Kramer’s Ergot becoming available. I picked up #3 by sheer chance in the back of a comic store once (Waaaayyy back, past the hero stuff, past the porn comics, with the indie stuff they just threw there because they figured no one cared) and love that I can now read and enjoy #1 and #2. Plus, I picked up Thickness #1 and #2 as I recalled you saying great things about them before on the blog. That Secret Headquarters website must be pleased they found that stockpile!

  3. adamb says:

    Hey, it was me that Frank got mad at for not crediting Ben Jones. The thing is, I thought I had, I had put BEN JONES in the tags box when I reblogged that, but it never showed up. I am on Frank’s side with this though, it is annoying when you see some really cool art on tumblr and have no idea who the artist is.

  4. Graham says:

    Hi Sean. The Beguiling is in Toronto, not Montreal.

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