Few more things:
Milx, the artist responsible for the beautiful new Silver Surfer book (part of the “great two or three weeks of Marvel comics” mentioned in the post below), is missing, according to Newsarama. Damn.
I’ve been emailing back and forth with Tom Spurgeon, former editor of the Comics Journal, about what makes for a good comic convention. I think that if there’s a real problem with conventions like WizardWorld, it’s not so much that they focus on superheroes, but that they reinforce the perception that the superhero-comic industry IS comics. (This is the kind of worldview that leads people to depict the “diversity” of comics by listing all the different writers working on Superman.)
On that note, John Barber offers a heated indictment of this mindset at Talk About Comics (link courtesy of the ever-lovin’ blackout-bravin’ NeilAlien). He focuses particularly on the head-in-sand attitude of the big American publishers toward the manga model, which as time goes by looks more and more insane.
This just in: Dirk Deppey’s an asshole!
A great mainstream-media article about some great comics can be found in Time magazine (link courtesy of Kim Thompson). And yes, Blankets is in there.