* There just wasn’t much to talk about over the past few days! Please note that if you ever miss me around here, you can probably get a temporary fix by following @theseantcollins on Twitter.
* Last weekend, I think, MTV2 was doing this weird thing where they’d just show a hodgepodge of stuff MTV used to air during the ’90s–sketches from The State, Beavis & Butt-Head segments, the original silent and awesome Aeon Flux episodes, actual music videos, etc. Among this melange I caught the opening installment of the in-retrospect outrageously faithful animated adaptation of Sam Kieth and Bill Messner-Loebs’s The Maxx, and wow, that thing held up. Now it turns out MTV is streaming episodes at its website. (Via JK Parkin.) The Maxx was really my gateway to alternative comics in a lot of ways–visually and eventually thematically it threw open some doors in my head that I walked through years later–and I know a lot of folks my age have a similar story.
* Frank Santoro Will Teach You To Make Comics!
* Anders Nilsen has been posting sketchbook comics like crazy lately; here’s the latest. They’re a little cutesier and sillier than usual.
* Behind-the-Curve Comics Theater: CF’s “Vollenweider’s Cave,” via everyone last week. Note the uncredited cameo by the Toxic Avenger, or his face at least.
* Just the other day I was talking with my brother, who was freshly returned from proposing to his girlfriend at Disney World, about what a kickass theme park ride Lost would make. I must have been tapping the zeitgeist, because lo and behold, a rumor to that effect was recently debunked. Too bad!
* Holy moley, this gallery of 200 Dick Tracy characters is impressive. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* Hey, look, it’s Nick Bertozzi! (Also via Spurge but I can’t get the link to work)
* While the Loch Ness Monster will always hold a special place in my heart, and while I love giant squids to pieces too, I think the cryptid that really fires my imagination most is the mokele mbembe, the sauropod dinosaurs that supposedly still lurk in isolated jungles in central Africa. But what if the mokele mbembe isn’t a dinosaur at all? The extinct rhinoceros relative Indricotherium would match the long-necked descriptions offered by eyewitnesses and local legend; its former habitat would map pretty neatly to the contemporary African jungles; and obviously it’s a bit easier to imagine a surviving pocket of slightly prehistoric mammals than it is to imagine a bunch of dinosaurs running around millions of years after the fact. Finally, HOLY CRAP LOOK AT THIS AWESOME PICTURE
There were rumors you were hiking the Appalachian Trail.