* Nothing has made me regret missing the San Diego Comic-Con this year more than taking a gander at Rickey Purdin’s eye-melting gallery of his Watchmen sketchbook haul for the show. Gabriel Ba, Ross Campbell, Travis Charest, Jordan Crane, Nathan Fox, Matt Furie, Sammy Harkham, Derek Kirk Kim, Fabio Moon, Tom Neely (not pictured for NSFW reasons), Johnny Ryan, Jeff Smith, Mark Todd, Esther Pearl Watson…insane.

* Speaking of insane, Matt Maxwell has posted the first two installments of his epic Comic-Con recap. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

* Kiel Phegley recounts his Top 5 Comic-Con Celebrity Sightings. They’re funny.

* CBR’s George A. Tramountanas has posted a report on the Lost panel. It sounds like Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (and Jorge Garcia and Michael Emerson and Josh Holloway and Nestor Carbonell and Dominic Monaghan) primarily designed the panel as a comedy-hour payback for the SDCC faithful^. It’s a smart way to go, given how pretty much anything they could really reveal about the final season of that show would be a spoiler by necessity–the season is short and the dangling plot threads that need to be tied up are so many that it will probably occupy every available second of airtime. Anyway, the panel sounds like a scream, particularly the gratuitous dig at Heroes, which I still resent for its mercifully brief but grossly exploited and ultimately ridiculous and unsustainable eclipse of Lost in the fickle hearts and minds of nerddom circa Lost Season Three and Heroes Season One.^^

* Robot 6’s Kevin Melrose pulls some Neil Gaiman quotes on the Marvel/Marvelman/Mick Anglo deal from a couple of sources. The gist is that they’ve acquired the rights to the character, have not yet acquired the rights to the Gaiman/Buckingham/Eclipse run on the character but both Gaiman and Buckingham are optimistic on that score, and have not yet acquired the rights to the Alan Moore/Eclipse run, about which Gaiman can’t hazard a guess.

* Holy smokes, check out the partial table of contents for The Comics Journal #300. In conversation: Kevin Huizenga and Art Spiegelman, Sammy Harkham and Jean-Christophe Menu, Dave Gibbons and Frank Quitely, David Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw, Alison Bechdel and Danica Novgorodoff, Ho Che Anderson and Howard Chaykin, Denny O’Neill and Matt Fraction, Zak Sally and Jaime Hernandez, Ted Rall and Matt Bors, Jim Borgman and Keith Knight, Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer. Seriously, holy smokes.

* Writing for the Onion AV Club’s “Gateway to Geekery” column, devoted to giving newbies starting-point recommendations for various nerd-beloved but daunting series and oeuvres, Leonard Pierce tackles Love & Rockets in what strikes me as an inaccurate and ill-advised fashion. For one thing, the comic hasn’t been “reputedly monthly” in years, so it’s weird to even discuss it in those terms. But more importantly, if you’re trying to give people a starting point, why recommend the gigantic, unwieldy, expensive hardcovers (don’t get me wrong, they’re awesome, but they’re not for beginners) when both Gilbert and Jaime’s work has now been collected in a less expensive, more complete, more welcoming series of softcover digests that can give you a taste without breaking either the bank or your back? Try reading the Palomar or Locas hardcovers on the subway, I double-dog dare you. For pete’s sake, the place to start with Gilbert/Palomar/Luba is Heartbreak Soup, the place to start with Jaime/Maggie/Hopey/Izzy/Locas is Maggie the Mechanic, and the place to start for both brothers’ other stuff is Amor y Cohetes. You’re welcome, world! (Link via Curt Purcell.)

* The AV Club acquits itself more admirably with Scott Tobias’s latest New Cult Canon column, on Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. Pre-Hot-Topic-hackdom^^^, Tim Burton really was a wondrously inventive and funny director–his first Batman film is still the best superhero movie ever made by a comfortable margin–and Beetlejuice was really a doozy. (The Missus and I wonder aloud why Otho isn’t an oft-quoted cult hero on a regular basis.) I was particularly intrigued by Tobias’s linking of Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight to Michael Keaton’s turn as the title character here.

^ Being in the audience for the sneak preview of the show’s pilot episode at Comic-Con 2004 remains one of me and the Missus’s great geek claims-to-fame.

^^ I was in the belly of the nerd beast at that time, running WizardUniverse.com’s weekly roundtable discussions of Lost, and the way some of the company’s, let’s say, “aesthetically challenged” staffers kicked the show to the curb in favor of slobbering all over the Save the Cheerleader nonsense was enough to make you chew your own foot off.

^^^ This is not a slam on Hot Topic, which I love. But you know what I mean.

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