* It’s been a looooooooooooong time coming, but today Marvel.com posted my interview with Paul Pope about his contribution to the company’s upcoming “indie/altcomix creators do the Marvel Universe” anthology series Strange Tales. Even if you’re not interested in the book, Paul talks about some of his childhood favorites, which is a treat.

Best of all, this interview is just the first in a loooooooooooooong series. When all is said and done, I expect to have interviews up with everyone involved in Strange Tales. As you can imagine this has been no small undertaking, and many thanks to Ryan Penagos, Aubrey Sitterson, Jody LeHeup, Ben Morse, Arune Singh, John Cerilli, and all of the creators for helping to make it happen.

* Heidi MacDonald’s San Diego Comic-Con report contains the most detailed and useful chronicle of the show’s possible security/traffic-management overreach and missteps this year that I’ve seen. For the most part, overreach and missteps are what it sounds like, as opposed to, say, the thoroughgoing lack of planning and dearth of informed staffers that made the first New York Comic Con such a mess. Fortunately, a lot of the problems Heidi describes seem like they could be solved by beefing up requirements for pro and press passes and subsequently really making them mean something in terms of access. Providing guest lists for the panels to the security guards would obviously help, too.

After her rundown of the security issue, Heidi moves on to the Great Hollywood Douchebag Invasion. I complained about this a bit last year myself. It’s not the Hollywood component of the show per se, it’s the (in the immortal words of Tool) smiley gladhands with hidden agendas who go with it that irk. Nothing infuriates the part of me that got beat up in fourth grade for liking G.I. Joe than seeing these moneyed jackasses descend upon my beloved Nerd Nation.

But then Heidi segues to a complaint about the big swanky exclusive Hollywood parties, which she laments that comics people can’t even get into. Here’s the thing: If they’re so full of douchebags, why would comics people want to get into them anyway? Who cares if they’re not inviting Darwyn Cooke?After all, it’s not like Spike TV took over the altcomix beach party and threw Kim Thompson out by the scruff of his neck. Before the Hollywood Invasion, these giant glitzy shindigs didn’t exist, and they’re not ruining anything that did. If comics people want to party so badly, they should throw their own parties. Yeah, they probably won’t be as lavish as the studio soirees, but comics isn’t as big as the motion picture industry, so why would they be that big? I don’t see why comics folks should feel entitled to hang with the Hollywood types just because the Hollywood types have an overactive sense of entitlement. Two wrongs don’t make a right and all that. And in my old age, discovering that other people nearby are having a more fabulous time than I am has ceased to rankle. I’d rather sit around a dinner table and talk to my friends than stand around amid hundreds of people I don’t know and shout to them. (I see Tom Spurgeon had many of these same thoughts.)

* Here’s another thing: I love the Con as a cultural phenomenon and therefore I love giant reports on the Con as a cultural phenomenon, whether as a reader or a writer. I am an all-purpose nerd, and Comic-Con is my Disney World. I think that for many media outlets, combining comics with general geekery is logical and desirable–I pushed for it at Wizard, for example. But here in the Comics Internet, we have the ability to generate giant reports solely on the comics news and comics releases and the overall comics presence at the con–and we should! I think it’d be very useful for more of the comics press to generate big after-action reports that didn’t have a single mention of stormtroopers or cosplayers or Twilight or Iron Man 2 or long lines or the party scene or what the flight was like or anything but interesting comics stuff. Next time I go to a big show I’ll try giving that a shot. If we want the comics component of Comic-Con to get more attention, we might as well be the ones who start paying it!

* Did everyone know there’s a giant new John Porcellino book coming out this fall and just didn’t tell me? It’s called Map of My Heart, it comes out from Drawn & Quarterly in October, and I guess it collects strips about his divorce. He’s touring to support it, too.

* My friends in the comics industry and I already meet for lunch in Bryant Park once a week or so (when it isn’t grotesquely humid at least), so I think we’ll have to make a point of checking out this roundtable discussion featuring David Mazzucchelli, Chip Kidd, Joe Quesada, Heidi MacDonald, and Danny Fingeroth at the Bryant Park Reading Room on Wednesday August 19th.

* Gary Groth’s critical/editorial style has a thousand fathers, and Comics Comics’s Jeet Heer conducts the paternity test.

* Also from Heer: Following up on Frank Santoro’s obituary for alternative comics in the Direct Market–part lament, part “good riddance”–Heer notes the small-c catholic comics education that both superhero fans and altcomix adherents stand to lose if the bridge really is over.

* My pal Ceri B. comes to praise Brian Wood’s Local and bury Brian Wood’s Demo.

* Now That’s What I Call Torture Porn: Rick Trembles’ Motion Picture Purgatory tackles Graphic Sexual Horror, a documentary about an extreme, horror- and serial-killer-influenced S&M porn site shut down by the Feds under the dubious contention that porn funds terrorists, or something.

* Slate’s Josh Levin lists 144 potential routes to an American apocalypse, from bang to whimper and beyond. (Via CRwM.)

* Heebie-jeebies here we come: Cracked lists 7 Terrifying Giant Versions of Disgusting Critters, from worms to crabs to spiders. All creepy, and all too real!

* This truly is one of the funniest shirts I’ve ever seen.

HELLO MY NAME IS TWILIGHT AND I AM A DRACULA

I just like writing it!

* Matt Maxwell continues to beat the San Diego Comic Con into submission with his word-mace: here, here, here. I think Matt’s perspective is valuable in that he’s a smart guy with articulately argued taste, but also because he’s writing about the show from a the insidery perspective of a seasoned pro, but leavened with plenty of open and honest acknowledgment that he’s still in some ways an outsider. To be frank, most comics commentators are too busy swinging their dicks around to be that candid, making Matt’s observations all the more worth noting.

* Speaking of valuable perspectives on San Diego, the great Jordan Crane had a really bad time this year and may not be long for the show overall.

* Believe it or not, The Blair Witch Project–the scariest movie I’ve ever seen–is ten years old this summer. The Horror Section’s Jay Clarke rounds up reactions and memories from a variety of horror bloggers, and offers up a few of his own. As I say every time Blair Witch pops up among the horror cognoscenti, I’m really gratified to see that the movie appears to have successfully weathered its massive backlash and is on the verge of canonization, if it hasn’t made it there already. (Via Rue Morgue.)

* Wow, cartoonist Lisa Hannawalt is all over the comics internet today. In addition to my review of two of her minicomics, both Scott McCloud and Ken Parille have extremely complimentary things to say about her new comic from Buenaventura Press, I Want You.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Lilli Carre of Tales of Woodsman Pete and The Lagoon. Did you know she has a new book out called Nine Ways to Disappear? I didn’t!

* New Kevin Huizenga book called The Wild Kingdom coming in 2010!

* Two of the best Mome contributors, Tom Kaczynski and Dash Shaw, are collaborating. This should be pretty sweet.

* Hans Rickheit shows off a copy of his Fantagraphics graphic novel The Squirrel Machine. I am awfully excited for this.

* Deep in my mental “someday, Sean, someday” file is a thinkpiece on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!‘s use of horror as comedy. We may never get there, but in the meantime there’s this interview with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim at VanityFair.com, in which they explain that for them, the horric awfulness of a disturbing David Lynch scene and the comedic awfulness of an awkward scene from The Office are essentially playing the same notes. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Robot 6’s JK Parkin interviews my pal and Twisted ToyFare Theater collaborator Justin Aclin about San Diego and his book Hero House. Justin’s a friend so I’m nowhere near an unbiased observer, but I think that if you like indie superheroes, you’ll really appreciate how hard he works to give this book emotional heft within the genre by exploring how friendships begin and end.

* I ought to have linked to these before, but Douglas Wolk and Chris Mautner both reviewed David Mazzucchelli’s excellent Asterios Polyp. One thing to keep in mind about that book is that it doesn’t feel like homework at all–it’s a lot of fun to read!

* Frank Santoro wants to stick a fork in the Direct Market and its associated ways of making, selling, and convention-ing comics. Tom Spurgeon’s not so sure. The split seems to stem from whether or not you think the DM’s (d)evolution is due to irreversible trends in the North American comics marketplace and mainstream comics tradition, or due to reversible decisions made by a handful of that marketplace/tradition’s major actors.

* Tom Neely is awesome.

* Hope Larson ain’t no slouch neither.

* James D. Griffioen presents a photo gallery of “feral houses,” abandoned homes overwhelmed by encroaching nature. Griffioen is the photographer whose pictures of the ruined Detroit Public Schools Book Depository burned up the internet a while back. (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* Raekwon IS Cloverfield.

It’s Sexy When People Know Your Name

Lisa Hannawalt, writer/artist

self-published, 2007

60 tiny pages

$3.50

Buy it from Buenaventura

Stay Away from Other People

Lisa Hannwalt, writer/artist

self-published, 2008

56 pages

$5

Buy it from Buenaventura

There’s a lot to like about Lisa Hannawalt’s comics/doodles/stream of consciousness/what have you as presented in this pair of minicomics. (A third, Mistakes We Made was one of the Ones That Got Away from me at MoCCA 2009). For starters, she can draw like a motherfucker, with a razor-tight line that lends itself perfectly to manically detailed portraits of nattily attired human bodies with animal or insectoid heads. Those things are sort of like if Matt Furie based his similar work on wintertime Macy’s catalogs from the early ’80s, and could easily make her the toast of a hipster-illustration world that, bizarrely, seemingly can’t get enough of weird animal stuff these days. But she’s also got the mind of a sketch comedian, or perhaps more accurately an observational webcomics cartoonist of the sort who’s equally popular in an entirely different segment of the illustration-appreciating population. Her list-based strips, rolling out her thoughts on topics such as “Ideal Wedding Plans,” “A Typical Week,” “12 Things I Think About on My Way to Work,” and the strip on unlikely things that are sexy that gives the first mini its title, progress in a rewardingly and amusingly haphazard fashion, alternating short-and-to-the-point deadpan entries with lengthy and baroque ruminations that you have no doubt plagued her brain for minutes on end. In that “On My Way to Work” strip, for example, entry #9 is “Car Crashes”; entry #6 is this:

What Does the Factory Where Money Is Made Look Like and How Do They Keep Employees From Stealing It. Paper money is printed in large strips which must be cut by giant scissors. All of the little 20s must be furiously stamped by hand onto every $20 bill. Employees must strip naked and place clear packing tape over their genitals and bodily crevices. They receive excellent benefits and are exempt from paying income tax.

Needless to say, that’s all illustrated, in all its packing-tape-covered-buttcrack glory.

But if the goofiness of the gags conceal Hannawalt’s self-exposure with silliness, other parts of these minis do no such thing. Speaking as someone who suffered through a loooong car commute of his own for several years, I instantly related to her frequently referenced obsession with car crashes, and her unnecessarily detailed drawings of animals and entrails (occasionally combined), all of which I saw and/or thought about way more than was healthy during that time. Her approach to sexuality is similarly infused with a sense of “I just can’t help it”–witness the uncomfortable gag (no pun intended) about how she distracted herself at the dentist by thinking of oral sex, and the shame-tinged images that conjures for her; or the juxtapositions of imagery and text for the strip about things that are sexy, several of them hinging on dominance, submission, or even violence in a disarmingly direct way. (“A healthy appetite is sexy, and so is the act of obediently eating what has been given to you”; “Being patronized or humiliated can be sexy.”) Hannawalt’s skill set is varied and unique; she’s going to be part of Buenaventura’s damn-the-torpedoes alternative-comic-book line, and I’ll be looking forward to it.

When it comes to obsessively policing the “correctness” of works within their chosen genre, nobody beats horror fans.

Sure, sci-fi readers may have us matched when it comes self-defensive knee-jerk reactions to what we perceive as anti-genre bias in the mainstream. But nobody can get as hot when proposing what should and should not be considered as a valid addition to our pet genre. You couldn’t find a mystery fan who, even if their tastes ran towards the hardest of hardboiled crime fic, would not recognize the elegant classics of Elizabeth Daly, the juvenile Nancy Drew series, and the aw-shucks slapstick of Kinky Friedman as all belonging legitimately to the genre. Sci-fi guys regularly lay down definitions RE the scientific rigor of the romances they read, but they know it’s bullshit: Not a one of them wouldn’t count Philip K. Dick among their number and his works are about as scientifically rigorous as The Great Space Coaster. I can’t imagine you hear many romance novel readers say, “I don’t consider romances between nurses and doctors to be real romance. It’s either lusty pirates with good hearts and the clever, but sheltered – don’t forget sheltered, sheltered is the whole thing! – daughters of wealth shipping magnates or nothing!”

—CRwM, And Now the Screaming Starts

OH MY JESUS YES