* Josh Simmons’s excellent, unauthorized Batman minicomic is now on sale for a limited time at Secret Headquarters’ web store. You know what to do.
* Speaking of sales, Top Shelf and PictureBox are both having great ones right about now. The Top Shelf sale boasts some real steals, while the PictureBox sale ends tomorrow. Shop early, shop often!
* Cameron Stewart will be drawing the third arc of Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin! Announcement here; more art here; interview here; attempt to read the tea leaves as to what this means for Frank Quitely’s previously announced second arc and Frazer Irving’s never officially announced but talked about by Morrison and Stewart arc here.
* Here’s a real treat: The great film scholar David Bordwell takes a look at Inglourious Basterds (and Public Enemies, but I skipped that part because I never got to see the movie). One insight out of many:
Talk in Tarantino comes in two main varieties: banter and intimidation.
* My pal Kevin Mahadeo speaks to Agents of Atlas author Jeff Parker about the team’s upcoming crossover with the X-Men. That’s a come-up for the Agents and Parker alike.
* Nice get for Robot 6’s weekly What Are You Reading? column: Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly.
* One of the reasons I’ve been enjoying (and repeatedly linking to) Curt Purcell’s Blackest Night posts is because as a lapsed reader of superhero comics who’s been away from them for quite some time, he’s coming at the project with a set of assumptions we devotees don’t have, and without another set of assumptions that we devotees do have. In his latest post on BN, he voices disappointment that despite ten or so issues of Blackest Night comics if you count all the tie-ins, the only thing that’s really happened is some old superheroes and supervillains have come back as Black Lanterns and attacked other superheroes. Having spent the past eight years or so reading superhero comics on the regular, it was weird to me just to see Curt use the phrase “ten issues later” to describe where we’re at with Blackest Night–by my reckoning, i.e. by the numbering of the main BN series, we’re only two issues deep. It would never occur to me that anything important would happen in any of the tie-ins, except perhaps the Johns-authored Green Lantern and Tales of the Corps issues. There are a couple of routes recent event comics have taken to make their tie-ins matter: You can use them to fill in all the important story details that your main-series slugfest elides, as did Secret Invasion scribe Brian Bendis in his vastly superior New Avengers and Mighty Avengers issues; or you can make the tie-ins have little, if anything, to do with the main series, as Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, and Greg Rucka did with their Final Crisis minis. The problems here are obvious, though: The former can leave fans feeling like we could have lost a few boring battle splash pages in favor of actual information, while the latter can leave fans scratching their heads and ruing their purchases.
* The quote of the day comes from Squirrel Machine author Hans Rickheit:
I have now graduated from being someone who draws comics that no-one reads to a person that draws comics that no-one comprehends!
* Finally, Brickhousebunny21 would like us all to know that All Of Our Responsible This.