* Comic Book Resources began posting its Top 100 Comics of 2009 list today. I’ve got two write-ups in this first installment: Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce (#90) and Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club (#79). I apologize for the egregious mixing of metaphors in that last one in advance, but in my defense, I was super-baked.
* At Josh Simmons’s hilariously named blog he links to a whole bunch of comics of his you can read online. Merry Christmas!
* Anders Nilsen salutes James Cameron. Not kidding.
* Heidi Mac helpfully links to almost all the Comics Journal #300 cartoonist conversations. It’s kind of funny how they’re easier to find on the Beat than on TCJ.com. Funny sad.
* More Tom Spurgeon books-of-the-decade holiday interviews: Rob Clough on Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19, which is maybe the best comic of the decade, and Jeet Heer on Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, which if this were one of those holiday-weekend classic-rock radio mega-countdowns would be played in the final hour of the marathon, no doubt.
* Speaking of Ware, the latest Our Comics Decade post at The Cool Kids Table features Jimmy Corrigan, which is the “Comfortably Numb” to Acme #19’s “Stairway to Heaven” or vice versa depending on what mood I’m in. Also, the story of how Ben Morse ended up at Wizard, which is one of the better stories of its kind.
* Christopher Allen’s year-in-review piece is a treat.
* Congratulations to newly minted Xeric Grant winner Lane Milburn! Really looking forward to what he can do with it.
* An undiscovered Fletcher Hanks story has surfaced. Wunderbar!
* A Field Guide to Lovecraftian Fauna. Or flora, or whatever the hell those things are. My favorite bit right now is a toss-up between the advice on what to do if you encounter a shoggoth and the way to tell the difference between Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath.
* Flying crocodilians: a visual history.
* Today on Robot 6: a cool guitar gods poster and a Prison Pit doll.
* I enjoyed this Laura Clawson piece on being a fan of romance novels–a lot of it seems applicable to any kind of fandom or nerddom.
* Related: A couple of quick things about Abhay Khosla’s latest essay. First, it’s a lot easier to score points off of opinions when you ascribe them to “Internet” than it is when you properly attribute them to, say, Tom Spurgeon. Second, discovering that certain kinds of comics no longer deliver the same thrills you got from them when you were a younger and less experienced reader and subsequently proclaiming that Comics Has Failed Me This Year is neither news nor analysis, it’s flounce.
Ah, Petersen’s guide. I still have my copy. The only piece that survived my 1992 auction of my (complete) CALL OF CTHULHU collection (done by email in the heady days before Ebay.)
Think I got $125 for my copy of DEITIES AND DEMIGODS that featured the Elric and Lovecraft mythos (subsequent editions were printed without those chapters.)