* My MoCCA report is up at Robot 6. I’d gotten really excited for this show for no discernible reason–it was quite aside from selling my own comics there, honestly–and though I know others might have had different expectations and results, I personally was not disappointed. I had a lovely time.
* Frank Santoro found the show nice, nice, not thrilling, but nice.
* My collaborator Isaac Moylan broke it down in terms of the CCS style vs. Fort Thunder, with extra observations on the Scandinavians and the “new action”eers. (Isaac, “the New Action” was a Bill Kartalopoulos coinage.)
* My chum TJ Dietsch approaches the show from the valuable perspective of a genre-comics reader using the festival as an excuse to dip his toes into the wilder and woolier material.
* Tom Spurgeon had a good post rounding up reaction from afar.
* Strange Tales 2 is a go! Hornschemeier, Gurewitch, Brown, Cloonan, Kupperman, Santoro, presumably many more, all of whom I will likely interview.
* Marvel has dropped Diamond as its book market distributor and signed up with Hachette instead. Another large publisher’s move to a bona-fide book distributor was described to me by someone who would know as akin to “backing the money truck up to the doors and dumping piles of cash in,” so I’d imagine this will do good things for Marvel’s heretofore anemic bookstore sales. Spurge has analysis. Because I am an asshole, I would also like to take this opportunity to say “toldja.”
* Heidi Mac scanned the promo for Charles Burns’s upcoming book X’ed Out. How do you follow up a beast of a book like Black Hole?
* Read Soldier X online for free! Seriously, do it.
* They’ve enlisted the Predators reboot writers to write a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe screenplay. (Via Jason Adams.) My fellow He-Fan Rob Bricken has further thoughts. There’s no way a live-action He-Man movie captures the wonder of He-Man unless They go back in time and have the Wachowski Brothers do it instead of Speed Racer.
* Paul Cornell, author of the late, lamented Captain Britain and MI-13, will be writing Action Comics. He takes over from Marc Guggenheim, whose run on the Superman title is exactly zero issues long.
* Eve Tushnet on The Lost Boys. That was my first R-rated movie too! Holds up. “I’ll pray…I never need to call you.”
* Whoa, Marc-Oliver Frisch makes this Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange comic sound pretty good. Frazer Irving!
* Real Life Horror: Connecticut’s Roman Catholic bishops want to cover up child rape and they need your help!
* The life lesson I learned during the one (awesome) campaign of D&D I played years ago? Never trust a Mind Flayer.