* A pair of bloggers tackle two of the three major recent altcomix releases that begin with the letter W: Tucker Stone on Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Christopher Allen on Wally Gropius. I don’t think I agree with Chris’s take on Gropius, which I feel is only superficially superficial; Tucker’s piece is more or less on the futility of having a take on a book like Weathercraft. Both books are doozies and both pieces are worth thinking about.
* Suddenly there’s a lot of Frank Miller talk to read. I like his read on his own 300 as a sort of Spartan Starship Troopers.
* Recently on Robot 6: Emily Henochowicz lost an eye protesting the Israeli flotilla raid; here’s her art;
* and Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a bit about anti-Irish racism today; here’s their art.
* Cameron Stewart out, Georges Jeanty in on the Western issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne. Too bad.
* A full-page ad for We’re Only In It for the Money by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in 1968’s Daredevil #38? Sure, I’ll eat it.
* It hits on a topic or two a little repetitively, but that aside, Sean O’Neal’s interview with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy for the Onion AV Club is festooned with gems, like this bit about wearing one’s influences on one’s sleeve:
“Somebody’s Calling Me” was written in the middle of the night, and usually I’m pretty purposeful about my grand theft, like stealing the guitar sound from [Robert] Fripp for “All I Want” and stuff like that. “Somebody’s Calling Me” was written in my sleep, and the original was just the piano and the beat and the singing. And that was it, because I was on Xanax and asleep, and that’s what I did in the middle of the night. But then when I was working on it, putting in the little synth sounds and stuff like that, I was totally like, “Ha ha, this sounds like ‘Nightclubbing.’ Let’s put some crazy synth sounds on it.” Once you find out it sounds like that, you just have to allow yourself to use what you like, or else you’re trying to hide it–and that’s usually a way to make a boring song. I’d rather have a song I like that sounds like another song, than a song that I’m hoping nobody notices sounds like another song that I’m not that into.
(Via Dave Gutowski.)