* Good God, Nicole Rudick’s interview with Al Columbia for Comics Comics is such a monster. I’ll admit that I wondered if it’s a put-on, that’s what a mind-melter it is. I mean, goddamn:

[Al Columbia:] My dad, for some reason, didn’t have the sense that a child shouldn’t see horror movies. He took me to see a lot of horror movies when I was a kid, or I’d get to see them on TV or HBO. He didn’t seem to have that filter: “Oh yeah, maybe he shouldn’t watch that. It could be disturbing.” So I was exposed to a lot of very disturbing images at a young age, which later in life came back in a strange way to haunt me, which I would never have expected.

[Nicole Rudick:] In what way did they haunt you?

Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head.

Images from those films?

I believe they had to have been, or the movies had to have influenced something. They were unwanted images. They weren’t fantasies but constant terrifyingly violent images or ideas piercing into my everyday life. I’d be watching TV and the next thing you know the newscaster . . . I would imagine, without warning, something bad happening to the people on TV or to somebody I knew. I couldn’t really look at someone without them immediately becoming dismembered or in some way murdered in my head.

Does that still happen?

No, not anymore. But it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.

That’s certainly how Pim & Francie felt. Anyway, like I said on Robot 6 one of the most striking things about the rest of the interview is how drawing comics only makes things worse for Columbia. This reminds me a lot of what Josh Cotter said about what was going on behind Driven by Lemons. My two favorite comics of 2009 were both the products of mental illnesses that were exacerbated rather than ameliorated by their creation. Jeez.

* Day-and-date digital-comics update: Brigid Alverson surveys the comics-commentariat landscape that existed before Marvel’s announcement of the same-day release of Invincible Iron Man Annual in print and via the Marvel Comics app. Heidi MacDonald surveys the post-announcement landscape. Tom Spurgeon wonders how digital publishing will affect the financial health of creators, something he thinks should be a lot closer to the front of any discussion about digital publishing.

* Related: A while back, I said I thought we’d see moves toward same-day digital release of comics sometime this year, Dirk Deppey said no we wouldn’t, last week we did, and so…Dirk was right? JK LOL ROTFLMAO! We hash things out in the comments a bit, which is a fun read if you’re the sort of person who’d like to see a scene in the Hall of Progress dedicated to what it was like to discuss comics in the Comics Blogosphere of 2003.

* Today on Robot 6: Ian Sattler works for the green skins…and helped out the pink skins…and done considerable for the blue skins…only there’re skins he never bothered with–!

* Jason Overby visits the Ben Jones exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth. The comments are worth a read too, for a discussion of artists who fall out of comics and for whom the medium is not a necessary component of their artistic project.

* Matthew Perpetua on the Voltron cartoon and toy relaunch: “This is good news for little boys, and bad news for anyone hoping for a very serious hard sci-fi film about a giant robot made out of mechanical lions.”

* My blog chum and former classmate Eve Tushnet has been profiled by The New York Times! Eve and I have a lot of pop-cultural overlap but virtually zero sociopolitical overlap. Haha–to cope with our mutual freshman year, she became a Catholic, while I started drinking.

* Real-Life Horror: Megadittos to Atrios and Andrew Sullivan on the installation of torture as a Republican Party platform plank.

* Related: The Bush Administration torture program as human medical experimentation.

* Mike Barthel on “the retro valley.” Thank you for coming up with the perfect phrase for the exact musical phenomenon my wife and I were discussing not 24 hours ago.

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