* I was just talking about this book yesterday and saw the official announcement of it this morning via Tom Spurgeon first: Chester Brown’s memoir of prostitution patronage, Paying for It, due from Drawn & Quarterly in Spring 2011. What do you think: First D&Q book I can get into Maxim? D&Q’s blog has more.
* It’s rare enough for me to see something I wrote approvingly cited to shore up an artist’s aesthetic argument that your’e damn right I’m gonna blog about it: Cartoonist/editor/critic Shaenon Garrity tips her hat to the Dandy Warhols-quoting review I wrote of Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss while talking about a style-minded character in her comic Skin Horse.
* Kitty cats as Marvel characters. Hit that link for Agent M’s tumblr–he’s been posting like four of these per hour since that post went up.
* People in Afghanistan are being killed and injured during protests and riots over Koran-burnings in America. I don’t at all wish to diminish the fact that the people primarily responsible for these deaths and injuries are the people actually perpetrating the violence and the people egging it on. Nor do I wish to diminish the fact that hurting someone because of what happens to a book, any book, or because someone made a drawing, any drawing, is beyond disgusting. But this is what I was talking about when I said that the Koran-burning controversy made me rethink the Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy: People pay for provocations, and those people are almost never the provocateurs or the counter-provocateurs. There are, of course and alas, exceptions.