* Sad news: pood is folding with its fourth issue. That was a nobly intentioned effort of the sort we need more of, not less.

* Ken Parille does his Ken Parille thing on Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray, which at the time of its release had a decent claim to “Best Single Issue of All Time.”

* Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem looks awfully promising. I think it’ll be an interesting book for a couple of reasons. First, unlike North Korea, China, and Burma/Myanmar, Israel is not an open dictatorship, regardless of what you think of its policies, and I’m curious as to how Delisle’s alien-abroad reportage will translate in that setting. Second, unlike those other nations, the degree of financial, political, and cultural complicity in Israel’s policies, good bad and different, is far greater for the West, so one assumes Delisle’s writing may get more openly political as a result. Regardless, damn, look at that cartooning. As elegant as he’s ever been.

* Closed Caption Comics’ Molly O’Connell will be debuting two books at BCGF; here’s what one of them is gonna look like, and my, it’s lovely.

* Speaking of CCC, Ryan Cecil Smith continues posting gorgeous pornographic pages on his tumblr. Not even reproducing this one, in deference to you shrinking violets out there.

* Michael DeForge, man. More Kid Mafia, stuff for The Believer. more Ant Comic, still more Kid Mafia, something called “Hot Dog.”

* Jim Woodring’s still posting splendidly troubling art almost every day.

* More Chameleon #2 promo art from Jonny Negron. I enjoy this pure concentrated Weirdness.

* Jeepers, take a gander at the art of Ulises Farinas. Darrow über alles these days, huh? (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* B.P.R.D. teaser art? Sure, I’ll eat it. No pun intended.

* Finally, Uno Moralez has a new image/gif gallery up. You know what to do.

Queen of the Black Black
Megan Kelso, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2011
168 pages
$19.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

* Lisa Hanawalt’s poster for BCGF gives me a good excuse to link to BCGF’s list of exhibitors, featured artists, and debut releases, which is astonishing.

* Ohhhhh man: The latest old Kevin Huizenga c omic to get a full-fledged hardcover reworking/repackaging from Drawn & Quartelry is Gloriana (previously known as Or Else #2), which features “The Sunset,” one of the greatest comics of all time. OF ALL TIME!

* Related: My Robot 6 colleague Graeme McMillan on Ganges #4.

* Drawn and Quarterly has posted its Winter 2012 and Spring 2012 catalogues for download. And Fantagraphics has published its Spring/Summer 2012 catalog for download. I actually carry new Fanta catalogs around in my backpack to read and re-read like a comic.

* Recently on Robot 6: My quick take on Matthias Wivel’s epic L’Association article.

* Hey now: Jonny Negron’s Chameleon anthology has a second issue on the way in December! Here’s the cover and here’s a page from Negron’s contribution to it, “Violence City.”

* And here’s a page from Uno Moralez’s contribution to it. That’s right, Uno Moralez’s contribution to it.

* Big Two news: Things are looking good for DC’s big relaunch right now, though as many, many people have pointed out to me, these initial few months’ sales figures reflect sales to retailers, not to customers, and have all sorts of huge returnability incentives built in, so sales will likely settle down significantly at some point soon. And Marvel is cutting staff, series, budgets, and royalties. I do believe many Marvel staffers’ protestations that this has nothing to do with DC’s recent success, but the timing sure is unfortunate from a PR perspective.

* Saving this for when I really have time to savor it: Curt Purcell on the psychological underpinnings of the appeal of crossover stories.

* Happy sixth birthday to the A Song of Ice and Fire fansite Tower of the Hand! TotH has the most elegantly coded solution to the problem of spoilers that I’ve ever seen. Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

* Tom Spurgeon on comic titles that read like Captchas.

* Tom Brevoort’s formspring seems to have gone from surprisingly candid to surprisingly lyrical.

* “The scientist’s plan worked perfect. The dog was now a super hero.”

* My Kraven story in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 got a couple more good reviews: Here’s the big-time spider-fan site Spider-Man Crawl Space, and here’s Robot 6’s Tim O’Shea, who singles out a little layout gimmick I was pretty proud of.

* Monster guest lineup at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this year. Aw, who am I kidding, by “monster guest lineup” I mostly mean “oh my God, Phoebe Gloeckner!!!!” Gloeckner is one of a very, very small number of people with whom I’ve had conversations that I’ve more or less memorized.

* Anders Nilsen reveals his five favorite comics to the AV Club. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Zak Smith/Sabbath explains how to make things weird. The answer may surprise you! As is often the case with Smith’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars blog, this post is applicable to a lot more than just playing D&D.

* Is anything in the world more comforting than Peter Jackson talking about the technological wonkery he’s deploying to make movies about Middle-earth? I’m serious — if you studied my brain chemistry while watching something like the making-of video for The Hobbit below I bet there’d be measurable changes. I love this man.

* My friends Ryan Penagos and Ben Morse have launched the This Week in Marvel podcast.

* Yep, those are Jason’s five favorite post-2000 bands, alright.

* I guess that if you’re going to troll Tom Brevoort’s formspring account, you might as well be a good writer in the process.

* You keep drawing them, I’ll keep linking to them, Tom Kaczynski.

* My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is one of those records about which I could read breathlessly effusive birthday celebrations all the live-long day. The best thing I ever read about that album was by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson: “I’ve long dreamt of an album that was ‘Like Loveless, but more,’ but I haven’t found it.”

* Real Life Horror: I briefly started following Andrew Sullivan’s blog again after one of my periodic hiatuses, though every time he asserted that the way to get both the country and the Obama presidency back on track is to “embrace Simpson-Bowles” I was sorely tempted to decamp again, and a post regarding a “debate” over whether or not liberals value “hard work” broke the camel’s back within less than twelve hours of re-adding the RSS feed back to my increasingly less useful Google Reader. But when he’s not espousing fatuous faith-based economics proposals or rounding up links about total nonsense he’s actually quite good, and indefatigable, on issues like torture, or in this case, pretty much the out and out murder/cover-up of several Guantanamo Bay detainees subjected to a suffocation-torture technique called dryboarding. Land of the free, home of the brave.

* Apparently this is just how Ryan Gosling looks now? Like, when he goes to music festivals and what have you?

Twice this year, developments in long-running serialized superhero comics I’ve enjoyed for years were spoiled for me before I had a chance to read them, not by spoilers themselves, but simply through the existence of spoiler warnings about them. With some comics, the number of potential plot twists that the comics Internet would deem both newsworthy and worthy of tagging with spoiler warnings is limited enough that you can guess exactly what they’re talking about simply based on the fact that they’re talking about something.

Of the two, one was a full-fledged “A shocking issue of so-and-so hits stands Wednesday” spoiler-warning-tagged PR blitz promulgated by the publisher a couple days in advance of the issue’s release. That one pissed me off, because it diluted the impact of the story itself, a story that really, really, really, really, really should have been allowed to unfold in its readers’ minds on its own terms. It was, quite literally, the moment the series had been building toward for years, and of all people, the publisher and its representatives should have realized how important it was not to monkey with that for the sake of a sales boost.

The second was just a bunch of people reading the issue the morning it came out and posting about it, and other people complaining that those people had posted about it. This one didn’t bother me so much. First of all, it wasn’t the publisher’s fault. Secondly, the development that the “watch out for spoilers!” talk spoiled through its very existence was, basically, the undoing by a character’s usual creative team of a pretty poorly handled storyline involving that character by a separate creative team. In other words, the twist wasn’t something that emerged from a story I’d been following and enjoying, and thus having it spoiled didn’t ruin my enjoyment — the spoiler was basically an announcement that the story I’d been enjoying until it was kind of ruined by that other creative team was back on track.

* Susie Cagle, a cartoonist and journalist covering Occupy Oakland, has been arrested in one of the mass-arrest sweeps of protesters by police that are becoming depressingly routine in this country. According to her twitter feed, currently being run by her partner, she and other journalists and legal observers rolled up in the arrest were initially charged with unlawful assembly and are being held at the Santa Rita jail; Cagle is slated to be released, but has been charged with “remaining at the scene of a riot, etc.” [sic!]. This is, of course, totally outrageous in a country where the freedom of the press and peaceable assembly are nominally guaranteed. Ali Ferzat winning the Sakharov Prize because his political cartoons brought retaliatory action upon him should be the exception as to how these things work, not the rule. (See also the bombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in France, although at least there the bombers likely don’t draw government paychecks.) Cagle’s partner urges people to call the jail at 925.551.6590 and request their release.

* Marvel will offer same-day digital distribution of all its Marvel Universe comics by the end of March 2012. A year and a half ago they’d just announced day-and-date digital release of a single title; today they’re, what, third or fourth of the major publishers to do this? It happened very fast.

* Great reporting: Matthias Wivel on the crisis at L’Association, the hugely influential French alternative-comics publisher, featuring extensive quotes from the participants on both sides. L’Asso is mindblowing from the perspective of a North American observer — it’s as though the Image Seven were Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, Seth and so on instead of guys who drew the X-Men — and so the acrimony surrounding its gradual takeover by co-founder Jean-Christophe Menu and his ensuing conflicts with the publisher’s employees, creators, and other co-founders, culminating in a strike and Menu’s ouster, are doubly fascinating. When you have people like Lewis Trondheim going on record with a reporter with statements like “Menu was the driving force in the creation of L’Association, along with us, but he also ended up a threat to its existence because of his lack of social intelligence and ineptness as a boss and as a manager, and because his alcoholism and paranoia got out of hand,” that is really quite something. The link takes you to part one of the report, which brings things up to the eve of the strike; part two to come.

* My Robot 6 colleagues are posting interesting interviews left and right: J.K. Parkin interviews Ian Harker about the Image Comics tribute zine Rub the Blood, Matt Seneca interviews Benjamin Marra about layout and sequencing, and Chris Mautner interviews Kevin Huizenga about Ganges #4. Bonus Robot 6 link: J. Caleb Mozzocco reviews Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray.

* What Beguiling retailer/TCAF organizer Christopher Butcher thinks about superhero comics and non-superhero comics. The answers may surprise you! I think his point about how you can easily cobble together a very saleable selection of ongoing series from mainstream-accessible genres from all the publishers who aren’t DC or Marvel, plus a handful of such books from those two to boot, is especially well-taken. So too his point that whereas the big mainstream-impactful superheroes have way too many books to their names to make any one the go-to for new readers, non-superhero genre series all have nice, easy to recognize Volume Ones that can be handed to customers with the promise of more to come.

* I would imagine this issue is complicated by Marvel’s pennywise and pound-foolish decision not to emphasize its backlist by keeping it in print. Historically, DC has aligned itself behind certain perennial collections, which not only enhance their sales but, I would argue, their critical reputation. While it is perhaps true that the Marvel of the 1980s didn’t produce any single work of the caliber of Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns, they could easily answer Batman Year One with Daredevil: Born Again by the same creative team, and with some canny marketing and thoughtful maintenance of stock there’s no reason they couldn’t do with Marvels, The Dark Phoenix Saga, Kraven’s Last Hunt and so on what DC has managed to do with, say, Arkham Asylum, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Kingdom Come. I’d also argue that in turn, DC (Kirby books aside) doesn’t have Silver Age runs of quality comparable to those of the great Stan Jack Steve and JRSR books, but Marvel’s program has relegated those titles to the status of historical curiosities rather than positioning them as vital to the Marvel Universe (to say nothing of the art form generally) in the here and now. There’s no reason for that to be that way, either.

* Real Life Horror: Jon Lee Anderson’s New Yorker article on the rise, reign, and fall of Muammar Qaddafi, and the Libya he left behind, makes for hugely compelling reading. You might say I have a professional interest in dictatorships, and this piece teases out some common threads I don’t think I’d thought of as common before. For example, Fidel Castro keeping the identity of his special lady a secret for years and years, Saddam Hussein’s near total disappearance from public view once his regime began taking serious black eyes, and Qadaffi’s penchant for creating a byzantine network of confusing and competing bureaucratic entities in order to both defuse potential rival power centers and diffuse culpability for poorly received actions — all three of these things were lesser-discussed items straight from Adolf Hitler’s playbook.

* Well, this is certainly nice: My comic in Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 is getting good reviews from the folks who enjoy Spider-Man comics. Here’s Ray Tate at Comics Bulletin, and here’s David Walton at The Reilly Factor. Kitty’s Pryde liked my page layouts but didn’t like my jokes, which, hey, fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing if I pass muster with the big Spider-fan sites.

* Oh hey, look, it’s four of the best people in the history of comics. From left: Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Gary Groth, Phoebe Gloeckner. (Via Peggy Burns.)

* Over at my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog, I wrote about the role of social justice in the series, using the conclusion of the Harry Potter series as a counterexample. I elaborated on the point for the benefit of a naysayer, too. I realized yesterday just how important this is to me.

* Recently on Robot 6:

*Good god: Gary Groth interviews Robert Crumb at glorious length. I ran down some of the high points for Robot 6.

* Ng Suat Tong annotated all the flashback panels from Jaime Hernandez’s “The Love Bunglers.” I added my two cents at R6 as well.

* Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” has wrapped up. Some lingeringly creepy images in here, as you’d expect.

* And here’s a quick little highlight reel for the Journal’s Habibi roundtable.

* Zack Soto’s Study Group Comic Books, Jason Leivian’s Floating World Comics, and François Vigneult’s Family Style have formed a publishing collective called Press Gang. That’s promising.

* Jesus: The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo put a caricature of Muhammad on the issue that came out yesterday. Later that day, someone blew up their offices.

* The Minneapolis small press show MIX may be having its last hurrah this weekend.

* David Bordwell’s latest absolute killer of a film essay is on visual density, specifically the way leaving objects that previously played a role in the narrative within the frame charges that frame with memories. The relevance to comics is obvious. And in terms of Bordwell’s recurring themes, he argues that this technique has largely been lost with the primacy of the walk-and-talk/stand-and-deliver binary for shooting dialogue.

* Matt Seneca on recent releases from the great Yuichi Yokoyama. While as usual I disagree with many of his emotional and thematic conclusions — I don’t get pessimism from Garden at all; it seems beyond that to me — I enjoy a lot of his specific observations, like the kindly feeling of the book’s slideshow-style finale. Plus, the piece includes a bunch of gorgeous art from Yokoyama’s thus far untranslated Baby Boom.

* Joe McCulloch on pre-Code horror comics for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Local boy makes good!

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the increasingly obvious problem with the NYPD.

* Dan White’s latest Cindy & Biscuit story is an all-Biscuit affair. Such vibrant cartooning!

* Michael DeForge previews his next comic, Kid Mafia. I’m detecting a lot of Tim Hensley/Wally Gropius in this one.

* Oh hey, Jonny Negron decided to mint money by offering prints for sale of his Drive pin-up.

* Andrew White appears to be prepping to post a comic every day this month.

* Keep drawing the sessy ladies, Tom Kaczynski.

* More hot stuff from Ryan Cecil Smith. You know, it’s times like these when I wonder if I should put some kind of NSFW tag at the top of the blog, or if it goes without saying.

* Your must-read of the day: The Comics Journal’s excellent Habibi roundtable, featuring Charles Hatfield, Hayley Campbell, Chris Mautner, Tom Hart, Katie Haegele, and Joe McCulloch. Savor it.

* Tom Spurgeon sounds off on people who approach acclaimed comics angry about their acclaim. Comics has a near-terminal case of “You think you’re better than me???”-itis sometimes. I’ve been there!

* I pulled out the superhero-related quotes because they were the pithiest, but Alex Dueben’s interview with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden about the Best American Comics series was a top-to-bottom fascinating look at their process, particularly the thinking behind the “Notables” section at the back of the book. Abel and Madden are two of contemporary comics’ most stealthily influential figures.

* Legendary will be publishing a new edition of Paul Pope’s The One-Trick Ripoff that will also serve as an omnibus of his non-THB work from the bulk of the ’90s, including his lost manga for Kodansha.

* Ganges #4 is out! This is a great comic book.

* Closed Caption Comics news: Did you know that Ryan Cecil Smith has a blog (via Shit Comix), or that Conor Stechschulte came out with a new comic called Fountain at BCGF last year? Because I sure didn’t! CCC folks: You realize I’m your target audience, right???

* Frank Quitely talks shop. I feel like that’s a rare occurrence?

* Chris Mautner didn’t think much of DC’s New 52.

* Rub the Blood is a noisy-alt tribute to the Image Comics of the early ’90s. Could be a pip, could be a pip. I mean, surely you want to see Victor Cayro take on Shadowhawk or whatever the case may be.

* Joe McCulloch on Yuichi Yokoyam’s Color Engineering. I’ll admit that Yokoyama’s painted style leaves me cold compared to his line art, but he also rarely disappoints, so I’ll certainly be reading this.

* Hooray hooray, Tom Kaczynski’s drawing pretty girls again.

* It’s always good to see new work from Tom Neely.

* Meanwhile I think we should take all available opportunities to look at the art of David B.

* Ben Affleck is maybe directing a feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, and is definitely directing Matt Damon in a Whitey Bulger biopic written by Boardwalk Empire‘s Terrence Winter. And that is two more interesting Ben Affleck stories than I expected to read this week.

* I sure hope this means Kevin Huizenga will be drawing characters from every book in his unsorted pile.

* Yeesh, King Con.

* I’ve gotten an awful lot of enjoyment out of Nine Inch Nails’ cover of U2’s “Zoo Station.” It’s interesting to see how those two bands’ post-’90s activities have affected conventional wisdom about their (mutually excellent) ’90s activities.

* Speaking of: I’ve listened to the freshly reunited Orbital’s new song “Never” probably thirty times today. I haven’t been this delighted by the comeback of a band from my youth since I heard Portishead’s “Machine Gun.”

* So it was the side effects of the cocaine! (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* I remain completely amazed by how bad Netflix is at being Netflix. I really have never seen anything like it, this string of necessary changes handled as badly as possible coupled with unforced errors of spectacular proportion. Read the letter to shareholders excerpted at the end of the article at the link and marvel at the tone-deafness and inattention to detail (typos???).

* Real Life Horror: Heads on sticks. Greenwald is right: That line in Obama’s speech about killing Bin Laden that said it’s proof that America can do whatever we set our minds to weirded me out as deeply as anything in politics since the introduction of the previously unheard-of term “Homeland” as a descriptor of American territory. There was something very bad about each of these ideas, and I recognized the latter even in the depths of my unpleasantness.

* When it comes to the reason why you can never do a google image search for any of the Simpsons with the safe search filter turned off, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. Michael DeForge is now part of the problem.

* So as you might have heard, I wrote a Spider-Man comic and annotated A Game of Thrones.

* On the latter score, Elio Garcia of Westeros.org has posted his own announcement of the project. Elio calculates that he and I and Anne Groell wrote over 1,000 notes on the book between us, which both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me at all given how into it we all got. I’m telling you, it’s a really rich vein to tap. Elio also notes that Subtext is working on a web version, so you non-iPad users out there, take heart.

* And this was a daymaker: An effusive write-up from big-deal SFF site Tor.com, and one that quotes extensively from me at that. I mean, get a load of this praise:

“this definite guide is interactive, comprehensive, ever-expanding, and most of all, made with the fans in mind….The annotations aren’t idle theories, rather, these are insights from those who know this world better than anyone else in the world, save George R. R. Martin himself.

Who am I to argue?

* My chum Rob Bricken of Topless Robot notes how useful the annotations will be for those readers who can’t tell the players without a scorecard. He also touts our bonafides as experts, which apparently I will never get used to.

* And a special tip of the hat to the Chief, Dan Nadel, who very kindly congratulated me for the project on the blog of the estimable Comics Journal itself.

* As for Spidey, I’d like to thank three of my favorite comicsbloggers, JK Parkin, Tom Spurgeon, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch, for pointing their readers in my comic’s direction. Same for everyone on Twitter and Facebook who’s done so. Thank you all!

* And as noted, I spoke with my co-writer J.M. DeMatteis about all things Spider-Man for CBR.

* Meanwhile, I’m still making my way through Mad Men. Latest post on the end of Season Three here, archive of every MM post so far here.

* As I mentioned earlier, I reviewed Benjamin Marra’s Gangsta Rap Posse #2 for TCJ.com.

* Over at Robot 6, Eddie Campbell, Leela Corman, and I defend Craig Thompson’s Habibi against accusations of Orientalism.

* And Ron Régé Jr. says “Fuck Other Forms of Art.”

Today’s the day: My Spider-Man comic is now in stores! It’s called Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19, and I wrote the back-up story, illustrated by Pere Pérez — a battle between Spider-Man and the nefarious Kraven the Hunter. I hope you enjoy it!

Gangsta Rap Posse #2
Benjamin Marra, writer/artist
Traditional Comics, October 2011
24 pages
$3
Buy it from Traditional Comics

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

Over at Comic Book Resources, I talked with J.M. DeMatteis about writing Spider-Man in anticipation of our (!!!) comic Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #19 — in stores tomorrow!

* Alejandro Arbona and Jody LeHeup, two of Marvel’s best editors and the men responsible for Invincible Iron Man & Immortal Weapons and Uncanny X-Force & Strange Tales respectively, were laid off by Marvel yesterday, among many other employees of long standing. I’ve been pretty upset about this. Comic Book Resources provides the facts; Tom Spurgeon and Heidi MacDonald provide much-needed and highly infuriating context.

* “Dylan [Williams] said something once that really stuck with me. ‘Art isn’t bullshit and love isn’t bullshit.’”—Austin English

* Wow, speak of the devil: Andrew White has posted the complete Chapter Five of Sexbuzz.

* Vasilis Lolos is prepping a webcomic called Supersword, the goal of which, he says, is “Lord of the Rings for the Nintendo generation.” Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Well, it happened: Jonny Negron saw Drive. AND THE REST IS HISTORY.

* Tom Gauld’s doing a book for Drawn & Quarterly? Tom Gauld’s doing a book for Drawn & Quarterly!

* Dustin Harbin drew some dinosaurs, Sam Bosma and Kali Ciesemier colored them, and it was good.

* Whoa: Matt Zoller Seitz says the new Kelsey Grammer drama Boss is a great show.

* The great cartoonist Jason lists his five favorite giallo actresses and posts a picture of Edwige Fenech for emphasis. Paging Dr. Purcell, Dr. Curt Purcell!

* Happy birthday to Mike Baehr of Fantagraphics. Like so many Fanta employees, he’s one of the good ones.

* Real Life Horror: I guess we’re sending flying killer robots to execute American teenagers from the sky at will now, which is super-fucking-exciting, isn’t it.

* Wow, Uno Moralez has really outdone himself with this image gallery. It’s called “Horny Goblyns,” and it makes the abbreviation NSFW a comical understatement.

* Sex, synths, teen angst/lust, eldritch horrors: Is there anything about Jérémie Périn’s video for “Fantasy” by DyE that isn’t one of my favorite things? (Hat tip: Steven Wintle.)

Ganges #4
Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist
Fantagraphics/Coconino Press, October 2011
32 pages
$7.95
Buy it from Fantagraphics

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

You have no idea how proud of this I am.

Text by me, wizardry by Alex Kropinak.

* I posted a rundown of all the things I’ve been working on lately over on my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones blog All Leather Must Be Boiled. Keeping pretty busy!

* BAD COMICS ARE THE DISEASE. JAIME HERNANDEZ IS THE CURE. I’m going full-court-press on Jaime and Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 this week, in case you hadn’t noticed. The latest:

** Springboarding off Tom Spurgeon’s excellent piece, I talk about Jaime as a literal alternative comic for disgruntled or jaded readers.

** And springboarding off Jeet Heer’s excellent catch-all column for The Comics Journal, I talk about “The Love Bunglers” as a potential career capstone, and Gilbert’s comics as an under-the-radar phenomenon of comparable quality and import vis a vis his thirty-year storyline.

* There’s lots more to talk about in Heer’s post, by the way. I’m particularly struck by his argument that the work of contemporary cartoonists on classic reprints in a design, editorial, or critical capacity helps fold those works into the current practice of comics the same way a Scorsese riff on Welles or Eisenstein does in film. It comes as a riposte to some bombthrowing on the topic of contemporary vs. classic cartoonists, too, and you know I always like to see bombthrowing defused.

* Also on the L&R tip: Matt Seneca on the bravura mirrored sequence in “The Love Bunglers.” No, not that bravura mirrored sequence — the other bravura mirrored sequence.

* Yeah, I’m pretty happy about Sexbuzz.

* Ben Katchor’s latest comic takes on the 1%.

* Like the Geto Boys, Michael DeForge can’t be stopped. He’s posted a new installment of Ant Comic, while his wondrous horror minicomic SM is now up in its entirety on Jordan Crane’s What Things Do. Jesus but his line really pops against that cream background.

* The good news: Ross Campbell has finished Wet Moon 6, the latest volume in his engagingly morose and meandering goth slice-of-lifer. The bad news: It’s not coming out until October 2012.

* A day may come when I don’t link to a new Uno Moralez image/gif gallery…but it is not this day.

* Speaking of Moralez, I don’t know if Google Translate is steering me right, and the post itself is showing up in my RSS reader but can’t be accessed directly, but a post that features the image below and appears to state that Moralez is self-publishing a collection of his work is too good not to at least try to share.

* I love Matthew Perpetua precisely for posts like this one. In one fell swoop he singles out the best song on the new album by retro synthgazer guy M83 and quickly describes why it’s good, while also explaining why his overall project never quite gets off the ground:

Their new album, a double disc set, is sprawling and “epic,” but its expanse is mostly numbing – a few setpiece numbers are surrounded by ethereal time-wasters and underwritten bombast.

That is exactly right, and it’s been exactly right for at least three albums running now. In theory M83 could not be more up my alley, and from single to single he’s one of my most listened-to artists of the past decade (up until now, that is — I’m not crazy about “Midnight City”; too much yelping), but in practice his albums feel overlong, undercooked, and too content with his (admittedly) great idea for a musical aesthetic to actually execute that idea well. But yeah, “Claudia Lewis” is pretty terrific.

* If you know the source of the image, this is one of the funniest Kanye + Comics entries ever.

Sexbuzz
Andrew White, writer/artist
Self-published online, 2010-
Currently ongoing
Read it here

Holy shit. Who is this guy?

Though I first encountered Andrew White’s work through a collaboration with the writer Brian John Mitchell on one of Mitchell’s very tiny minicomics, I didn’t really become aware of White as a creator until a few weeks ago, when (I believe via twitter) I followed a link to his homepage and read this science-fiction sex/spy/slice-of-life webcomic. To say I was impressed would be an absurd understatement. Let me put it this way: I emailed my friends freaking out about him, but refused to tell him his name, because I didn’t want the word going out. A quick google search, in fact, had revealed essentially zero hits. The only person talking about Andrew White was Andrew White, and barely at that. That is nuts.

In Sexbuzz, you’ll see a lot of what you like in the comics of Dash Shaw in the way White fuses science-fictional ideas with formal play rather than with set dressing, which in turn gives him the freedom to pursue human-interest storylines without getting tripped up by excessive visual worldbuilding. You’ll see some Ryan Cecil Smith in how he uses loose, almost ramshackle character designs and a fine sense of movement and momentum in his action sequences to make his world feel loose, large, and full of possibility. You’ll see Paul Pope in his big thick ink squiggles, and a fixation on the role of physical objects as a loci of near-future science fiction rather than a more ethereal digital conception of the genre. You’ll even see some Gilbert Hernandez in the way he occasionally pulls back for isolated, abstracted images of the world around us that suffuses it with a weird melancholy magic.

But beyond all the trainspotting, White’s just very good at making the most of the tools at his disposal. The comic’s long vertical scroll gives you the sense of a long story, a story to get lost in, unfurling before your eyes. His graytones are beautifully applied for shading and contour, but also enhance the impression that this is a dingy, rain-soaked city of the night. He’ll slow time down to a crawl with spread-apart panels that evoke McCloud’s infinite canvas without using it outright, then leap forward in time at a chapter break. And he’s constructed the story itself — about underemployed twentysomethings who steal the works for their dangerous technological sex drug Sexbuzz from a sinister corporation — with ample room to play in any number of genres: sci-fi spy thriller, a satire of the corporate/security state, alt/lit young-person relationship drama, action, romance, even erotica. (The nakedly transactional exhibitionism of that opening chapter is hot stuff.) Like Jesse Moynihan’s Forming before it, it’s the kind of webcomic you dream of stumbling across. Long may it run.

(Here are a few pages.)

* Recently on Robot 6: Everybody’s talking about “The Love Bunglers,” and everybody should be talking about Jim Woodring too.

* Dustin Harbin salutes Dylan Williams.

* Lisa Hanawalt draws J.G. Ballard and opens a spiffy new store.

* New comics from Jonny Negron! Not, perhaps, what you’d expect.

* Jordan Crane’s Keeping Two has taken a turn.

* Grant Morrison’s long-discussed plans for a Wonder Woman series seem to be taking shape for sometime next year. Sounds kinky. I wonder if anyone will mutilate a horse, walk around a room naked, or dismember a guy in this one.

* David B. is working on a book on the history of U.S./Middle East relations?

* DC’s relaunch moved a lot of units. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the first time a Big Two publisher has ever brought forth its own set of actual sales figures since I’ve been following these things.

* Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy never seemed to find its way into Wizard’s hallowed halls when I worked there during its run, so I have yet to read any of it. I can’t tell if the NYCC announcement that the title’s moving to Dark Horse means they’ll also be reprinting the previous material in addition to the three new issues they’ve got planned. I hope it does. There couldn’t be a more influential artist than Darrow right now.

* The Sleeper/Criminal/Incognito team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are working on a Lovecraftian noir series called Fatale, surprisingly for Image rather than Marvel’s creator-owned Icon line.

* At Marvel proper, Rick Remender and Gabriel Hardman, one of their best writers and best artists respectively, will be taking over Secret Avengers. It’ll probably be pretty darn good. I read somewhere that Bettie Breitweiser, one of their best colorists, won’t be rejoining Hardman here, though, which is too bad. Also Jack Kirby deserved more credit and rights and money and so do his heirs, but you knew that.

* Marvel’s Tom Brevoort explains how nearly all of a given superhero franchise’s titles can end up dumped into stores on the same day. I do wonder how DC’s experiment with rigorous scheduling will affect this conventional wisdom.

* Worth noting: Zak Smith/Sabbath wrote an RPG manual for his fantasy city Vornheim.

* Real Life Horror: Wake me when Obama sends military advisors to take down the pope.

* They’re not making movie cameras anymore. My jaw dropped when I read this.

* Roger Corman, ladies and gentlemen.

* Scarlet Witch cosplayer at NYCC photographed by Judy Stephens. Sure, sure.

Thickness #2
Angie Wang, Lisa Hanawalt, Michael DeForge, Mickey Zacchilli, Brandon Graham, True Chubbo, Jillian Tamaki, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, October 2011
60 pages
$12
Buy it from the Thickness website

Anthology of the year? I’d need to double-check some release dates, but it certainly seems that way to me. The second installment of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge’s art-smut comics series is an intense, diverse collection of sex comics, beautifully printed and rich enough to revisit well after your first virgin read.

Michael DeForge, god help us all, continues his juggernaut run with what could well be his best comic yet. “College Girl by Night” stars a young man who’s transformed by the light of the full moon into a beautiful young woman, and uses the time to seduce and fuck college boys. His/her narrative captions don’t comment on the night-in-the-life activities depicted in the art, but rather explain the background of the transformations, her preferred conquests (tired of her “spoiled, drunken nineteen-year-olds,” she’s “made vague plans to set my sights on Edgeton professors, posing a student seeking advice after hours”), her almost idle questions about the science of it all (“Maybe if I got pregnant, it would only show when I transformed. If I even have a uterus, that is”), fictional precedents (“When Billy changed into Captain Marvel he wasn’t technically ‘transforming’…he was having his Billy Batson body physically replaced with an entirely different Captain Marvel one”), and daydreams about starting a relationship while in female form (“I once found a Missed Connection written about me on Craigslist”). It’s funny stuff, featuring DeForge’s trademark juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane. But it’s also really, really hot stuff. His character design for the main character’s female form is a note-perfect assemblage of alluring details: spagetti-like tendrils of hair, a dusting of freckles, a short and nearly translucent dress, long lashes that flutter when she throws her mouth open in ecstasy. But then DeForge takes the ruthlessly (if ironically) heterosexual nature of the situation (as she herself puts it, “Is it hugely unimaginative that during my time as a woman, the only activities I’ve done so far is fuck myself or get fucked?”) and crashes it right into its own subtext, reversing the transformation mid-coitus and presenting the two college guys now present on the scene with the opportunity to pick up where they left off, or not. Even if your door doesn’t swing in that direction, there’s a willingness to be led solely by pleasure and desire, a “Shhhh–no one can see, so why not?” quality, that’s hard to deny.

Brandon Graham’s “Dirty Deeds” is the most lighthearted of the contributions (well, aside from True Chubbo’s), and his sense of humor isn’t mine. It’s got this bigfooted vaudevillian underground schtickiness to it that’s just not my thing unless it’s Marc Bell. (Lots and lots of puns: “prostate of shock,” “cervix with a smile,” “I was young, I needed the monkey” — that last one’s a bit of a long story.) But that’s not to say that a breezy sex romp isn’t a welcome addition to this issue’s 31 flavors. Certainly Graham’s warm, curving line is shiny and happy enough to make up for a few jokes that leave me cold, and it’s fascinating watching him use it to achieve certain unique effects — the way he crams detail into limited segments of the page, piling line on line like a soft-serve ice cream cone, while letting the rest of the page breathe, say, which in turn lets him work wonders with images of massive science-fictional scale. And he really makes the most of Sands’s red-orange risograph’d coloring, particularly with his vivacious heroine’s hair and a sexy tan-line effect using what looks like the world’s tiniest zipatone dots. I’m kind of amazed that anything would give this Adrian Tomine print a run for its money in the “Sexiest Use of Tanlines 2011” sweepstakes, but there you have it.

Mickey Zacchilli’s contribution is the most off-model of the bunch, a melancholy affair in which a Brian Chippendalesque lost girl loses her wedding ring and therefore enters some weird subterranean sex chamber, in which a brawny beast and a “slime worm” have their way with her as she worries about other things. What keeps her going is the promise of ice cream on the other side of the chamber, but the showstopping reverie begins with the phrase “All I could think about at that moment were all the various objects that I had never stuck in my vagina.” Arrayed in the closest thing to a clinical grid as Zacchilli’s noisy, scratchy line can muster, this assortment goes from “Yeah, okay, feasible for a curious young woman” (“screwdriver,” “chisel tip Sharpie permanent marker”) to “uh-oh” (“rawhide dog bone,” “rotting arm,” “disembodied head”). When added to the brusque treatment she receives from the creature who lets her in — “Thru the door Alice, Jeanette, Angie, whatever” he says, her identity unimportant — and her tears when she discovers the ice cream shop is closed, it makes for a distressing portrait of disconnect between mind and body, thought and deed.

Dare I call Angie Wang’s contribution erotica rather than smut? Wang offers a four-page start-to-finish portrait of two women — one seemingly shy or hesitant, the other taking charge — having sex. Each panel depicts a discrete body part or moment of connection. It’s a familiar panoptic effect for this kind of thing, and I usually find it to be a bit false to the experience of sex, presenting it as a sort of greatest-hits grab bag rather than a journey from start to finish where the momentum, the upping of the ante from moment to moment, is key. But Wang cleverly jettisons the mishmash approach with an array of techniques: ratcheting the panel grid back from page to page, from 16 to 9 to 4 to a final, climactic (pun intended) splash page; using tangents to connect one panel to the next; paring away dialogue and sound as she goes; altering the focus of each page, from foreplay to initial genital contact to climax to afterglow. Whether despite or because of its delicate, painterly line, it’s got oomph.

Lisa Hanawalt’s contribution is profoundly Hanawaltian. Using the tried-and-true porn setup of the teacher with the hot student, she subverts (or heightens, depending on what you’re into) the fantasy by having the pair’s taboo rendez-vous take place in full view of the rest of the class; the teacher doesn’t even stop delivering his lesson on unreliable narrators (“the narrator makes mistakes” he says as he unzips his fly). Hanawalt apes the male focus on individual body parts with alarming accuracy: “Oh god, her tits! Tiiiiiits…And that ASS,” thinks the teacher over a series of panels focusing on the student’s curves with that familiar combination of thumbs-up celebration and lizard-brain leer. Oh, did I mention she short-circuits the whole thing by giving the girl the featureless conical head of a worm while stuffing her cleavage with fibrous miniature worms, and by giving the bird-headed teacher a penis that itself ends in a bird’s head, which literally vomits its semen all over her ass and vagina when he pulls out? When she slaps a David Lee Roth-referencing “CLASS DISMISSED!” on the final panel, I’m not sure whether to run for the door or stay for extra credit.

The final two contributions hearken back to Sands’s zine roots: Ray Sohn and his anonymous wife serve up one of the funniest, grossest True Chubbo strips to date (you’ll love the Lawrence of Arabia “NO PRISONERS!” quote, especially once you see the context in which it’s being quoted), while Jillian Tamaki’s centerfold pinup intrigues with its incongruous details — a monumental topless woman kneels amid lush flowers and a small army of Russian doll-like people-shaped dildos (I think?), her implacable gaze juxtaposed with her very human bikini-area stubble and a big goofy digital watch on her wrist. They give Thickness #2 a welcome diversity of form as well as content, a “hey, here’s everything that was fit to print” feel.

Thickness #2 is the real deal: talented, fearless cartoonists working in that viscous red zone of pleasure, terror, filth, and fun where the only thing that matters is what the body does and doesn’t want, and your brain is simply forced to go along for the ride. Bravo, thumbs up, panties down.

Says Dan Nadel.

Says Frank Santoro.

Says Adrian Tomine.

Says Bob Temuka.

Says Tom Spurgeon.

Says me.