The News Blog of Comics Culture
Tweet I’m home for the holidays, and spending some time digging around my parent’s basement, delving into my assorted and sordid collection of ephemera. The above scan is from a photocopy of a bound volume of Life Magazine. While college students today have numerous distractions available to them via cellphones and wi-fi, back in the [...]
Tweet Why didn’t *WE* think of commissioning this? For those not in the know, Father Ted is one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, involving a bunch of Irish priests and their tea-loving housekeeper living on a small island off the coast. The show was created by Graham Linehan, best known these days for [...]
Tweet Totally missed this before, but better late than never? “Shallow Gravy”
Tweet Do not open this link until you have a lot of time. The online archives of Illustration magazine include piles of information on artists like Haddon Hubbard Sundblom, who perfected the “Santa Drinking Coke” look, above. If you are excited by an article titled “Inside the mind of Reynold Brown”, this is the place [...]
The late Joel Beck was a pioneer of the Bay Area Underground comics revolution, illustrating Lenny of Laredo, a satirical bio of Lenny Bruce, and a naughty poster of Daisy Duck among other things. The SF Chronicle reports that he’s also part of a family mystery his survivors are trying to crack:
Tweet Comedian/actor/sometime comics writer Patton Oswalt expresses clearly the vague feeling we’ve often haphazardly batted about here: as Geek Culture becomes the norm, it is itself dying. Oswalt pegs the phenomenon of “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever” as part of the problem, as the instantaneous availability of once-arcane knowledge devalues the feeling of achievement [...]
Marvel had quite a lot of new material on the market in November. Aside from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN shifting to a fortnightly format with its new “Big Time” direction, we’ve also got two new ongoing titles, GENERATION HOPE and SPIDER-GIRL. Further down the chart, there’s also a veritable horde of new miniseries, including ASTONISHING THOR, OSBORN, SHE-HULKS and a whole bunch of CHAOS WAR tie-ins.
As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market. It’s a relatively close month, though, with a lead over DC of 40% to 37% in unit share and 34% to 33% in dollars. A major factor there will be a number of high-profile Batman comics in the top 10.
Tweet The influential and historic DARK HORSE PRESENTS anthology — last seen as an online anthology available on MySpace and later adapted to print — will be back in April 2011, according to a press release and these two covers. Frank Miller’s XERXES is the prequel to 300 which he’s been talking about for a [...]
Tweet Two young men from LA have pled guilty to selling bogus Comic-Con passes. The two advertised their counterfeit passes on Craigslist and sold them to two women for $120 each. The purchasers were dismayed to find the tickets were phony when they arrived at the show. The charge is a misdemeanor and the criminals [...]
TweetStuff we’ve been bookmarking: § You know you’ve arrived when internet blowhards start yapping about you. In this case, a right-wing blogger protests the new Franco-Algerian-Muslim Batman of France. This follows similar protests over the casting of dark-skinned Idris Elba as Heimdall in the Thor movie, with white supremacists calling for a boycott, if by [...]
Tweet Rather expectedly, my flight this morning to snowbound NYC was canceled. Unexpectedly, I can’t get another flight home until Friday. Oops. I had a bunch of things I was working on for this week, but I foolishly neglected to upload them to the server and they’re all sitting on my home computer. Oh well. [...]
Tweet As you probably know, the Spider-Man musical claimed another victim when Christopher Tierney, 31, the main aerobatic Spider-Man, plummeted 20 feet when his safety harness malfunctioned. Although he managed to tuck and roll in the fall, the injuries threaten his career as a dancer: Timothy Tierney said doctors were “cautiously optimistic” that his son [...]
Tweet I know you don’t come here to see my vacation photos, but if there was ever a Man Against Weather post, it’s been my Christmas trip to the UK. My arrival last weekend — with a connecting flight in Paris — got caught up in the ongoing European travel crisis — earlier and more [...]
From the Archives: Star Trek #7, March 1970
TweetHere’s a comic from my brothers’ collection, the type of comic kids read back in the 1960s and 70s. We didn’t care about condition or collectibility, we just read the comics, tossed them in a cupboard somewhere, and maybe re-read them when we were bored. That pile never got in the way, never got too [...]