Author: Andrew Wheeler

Comics Links

They’re sold out now, but for a brief, shining moment, the world had a chance to buy knitted Hellboy dolls. (Figures? Plushes? What do you call these things?) [via Newsarama]

This weekend, The New York Times dug through Stan Lee’s boxes of old photos for an article about the places he’s lived.

Comic Book Resources interviews Kent Williams.

The Friends of Lulu are looking for new board members, sayeth The Beat.

The Beat lists Diamond graphic novel sales charts from 2006 and 2007 (to date).

The Harlan Ellison/Fantagraphics legal matter just will not die…even after the supposedly final settlement, Ellison has now balked at posting the required-by-the-agreement 500-word rebuttal by Fantagraphics’s Gary Groth to three specific claims Ellison made about Groth. The unposted statement, and Ellison’s lawyer’s “not gonna do it” letter, are in the middle of this long post at The Beat.

Comics Reporter interviews Warren Craghead. (No, I didn’t know who he was, either. But CR likes him…)

The ComicBloc interviews Sean McKeever.

Some guy named Dan Stafford:

1)    wrote polite letters to various comics folks, like R. Crumb, Joe Matt, and James Kochalka, asking some questions.

2)    got letters back from same, with answers to those questions.

3)    Posted the results here.

The Bookseller (the UK’s magazine of bookselling) recently reported that UK manga publishers have had to beg the big chains over there to expand the space devoted to manga. Either the UK market is vastly different from the US, or Waterstone’s just isn’t that interested in making great piles of money…

Comics Reviews

The Joplin Independent reviews the Marvel comics adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

The Globe and Mail reviews a bunch of graphic novels and comics, starting with Sara Varon’s Robot Dreams.

Hannibal Tabu of Comic Book Resources lists his “buy pile” for this week.

Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good reviews Nick Abadzis’s Laika.

Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good reviews this week’s comics, starting with Action Philosophers! #9.

Greg Hatcher of CSBG reviews a pile of stuff he got for free.

From The Savage Critics:

• Graeme McMillan reviews Black Canary Wedding Planner
• McMillan also reviews Amazing Spider-Man #544
• Diana Kingston-Gabai reviews Captain America: The Chosen #1
• Jeff Lester reviews Rutu Modan’s graphic novel Exit Wounds
• McMillan is back with a look at Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin #1
• Jog looks back at an old miniseries, Batman: The Cult
• and McMillan comes back again for a review of Captain America: The Chosen #1. of his own.

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Comics Links

Comic Book Resources talks to producer Tony Panaccio about the recent Heroes Initiative DVD, featuring a conversation among Stan Lee, Joe Quesada, and Kevin Smith.

CBR’s Mayo Report crunches the numbers on comics and trade paperback sales in July. Bottom line? Marvel is selling a hell of a lot of TPs collecting series that barely ended.

The Wall Street Journal thinks that women might buy more comics if given more of the stuff they’d like.

The Bookseller – the magazine of bookselling in the UK – points out that manga is huge over there, too.

Comics Reviews

Bookgasm reviews DC Comics Covergirls.

Forbidden Planet International reviews Marvel’s Secret War.

PLAYBACK:stl reviews Immortal Iron Fist #1.

Seibertron reviews two upcoming Transformers comics: Devastation #1 and Beast Wars Ascending #1.

Comics Reporter reviews The Mice Templar #1.

Blogcritics reviews Graphic Classics: Bram Stoker.

Comics Worth Reading looks at the Carey/Liew/Hempel Minx original graphic novel Re-Gifters.

Panels and Pixels investigates Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog reviews this week’s comics, starting with The All-New Atom #15.

Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good reviews She-Hulk #21, writer Dan Slott’s last issue.

Cronin also reviews the first part of the latest everything-will-change-forever storyline, “One More Day,” in Amazing Spider-Man #544. (And does anyone else start singing Les Miserables songs every time he hears that title?)

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Comics Links

Costumes? Check. Vigilante activities? Check. The KKK were always closer to mainstream superheroes than we’d probably like, but it took Craig Yoe to dig up the bizarre ‘20s newspaper comic strips in which a flying KKK squad do good deeds.

Political cartoonist Steve Bell is interviewed by the Sunday Herald. [via Forbidden Planet International]

Wizard has photos from Fan Expo Canada 2007.

TrekWeb interviews IDW editor Andrew Steven Harris about the future of Star Trek comics.

Comic Book Resources interviews Christos Gage about the upcoming House of M: Avengers mini-series.

Heidi MacDonald remembers Disney Adventures Magazine at The Beat.

ICv2 interviews DC Comics’s King of All Media, Paul Levitz.

On the Fantagraphics Blog, Gary Groth interviews Alias the Cat creator Kim Deitch.

New Scientist employs the theory of social networks to explain why super-heroes always win.

MangaBlog has a longer version of an interview with Mark Crilley that originally ran in Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.

Comics Reviews

Bookgasm reviews John Porcellino’s King-Cat Classix.

At Comic Book Resources, Augie De Blieck, Jr. reviews two recent TwoMorrows books and other things.

Comics Reporter reviews Monte Beauchamp’s Devilish Greetings.

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews James Sturm’s America.

Warren Peace Sings the Blues reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Chance in Hell.

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Labor Day’s over and it’s back to work or school. Here’s some cheap thrills to get you through the day. (Our illustration is a recent Clay Bennett editorial cartoon.)

Comics Links

The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Evan Dorkin (in the first of what may be many parts).

Eddie Campbell remembers zipatone.

Comic Book Resources talks to Paul Jenkins.

Just in case you missed it: Monday was, in the Comic Curmudgeon’s words, Fööberdämmerung.

Comic Addiction talks to Ben Templesmith.

Newsarama slashes summer. No, really. That’s what it says.

The Montreal Gazette reports that a Dragon Ball Z live-action movie will be filmed there over the next year. OK, is there any chance that this won’t suck? [via Newsarama]

Comics Reviews

Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good reviews the first issue of the new magazine about comics, Comics Foundry.

From The Savage Critics:

• Jog on Angry Youth Comics #13
• Graeme McMillan on The Mice Templar #1

SF/Fantasy Links

SF Scope reports that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have just suspended their ePiracy committee in the wake of SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt’s recent badly-handled complaints against the Internet text-sharing site Scridb. (The full SFWA motion is also available on their LJ community.)

Robert J. Sawyer thinks the process for the Canadian SF award the Prix Aurora is horribly messed up this year — but he has a suggestion to help fix it.

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Comics Links

Wired has a long article about the creators of Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik.

Rick Geary presents: The Comic Con Murder Case, a short online comic.

Comics Reporter interviews Nick Abadzis, cartoonist of Laika.

Greg Hatcher of Comics Should Be Good thinks about history and comics and ends up daring DC Comics to just reboot their entire line already.

Comics Reviews

The Toronto Star reviews Scott Chantler’s The Annotated Northwest Passage.

The LA Times reviews Adrian Tomine’s upcoming graphic novel Shortcomings.

Brad Curran of Comics Should Be Good reviews Countdown to Adventure #1.

From The Savage Critics:

• Graeme McMillan on Local #10
• McMillan on The Last Fantastic Four Story
• Diana Kingston-Gabai on World War Hulk: X-Men #3
• and Jog on Batman Annual #26

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reviews DMZ: Public Works.

Edward Champion reviews Warren Ellis’s novel Crooked Little Vein in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

SF/Fantasy Links

The 2009 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Montreal, Canada. Neil Gaiman will be the author Guest of Honor.

SF Site has indexed the contents of the first twenty-four annual volumes of Gardner Dozois’s annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, by author, title and volume.

Reports from Worldcon:

• Alma Alexander: Friday/Saturday, Sunday
• K.J. Bishop (note: contains no reference to the Worldcon or SF, but she is in Japan, which would be a huge coincidence)
• Jay Lake

And reports from Dragon*Con:

• Peter David
• Justine Larbalestier

Neil Gaiman visits the Great Wall of China and learns that giraffes are forbidden to drive cars there.

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Chance in Hell is Gilbert Hernandez’s second stand-alone graphic novel, after Sloth. Like Sloth, it’s unconnected to his Love & Rockets work, but – unlike Sloth – it’s deeply metaphorical and difficult to follow. It’s set among unnamed people, living in unnamed places in an unspecified time, worrying about criminals with monikers but not names and slaughtering each other at whim. I’m afraid it’s all supposed to be an allegory for something, most likely the Iraq war, but I couldn’t quite bring that into focus.

The story takes place in three time periods in the life of one woman, but they’re not separated or otherwise marked as chapters; there are no captions at all. Our protagonist is called “the Empress,” and she’s the only person with a name – besides “the Babykiller,” whom is talked about but never shown – out of dozens in this graphic novel.

We meet the Empress as a young girl, living among people prone to extreme violence in a Mad Max-ian trash heap. Eight or ten unnamed male characters, mostly teenagers, fight over her, while two technicians try to maintain a fence around a large, dangerous piece of unspecified machinery. Empress is perhaps four or five, playing with a doll and not talking much. At the end of this scene, after much bloodshed, a man in a suit takes Empress away, with a promise to become her new “daddy.”

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Comics Links

Shaenon Garrity imagines what Edward Gorey’s adaptation of “The Trouble With Tribbles” might have been like.

The Beat takes a look at DC’s sales in July.

Comicon interviews James Kochalka, whose new children’s book Squirrely Grey has just been published.

Comicon also talks to Scott Shaw! about the rebirth of Captain Carrot.

The Wall Street Journal reports on Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is trying to use manga’s popularity in the West to improve Japan’s image.

Ridiculopathy has the sarcastic version of the old how-to-create-a-webcomic story.

Comic Book Resources interviews what looks like every person connected with the new Marvel Comics Presents series.

CBR also interviews Joe Casey about his new series Pilot Season: Velocity.

Comics Reviews

AppScout reviews the preview chapter of a new graphic novel, Shooting War.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog covers this week’s comics, starting with Avengers: The Initiative #5.

Graeme McMillan of The Savage Critics learns that Gene Simmons’s Dominatrix #1 is just as bad as he thought it would be.

Awards

According to Charles Stross, his novel Glasshouse has won the 2006 Prometheus Award, given by the Libertarian Futurist Society to the best Libertarian SF novel of the year.

SF/Fantasy Links

Tobias Buckell runs down a current SFWA kerfuffle: one particular officer is a bit extreme on fighting copyright infringement, and has demanded the website Scribd take down a whole bunch of things are aren’t actually infringements. (And here’s the original report from Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing.)

One more Worldcon report today, from Pat Cadigan.

Robert J. Sawyer walks the Great Wall of China – and takes pictures.

Commonwealth of Fantasy, you can rest easy tonight. The SF Diplomat is taking his ball and going home.

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Today, our illustration is of a felt replica of an Underwood typewriter, simply because dogged persistence in the pursuit of idiosyncratic ends should always be celebrated. That is really impressive.

Comics Links

Comic Book Resources has a Bizarro talk with Geoff Johns.

CBR also chatted with ComicMix‘s own Mike Baron, whose character The Badger will be returning soon from IDW. ("Lawyers? I hate lawyers!")

Comics Reporter runs down the reactions to the news that Berkley Breathed’s strip Opus has been dropped from a number of papers for two Sundays for religious intolerance and making the wrong kind of jokes.

Newsarama has another article in their ongoing series about stuff they love, “I (heart) comics.” Has anyone told them that the heart icon doesn’t come through in feeds – and not always on their page as well – so it looks like they’re saying “I slash team books?” And do they understand the significance of slash?

Comics Reviews

The Book Nerd reviews Linda Medley’s graphic novel Castle Waiting.

The Tri-City News loves itself some Scott Pilgrim.

Blogcritics reviews The Poison Diaries by Jane, Duchess of Northumberland & Colin Stimpson.

SF/Fantasy Links

Here’s an official report on the Chengdu International SF/Fantasy Conference, and here’s Neil Gaiman’s personal report.

Ellen Kushner has arrived in Japan for Worldcon.

And so has Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

(Further links, I hope, as more people arrive in Japan and start posting.)

SF Diplomat circles back to the subject of Fantasy (which he still hates). You know, I could read one or two romance novels, loathe them, and then create a huge, unwieldy critical apparatus too, but…I have better things to do with my time. (He gets hammered in the comments quite comprehensively on similar grounds.)

John Joseph Adams’s upcoming anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse has a website.

Niall Harrison of Torque Control has some notes from an evening with William Gibson.

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