Author: Andrew Wheeler

Comics Links

Newsarama has discovered the exisitence of Triple-A Baseball Heroes, in which Marvel superheroes apparently battle villainy in tandem with minor-league team mascots. (The cover is our illustration today.)

Comics Reviews

Ain’t It Cool News reviews a pile of recent comics, starting with the Booster Gold relaunch.

CHUD’s Thor’s Comic Column presents reviews of comics by several people, none of whom are actually named Thor.

Comic Book Resources’s Hannibal Tatu reviews a pile of this week’s comics.

Comics Reporter reviews Hurricane Season #1.

The Daily Cross Hatch reviews Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.

Comics Worth Reading reviews To Terra by Keiko Takemiya.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog covers this week’s comics.

Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good also reviews this week’s comics.

Comics Should Be Good’s Brian Cronin looks at the first issue of the second series of Mouse Guard.

SF/Fantasy Links

What is Star Wars were a musical? Let’s Blow This Thing! might just be the result. [via Extra Life]

Locus Online lists the new books that they saw in mid-August.

Jeff Somers’s new book The Electric Church now has its own website.

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Comics Links

Variety reports that Todd McFarlane’s toy-based re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz is being developed as a movie. (See all the toys here; everyone else went with Dorothy as the obvious illo, but I thought his vision of Toto was just as bad, but even weirder.)

Mark Evanier writes about Robert Kanigher and his Metal Men.

Nick Bertozzi has posted the proposal he and James Sturm put together in 2003 for a graphic novel adaptation of a screenplay called The Black Diamond Detective Agency. (The owners of the property ended up giving it to Eddie Campbell to turn into a GN, which came out earlier this year.)

Jayme Lynn Blaschke visits Metropolis, Illinois, and takes pictures of all of the Superman stuff there.

Comics Should Be Good casts their usual beady eye on DC’s November covers.

Occasional Superheroine believes everything is wrong with DC Comics, and explains their problems in great detail.

The Elmira Star-Gazette is happy to see the new comic based on a video game, Halo: Uprising.

Dick May or May Not Read Your Blog begins an odd, quixotic series on the career of Rob Liefeld with a long post about his work on Hawk & Dove.

Comics Reviews 

Wizard reviews Mike Allred’s Madman, Vol. 1 and Marvel’s X-23: Target X.

Comics Reporter reviews a mini-comic called Click by Sara Ryan.

Jog of The Savage Critics looks at Bill Jemas’s reign at Marvel, the “progressive” era, Igor Kordey, and, finally, the first eight issues of Soldier X.

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Comics Links

Toon Zone asks Philip Brophy to explain to them how wonderful Osamu Tezuka is, in connection with an exhibition of Tezuka’s work now in San Francisco.

The Beat has a whole load of Toronto Comic Arts Festival photos.

The International Herald Tribune looks at the recent increase in graphic novel publishing in the UK.

The Seattle Times takes a look at DC Comics’s new Minx line.

Scott Shaw! explains how, once upon a time, Archie met the Punisher. (It was the ‘90s – that kind of thing happened a lot.)

Comics Reviews

Comics Reporter reviews World War Hulk #3 and Booster Gold #1.

Boston Now reviews the graphic novel Re-Gifters by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew, and Marc Hempel.

SF/Fantasy Links

Paul McAuley explains why he writes short stories (and it’s certainly not the money).

Edward Champion is not happy – at great length – with Adam Gopnik’s recent profile of Philip K. Dick in the New Yorker.

Tor Books will be podcasting from Worldcon, with commentary from Tom Doherty and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

John Klima lists some of the major SF/Fantasy short-fiction outlets (for ease in supporting them).

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Comics Links

Comic Book Resources looks back at the long, odd history of the Metal Men.

The Toronto Star reports on a Toronto Comic Arts Festival presentation on four wordless graphic novels from the early 20th century.

If you’re like me, and spent much of the weekend in the company of kids watching a Naruto marathon, you might also find this Paul Gravette lecture about Naruto to be useful in explaining what the heck it all is about.

Comics Should Be Good takes a look at all of Image Comics’s October covers.

Mike Sterling discovers that if you stare at a poster of Superman’s funeral long enough, the abyss also gazes into you.

Comics Reviews

Comics Reporter reviews Rian Hughes’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows.

The New York Times reviews Emily Flake’s These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves and Jessica Bruder’s Burning Book.

Warren Peace Sings The Blues reviews Whiteout by Rucka and Lieber.

SF/Fantasy Links

Douglas Cohen responds to comments and criticisms of his drive to increase subscriptions for print SF/Fantasy magazines.

Irene Gallo of The Art Department showcases Jon Foster’s covers for Timothy Zahn’s “Dragonback” series.

The Hugo Awards now have a website of their own – just in time for this year’s awards, which will be announced at Nippon 2007 in less than two weeks.

The UK SF Book News Network lists all of the newly-published books that they’ve received in the last three weeks.

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Comics Links

Comic Book Resources investigates the existence of women – often attractive women, some of whom actually read comics – at comics conventions. Astonishing! (Illustration: one of those elusive “real women.”)

A long 1977 New York Times article about Harvey Kurtzman and Mad magazine has been posted by Mike Lynch. [via Mark Evanier, who had some comments on it]

The Times (of London) checks in with Cam Kennedy and lan Grant about their in-the-works graphic novel adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

Mark Trail likes squirrels. [via the Comics Curmudgeon]

Kleefeld on Comics posts scans from the mid-70s Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book. [via everyone else blogging about comics, basically]

Comics Reviews

Bookgasm reviews the second trade paperback collecting the DC series 52.

Richard of Forbidden Planet International reviews The Other Side.

Eddie Campbell reviews Robert C. Harvey’s biography of Milton Caniff.

Dana of Comics Fodder reviews this week’s Marvel comics.

Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good does that one better – reviewing a pile of this week’s comics regardless of their publisher.

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Comics Links

The Beat has a few choice photos from the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con – sure, it was smaller and easier to get around, but look at the clothes they had to wear! (This photo of Mark Evanier, and the others at this link are by Alan Light.)

Todd Allen is not entirely positive in this Comics Should Be Good report on Wizard World Chicago.

Grumpy Old Fan (at Newsarama) pokes at the current legal issues around Superboy’s ownership.

The Beat has posted the official, lawyer-approved settlement agreement between Fantagraphics and Harlan Ellison.

Comics Reviews

Charleston City Paper reviews a few comics collections, including Flight, Vol. 4 and Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting.

Blogcritics reviews the first issues of Black Adam and Metal Men.

The A.V. Club has a comics review column this week, starting off with Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets and covering over a dozen other compilations or original GNs.

Comics Reporter reviews Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened.

Comics Reporter reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Chance in Hell.

Brian Cronin at Comics Should Be Good reviews Good As Lily, the new Minx comic.

The Savage Critics usually has a couple of reviews every day (and I’m too lazy to link to every single one of them); here’s Graeme McMillan writing about a bunch of comics that came out last week.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reviews Death Valley.

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First, the consumer report: LoserPalooza is a treasury-sized collection, which means it’s larger and more expensive than the usual run of comic-strip collections, and also that it collects strips from two previous smaller collections. In this case, LoserPalooza has the comics from Say Cheezy and Scrum Bums. LoserPalooza does have the Sunday strips in color, though, so it’s not entirely twice-baked beans. (It’s also rarely clear whether a strip is being reprinted in its entirety to begin with, or if all of the strips from the smaller collections make it into the Treasuries; specifically, it’s not clear in this case.)

Get Fuzzy is one of the most successful new strips of the past decade, and possibly the most successful strip launch since Dilbert in 1989. (The competition includes strips like Pickles, Baby Blues, and Adam @ Home, which aren’t as edgy as Get Fuzzy and so are probably in more papers daily. On the other hand, Get Fuzzy seems to be one of the most successful comics when it comes to selling reprint collections, so it’s hard to tell which strip actually makes the most money or has the most readers.) In any case, it’s still fairly young, for a daily newspaper strip, and it’s grown to a lot of papers pretty quickly.

As the characters note in a storyline mid-way through this book, Get Fuzzy could be seen as a Bizarro-world version of Garfield. A man of indeterminate age (Rob Wilco) lives with a cat (Bucky) and a dog (Satchel), and funny stuff ensues. Except, in Get Fuzzy, we don’t identify with the cat – Bucky is clearly insane (as all cats are). Satchel is lovable but dim, also like most dogs. And Rob isn’t quite as much of a loser as Jon Arbuckle. Well, he is a vegan rugby fan who hasn’t had a date in years, does something unspecified involving crunching numbers, and roots for the Red Sox – so maybe I should say that he’s a more realistic loser than Jon is. Get Fuzzy doesn’t have the ground-into-the-turf running jokes Garfield does – and I hope it won’t, even if it runs for thirty years – but it’s vastly younger than Garfield is, and hasn’t had time to get stale.

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