Unscripted, by Elayne Riggs
Last weekend, New York City had its annual Del Close marathon. I’m sure our esteemed editor Mike Gold and my fellow columnist John Ostrander were somewhere about, if only in spirit. I was home doing housework, lounging about and occasionally glancing at the Olympics. Which can be tough, by the way, if you’ve got a female gaze. I do wish the men’s and women’s sports getups bore a bit more resemblance to each other, kinda like the outfits most of the countries wore during the Parade of Nations.
But instead we have women’s volleyball team uniforms, for both the indoor and beach variety, that consist of either porn-movie short-shorts or bikini bottoms, while the guys get to wear nice loose regulation exercise-type shorts. I cry unfair! Butt shot after butt shot, and the only time my prurient interest is slightly catered to is when it rains and the boys’ clothes start to lovingly cling to them… er. Ahem. Where was I? Oh yeah, and what’s with the creepy male coaches for all the women’s teams? In this day and age that’s as unseemly as me drooling over young nubile volleyball-playing boys… Uh. Well.
So, I’ve been sitting here improv’ing on my computer keyboard. I do that a lot. Maybe it’s the writer’s version of riffing on a jazz tune. Or was that reefering? I’m so not hep. Robin says our marriage sometimes feels like a never-ending improv routine. I think the best marriages ought to be like that, with two well-matched partners constantly playing off each other. Of course, as accident-prone as I am, I could wish my particular situation involved more wit and less slapstick, but there you are. (more…)
Kurt Busiek’s brain is about average-sized, I assume. And yet it contains this entire city, detailed down to every last resident’s personality and scrap of trash in the street.
($29.99). Busiek ventures back to the not-so-pleasant past to tell the story of two brothers who go on very different paths amidst the chaos of superheroes and villains.
This is pretty much the contest that defines the term "revamp," folks. Harris Comics and the Project: Rooftop crew are looking for aspiring artists to 
The controversy over just who should see The Dark Knight heats up in the UK, while over here we hide out at the comic shop among a stack of great new trades out this week, plus:
or 
Scout, Volume Two
I never talked to either Jack Kirby or Stan Lee about politics, so I don’t really have any idea where they stood on the subject. My guess would be that following their political spoor wouldn’t take you very far west and that they didn’t have much sympathy for the hippie-rebels of the 60s (and here allow me to blush and hide my face). After all, they and their parents (and my parents) fought for a place in the American mainstream because, finally, acceptance meant an increased chance of survival and for those outside the tribe, who suffered the Great Depression, not surviving seemed to be a real possibility. Then here came the snotty kids with their tie-dye and their girly haircuts and their wiseass slogans saying that a place in the tribe was not worth struggling for – in fact, the tribe itself was stinking of corruption.
