Category: News

Lemire is in the middle of an impressive thematically-related trilogy of stories about a rural bit of Ontario, Canada – the first book was Tales from the Farm, in early 2007, and the third, [[[The Country Nurse]]], will be along in October of this year. [[[Ghost Stories]]] is the middle book, but it’s a completely independent story – you don’t need to know anything about Tales to read it.

Ghost Stories: Essex County, Vol. 2
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, September 2007, $14.95

Lou Lebeuf is an old, alcoholic, deaf man, living alone on the farm that was his younger brother’s and their father’s before him. He’s also either going senile or just doesn’t care about his current life – and who would? there’s not much to it – so he ignores his new home-care nurse and instead wanders through the memories of his younger days. At first he remembers growing up on that farm, playing hockey with his younger, bigger brother Vince, but he soon moves into the main plot of Ghost Stories.

Lou came up to Toronto to play semi-pro hockey for the Grizzlies around 1950, and Vince followed him up in 1951 — Lou was a solid, smart player, but Vince was a giant bull of a man, dominating the ice once he got angry enough. But, unfortunately for both of them, accompanying Vince on that trip in 1951 was his fiancee, Beth Morgan. Lou was strongly attracted to Beth, and, once — the night after the Grizzlies made the playoffs that March — Lou and Beth had quick, secret sex on a rooftop.

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Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1915, Anthony Joseph “Tony” Strobl graduated from the Cleveland School of Art in 1937 (along with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—Strobl helped them fine-tune a character concept they were working on, which they called "Superman") and began working for Disney a year later.

His first project was doing “in-between” art (the frames between the ones the main animators drew) on Fantasia. Strobl also worked on Pinocchio and Dumbo before joining the Army during World War II.

After the war, he decided to switch from animation to comics, and in 1947 he went to work for Western Publishing. Western produced comics starring characters from Disney, Warner Brothers, and Walter Lantz, and Strobl did a lot of art on Disney’s “Duck” books.

After 1954, he was responsible for the monthly Donald Duck comic. In the mid-’60s Strobl began drawing Disney comics for the international market, and from 1986 to 1987 he drew a daily Donald Duck comic strip for them as well. Strobl died on December 29, 1991.

Once again, a bunch of things that haven’t quite generated a post of their own, but deserve some sort of mention…

• The must-have costumes for San Diego: your own powered exoskeleton, rentable for only $1000 a month– and it’ll make hauling boxes a lot easier too. But if you’re on a budget, you can always go as the Bat-Signal.
• Now where have we heard this before?
• What makes a superhero comic? What, is this like Scott Adams’s checklist on what makes a joke?
• The creatures in Andrew Bell’s head.
• Some Hong Kong "entrepenuer" grabbed all the images from Darren Di Lieto’s The Little Chimp Society website and published it into a 350-page book being sold online for $100. You can read more on this post in Darren’s blog. (Via Stuart Immonen.)
• Tom Brevoort was a teenaged moron. It’s true, he was. And he’s just showing the stuff from 1988– you should have seen the stuff from 1983. On the other hand, I wasn’t much better. But while Tom and I have gotten better, Laura Hudson is still evil.
• A story of love in the letter columns.
• The Flash is back… at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? This wasn’t the Flash Museum I remembered… Now with extra photos of the gala event.

And before I forget… hi, Mom!

Born on May 11, 1962 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, Sandy Carruthers remembers watching the Batman television series when he was only a toddler. He began drawing soon after that, and hasn’t stopped since.

Carruthers attended Holland College from 1979 to 1981, training in its Commercial Design (now Graphic Design) program, then studied illustration at Sheridan College in Ontario. His first job in comics was at Malibu Graphics and included Captain Canuck and what is still his best-known work, the comic book series The Men in Black (later made into the films Men in Black and Men in Black 2).

In 2004, Carruthers began the web comic Canadiana, which took a break but resumed in 2007. He has also done several graphic novels for Graphic Universe, illustrated several books, done a cartoon strip for the Guardian newspaper, and teaches at his old alma mater, Holland College.