This has been floating around the inter-tubes recently: a TV interview with Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith that ran on WFSB (channel 3, Hartford, CT) Eyewitness News on November 7, 2003. Dig that close-up camera work!

The audio isn't great, but it's there. Here's the legendary Milton Berle cock joke courtesy Freddie Roman at Drew Friedman's Friar's Club event:

A Cathy Malkasian sketch from Comicon 2007. 

Anyone heading to Portland for Stumptown later this month might wanna get to town a couple of nights early for this one:

Thank you Tony Millionaire!

(T minus 27 days til fatherhood... and I'm praying she'll have lost that stubble by the time kindergarten starts up.)

Now reprinted here on the Fantagraphics website for your reading enjoyment: the full Introduction to the forthcoming, revised softcover edition of Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosenkranz. It actually comprises 3 sections: the Foreword, "The Setting" and "Distant Early Warnings." Read it here.

Flickr user lilylord has some fantastic photos of Drew Friedman taken during his visit to L.A., including the above, with Drew approving of Johnny Ryan's homage (while Glenn Bray gives a dissenting opinion).

TONTO KIDD archives some great old illustrators on his Flickr page. He's Italian so a lot of the work is foreign (and new to me). Unfortunately he doesn't have any sets organized so you just have to flip through and see what you find. 

The average-joe quality of these Spidey images kills me...

UPDATE: Tonto-Kidd (Enrico) tells me that he had a Flickr account with over 1,500 images archived before something happened and it was lost. So this is probably a good page to bookmark for more great stuff in the future.

On Thursday, April 17, author David Hajdu will be at Town Hall to promote his new book, THE TEN CENT PLAGUE, detailing the Senate crackdown on comic books in the 1950s amidst fears of their contributing to juvenile delinquency. Fantagraphics didn't publish this book, but we like it so much that we're teaming up with Town Hall to promote the event. For you NEW YORKER readers out there, the current issue includes a review of THE TEN CENT PLAGUE (as well as a swell "Talk of the Town" piece by Lillian Ross about Drew Friedman's Friar's Club event to promote MORE OLD JEWISH COMEDIANS).

Anyway, we hope you'll join us for what promises to be a fascinating talk about one of the more curious and ignoble moments in American pop culture history, a period which put several comic book publishers out of business and threatened to destroy the industry completely. Here's the full description:

Conventional wisdom places rock 'n' roll at the dawn of American youth culture, but it was the comic books of the 1930s and '40s that first created a radical divide between the generations. David Hajdu looks at why Jews — such as Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Stan Lee — dominated the comic book industry, and how they employed comics to express their Jewish experience. Music critic for The New Republic, Hajdu is the author of Positively 4th Street. His new book is The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America. Presented by Nextbook: Public Programs on Jewish Literature, Culture and Ideas. Advance tickets are $8/$6 Town Hall members, students, and under 25 only at www.nextbook.org. Call 206/744-2289 for more information.

Thursday, April 17, 2008, 7:30 PM. Downstairs at Town Hall, enter on Seneca Street.