• List: Same Hat! Same Hat! names the "Best X of Everything 2008: Comics!" with Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4 by Michael Kupperman in the #5 position

• Review: Optical Sloth likes Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix so much, he's willing to buy you $5 worth of stuff from our website if you don't like it too

• Things to see: For The Boston Globe, Alexander Theroux reviews a recent book about Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy

• Things to see: In Douglas Wolk's convention sketchbook, a page by Charles Burns

Buckle in: 

• Review: The Beat says "You should be reading Rocky"

• Profile: Shameless looks at the collaborative comics of Ellen Forney

• Analysis: Vibrational Match finds Jack Kirby parallels in Gilbert Hernandez's XXX comic Birdland

• Interview: The Daily Cross Hatch posts the second of their three-part chat with Lilli Carré

• Blurbs: At Robot 6, Chris Mautner and Richard Thompson (Cul de Sac) both declare that they're currently reading recent volumes of The Complete Peanuts

• Birthday: On the Jim Flora blog, Irwin Chusid commemorates the 95th anniversary of Flora's birth yesterday

• Birthday: Relatedly, The Comics Reporter notes Jules Feiffer's 80th birthday today

• Things to see: It appears that Michael Kupperman has a new blog under construction; the Internet might be about to get measurably funnier 

• Things to see: This slideshow of photos by Lou Siroy at FOTO8 is accompanied by an introductory essay by Alexander Theroux

• Things to see: More sketchbook pages (a.k.a. "Doodle Dump") from Tom Kaczynski

• Things to see: More Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu-themed desktop wallpaper from Ellen Forney

• Things to see: Rare vintage animation by Hank Ketcham (via The Daily Cartoonist)

• Things to see: A new book cover illustration by Anders Nilsen

Belgians, catch American cartoonists Dash Shaw and Alec Longstreth at Librarie MultiBD in Brussells on February 6 - click here for more information.

Adam Grano says, "I've been working here for more than six years and this is the first time I've been privileged enough to receive a note on Gary's personal stationery." I've been here 16 years years and I've never been so lucky; I'm enormously jealous. I'd like to believe that Gary designed it himself.

Here are some thoughts on last year's comics that I would like to share with you. I don't dare call this a "Best Of" list -- these are merely some comics that I read and that stand out to me, excluding Fantagraphics releases because it's my job to love them all equally, though you'll find some stuff from Fanta folks in here. Listed more or less alphabetically:

• Against Pain by Ron Rege Jr. (D&Q) - A nice hefty slab of Ron's unique vision. I'm always compelled by Ron's stuff and it's great to have this much of it in one place.

• Capacity by Theo Ellsworth (Secret Acres) - A warm, cleverly constructed, visually stunning tour through the artist's amazingly fertile creative imagination. Ellsworth synthesizes his mind-bogglingly detailed fantastical world-building with autobiography in a really natural and satisfying way without seeming like a crazy person, which is quite a feat.

• Dead Ringer by Jason T. Miles (La Mano) - A big, haunting slab of swampy beauty, mortality, cartoon gore, poetry and lovely chipboard. Morbid, funny, sublime, and lowbrow all at once. I get to sit next to this guy at work.

• Fight or Run: Shadow of the Chopper by Kevin Huizenga (Buenaventura) - Huizenga makes an experimental comic and the result is pure, distilled, uncut, unadulterated Comics Fun. Nifty!

• The Man Who Loved Breasts by Robert Goodin (Top Shelf) - Like a master class in expressive cartooning. Just look at George Olavatia's face from panel to panel, for Pete's sake.

• Trubble Club (online and self-published mini) - Cute, weird, gross, sad, funny jam comics from over a dozen participants (including Laura Park and Lilli Carré). Almost every panel goes in a delightfully unexpected direction.

• Welcome to the Dahl House by Ken Dahl (Microcosm) - His story in Papercutter hooked me on his acerbic worldview and crackerjack cartooning. This is mostly earlier stuff and as such a little rougher but it brings you up to where the greatness is.

• Renee French's blog - I look forward to Renee's daily drawings more than anything else in my RSS feeds. I especially love her lo-fi cameraphone (?) doodle snapshots and she occasionally flat out blows my mind.

We've brought our previous website poll to a close. In answer to the question "Following Palestine and Ghost World, what should get the Special Edition treatment next?" the top response is "The Bradleys / Buddy Bradley saga" after an early lead for "Complete (non-Frank) Jim Woodring" and a long period of domination by "Complete Eightball." See the final results here. (UPDATE: apparently we've been the victims of ballot-stuffing -- see the comments for details.) So does your top choice have a chance of being made? Well, they've all been discussed at one point or another, but so far the only one to make it onto our schedule is Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition, debuting at Comic-Con this summer as a two-volume slipcased hardcover set with loads of extras -- our biggest Special Edition re-issue yet!

Our new poll asks "What never-reprinted Fantagraphics series would you most like to see collected?" Vote in the right-hand column here on Flog or on our home page. As far as I know, none of the choices have actually been discussed as a possibility, but who knows, if we get an overwhelming response...

The newest release from Jim Flora Art is this fine art screenprint of Flora's cover for Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Band. More details and ordering info here.

• List: The Comics Reporter posts Rich Tommaso's Best of 2008 list, which includes Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 by the Hernandez Brothers

• Review: Swedish blog Weltklasse Serier says Ganges #1 by Kevin Huizenga is "a blue anemone in the great series of forest," according to the Google translation

• Blurb: Irish illustration blog Scamp takes note of Beasts! Book 2

• Things to see: Getting excited for the imminent release of our Humbug collection? Whet your appetite with some original pages, courtesy of Joey Anuff

Time for the new installment of Steven Weissman's in-progress pages from "Blue Jay," an epic 32-page story from Chocolate Cheeks, the next collection of the Yikes! gang's adventures. In this week's installment: dang, those parents are heavy sleepers.

And don't forget to catch up on our current 5-day chunk of Martin Kellerman's hilarious Swedish smash-hit Rocky, updated Monday-Friday! This week, Rocky has his last hurrah in New York City.