Friday nite webcomics party... new weekly strips for you...

The last of three sequential bar gags in this week's The House of No by Derek Van Gieson...

...your situation may be desperate, little guy, but that's probably not a good idea in this week's Blecky Yuckerella strip by Johnny Ryan....

...and unless I'm mistaken this is Michelle's first appearance in Barack Hussein Obama by Steven Weissman.

Not many Online Commentary & Diversions links today but they're high-powered:

• List: Matthew J. Brady posts his top-20 Best Comics of 2009, with You'll Never Know, Book 1: A Good and Decent Man by C. Tyler at #10 ("It's an artful mix, matching a biographer's insight for detail with beautifully-flowing art and real emotions.  If the next two volumes are this good, Tyler's work will be a modern classic, one for others to study for years.") and Low Moon by Jason at #8 ("It's funny, poignant, and, as always, full of insight about humanity, even though everyone is a strange animal creature. There can never be enough Jason.")

• Interview: Newsarama's Michael C. Lorah chats with Jason about his upcoming collection Almost Silent: "I'm grateful the books seem to have found an audience and are selling. It's not something I take for granted. There are better European cartoonits than me who have had problems finding an audience in America. I don't have a website or a blog so I don't have that much contact with readers except at signings and conventions. It's always good for the ego when some pretty girl says she's a fan."

• Tribute: In the Sun-Journal, Andy Rooney remembers his friend Bill Mauldin: "He was one of the great cartoonists who has ever been — in and out of the Army. I’ve looked at hundreds of cartoons he drew in my Stars and Stripes files, and he was a genius. His cartoons are still funny and perceptive." (via Journalista)

• Things to see: An Ellen Forney strip translated into Czech

The new issue of Johnny's self-published series is now available from his online shop!

Screen Thrills Illustrated to...

Dan Clowes to...

Frank Miller to...

Drew Friedman pays tribute to the late J.D. Salinger by presenting his classic strip (co-written with K. Bidus) "Guilty Pleasures of Literary Greats" (which we've previously featured for its documentation of the Vladimir Nabokov/Hank Ketcham connection). Even if you've seen this strip before, it's worth a re-visit, and Drew outlines some of Salinger's other pop-culture obsessions to boot.

Robert Goodin gives us a lovely two-page glimpse of "The Spiritual Crisis of Carl Jung," a 24-page story to appear in Mome Vol. 19 or 20, later this year.

All the proofs have been approved and on press right now is our latest collection of Basil Wolverton's work. Archiving every "Culture Corner" strip ever printed alongside every extant original sketch for each of those strips, this book is a fascinating document of the artist's process. It also inlcudes a large number of rejected or otherwise-never-printed sketches for the strip, as well as Wolverton's hand-written log of these things.

In short, it's all very incredible.

Culture Corner was a lot of fun to work on and I'm once again grateful to Monte Wolverton for trusting me so fully with the task of designing a book of his legendary father's work.

Everybody's doing mash-ups of one kind or another these days but nobody does a character mash-up like Jeremy Eaton's inspired cartoon jumbles. So when he started taking custom orders I jumped on it with "Original TMNT" vs "Archie TMNT." It's absolutely the best Christmas present I ever bought myself.

Jeremy does these with a beautiful combo of tones, from the tint of the paper to the hues of the wash. You can order your own Spider-Bat or whatever you like in the sidebar of his blog.

A variety of Online Commentary & Diversions:

• List: The Comics Journal's R.C. Harvey names Sam's Strip ("because its spoof of comic strip cartooning is a joy to behold and because it has been so long awaited") and Humbug ("because, like Sam’s Strip, we’ve waited so long for a reappearance and because of the exquisite care Fantagraphics took in making the copies of the magazine’s pages as exact as possible") as two of the Best Reprints of 2009

• Review: "...[T]he handful of short stories [in The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.] represent great leaps in, or at the very least previously unseen examples of, [Shaw's] innovative approach to comics coloring, as well as some inventive storytelling techniques." – Christopher Allen, Comic Book Galaxy

• Analysis: At PopMatters, Oliver Ho explores the resonances between Gipi's Wish You Were Here #2: They Found the Car and the classic noir film Out of the Past: "It’s as though the story is trying to invert noir’s cliches. For example, Gipi avoids flashbacks, where Out of the Past is built on them. In this respect, the comic feels like a distilled, even-harder-boiled noir story."

• Links: Love & Maggie concludes their exhaustive, annotated breakdown of the contents of The Comics Journal #38

• Changes: Best of luck to frequent OCD link-ee Heidi MacDonald as The Beat leaves the PW umbrella and goes solo

• Things to see: More kids-book illustrations by Richard Sala

• Things to see: I can certainly understand why Kevin Huizenga did this particular piece of fan art

• Things to see: Mark Newgarden would gladly paint a mural for you Tuesday for a hamburger to-day (via The Comics Reporter)

First day of Angouleme, and Crumb covers the French paper, Libération.