As Earwax Cafe, a hub of comics activity in Chicago for many years, slips into memory and legend, Lilli Carré shares the above scan and reports on her blog: "I went there one more time this past weekend as they were closing, and they let me have the last extra copy of their xeroxed menu, the cover of which is adorned with doodles by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Archer Prewitt, and others." What an artifact!

UPDATE: Paul Hornschemeier also shares some thoughts on the closing of Earwax on his blog.

Convention season is getting into full swing and after Emerald City ComiCon this weekend our next stop is the 2011 MoCCA Fest in New York City, April 9-10. The festival announced the lineup of guests and we've got Peter Bagge, Michael Kupperman, Ted Stearn, Leslie Stein and (pending confirmation) Gahan Wilson hanging out with us at our table, with several other old friends of ours in attendance as well (including but not limited to Peter Kuper, who designed the official festival poster above). We're also pleased that Al Jaffee will be presented the 2011 Klein Award. Stay tuned for more details from us; in the meantime, check out the official festival announcement here.

UPDATE: He's not on the official Festival guest list but we've got Stephen DeStefano too!

UPDATE #2: Gahan Wilson is now confirmed! Yay!

Ta-da! It's your first look at art director Jacob Covey's beautiful final cover design for Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Vol. 1: Race to Death Valley by Floyd Gottfredson! (Click the image for a bigger version.) The book went to the printers last week and is scheduled to be available in early June. And that's not the only exciting Mickey update we have for you!

On Monday we sent out digital copies of our promotional BLAD ("Book Layout And Design") brochure for the book to members of the press; today, we are pleased to offer it to everyone as a 3MB PDF download! Inside you'll find tons of information about the book including samples of the strip and preliminary versions of some of the bonus features. (Note that details regarding the book may have changed since we first put the BLAD together — you'll notice that the cover image it shows is an earlier, unfinished version, for instance.)

Yesterday at Comic Book Resources, Shaun Manning talked to series co-editor Gary Groth. A small sample: "Most of Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strips have not been reprinted, and the few collections that do exist are out of print. Asked how these early strips came to be neglected, Groth said, 'The easy and honest answer is, I don't know. Why did it take 'til 2004 before Peanuts was properly reprinted? Mickey Mouse strips have been reprinted or excerpted desultorily in other, larger books over the eras, but never systematically. Sometimes the determining factor to these things is a weird confluence of circumstances, and with Mickey, now is the time.'"

On CBR's Robot 6 blog, Sean T. Collins commented further: "...I’m sure Groth wouldn’t mind if I said that the real star attraction for the piece are the actual Gottfredson strips used to illustrate it. Simply put, my jaw literally dropped once I opened up these action-packed images, so impressed was I by their power and grace. And since most of Gottfredson’s work has been reprinted rarely, if that, chances are you’ll be bowled over too."

This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. It's a great week if you like classic comic strips with adventure on the high seas! Read on to see what comics-blog commentators are saying about our releases this week, check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability.

240-page black & white/color 9.25" x 9.25" hardcover • $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-60699-362-0

"A $35 Fantagraphics hardcover, collecting the first few years' worth of the daily incarnation of Roy Crane's oh-brother-I'm-a-buzzboy newspaper strip, 1943-1945." – Douglas Wolk, Comics Alliance

"Any extra money I find under the couch would go toward another comic strip collection, Buz Sawyer Vol. 1 by Roy Crane. I really enjoyed the first volume of Crane’s Captain Easy that Fantagraphics published last year, and am eager to experience Crane’s other big strip." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

"It's a gorgeous collection of daily newspaper strips from the World War II-era." – Benn Ray (Atomic Books), Largehearted Boy

"...Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer HC Volume 1: The War in the Pacific... is more amazing stuff from the guy who brought you Captain Easy. [...] This volume collects all of the dailies that were published during the War — in which Buz serves aboard an aircraft carrier, flies combat missions, crashes behind enemy lines and gets nabbed by a Japanese submarine — along with a selection of the best Sundays as fold-out pages. [...] He also meets a bunch of beautiful women along the way, obviously." – The Gosh! Comics Blog

Popeye Vol. 5: "Wha's a Jeep?"
by E.C. Segar

168-page black & white/color 10.5" x 14.75" hardcover • $29.99
ISBN: 978-1-60699-404-7

"Also in reprints, the latest in Fantagraphics’ line of huge E.C. Segar hardcovers." – Joe McCulloch, Comics Comics

"Thirty bucks gets you the penultimate volume of the huge, sturdy collections of E.C. Segar's final decade of Thimble Theatre, from Fantagraphics. [...] I'll gladly pay you tomorrow for a Popeye book today, etc." – Douglas Wolk, Comics Alliance

"The most obvious choice (and easily the pick of the week for me) is Wha’s A Jeep, volume five of the classic E.C. Segar comic strip." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

"Fantagraphics’ latest collection of E.C. Segar’s original Popeye strips is another gorgeous... tome, featuring Pappy, Swee’Pea and The Jeep." – J. Caleb Mozzocco, Newsarama

"If you've been hankering for some classic cartoon strips then Fantagraphics have just the ticket: Firstly, there's Popeye HC Volume 5: Wha's a Jeep? which means their spines along our shelves will now spell out POPEY as opposed to POPE — adjective; meaning 'Pope-like, or -ish' rather than just the dude himself." – The Gosh! Comics Blog

On both:

"Two handsome collections of very strong work by outright cartooning masters. The only reason you shouldn't be buying them today is because you pre-ordered them somewhere." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter

[Added more links/blurbs on 3/8.]

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Plug: "The Comics Journal: long known as a magazine where you can look at never before released sketches from R. Crumb next to essays about Wonder Woman’s bondage past next to in-depth interviews with superhero comics auteurs next to oral histories of underground dudes you didn’t even know you were interested in until you read about their entire lives. We could go on that tangent forever, but instead we’ll just direct you here to pre-order." – Sam Hockley-Smith, The Fader

• Plug: "In Mezzo and Pirus’ King of the Flies, characters who die in the first volume... come back to watch over the still-living – lovers, friends, mothers. Mezzo and Pirus’ undead are able to travel to Mars in the blink of an eye, and then back to the David Lynchian small-town that is the story’s main setting. Liberated from physical constraints, they are frustrated, morose, angry, holding onto grudges. ...Mezzo and Prius... have created a darkly erotic and blackly humoured book that, days after finishing, I’m still thinking about." – Shawn Conner, Guttersnipe

• Plug: Los Angeles magazine features Freeway by Mark Kalesniko in their latest roundup of books of local interest

• Interview: The Daily Cross Hatch's Brian Heater continues his conversation with Stan Sakai: "Originally, I had wanted to do a series inspired by the life of a 17th century samurai named Miyamoto Musashi, but — he’s regarded as one of the great swordsmen in Japanese history, but one day I just drew a rabbit and Musashi became a rabbit. Instead of Miyamoto Musashi, my charcter was Miyamoto Usagi — 'usagi' means 'rabbit' in Japanese. The 'Miyamoto' part I kept as an homage to the original Musahi, but everything else is pretty much original."

• Profile: Variety recently talked to Dash Shaw about his artwork in the feature film Rabbit Hole — here's a scan, uploaded by Dash

• Feature: Mike Lynch posts scans of a "How to Draw Buz Sawyer" article by Roy Crane from a 1969 issue of Cartoonist PROfiles

• Unpaid product placement: Jordan Crane's Uptight #4 makes a cameo appearance in Kevin Church & Benjamin Birdie's relaunched webcomic The Rack

Peter Bagge is the subject of a major feature at Spain's largest newspaper, El Mundo. It's all in Spanish and it sure is snazzy.

Minneapolis comics maven Sarah Morean recently visited Zak Sally's studio with Tom Kaczynski and documented the occasion with a bunch of photos and the brief video above.

O, the sights! View the full set of photos here.

Hey, remember that cover art for Wandering Son (Hourou Musuko) Vol. 1 by Shimura Takako that we were so excited to debut last week? Well it turns out we were a little TOO excited as the version we showed you was incorrectly cropped. Here's the corrected version above; we've also fixed it in the original post, which contains more information about the book. Sorry about that folks!

• Michael Kupperman is stepping up the art posts on Twitter, with the "doodle" above and an older strip with the promise of new ones to come (!)

• A couple of recent landscapey drawings by Gabrielle Bell (and they're for sale)

• An older watercolor sketch (above) and an unused character by Leslie Stein

• Album covers and undead Popeye by Tony Millionaire

And more Things to See from the past week:

• New illustrations from Matthias Lehmann at his Bloc-Notes blog

• Odds, ends, outtakes and film reviews by Jason at his Cats Without Dogs blog

• Steven Weissman's latest "I, Anonymous" spot and pieces for the Game Over IV show at GRSF on his Chewing Gum in Church blog

• Snapshots of recent drawings from Frank Santoro

• Recent sketches by Marco Corona at his Il Canguro Pugilatore blog

• Sketches by Mark Kalesniko (for his new graphic novel Freeway and otherwise) at his blog

• Another page from a Kevin Huizenga "Focus" book at his New Construction blog

• Noah Van Sciver is heading to Australia

• Drawings, photos from Renee French (and her doctor)

• Some great dedication sketches at Splog!, the Sergio Ponchione Lost Objects Gallery blog

• Sketches, portraits, & updates from Steve Brodner

• Daily drawings from Dash Shaw at The Ruined Cast blog

• An old strip and other items of note from Hans Rickheit

• Recent sketches by Tom Kaczynski at his Transatlantis blog

• Prints & sketches by Eleanor Davis at her We Be Ouija blog