Jim Woodring has recently relaunched his official website with a completely new design and architecture. You can browse galleries of his artwork and comics; download and share various media; purchase artwork, prints, toys, signed-and-drawn-in books (such as below), and other merch in the revamped Jimland Novelties store; and more. So much to explore! So much to enjoy! So much to buy! And that new layout is so clean and inviting. 'At's-a good website! (Update: I just noticed there's a semi-secret adventure starring Pupshaw & Pushpaw as you explore the site — pay attention!) (Updated again to credit Plexipixel with the excellent new design.)

UPDATE 11/9: Unfortunately, Jordan Crane has to cancel his Toronto appearance, but will hopefully reschedule soon... Stay tuned!

We're excited to announce that long-time comics icon Jordan Crane will be making his first-ever appearance in Toronto on Thursday, December 1st! This is not to be missed!

The awesome crew at The Beguiling bookstore will be hosting Jordan at Clinton's Tavern [ 693 Bloor Street ] for a presentation and discussion of his long history in comics and design.  The event kicks off at 8 PM, with Jordan being interviewed on stage, and a Q&A and signing will follow. If you forget your copies of Uptight, there will be books to purchase at the Tavern!

And, earlier that day at 5 PM, you can bring your little ones to Little Island Comics for a signing of his new children's book Keep Our Secrets, written and illustrated by Jordan! 

And did we mention? Both events are FREE! Who knows how long it will be before Jordan returns to Toronto? Don't miss out -- go meet him while you can!

Bryan Connolly, co-author of Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film, co-directed (with Tommy Swenson) this super-fun music video for "Down with Netflix" by the Charles Edward Cheese Band. Support your local video store!

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "Graphic novelist Richard Sala cures the zombie apocalypse malaise with a new book that takes the basic set-up of those tales and turns it into an artsy, comical, downright weird exercise in terror that brings together several slices of the horror genre... into something modern and surprising. Equally, Sala’s art style helps the story ride high -- his dark cartoons manage to suck you into the narrative while still highlighting the meta quality of the story. This is a story about horror as much as it is a horror story, examining the themes that draw us into these stories as much as they are utilized by authors to comment on the real world. Somewhere between those two intentions lies The Hidden, a modernist horror tale that acts like the zombies it evokes, cannibalizing the genres from which it sprang and spewing out something new from those entrails." – John Seven, North Adams Transcript

• Review: "The stories [in The Frank Book] are fantastical, phantasmagorical fables full of transmogrification, mostly silent so that you can bring to them what you will and interpret them as you like, and if you were to sit down with someone else and discuss any given piece you’d find it very revealing – both of yourself and of your friend. I often describe them as 'mind-altering, yet legal.' Enlightening too, as I say.... [Jim Woodring] is a visionary, a veritable shaman with a love of Persian architecture and that rare ability to communicate wisdom — and folly (umm, yes,  mostly folly!) — with skill. As a visual craftsman he totally floors me, his wrinkled-line textures placed just-so, leaving each panel on the page a perfect composition. A beautiful, beautiful book." – Stephen L. Holland, Page 45

• Interview: Comics Bulletin's Jason Sacks talks to Gahan Wilson about his new collection of Nuts: "The thing that inspired me and put me on the kids' side, kept moving me along on it, was that the grownups -- and more grownups do it wrong than right -- that they don't understand how complicated that little rascal is. How much they're taking in. How alive they are. How much they apprehend. And how seriously they take it. They are astoundingly alive with bad things and good things."

• Interview: Hanna Brooks Olsen of Seattlest talks with Megan Kelso about her upcoming presentation at Richard Hugo House this Friday: "I'm using a series of rotating images on a loop. Unlike when you're reading a comic by yourself, where you can go back and re-read a panel or flip back a page (if someone's reading aloud), suddenly it's going by, almost like a film, and you don't control the page. And I think that that control is what people love about comics. You get to entirely control that space. A lot of the things that are magical about reading comics on a page are lost when they're performed live."

• Behind the Scenes: Ever wonder why our "Diaflogue" interviews turn out so good? Sshhh — our own Kristy Valenti is the secret ingredient

It's gonna be a SCAD, MAD, MAD, MAD Weekend this November 11th-13th at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia!

And you can catch what sounds like an amazing panel with Al Jaffee, Jack Davis, and the "Usual Gang of Idiots" on November 12th at 5:00 PM at the Trustees Theater [ 216 E. Broughton St., Savannah, Georgia ].

It's free, open to the public, and you'd be MAD to miss it!

A group of us are waiting to be served in a restaurant. The waiter arrives, and the person facing me evidently ordered paper-wrapped baked owl. (What he gets looks like a little owl mummy.) I puzzle over why this seems somehow wrong and disturbing even as the diner peels off the first bit of the wrapping, releasing a gust of cooked-bird steam and exposing a naked, baked owl wing. It actually looks pretty tasty.

The diner sitting next to me is Françoise Mouly, which, although tenuous at best, is enough of a connection for me to consider this a comics-related dream and include here. As I wake up I wonder if the French term for this delicacy might be something like hibou en croûte, but that's more like a meat baked in a pastry shell, like beef wellington.

In case you're wondering, a few minutes' googling here and now reveals to me that the correct term would have been hibou en papillote (but there is, mercifully, no such dish).

Tony Millionaire drew these portraits of Occupy Wall Street protester Manissa Maharawal and ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for Frank Rich's column at New York magazine.

Tony's 500 Portraits is coming soon. (The numbers here are bullshit, since we cut a few dozen images from the book and there have probably been more in the intervening time, but it made for a great headline, didn't it?)

[Follow our Tumblr blog for lots of new Things to See every day.]

You can add one more posthumous laurel to Hal Foster's already-impressive pile of achievements: New York Times Best Selling Author. Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 shows up at #8 on this week's Hardcover Graphic Books top 10 list. It comes as no surprise to us: we've been selling out multiple printings of the series as fans old and new have been snapping the books up. What else would you expect from one of the greatest comics of the last (or any) century?

UPDATE: Well shut my mouth, it was #1 last week!

I'm not sure where webcomic creator Mark Stokes dug up this close-up image of Charles M. Schulz art for a 1951 Peanuts strip (as collected in this lovely hardcover volume) but it's pretty great to see how Schulz tried out some alternate poses for Patty and Charlie Brown in the pencil stage. (Via The Daily Cartoonist.)

[Follow our Tumblr blog for lots of new Things to See every day.]

Now that this title has been released to comic book shops, we are pleased to also make it available to our mail-order customers:

Ganges #4
by Kevin Huizenga

32-page two-color 8.5" x 11" comic book, with jacket • $7.95
Part of the Ignatz Series

See Previews / Order Now

Can you make an exciting comic out of insomnia? Kevin Huizenga rises to the challenge as he depicts his alter ego Glenn Ganges wrestling with sleeplessness, trying to trick it by reading a particularly abstruse book, obsessively breaking his past, present and future life down to ever more hallucinatory, complex grids, and wandering around his darkened house trying not to wake up his wife. Also: Loose cat action!