Cripes, September is over already? Here's your Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book makes for pleasant midday reading, maybe perched somewhere outdoors in the sun with a glass of ginger ale at your side. Read it in a lazy mood, identify with the slacker characters, and speculate on whether you could solve demented mysteries as well as they could. (Answer: probably not.)" – Molly Young, We Love You So

• Interview: Making his second appearance on the Inkstuds radio programme, Mr. Tony Millionaire

• Plug: "Man, if that Crumb book weren't coming out [Prison Pit: Book 1] would easily be my main pick for the week. Johnny Ryan does straight on fantasy/action, with no tongue in cheek, but without forsaking a single ounce of blood or guts. In fact, this may be even more gory and gruesome than his humor stuff... but those with strong stomachs will thrill to Ryan's grotesque and truly imaginative fight fest." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6

• Things to see: Dolls! DVDs! It's your Dame Darcy update

• Things to see: Fantastic Four #9, page 10 by Anders Nilsen

• Tunes: The latest entry in the Inkstuds Mixtape series of cartoonist-curated playlists is from Noah Van Sciver

• Staff: “Language is Hell and Other Concrete Poetry from Nico Vassilakis” at Pilot Books in Seattle

This is "Twelve Stories," Ray Fenwick's new letterpress print for Tiny Showcase. Super nice.

Be like Jerry and get yourself a copy of Drew Friedman's latest limited-edition fine art print reproducing his 2004 strip "HEY OSCAR!" illustrating reasons why Jerry deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award! Order here (make it a pair with Dino), and get some background and must-read anecdotes on Drew's blog.

If you've got pictures of Fantagraphics at SPX, let us know! Here's a few that we've found on our own or have been sent to us. Con reports abound on the web: Rob Clough has a good one to start with, and Sean T. Collins has audio from the Critics Roundtable panel featuring our own Gary Groth.

Let's lead off with a video of Gahan Wilson at the Ignatz Awards, courtesy of Tom Neely:

Gahan Wilson & Gary Groth by Flickr user mgrhode1

Carol Tyler by Flickr user mgrhode1

From Rafer Roberts, the Gahan Wilson/Carol Tyler panel

Another view, from Colleen Venable

Carol Tyler presenting at the Ignatz Awards ceremony, by Greg McElhatton

Gahan Wilson at the Ignatz Awards, by Greg McElhatton

Gahan Wilson by Scott Edelman

Find more photos in our Flickr gallery.

Here comes your Online Commentary & Diversions for today:

• Interview: We Love You So, the blog of Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are movie, talks to newly-minted Ignatz winner Jordan Crane, saying "Presenting melancholy tales of workaday worries and broken relationships right alongside whimsical, child-friendly fare, Uptight provides a fascinating peek inside Crane’s constantly shifting thoughts, and never fails to entertain." From Jordan: "When I’m writing something I usually have a particular person in mind that I’m writing it for. Not a general thing like 'I’m writing for someone between the ages of 25 and 50' but rather an actual person."

• Plug: "Oh yes, it's finally here — Johnny Ryan's bloody sexual fight comic [Prison Pit Book 1], ...a two-fisted smash-up of international comics influence and the universal joy of tight-wound one-on-one combat, so tight that everything that comes out of a body becomes a weapon, and doesn't that have a way of mixing pleasure and pain? ... I liked this a hell of a lot." – Joe McCulloch, Jog - The Blog

• Events: Michael Cavna of the Washington Post lists his SPX highlights, including talking to Gary Groth and seeing Gahan Wilson

Scheduled to arrive in comics shops across the country this week (though by some reports I think some shops may have received it last week): Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit Book 1! Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter says "This is an awesome book, and you need to own it eventually so why not buy it today?" Indeed! But first, why not check out the previews & reviews here and contact your local shop to make sure they get it?

Mome Vol. 16 - Fall 2009
By various artists; edited by Gary Groth & Eric Reynolds

This issue features several of our favorite alternative comic artists of the last 15 years, bringing us great joy. Archer Prewitt is the first, with an all-new “Funny Bunny” strip created in between his active musical career. “The Moolah Tree” is the new Fuzz & Pluck graphic novel from Ted Stearn, following Fuzz & Pluck and Fuzz & Pluck: Splitsville, beginning serialization here. We are equally proud to debut new work from Renée French, whose work is also featured on the front and back cover of this issue. And Nicholas Mahler debuts to ask "What Is Art?" (translated by secret weapon Kim Thompson).

Also: the second chapter of T. Edward Bak's "Wild Man - The Strange Journey - and Fantastic Accounts - of the Naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, from Bavaria to Bolshaya Zemlya (and Beyond)"; a new "Cold Heat" story by the team of Ben Jones, Frank Santoro & Jon Vermilyea; Dash Shaw interprets an episode of "Blind Date" into comics form; and new stories from Lilli Carré, Conor O'Keefe, Laura Park, Nate Neal, and Sara Edward-Corbett, with incidental drawings by Kaela Graham.

112-page color/b&w 7" x 9" softcover • $14.99
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

You Are There
By Jacques Tardi & Jean-Claude Forest

THE SATIRICAL MASTERPIECE THAT USHERED IN THE GRAPHIC NOVEL ERA TO EUROPEAN COMICS… FINALLY AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

One of the earliest full-length, standalone graphic novels to be published in Europe, and certainly one of the best and most original, Ici Même was serialized in the adult French comics monthly (A suivre) in the early 1980s and then released in book form. A quarter of a century later, this dark, funny, consistently surprising masterpiece has finally been translated into English.

An unexpected yet smoothly confident collaboration between the darkly cynical Jacques Tardi and the playful fantasist Jean-Claude Forest (of Barbarella fame), You Are There is set on a small island off the coast of France, where unscrupulous landowners have succeeded in overtaking the land from the last heir of a previously wealthy family. That heir, whose domain, in a Beckettian twist, is now reduced to the walls that border these patches of land he used to own, prowls the walls all day, eking out a living by collecting tolls at each gate.

His seemingly hopeless struggle to recover his birthright becomes complicated as the government sees a way of using his plight for the sake of political expediency, and the romantic intervention of the daughter of one of the landowners (who has her own sordid history with the politician) engenders further difficulties, culminating in an apocalyptic, hallucinatory finale.

Set in Tardi’s preferred early 20th century milieu, You Are There is drawn in his crisp 1980s neo-“clear line” style, gorgeously detailed, elegantly stylized, with impossibly deep slabs of black: You Are There is a feast for both the eyes and the brain.

196-page black & white 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $26.99
Add to Cart • More Info & Previews

Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "[The Squirrel Machine is a] darkly disturbing, brilliantly drawn story... B&W pen and ink drawings elucidate complex machines and Victorian-era architecture in baroque detail, while surrealist imaginings take turns for the truly repugnant. Sexual perversion, putrefaction and serial-killer style artworks are all ornately portrayed, as are the buildings, shops, horse-drawn carriages and crumbling mansions of a 19th-century small town. The story, while told primarily in pictures, includes a stilted and formal dialogue that only adds to the perversity. ... Though not for the faint of heart, this obscure tale will offer rich rewards to the right kind of reader, one who appreciates grotesque horror, angry mobs and the creative explosion of a repressed Victorian sexuality." – Publishers Weekly

• Review: "In this memoir [Giraffes in My Hair], [Bruce] Paley openly shares his stories of the '60s and '70s, and by the end you'll feel like he's a long-lost uncle. ... At some point, this book will probably become a movie, but I suggest you check out the uncensored version with [Carol] Swain's great artwork, which sets the scene perfectly. It's a miracle Paley survived to tell these anecdotes, but I'm glad he did." – Whitney Matheson, USA Today Pop Candy

• Plug: Animator Jan Stephens recommends the works of Thomas Ott

• Profile: Joe Heller, editorial cartoonist for the Green Bay Post-Gazette, talks to the Philadelphia Inquirer's Tirdad Derakhshani in a syndicated article about the influence of Prince Valiant ("The release of Prince Valiant, Vol. 1: 1937-1938, the first in a new series of gorgeously printed, hardcover Valiant collections from Fantagraphics Books, served as a bittersweet reminder of the century-long rise and eventual decline of a great American art form, the comic strip"), with accompanying video

• Hooray for Hollywood: Popeye optioned for CGI movie; please don't screw it up

• Onomatopœia: Stephen Worth at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog presents a great Basil Wolverton rarity: an article Wolverton wrote for the Daily Oregonian in 1948 titled "Acoustics in the Comics." Learn the difference between "SCHALAMPF!" and "PFWUMPFPH!" (It's a re-run, but still worth a look)

• Things to see: Is Steven Weissman (a) prepping for Halloween, (b) inventing a new superhero, or (c) hoping to get cast on the next season of Project Runway? Whatever it is, I like it

Lilli Carré has updated and redesigned her website, home to her comics, illustrations, films, and bewitching "moving drawings." Much lovely strangeness awaits.