Which reminded me, I happened to glance through Marvel's Halloween horror anthology one-shot Tomb of Terror at ye olde comick shoppe last week and noticed Paul's writing credit on the lead-off story starring Man-Thing (with art by Mark Texiera). That was a cool surprise!
A lot of catching up to do with this batch of clips & strips — click for improved/additional viewing and possible artist commentary at the sources:
• A couple of things Bill Griffith has recently shared on Facebook: the rejected first draft of the home screen for the Zippy Comix iPhone app, and a "lost" Wacky Packages design that Bill says is "almost sacrilegious"
• Interview: For Suicide Girls, Alex Dueben, who says "Dame Darcy is a renaissance woman. The Idaho-born artist has crafted a broad and powerful body of work. [...] She is an artist in the finest sense of the word," gets the full scoop from the artist herself: "I come from a family of cowboy poets in Idaho who played music, painted and wrote. So I was always exposed to art as a normal part of life. I began drawing sequential stories when I was two. My great Grandma Marler was a cowgirl and a school teacher, she taught me to read and write at an early age, which I am thankful for because without her help dyslexia would have made it even harder for me to be a writer than it already is. I think my will to tell stories got me through it, and I can remember wanting so badly to be able to write the words over the pictures."
• Commentary: At Amazon's Omnivoracious books blog, Alex Carr examines Ken Parille's essay on Daniel Clowes in The Best American Comics Criticism
• Hans Rickheit's Ectopiarypage 40 — our Dutch-speaking readers may be interested to know that Ectopiary is being translated and serialized at Serieland
First a bit of related happy news: Peter Kuper's "Ceci n'est pas une comic" (which Peter generously allowed us to host here following its various print appearances) was selected for inclusion in Best American Comics 2010, edited by Neil Gaiman.
This week we're pleased to bring you a sexy & romantic Flog-exclusive unpublished 5-page story by Dame Darcy, a hilarious new strip by Stephen DeStefano which will run for the next 11 weeks, and our usual weekly visit with the President from Steven Weissman:
Originally run as an experiment on Stephen's blog starting in 2008, Monday's Strip is re-presented here starting with this fine how-do-you-do, seen here in color for the first time.
Visitors to the "Counterculture Comix" exhibition at Bumbershoot in Seattle this weekend will get a preview of the latest installment of Hooked on Comix. Director David P. Moore will attend all three days of the festival and screen clips from the new volume, featuring Fantagraphics favorites Dame Darcy and Tony Millionaire [seen below together at Comic-Con - Ed.], who will be at Bumbershoot on Monday.
The show features continuous screenings of classic early volumes of Hooked on Comix. The exhibition celebrates Seattle's legacy of alternative comix awesomeness. It's free on Friday, and the holiday weekend includes giants of pop music (Bob Dylan, Courtney Love, Neko Case, Mary J. Blige, Weezer, etc.), as well as contemporary film, lit, visual arts, and more.
• Review: "Meat Cake is a tour de force showcasing the most primal of passions! It is an issue of Creepy edited by Edward Gorey! It is a Gothic soap opera as written by Victorian lolitas! It is a celebration of love and hubris, beauty and decay! There is no other comic in the world that offers a titillating parade of mermaids, ghosts, sailors, sirens, faeries, witches and wolfmen in intriguing and compromising situations! You will be dazzled, you will be entertained, but above all, you will be enchanted!" – STORM (guest columnist), Robot 6
• Review: "Werewolves of Montpellier is a sad and even somewhat funny novel about the fact that loneliness is not hiding under the mask. Is this novel better or worse than other works of Jason? Probably not. Despite repeated methods in his books, [his] novels are utterly worth reading. If you have a werewolf friend, buy him this book. If you don’t, buy two." – Ray Garraty, Endless Falls Up
• List:The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon names Ici Même (You Are There) as one of "25 Emblematic Comics of the '70s": "This grand effort by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest may seem like an extravagant oddity now, but it gets credit from some for igniting a wave of alternative voices in a French-language comics industry whose mainstream had the added appeal of actually making its creators popular and wealthy successes. Even if you don't like the tune — and while it's a song I could personally listen to every day, I know many people couldn't — at the time I have to imagine that many comics readers weren't even aware that the medium could play some of these notes."
• Profile: "Just like Peter Parker, the most celebrated co-creation of the subject of his first book, Toronto writer Blake Bell was bitten by a strange bug as a youngster. And just like Peter Parker, he was transformed beyond all recognition — into the Amazing Comic Book Historian Guy." – Canadish
![Fire & Water: Bill Everett, the Sub-Mariner and the Birth of Marvel Comics [September 2010]](components/com_virtuemart/show_image_in_imgtag.php?filename=4d367ac2e38dc4ff3cbd389d85aae3b0.jpg&newxsize=145&newysize=&fileout= "Fire & Water: Bill Everett, the Sub-Mariner and the Birth of Marvel Comics [September 2010]")
