Daily clips & strips -- click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• A new Amazing Facts and Beyond with Leon Beond strip by Kevin Huizenga

• From Steven Weissman, this week's "I, Anonymous" and the piece that gives the Butter and Blood art show at GR2 its name

• At last, those misty color backgrounds that Frank Santoro's been posting make sense

• A midday visit to the lake by Debbie Drechsler

• Two new illustrations by Sergio Ponchione, including... the world's first Muslim online sex shop? (completely SFW)

• It's Paul Hornschemeier's new weekly t-shirt design for his Forlorn Funnies Shirt Shop

• Don't miss Bunny Quacker, Josh Simmons's counterpart to his Quacker Bunny above, at his & Wendy Chin's Quackers blog — he's just as grumpy

• A montage of new Frank drawings by Jim Woodring... is that our first glimpse of Frank's female counterpart that Jim's mentioned? Also, Jim would like to see you at TCAF

• More glimpses and test images for Derek Van Gieson's Mome story "Devil Doll"

• Jon Vermilyea shows off the printed cover and pages of his new Pizza Time zine

Daily clips & strips -- click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• Spanish-language newspaper El País publishes a Joe Sacco cover for their literature supplement

• The cover of Jon Vermilyea's forthcoming turtle-flavored minicomic Pizza Time

• This is a photo John Pham posted on Facebook of a piece he has in the Poketo "Los Angeles I'm Yours" art show at Space 1520 in LA which opened on Saturday and which also features handmade minicomics by Jordan Crane

• Also on Facebook, Bill Griffith posts this one-page story (excerpted above) which was recently published in a new book about Levittown, Second Suburb, edited by Dianne Harris (link goes straight to the image file, since I don't know Bill's Facebook privacy settings, but he posts cool stuff all the time)

• Moose! You're killing me with cuteness, Renee French

• Hans Rickheit's Ectopiary, page 21

• T. Edward Bak is posting several pages from his current serialized Mome story "Wild Man" — for 50 bucks you can purchase an original page and help fund his impending trip to Alaska for field research for the story, so hit that Paypal link on his blog

• Gabrielle Bell reports from her trip to Stockholm

• The Archer Prewitt-designed Allen Ginsberg figurine from Presspop is coming closer to reality

Daily clips & strips — click for improved/additional viewing at the sources:

• A new Vice comic by Johnny Ryan

• Steven Weissman's new series of Stinckers is taking shape

• On his Clip Joint blog John Hankiewicz says "My lithograph No Argument is part of the 30th Annual National Print Exhibition at Artlink Gallery in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The show, now open, runs until May 26th. More information here."

• From Frank Santoro, what I can only assume are process pics of some color backgrounds using airbrush or spray paint... they're pretty, whatever they are

• Get yourself a Dame Darcy Witch Craft Kit for all your charm-casting needs

• Debbie Drechsler draws a fallen crow

• Gabrielle Bell re-runs her story "Roosevelt Island"

• It's Archer Prewitt's packaging design for Presspop's forthcoming Allen Ginsberg vinyl figurine

• I don't imagine Renee French intends to remind us to floss, but that's what I'm getting here

• This looks like it might be the cover to a new mini by Kevin Huizenga but maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part

• "Blond Girl in a Black Dress 2 " by Mark Kalesniko

• Josh Simmons & Wendy Chin have been keeping the cute coming on the Quackers blog

• I'm super excited for Roger Langridge's new Thor series

• Ectiopiary page 20 and "an ancient illustration" by Hans Rickheit

• Jon Vermilyea posts a teaser from his upcoming TMNT zine

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.

Flickr user Moonage Daydreamer has a few photos from the Art of Stan Sakai exhibit (from early 2009) that I hadn't seen before. The anecdote posted with this photo is typical Sakai, one of the truly gracious men of comics.

A dream of mine was dashed last week, when the TMNT property transfered hands (for $60 million) from a flesh-and-blood man, Peter Laird, to a corporate entity, Nickelodeon. What had seemed a plausible book idea that would storm the world whenever I, you know, got around to proposing it (A TMNT book in the vein of "Batman Collected" meets "Bizarro World" by way of Kramer's Mome meets the "Marvel Encyclopedia" and, of course, "BEASTS!"*) is almost surely a lost cause now.

My Argentian "Kalkers", my ceramic French mini-figures, that baby-turtles animation cell up above, and my whole lot of compulsively collected TMNT merchandise* is going back in the closet. Also going in the closet is my hope of convincing Dash Shaw to do a TMNT story that the original series should have made when Eastman/Laird decided to bring on outside artists who got "wacky" instead of exploring the complexity of the characters' personalities (ala the flicker that was the "Return to New York" storyline and more akin to the trend in the Marvel universe that has made such successful films possible).

Sure, Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds had his fun at my expense: "Yeah, it'll be a shame to see them commercialized." But I'm not the only one here at Comics Cred Central who loves the Turtles. Fantagraphics office manger, Zuniga, is pretty broken up about this sale too. And this is a guy who's serious about comics--a guy who was personally invited out by the Wu Tang Clan at ComicCon but said "No, I've gotta sell comics."* I'm telling you, it's a shame what the property could turn into. Especially when a great book could still be made.

But hey, I'm optimistic and somebody at Nickelodeon showed up to work this week with a big pile of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tasks on their "To-Do" list and I want to make that person's job easier: I'm the graphic designer you need.* Note: I'm marginal at "wacky." Also "testestorone-fueled." But, man, have I got a book idea for you!

...I hope they at least get Chris Duffy involved. He's already in their payroll system and the man's been good to comics.

*not kidding

I think I might start posting weekend updates -- these Monday roundups are getting bananas...

• Review: We received a wonderful endorsement of Supermen! from Bud Plant, which we've proudly placed on the product page

• Review: John Mitchell on Supermen!: “Supermen points to a time when comic books were a new and exciting form — admittedly low brow in presentation, but filled with visual and narrative leaps that would affect how we told stories visually for decades to come... This book chronicles the exciting, silly, fun and experimental world in which these kinds of [superhero] characters were forged — fairy tales from the modern era."

• Review: Lady, That's My Skull takes lunch with The Wolverton Bible, saying "It is a fascinating look at the side of an artist that most fans are not familiar with due to the scarcity of the material."

• Review: My Year Online on Ted Stearn's first Fuzz & Pluck collection: "[I] laugh[ed] out loud at many points. This is all down to Ted Stearn’s genius in depicting expressions, his excellent slapstick timing and great storyboards, where you can never tell what will happen next..."

• Reviews: The blogger behind Fluid Motion has "been reading a lot of comics by Jason recently," offering micro-reviews of 3 of his books

• Review: Newsarama enthuses about Popeye Vol. 3 (scroll about halfway down): "As with previous volumes of Popeye, it's a cornucopia of mangled English, slapstick, violence and hamburger soliciting... Fantagraphics continues to knock it out of the park with their work on the production of these books... With his fun designs and slapstick exaggeration, Segar's art has always been a plus, and nothing about that changes here... It's packed with adventure and humor, strong art, inventive and complex stories, and features more slam-bang punching than any other ten comics. It is a true, to use a much abused word, classic."

• Review: Blogger Kevin Schulke particularly enjoys the hockey strips in The Complete Peanuts 1971-1972

• Review: I'm not sure if this review originally ran in Rain Taxi or is original to the Powell's Books blog where it appears now, but: John Pistelli delves into The Lagoon by Lilli Carré: "The Lagoon's artisanal craftsmanship and child's-eye ironies reflect the baffled wisdom of a heroine too young to be foolish... it is a gorgeously bleak work for so young an artist."

• Interview: Baldur Bjarnason presents a 21-minute audio interview with el jefe Gary Groth recorded at the 2000 San Diego Comic Con

• Commentary: In re Strange and Stranger, here's some further Ditko analysis from Ken Parille at Blog Flume

• Commentary: Movement Point looks at pop cultural references in Peanuts, citing an obscure example from The Complete Peanuts 1971-1972

• Things to see: Peter Laird presents a treat for Usagi Yojimbo and TMNT (*cough*Covey*cough*) fans: rough layouts for the Usagi/Leonardo crossover story

Okay, yeah, I GET why the TMNT have a bad name. I do. But not all fans are looking to depict Raphael nude with towel, or Leonardo "brandishing his Katana." I feel very sick about this.