• I feel a little strange re-posting the deeply personal comics that Laura Park has been making about the recent loss of her kitty Lewis, but they're just so amazing
The Minneapolis Indie Xpo takes place this Saturday, and the kick-off pre-party at Big Brain and the 501 Club on Friday night is doubling as a release party for a handful of new comics, including Zak Sally's Sammy the Mouse #3! More info at Zak's La Mano blog. Look for Zak, Tom Kaczynski and Noah Van Sciver at the fest as well. Looks like a fun show!
• Moscow-born San Francisco-residing cartoonist Roman Muradov sends us some pages done in homage/tribute to Jason — they're good, and got a thumbs-up from Jason
• Johnny Ryan has a bunch of new prints for sale. We saw Matt Groening admiring the one above at Comic-Con, our own Kristy Valenti very happily bought the cat one, and the "Nachos" one is just 100% pure genius
• Renee French has too many updates to link all of them individually; just go to her blog and work your way down. This, this, and this are highlights for me
"When you Orcs are through fighting, you can clean up this tell, it is a pig sty and a disgrace. Do you hear me? Just look at this mess– skulls and guts everywhere. Do you act like this at home?"
• A quarterly alternative comics anthology with a funny-sounding four-letter name? Gee, I wonder where they got that idea? Kidding aside, Robot 6 and The Beat report on pood, a newsprint broadsheet-format comic which debuts at MoCCA this year and features Sara Edward-Corbett (above), Hans Rickheit and many others
• SayethHans Rickheit: "I like Page 15 [of Ectopiary] simply because it contains a stuffy old lady denigrating beatniks and artists; that is always a winning ingredient of any succsessful book, in my opinion."
• The last word today goes to Jeremy Eaton, with this illustration for a (now out-of-date) Seattle Weekly article about that whole Amazon/Diamond foofarah. 'Nuff said!
• List: For Library Journal, Tom Batten recommends a handful of recent "Classic Graphic Novels," including The Left Bank Gang by Jason: "Supporting his highly imaginative and quirky storytelling, Jason's deceptively simple cartooning carries a great deal of intensity in each line."
• Review: "Winning a coveted Jury prize at the 2010 Angouleme festival, Dungeon Quest succeeds on so many levels: the art and character design are superb, the dialogue is acerbic yet measured, the page construction has a flow to it that verges on perfection, the meter of the storytelling is spot-on, and, most importantly, it’s actually really funny. ... As the first volume in a series projected to last for a good few books yet, readers are advised to party-up with the cast of Dungeon Quest immediately." – Martin Steenton, Avoid the Future
• Review: "The series only lasted four issues, but it is among the high points of 1960s comics, and this handsome collection is one of the most welcome reprint volumes of the last few years. ... Blazing Combat showed comics readers the gritty downside of war..." – Robert Martin, The Comics Journal
• Review: "...[S]ome books just leave a reviewer pointing and jabbering, unable to coherently explain what he's just been through or to find any words that will adequately explain what he has seen.The Squirrel Machine is a book of [this] kind... Reading The Squirrel Machine is very much like watching some German Expressionist movie: it's a series of alternately wondrous and appalling scenes, clearly connected by some kind of logic, the true meaning of which resolutely remains beyond the knowledge of the viewer." – Andrew Wheeler, The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
• Plug: The fine folks at Librairie D&Q say "Now in store is this little jewel just published by Fantagraphics Books. On top of being a well-researched collection of underground mini-comix of the 1980's, this book compiles pages and pages of interviews and commentary on the creative, edgy, weird and free-spirited post-Crumb scene. While it may not necessarily represent the global landscape of underground comix in the 80's (one could argue it needs more wemin-ahtists, for example), Newave! is definitely a praise-worthy sampler of work most often hidden in the shadows of the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s."
• Plug: Roberto C. Madruga of Evolve Happy on Luba by Gilbert Hernandez: "The story is Hernandez at his best and the artwork is simplistically gorgeous."
• Plugs: The latest Robot 6 "What Are You Reading?" roundup includes several Fantagraphics mentions, and guest contributor Ng Suat Tong on the black & white Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-1938 from Libri Impressi, available in the U.S. exclusively from us: "The new Fantagraphics and Portugese books are the only way one should read Foster's masterwork."
• Interview:The Comics Journal's Kent Worcester presents an edited transcript of his on-stage interview with Tom Kaczynski from the 2009 MoCCA festival