§ Jimmy Palmiotti is blogging for the Painkiller Jane site at SciFi.com and his first post includes a report on Barcelona and a picture of Amanda Conner and a balloon with a picture of a bunny rubbing a carrot on it.

It was a pretty amazing show featuring a who’s who of international comic book talents and a weekend attendance of over 110,000 people. All there just for the love of comic books. This was a wonderful and encouraging thing…especially since the show was sponsored by Coke [not Pepsi] and Spain’s very own sci-fi channel.

The most fun thing for me was seeing all the different versions of the Spanish printings of the Painkiller Jane comic book. There is something so surreal about seeing something you created reformatted to a totally new language.

§ The Daily Cross Hatch continues its conversation with Gilbert Hernandez;

Chance in Hell: it’s funny, because that’s getting a lot of interest, even though it’s probably my lightest work I’m going to be doing. Originally, when I was doing the Fritz stories, and I made her a B-movie actress, I got inspired to show little bits of these little B-movies, you know? And then it got a little more ambitious to where I’d dedicate whole issues to these little stories. Pretty soon it started growing like, why don’t I just do a whole graphic novel based one of these little films? But I didn’t want to use this character in Love and Rockets any more…for the time being. And that was at the time the whole graphic novel thing happened. You know, Blankets did well, and different books, and there was just a feeding frenzy for graphic novels. This is what three, four years ago? So I thought, well, I better start doing graphic novels—that’s more what I want to do anyway.

§ Eddie Campbell looks at the gentler side of Vinnie Colletta

That ear looks incorrect, but it’s the only one in the story that does so, so let’s overlook that (in much the same way that you forgave a clumsy ear of mine a couple of weeks back). What strikes us about this picture is the use of the chinagraph pencil to soften and model forms, most successfully on the pretty girl’s cheek. The only other place I’ve seen that effect in a vintage comic was in Kubert’s Firehair in the late ’60s (but I’m no completist). The second image is the last page from the same story. There’s one place in an earlier page where the artist doesn’t seem to have entirely figured out a photo he’s using for reference, but on this last page we can see that he does have an organisational skill. He makes an attractive arrangement out of a relatively static scene, focussing on body language and expression, with a restrained use of spotted blacks and once again various ways of softening the hard medium of black line art. Colletta never generates the intensity that Alex Toth could with the same kind of material, but I always enjoy picking up these old things when I find them, and they never cost very much.