§ Trina Robbins notes the passing of Valerie Barclay, a Golden Age artist and inker.

§ Jason Miles interviews Dylan WIlliams and provides a nice counterpoint to the Keiron Gillen interview in that Williams embraces the poverty and suffering that comes with comics — call it the Porgy Outlook.

I still get pissy and feel like the world owes me a living but then I do stuff with my friends and get to draw whatever the fuck I want and I’m so so happy. It helps to have known a ton of cartoonists who are trying to make a living. Seeing how hard it is on them. Seeing what companies do to you. Then having friends like Jason Shiga and Tom Neely who do their own shit makes me so happy. I don’t think I could ever be a self-promoter. I hate doing all that stuff, so that is when Sparkplug started after I’d gone back to work at a day job in 1998 and was doing comics for fun and then, after four years at that, realizing that I’d rather make a living in comics than working at a bad job. I couldn’t do art for money and nobody would pay me to work for their comic company and I didn’t want to write about old comics any more, so the only option was something like Sparkplug.

§ Deb Aoki interviews Gary Groth on the new manga initiative at Fantagraphics and reveals it took four years to achieve just because he didn’t have time to approve it, but otherwise has learned a few manga talking points:

My impression is that Moto Hagio is a groundbreaking and innovative cartoonist who forged new ground and wrote and drew stories aimed at a literate, mature readership — which seems custom-tailored for Fantagraphics. That her work is considered “classic” or that she started making comics in the ’70s (or very late ’60s) is irrelevant to me; the work is great and that’s all I care about. Our mission is basically to figure out how to sell those kinds of comics and that’s something we’ve gotten good at over the years, so we’re expecting Moto Hagio’s book to be successful.”

§ Frank Miller has a website and uses his first post to talk about his late friend, Brittany Murphy:

I’ve lost a dear friend and an inspiring colleague. And now I read of her summed up as nothing but a tired sob-story cliche, lumped like a sack of shit atop other sacks of shit, dropped into a Hollywood dumpster, branded as a drug casualty. I am disgusted.

§ Scott McCloud has a few words on a Coke commercial by KRAMERS ERGOT contributor Tom Gauld.

§ Jason Thompson continues to pick up manga rocks and discovers the incest branch of manga:

This doesn’t mean that incest is “accepted” in Japan; a google search for “Japan” “incest” turns up all kinds of bizarre stories, but it doesn’t take much digging to figure out that most of these are uncritically regurgitated tall tales from the same handful of websites spreading stories of exotic foreign depravity. Parents bathing naked with very young children is not the same as child abuse; Japan has an abiding stereotype in the West as a country of sexual dysfunction, but real incest is not any more accepted in Japan than it is here.

§ This essay by Brian Boyd on the origins of comics looks quite thought provoking and maybe we’ll have time to read it soon:

Humans have evolved no special adaptation for reading comics. Comics on the other hand have been gradually designed, culturally, to appeal to evolved—gradually and naturally designed—cognitive preferences, and designed so well that they appeal across cultures, to Japanese and French, to Fijians and Americans. Comics appeal especially to our dominant sense, vision, including trichromatic color vision (a primate solution to the problem of object discrimination in the low light of an arboreal existence), to our capacity for language (a solution to problems of social communication), and our adaptive inclination for storytelling. Storytelling maximizes social cognition in a flexibly ultra-social species through a kind of play-training: compulsive, pleasurable, high-intensity, often-repeated, like all play, and therefore cumulatively highly effective as tuition in social understanding (Boyd, Origin). Since comics, like other arts, have been intricately designed by gifted designers to appeal to human minds, the comparative success of comics, against other narrative forms, other arts or entertainments, and other preferences for our disposable time, should offer rich data to psychology: evidence for what we find appealing and easy, for the proportionate strengths of human preferences.