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§ Cartooner Halloween wrap-up: The Daily Cross Hatch has a stunning array of indie cartoonists costumes. Eleanor Davis’s hagfish might be the scariest thing we’ve ever seen.

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There’s also a Comics Alliance gallery highlighted by Laura Hudson’s Ramona Flowers.

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§ Two more from our collection. CCS’s James Sturm and Jen Vaughn as a rock star and obscure Dell superheroine Fleeta, respectively.

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And the cutest comics couple Peg Burns and Tom Devlin as the Potato Heads from TOY STORY 3. Evidence suggest that Burns may actually have greeted SF legend William Gibson clad as a potato.

§ Daily Cross Hatch 2: How DOES Jaime Hernandez do it?

Yeah, so everything’s got to match up. The eyes have got to match up with the nose, the length of the nose to the mouth, to the chin. And that’s a guessing game, if I’m just sketching it for somebody [laughs]. I hope I don’t put the mouth too low or the eyes aren’t crooked.

There’s a thing about artists—and I’ve seen this in even the best artists. If you’re left-handed, the eyes can drop. The right eye will drop, and the cheek is fatter on that side. It’s just the way our eyes work. So, when I’m sketching a face, I’m holding it up to the light, backwards. That’s where you can see the mistakes, easily.

When you’re looking at it straight on, you can’t see it because your eyes aren’t trained.

§ This had been in our link dump forever: a stab at a John Stanley Top Ten

§ Nina Stone is back and talking about the Avengers

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§ Look at it this way, you didn’t lose a Senator, you gained a superhero. Way to go, Alvin Greene.

§ Glen Weldon looks at Lynd Ward’s woodcuts as comics:

The whole discussion would most likely mystify engraver and printmaker Lynd Ward, who matter-of-factly subtitled Gods’ Man, his 1929 book, “A Novel in Woodcuts.” As far as he was concerned, the fact that a succession of images could communicate meaning on a deep, pre-verbal  level — and do so in a manner that was unique to the format — was self-evident. And now that Gods’ Man, along with five other books Ward produced over the course of the following eight years, has been edited by Art Spiegelman into a two-volume edition for the Library of America, readers can see for themselves that the guy had a point.

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§ If you play FarmVille obsessively — we’re Farm Story people ourselves — you can no longer purchase the SuperFVMan and SuperFVWoman characters. This blogger suggests that DC’s copyright lawyers may have had something to do with this, but it is only a surmise.

§ The first issue of The Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics is online…we have not yet appraised the contents but it sounds promising.

§ Jeet Heer looks at the new Greg Sadowksi bookSupermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941 and finds it a valuable historical document for the record of the racism and sexism of the era:

The racism of these comics can be explained (although not forgiven) in historical terms but I think there is an aesthetic dimension as well. Racism in old cartoonist often had a stylistic dimension. Virtually every cartoonist of the era was racist to some degree but their racism came through in different styles. Eisner’s racism, for example, tended to be avuncular and paternalistic: Ebony White, Blubber and the rest were meant to be cute (like little monkeys, one is tempted to say). Jack Cole’s racism, by contrast tended to be hyperbolic (as did his whole approach to cartooning). If Eisner’s Ebony White looked a little like a monkey, Cole’s Midnight (a knock-off of Eisner’s Spirit) had a sidekick who actually was a monkey. The same principal can be seen in The Claw. “If I’m going to draw a yellow demon,” Cole seemed to think, “why not go all the way and make his as satanic as possible?”

§ This news item suggests that Dark Horse had a licensing disaster with their Elric omnibus.

Dark Horse didn’t have the rights. They thought they had – they certainly once did, but they didn’t anymore. And the person who knew that had left without telling anyone. When this was discovered, they asked Michael Moorcock for an extension. But Moorcock already had a deal with another publisher, Boom! Studios which covered these rights.

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