§ As is so often the case, we’ll kick this off with a Comics Comics link, Jeet Heer’s thought-provoking The Mid-Life Crisis of the Great Commercial Cartoonists

Further to Dan’s excellent post on Wally Wood, one way to think about Wood’s career is to realize that he followed a pattern common to commercial comic book artists of his era. Think of Kirby, Ditko, Kane, and Eisner (and maybe also John Stanley). All these cartoonists started off as journeymen artists, had a mid-life crisis which made them try do more artistically ambitious work, but ended up being thwarted either by the limits of their talent or the constraints of marketplace.


More to chew on in the comments.

Oly-Beattie

§ Michael Cavna rounds up some Olympics cartoons.

§ Steve Bunche unearths The Most Disturbing Submission Letter Ever

§ Pirates beware! A Missouri man has been sentenced to two years in prison for illegally taping THE DARK KNIGHT in a movie theater. Between this and the arrest of theWolverine Fiend, the MPAA is fighting back. [Via Robot 6]

§ A roundtable discussing Ariel Shrag’s LIKEWISE is underway at The Hooded Utilitarian

So what is It? Ariel defines It as “sort of like an appreciation of certain things in the world…that like not very many people have, but you can tell if someone or something has it.” She also says, “you either have It or you don’t and it has to do with like getting to the root of things? like when you talk about something you talk about what it essentially is.” It, then, is cool; It’s ease with authority; It’s mastery. I think Freud would call it the phallus.


§ Same Hat! alerts us to an upcoming exhibit of art from Garo, the Raw of Japan.

§ Douglas Wolk interviewed Kevin O’Neill and it’s up to part 4 at TCJ.

§ Austin English also interviewed Rina Ayuyang

§ Is_Mark_Millar responds to Not_Mark_Millar

§ El Santo looks at some Xeric-winning comics, including Haunted

§ At the Forbidden Planet Int’l blog, Richard Bruton has a feature called “Graphic Novel Classic Library” and this time out he looks at Bryan Talbot’s LUTHER ARKWRIGHT.

§ Movie newsCap’n Jack Sparrow sill sail solo in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Will and Elizabeth (aka Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly) will not be back. I guess they are all busy waiting for that green flash. This outing will be directed by Rob Marshall, usually a sign that a franchise is settling into comfortable middle age. OTOH, a couple of hours of Johnny Depp mugging is usually a reliable performer at the box office.

1 COMMENT

  1. “A Missouri man has been sentenced to two years in prison for illegally taping THE DARK KNIGHT in a movie theater. Between this and the arrest of theWolverine Fiend, the MPAA is fighting back”

    At least they went after the right person this time.

  2. To be fair to the crazy submission guy, growing up with violent hippies seems a pretty solid grounding for working on Green Arrow.