§ Voting on The Inkwell Awards honoring the best in ink-slinging is now underway. The awards are being sponsored by Wizard Entertainment, and the ceremony will take place at Wizardworld: New England (Boston) October 15-17.
§ With the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at hand, Josh Neufeld’s AD graphic novel about the survivors is getting reexamined as well.
§ About 20 of the books on this list of 40 best graphic novels for the classroom are warhorses; the other 20 are more debatable but still fairly solid.
§ Oliver Ho at Pop Matters takes a look back at Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing run
“Steve Gerber’s role as one of the best and emblematic writers of his generation can’t be overstated. He was a crucial figure in comics history. Like some of the all-time great cartoonists of years past, Gerber carved a place for self-expression and meaning out of a type of comic that had no right to hold within itself so many things and moments that were that quirky and offbeat and delicately realized—except that Gerber made it so.” Those quirky and offbeat moments included experimental devices, such as inserting page-length texts and prose stories within comics, and writing himself into his penultimate issue, a meta-narrative move that seems to foreshadow such now-classic works as Grant Morrison’s iconic run on Animal Man in the 1980s. Gerber would downplay his use of the device.
§ CO2 Comics’ Gerry Giovinco continues his entertaining look back at the history of Comico, with a look at the Primer anthology which launched many a modern day titan of comics.
§ While cleaning out the email we were encouraged to check out the Rotten Comics’ site, and while we can’t vouch for the contents, the covers are nice.
§ We were also sent this link to a video by the Boffo Yux Dudes harmonizing on “The Ballad of Henry Pym.” Because if anyone needs a ballad, it’s Henry Pym. Edgar Wright, are you listening?
That “40 GNs” list suffers a bit from returning to the same well too many times. Satrapi and Pekar are each listed 3 times, and Moore, Miller, and Morrison/Quitely are each listed twice. While all of the listed works are worthy, it offers a less-broad view of the medium you’d get by including a few of the many also-worthy creators who aren’t on the list.
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