Art

Ethan Rilly's POPE HATS is a throwback to the golden era of indie comic books—a time undreamed of when LOVE AND ROCKETS and EIGHTBALL and HATE and YUMMY FUR came out every two months or so, and the comics periodical was an actual discrete unit of entertainment. It's also a reference to the finely observed, beautifully drawn comics...and yeah, it only comes out once a year or so, but it's worth waiting for.

Artist Jay Lynch has quite a storied career for drawing the Garbage Pail Kids, creating Nard 'n' Pat and such recents books as Otto's Orange Day for Toon Books. But it turns out, he and his ex-wife were also the artist known as Kringo:

My favorite Kirby now is the more crazy abstract stuff, so my selection favors that. Of course there was much more to Kirby.

By Steve Morris Avengers Assemble, Captain Marvel, and Pretty Deadly not enough for her, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has taken on a new project, at...

We've lost another great one: news spread today that Italian art master Sergio Toppi had passed away at age 80. Toppi got his start in advertising (and his sketchy, geometric styleed the way for the familiar the mid-century advertising look) but contributed comics to such magazines as Linus, Corto Maltese, Un uomo un’avventura, and Il Giornalino in Italy and l’Histoire de France en bandes dessinées and La Découverte du Monde in France. Best known for single stories rather than series characters, in recent years he worked exclusively with the French publisher Editions Mosquito. Archaia is bringing out a US edition of his retelling of the Arabian Knights, Sharaz-De later this year. A selection is below.

Stuart Immonen's artwork is one of the key selling points to, well, anything he is involved with, and All-New X-Men #1 is no exception. The premise of the book is that the original five members of the X-Men - Angel, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman and Beast - have come to the present for some reason (no, there's no sign of other founding X-Men Shortpack and Sage at this point in time). They are in the present, and they are... in the present. And Stuart Immonen is drawing it! So now you know the premise of the series in its entirety. The regardless point being, Marvel have released some of Immonen's pencils for the first issue of the series, written by Brian Michael Bendis. And unsurprisingly, they're spiffing, corking, and several other 1960s adjectives.

From September 1 to December 30, Oregonians and near Oregonians will be able to visit 25 Charles Schulz original on display at “GOOD GRIEF!...

After reading Bon Alimagno’s excellent interview/evaluation with colorist Erick Arciniega on iFanboy, I decided that it was time for more of us to start jumping on the coloring bandwagon. Getting the right colorist on a comic can be crucial to the success of the book, and yet there’s really very little coverage of this side of the industry available. With that in mind I contacted colorist-whizz (and nicest man alive) Val Staples, whose recent credits include books like Swamp Thing, New Mutants, Deadpool and Hulk, to get a basic insight into his life as a colorist.

Not quite comics, but hours of fun: The design blog Grain Edit features work by several cartoon-affiliated folks, and sums up the look of the day (as defined by the Mid-Century influence, whatever you call it) very nicely.

Afternoon diversion: Well, well, talk about tying up all our themes in one handy image, while tooling round we spotted the cover to the new edition of Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick, which covers:

This acclaimed study challenges the assumption that great women artists are exceptions to the rule who “transcended” their sex to produce major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture have often been neglected, Whitney Chadwick’s survey reexamines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender.

Mitch O'Connell is known as a wonderful artist in a vintage/pin-up style. He also has a huge collection of old comics. And at a perhaps unthinkable cost to himself, he's used that collection to give us one of the great treasures of our age: Sex in Comic! The top 100 strangest, suggestive and steamy vintage comic book panels of all time! Here are three excerpts but the whole thing has us gasping for air.

The collectible retro poster craze is burning up, man. Now artist Juan Ortiz is creating 80 retro style Star Trek posters-- one for each episode of the Classic Trek. The first four posters, from Quantum Mechanix, are a set of 18x24 plated-printed lithographs on 100-pound, aqueous-coated, satin-finish paper. The set is available for a mere $34.95 from startrek.com and many other fine retailers.