Cartoonists

Raina Telgemeier has had a busy year promoting her graphic novel SMILE -- which was just picked as an Honor Book for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards. She shares some of her pictures, including stops in Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and Queens. Here's Telegemier at the Dumbo Arts Festival just a week ago.

Speaking of Cartoonists Doing Things: Steve Murray -- the birth name of the cartoonist better known worldwide as Chip Zdarsky -- has launched a campaign for mayor of Toronto, ON:

The folks at Penny Arcade are running "Rob Liefeld Pose" * contest to promote the Liefeld inspired video game Comic Jumper. And artist Rob Liefeld entered it himself.

Via FLOG, word of a new, expanded website for Johnny Ryan with a blog and prints and all. The above are examples of new prints for sale.

Matt Furie, creator of the much loved indie comic BOY'S CLUB, has supplied the art for a web-video game called Return of the Quack. And it's excellent. It's Friday! At 2 pm the workweek ends, and you may commence playing this game.

And speaking of the '80s -- and Rob Clough! -- he's conducting a career-spanning interview with Steve Lafler over at The Comics Journal. Springing from the underground sensibility of the '70s, Lafler was a fixture of the alt comix of the 80s and beyond with his iconic characters Dog Boy and Benb. From the intro:

Vanessa Davis and her delightful Make Me a Woman are coming to several towns near you in the coming months:

Looking to get high today? What If Kirby is a new site devoted to new, detailed, mind-blasting scans of Jack Kirby's artwork, and honestly just a few minutes of browsing sent The Beat tripping into new realms. Purchase of a membership in the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center gives access to the real hard stuff however: even bigger scans.

The following is a selection of new titles due to be published in September 2010.

There is no particular order to the titles presented below.

This list is not comprehensive, as there are over 275 graphic novel titles scheduled for this month. If you would like to browse them at your leisure, click here. Instead, I have selected titles which caught my interest. These are not necessarily titles I will purchase, but which I will definitely look at once they arrive at my local comics shop or bookstore. Please be advised that publication dates are not set in stone. Also, your local comics shop might receive copies before your local neighborhood website or library. Links connected to publishers will link to the publisher's website, sometimes to the exact title. Links for the ISBN-13 (also known as the Bookland EAN) will take you to the title as featured on BarnesAndNoble.com . I consider my tastes to be rather eclectic. If you feel I've neglected or slighted a title, publisher, or creator, please feel free to mention it in the comments below.

Monthly lists such as this will be posted at the end of the previous month. I will also be posting specific subject lists (comic strips, comics history and surveys, superheroes...) for each season, but these will not have a set schedule.

So Darwyn Cooke got caught on video saying that superhero comics should "...stop catering to the perverted needs of forty-five-year-old men." He called out rape, children being forced to eat rats, explicit sex, foul language, and a lack of new characters. And now some people are getting upset. Oh come on, like you've never thought any of that. Unfortunately the whole thing got derailed by his swipe at turning Batwoman into a lesbian, which came off as rather homophobic to some. Personally, I have to admit, I read it more as the character continuity issue of a man who likes his Bronze and Silver Age comics, which is somewhat humorous, given that he's complaining about comics being ruled by the whims of forty-somethings, but he is large, he contains multitudes. (To which I say, Darwyn, it wasn't "overnight". She may have been around since 1956, but she hadn't made any significant appearances since Crisis on Infinite Earths which basically changed everything. SEE? I can be as big of a geek as you are.) So let's break this down from the point of view of someone who is not forty five or male -- me.

The great fantasist/cartoonist Jim Woodring has only raised 49 percent of the $4500 he needs to construct a Giant Steel Dip Pen and Penholder which he will use to demonstrate art, cure cancer, open a portal to Vhoori, save Social Security and make kittens fly out of rainbows. In this dimension, Woodring's plans for the giant pen are equally noble:

Wow, shit gets very, very personal in this installment.