History

The famous murals at New York's Palm restaurant appear to be gone.

Peter Bagge is prolific and hilarious, a very good combination in a cartoonist. He's been running short one page historical comic strips in recent issues of Dark Horse Presents and his own series Apocalypse Nerd, and these will be collected in the one shot Founding Fathers Funnies. Bagge is all over the humor of the great people who founded our great nation, and i'm sure it goes beyond cherry trees, kites and wooden false teeth.

This weekend's new superhero movie is Fantastic Four, not to be confused with Fantastic Four or Fantastic Four Or even The Fantastic Four The 1978 cartoon version famously substituted a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E for the Human Torch....

On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin became the first human being to achieve Earth orbit, effectively winning the space race. At NASA, scientists sighed, poured more coffee, and redoubled their efforts. In New...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVEbuuhLxc In his latest weekly video, Cerebus creator Dave Sim reveals that an anonymous donor has agreed to leave a bequest of $500,000 to The Cerebus Trust Fund. So it turns out someone really likes...

Just in case you missed my explanation of how manga helped pave the way for a more diverse comics industry, here's a video of me and then-Marvel editor Bobbie Chase in 1996 trying to explain why women might want to read comics. It's from a TV show called The Anti Gravity Room, which was shown on the SfiCi Channel as it was then known, which was a US version of Canada's Prisoners of Gravity. Both shows covered the whole "comics, nerd world" with taped interviews and comics-friendly segments that seem commonplace now, but were unique at the time. I think I co-hosted an episode or two, and I can't wait until those tapes surface.

Want to know what comic-cons are really about? Get these books. In my previous post I talked about the importance of community -- it is central to proper understanding of ethics, and as such it...

In honor of the Beat's 11th anniversary ehre are two epic photos from recent social media. In the first, Congressman John Lewis presents signed copies of the March graphic novels to Malala Yousafzai, the...

This is an old link, but Robort Boyd has posted a slideshow he delivered on Comixploitation! that rounds up some of the more egregious examples of horrible artistic rip-offs in comics over the years,...

While I was poking around the internet for the history of Marriott Hall the other day, I chanced upon some photos of San Diego in the 80s taken during and just after the construction of the Marriott Marquis and Marina. The first photo is prior to the hotel's completion in 1987. I'm not enough of an expert in San Diego history to know the history of the marina, but as you can see, it bears very little resemblance to the glitzy high rise neighborhood of today. There's no convention center, no Hyatt, no Embassy Suites, no Petco PArk, no Omni...nothing really.

Prolific cover artist and painter Earl Norem has passed away at age 91 as reported on Facebook by family members including his daughter: As my son has so eloquently posted, it is true that my...

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s); if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));Every once and a while...