History

Here's one of those matters where there are really no winners. The Wallace Wood Estate, which is administered by J. David Spurlock, the publisher of Vanguard Publishing, is suing Wood's ex-wife Tatjana Wood, for the possession some of 150-200 pages of Wood art. According to the complaint, the pages are worth between $2000-25,000 each.

Who is Marie Duval? While not a household name in comics circles she's actually one of the most important Victorian cartoonists, artist on Ally Sloper, one of the early cartoon sensations. The tale of a no good lazeabout that ran from 1857 on, it was created by Duval's husband, Charles Ross, but gained its greatest fame after Duval took over in 1859. The Guardian has a tribute to her.

Manga isn't all awkward schoolgirls and giant robots. There has long been a very strong alternative and literary thread of manga, and two recent articles give you some perspective on it. I would call Ryan Holmberg's Proto-Gekiga: Matsumoto Masahiko’s Komaga a must read, but I have to confess, it is very long and involved, and I have set it aside for weekend reading. BUT the important thing is that he compares and contrasts Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who is kind of credited as the father of "gekiga" or realistic manga, with Matsumoto Masahiko, a figure who appears in Tatsumi's autobiographical A Drifting Life under another name. Masahiko's work went down a slightly different path than Tatsumi's but Holmberg shows that it was equally important:

by Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Frederic Wertham’s name is akin to the devil incarnate in the comics world. Wertham was one of the ringleaders of the anti...

Dark Horse Comics have published the US edition of Mary & Bryan Talbot and Kate Charlesworth's Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, as of a few weeks...

We all know that William Moulton Marston, the creator of wonder Woman, was a bit odd. He had two "wives" and he was heavy...

Australian cartoonist/journalist Eleri Mai Harris isn't just an editor at The Nib, Medium's marvelous comics section, run by Matt Bors. She's a trained journalist who turned to comics to tell stories and in today's Nib she has a good one: the story of the abortive designs for Canberra, the capital of Australia. Like a few other planned capital cities—Celebration and Brasilia comes to mind—the structural, utopian approach to city design rarely works out. The story also includes a dandy forgotten woman—Frank Lloyd Wright's associate Marion Mahony Griffin. So sit back and learn some Australian and architectural history.

Lisa Hix of Collectors Weekly sat down with Trina Robbins and runs through a few chapters of Robbins' Pretty in Ink, her third history of women cartoonists. The result is an immense article that could function on a primer on the history of women cartoonists going back more than 100 years, starting with Rose O'Neil:

This weekend the Small Press Expo takes place in North Bethesda, MD. The show is known for its collegial, summer camp vibe, but this...

http://youtu.be/mNLcjWIzQHM Before Marvel became the toast of tinsel town, there were some pretty dreadful Marvel-based movies—and I'm not just talking Howard the Duck. Dolph Lundgren...

About Comics is a boutique publisher that specializes in bringing back unjustly obscure comics in affordable editions. They've just released HOLLYWOOD SUPERSTARS by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle. Originally published in 1990 via Marvel's Epic line, it was a non-superheroic variant of Crossfire by the same team, basically behind the scenes tales of Hollywood, seen through the adventures of a team of private eyes consisting of a stuntman, an aspiring actress and a stand up comic. Like Crossfire, it has that slightly elegiac air of people who believe Hollywood's legend and lore a little too much, told as only a couple of insiders could tell it.

Since I was just picking a fight with Brian Hibbs, now I'll quote him extensively. His latest Tilting at Windmills is an anniversary post, looking the original Diamond catalog from when he started in 1989! We've lost some soldiers along the way, but the Diamond catalog is now a bloated thing,