History

Well, this is really cool. It's a little more than a year ago that comics lost one of its greatest friends, mentors and publishers in Dylan Williams. Although his spirit lives on with the company he founded, Sparkplug, a new way to remember him has just been announced by The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the repository of Ohio State University's comics-related archives: The Dylan Williams Collection.

While the finding of the check for $130 which National presented to Siegel and Shuster might have been a high point of this year's comic history, here's a strong contender for another: the actual audio of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings on comic books.

Comics Scholar Jess Nevins is all the way up to Doctor Doom (I) in the Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes which is...just what it sounds like, and already has hundreds of entries. Best known for his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annotations, and other detailed annotations for revered comics series, this encyclopedia looks to be even more time consuming.

Recently, comics herstorian Trina Robbins and Ladies Making Comics' Alexa Dickman teamed up to find Golden Age Fiction House artist Fran Hopper was alive and not yet lost to the sands of time. And now they have a photo. Hopper, 90, is shown next to a self-portrait she painted back in the '40s.

The Blown Covers blog recalls the gag insert in Raw #8 which included an one page gags by Burns, Marischal, Panter, and the rest of the Raw gang. The punchlines were created by commitee however:

Friday's Olympics Opening Ceremony was perhaps the most deliriously audacious spectacle of the Internet age. Devised by the Anglo-Irish Danny Boyle, it celebrated the uniquely English heritage of industrialization, socialized medicine, drug-inspired music trends, James Bond, and fantasy literature. God, how did I even write that sentence?

Although this "quest for Seve Ditko" story calls him the JD Salinger of comics, he's actually pretty easy to find—like many other pilgrims, the Post reporter just rang the door on his studio.

Marvel is going all cosmic in the movie world, and Thanos, a character created by Jim Starlin, is at the heart of it. The evidence is unavoidable. First it was the Thanos cameo at the end of the Avengers—supposedly thrown in because director Joss Whedon was a fan of the character and a cosmic storyline is integral to keeping him on board for Avengers 2.

Disclosure: Author Sean Howe interviewed me for this; and he interviewed everyone else. Coming from Harper in October:

Tim Hanley (he of Gender Crunching) has a great guest post up at DC Women Kicking Ass looking at The Women Behind Wonder Woman. Of course we all know about the men like William Marston and HG Peter, but there were several women involved in the early years as well, including Marston's two wives Elizabeth and Olive (above—yes the three of them lived together and it was a little odd), but also women who worked directly on the series, including the great editor Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk and even a scripter:

Novelist Max Allan Collins is no stranger to the comics, with his ROAD TO PERDITION graphic novel being turned into an actual prestige movie, and his long-running Ms. Tree comic. His new novel is actually set in the world of comics with a comics section by long-time collaborator Terry Beatty.

You know how you're always reading about how great the first Comic-Con in San Diego was with everyone sitting around the pool at the El Cortez while throwing rubber duckies at Jack Kirby and Ray Bradbury? Well some of the surviving founders of SDCC have gotten together to put on an old-timey show called The San Diego Comic Fest, to be held October 19-21 at the San Diego Town & Country Resort and Convention Center. The guest list consists of some people who were actually at the first cons in the '70s, including George Clayton Johnson, Jackie Estrada, Mark Evanier, Murphy Anderson, Ron Turner, and Tim Powers.