Culture

Oh yeah speaking of the Oscars, Renee Zellweger -- WTF. While the actress often looks like she just chomped into a handful of Sour Skittles, last night her eyes seemed to have collapsed into tiny black holes orbiting Alpha Centauri. And what was with mean Richard Gere trying to get her to read on stage? It was obvious girlfriend did not want to wear reading glasses, and was too shy to say anything about it. Either that or she had found the stash James Franco had hidden at the Dolby Theater a couple of years back.

Oh no! Spoilers have escaped onto the internet once more, this time for a DC title of some kind! How can you avoid reading...

Poisoned Chalice Part 3: Marvelman Falls The actual work on the Marvelman titles was done by various artists, and Mick Anglo goes into quite a bit...

The Chicago Weekly profiles cartoonists cartoonist Ivan Brunetti, who talks candidly about his teaching, low comics output of late, depression, and home town. Perhaps best known for his Fantagraphics collection Misery Loves Comedy, Brunetti is a much respected foundational indie cartoonist. His two comics anthologies from Yale Press —Graphic Fiction and Grahpic Fiction Volume II -- are also just about the best introductions to literary and art comics of recent years.

What is the Harlem Shake? It involves gathering your friends in a messy room and jigging about merrily while wearing costumes and/or masks. Good old fashioned fun, really. Although the Harlem Shake is a real dance going back a decade or more and performed in Harlem, the new dance is for those too uncoordinated to do it Gangnam Style.

The other day we were joking about 80s comics weirdos/iconoclasts/content creators like Bob Burden and Steve Lafler -- post-underground cartoonists who turned out sizable, notable bodies of work that appeared mostly in serial form, mostly based around very strong characters. It's a format that has all but vanished. But here's another near legendary practitioner of the same, Canadian legend David Boswell, creator of Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman. Boswell has just put all of Fleming's adventures online in a pay-what-you-wish format, which most people will take to be free, but be a good sport and drop a few bucks, won't you?

ATTN MARVEL!!! Can you please do these as an insert next year?

In the spirit of the season!

Throughout the month of February, the Ohio Art League is showcasing a comic art exhibition curated by Ken Eppstein, creator, publisher and chief muckity-muck of Nix Comics, a local comic book publisher. Not only has Eppstein put together a delightful display showing the process in which a comic has made, he’s also arranged for three presentations about the past, present and future of comics in Columbus.

In this week's PW Comics World, I interviewed Jeremy Short—creator of the study on comics comprehension referenced here—about that study and a general overview...

A must read and a must-read for masochists top our linkage today, both returning to topics that were much on the minds of anyone in comics about 30 years ago — oldies but goodies. First and most importantly, library professor Carol Tilley has been going through Dr. Fredric Wertham's notes and found out that he was, to use a technical term, full of hooey.

There's been controvery over the past few days following DC's decision to hire Orson Scott Card, a pioneer in contemporary homophobia, as one of...