Culture

Not a lot of details on this yet, but Twitter and Facebook are spreading the news that Joe Kubert has passed away.

MUST DO EVENT OF THE SEASON!

Afternoon diversion: Well, well, talk about tying up all our themes in one handy image, while tooling round we spotted the cover to the new edition of Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick, which covers:

This acclaimed study challenges the assumption that great women artists are exceptions to the rule who “transcended” their sex to produce major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture have often been neglected, Whitney Chadwick’s survey reexamines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender.

Mitch O'Connell is known as a wonderful artist in a vintage/pin-up style. He also has a huge collection of old comics. And at a perhaps unthinkable cost to himself, he's used that collection to give us one of the great treasures of our age: Sex in Comic! The top 100 strangest, suggestive and steamy vintage comic book panels of all time! Here are three excerpts but the whole thing has us gasping for air.

Brooklyn is, despite the gentrification covering a huge swath of the entire borough, still home to a few people who don't shop at Kitsuné; and most of these urban poor seem to be cartoonists, which Brooklyn also has a huge population. The local website Brokelyn catches up with a few of them for survival tips. Brendan Leach, Leslie Stein and Lisa Hanawalt, (whose book on farts for children is excerpted above) give their recipes for ketchup soup and other practical hints:

Koyama Press will be publishing Volume 4 of Dustin Harbin's Diary Comics this fall, presumably in time for the fall comics show circuit. If you can't get enough of @dustinharbin on twitter or his website, this collection should definitely amuse and enlighten.

Matt Madden nails the history of comics in six panels. To see the thing full size, you'll need to go here, to a long essay by Professor Paul Lopes of Colgate University, on why comics are a great artform—something that some in the academic world must still be persuaded of.

As you may have heard, nail art is all the rage these days, and its getting more and more ornate. And some ladies are going for comics inspired pieces, such as this, by Brooklyn's Fleury Rose, who created this design for someone going to the Dark Knight Rises premiere in New York, who got to show them off to director Christopher Nolan, even. Who wouldn't want to sport these dark knails?

This is firmly under the HYPE banner since I was a publishing consultant for this project, but Ham Fisher's venerable boxing-themed comic strip character has been updated to an MMA-fighter for IDW's Joe Palooka, the brain storm of boxing announcer Joe Antonacci, along with Mike Bullock, Fernando Peniche and Matt Triano. In the story, Joe Palooka is a discredited MMA fighter who travels the world desperately trying to clear his name while fighting to earn a spot in the legendary “Legion of Combat,” worldwide fight series.

Last night Ragú debuted the above ad during NBC's telecast of the Olympics. We had to rewind it a few times before we actually believed what we saw.

As sometimes happens, I walk into a comics shop and discover something I didn't know I needed! Here's an example...

There's been some concern over Marvel's sales in the last six months or so. "But AVX is frickin' huge," you say. And it is. But that might be masking Marvel's inability to sell comics that aren't part of a crossover/Event. Marvel's Next event is the pseudo-relaunch of Marvel NOW! and nobody's quite sure what to make of that just yet. Last week, Brian Hibbs penned a column expressing concerns about Marvel NOW!'s viability and the poor general state of Marvel's and non-Event top list and mid-list. I think it's time to compare some of the numbers on this.