Culture

Bully's running theme this month is Christmas in Duckburg -- nobody got into the holiday spirit better than Carl Barks!

Once they teamed up to fight dull comics and superhero tropes with the twin pillars of 80s dark and edgy -- THE DARK KNIGHT and WATCHMEN -- but now they find themselves on opposite sides of a political battle! Okay it's not really a fight, it's middle-aged comics creators speaking their minds, but Alan Moore has rebutted Frank Miller's disparaging comments on the Occupy Wall Street movement. While Moore's work has actually become something of a symbol for the various protest movements springing up around the world as the V for Vendetta mask has become an icon at the rallies, Miller called the protesters losers who needed to go home to their momma's basement. And as usual, Moore just has no time for it:

Let's get our Christmas art parade kicked off with Japanese artist Tsuneo Sanda, one of the best known contemporary Star Wars artists -- because nothing says Christmas like Yoda. Every Star Wars Christmas image brings back distant memories of the "Star Wars Holiday Special" and Bea Arthur's bravura performance as the cantina owner. And the burning question "What do you get a wookie for Christmas (when he already owns a comb)?"

I happened across Iron Man 2.0 Vol. 1: Palmer Addley Is Dead at the library and thought I'd give it a go. I'd given the monthly version a look, but it hadn't held my attention. Sometimes, a comic reads better as a book and I've enjoyed Nick Spencer's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Infinite Vacation.

By Todd Allen A couple weeks back, BOOM! issued a "visual press release" about Grant Morrison's and Ian Gibson's "Steed and Mrs. Peel."  This caused...

About once a year, we give Stately Beat Manor a really good going-over — tossing out unwanted pamphlets, moving some stuff into storage, organizing permanent additions and so on — and after doing so we write a post with our thoughts about storage and hoarding and so on. This is that post, c. 2011. I assume most of you reading this are borderline hoarders, like The Beat. Your shelf porn resembles a splatter film. You have more longboxes than you do pieces of silverware. Your home contains at least one Billy. You have at one time -- perhaps even at this very moment -- made use of some kind of software to catalog your collection even if it was just Excel or Google spreadsheets. You know the drill.

It's the Hope Diamond of the comic book set. The one-of-a-kind 9.0 graded copy of ACTION #1 that once belonged to actor Nicolas Cage is going on the auction block -- and it is expected to set a record for a comic price. The comics loving actor purchased the copy -- the finest of ACTION #1 known to exist -- in 1997 for $150,000. It was then stolen from his house in 2000 and vanished from history until it was found in a California storage unit last year. According to ComicConnect's Vincent Zurzolo -- the go-to man for all comics collectible lore -- the stolen comic was actually tracked down and traced to a man who had purchased it from the owner of the contents of the unit. Will someone please make a movie about this investigation?

While we were tidying up, we chanced upon the old archives of Beat articles no longer on the Internet, including one linking to Edward Champion's Boilerplate for All Future Comics Articles. It's as true today as it was in 2006!

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend and plenty of turkey and stuffins. We spent the whole holiday mucking out our shelf porn -- organizing shelves, tossing pamphlets, setting aside some books for storage some for donation, a few for eBay. And some for Beat giveaways! Check back every day this week at 5 pm EST for some really swell classic GNs which we're giving away to lucky readers! A few other notes of business:

As you've doubtless heard by now, Marvel followed up the Fear Itself event mini-series with issues 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3.  Let's be kind and...

Via Crunchyroll, a translation of a 2chan chart which shows which kinds of otaku are the craziest and cause the most trouble. In case you're wondering about the "train" part that occupies the Michele Bachmann spot on the chart, it does not refer to various colloquial meanings of the word "train." It means fans who like...trains. You know, toot toots. Just what is it that makes them so crazy? Known as tetsudo otaku, train fans have long been looked on with suspicion by the Ahakibara crowd -- Irvine Welsh is universal, it seems -- but a band of younger, more energetic trainspotters has revitalized the subculture:

Former Marvel e-i-c Jim Shooter's blog has become the repository of some amazing stories -- some of them even true -- but here's one that could well become a holiday tradition: Thanksgiving in Newark. It's got everything a TV movie could need: a freelancer in need -- IRON MAN scripter David Michelinie -- an editor with a mission, two holiday orphans, and a quest to bring it all together: