Culture

By all accounts, it was one of the biggest Free Comic Book Days yet, with most stores reporting "sell-outs" early on and crowds and -- importantly -- SALES that rivaled their biggest days ever. It was also a media event as over 200 news stories show.

What was the world of comics like in 1994? This edition of the KCET nightly news show LIFE AND TIMES will give you the answer: much like today except there was a lot more hair and a lot less respect.

Judging by the joyful tweets that flowed out over the weekend, this year's Toronto Comic Arts Festival was a big success. There were many reports of books selling out, and general rapture. TPSycho Duck has a typical blog post:

Canadians seem like a peaceful, tolerant folk, but they have a record of seizing a lot of material at the border, including, this week, several copies of the comics anthology BLACK EYE. Editor Ryan Standfest has a complete account in the link. Basically cartoonist Tom Neely was carrying five copies of the book across the border, when the books were seized. Neely writes:

Dan Hipp has drawn many things -- GYAKUSHU, THE AMAZING JOY BUZZARDS, BEN 10, and many, many more comics, and his MisterHipp blog is a dragon's lair of fun art. However these posters imagining STAR WARS, TRON and ALIEN as Tintin books are must-sees.

As you've probably heard elsewhere, Heritage Auction recently sold a piece of original comics artwork for...

Free Comic Book Day is Saturday, May 7th, 2011! And there are very likely some comics-related festivities happening in your area, or at the very least some free comic books. There are way too many happenings to cover here. Diamond has a master list of events, including interviews by Darwyn Cooke and Humberto Ramos and the FCBD site has a monster list of signings organized alphabetically by state!

The contretemps over Neil Gaiman's $45,000 speaking fee and the Minnesota House majority leader who called him a "pencil-necked weasel" has continued, in the way that all matters of life and death have. Alex Pareene / at Salon has one side of it:

Now that Nerd Culture is just regular Culture, thanks to the Internet, you'd think everything would have been settled, but there are still some skirmishes going on. And only this week a new mini-ruckus erupted and oddly enough, it was among the girls.

Now, one of the GOOD things about the internet is that it has allowed girl geeks to be just as proud and out as boy geeks and to, indeed, show that they like geek stuff, something that was doubted for a long time.

Speaking as a lifelong nerd myself, I can testify that back in the neolithic age of nerditry, if you had girls genes you were not taken seriously as a comics fan, wrestling fan, Star Wars fan, or anything else that boys thought was just for them. Oh, the looks I got when I said I had read Robert E. Howard. For a long time, I felt like I was the only one. In fact while I was at WonderCon, I was chatting to Sergio Aragones about the olden days and he said, "Remember when you were the only girl?" and I could only laugh in agreement.

You may recall that yesterday Minnesota House Majority Leader Matt Dean got his website crashed after he called Neil Gaiman "a pencil-necked weasel" and a hated thief over a reported $45,000 speaking see at a library. Gaiman, naturally, fired the next round at his blog:

Before he designed the Thunder God whose movie opens tomorrow, Jack Kirby had designed two previous characters named Thor, and over at the Kirby Museum they look back at the Sandman version and the Tales of the Unexpected version. We've seen THOR btw and will have a full review tomorrow. Short version: entertaining but 3D sucks.

A Minnesota budget battle has expanded into an attack on Neil Gaiman, as one fiscally-minded politician called the Newbery Award winning writer, whom he "hates," a "pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota."