Culture

Looking to get high today? What If Kirby is a new site devoted to new, detailed, mind-blasting scans of Jack Kirby's artwork, and honestly just a few minutes of browsing sent The Beat tripping into new realms. Purchase of a membership in the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center gives access to the real hard stuff however: even bigger scans.

Via Superitch, an example of Canada's WWII comics efforts, in the shape of a complete Johnny Canuck story. We would give a lot to have a larger image of this cover, but alas, the internet has failed us. THAT'S how special Johnny Canuck is.

The following is a selection of new titles due to be published in September 2010.

There is no particular order to the titles presented below.

This list is not comprehensive, as there are over 275 graphic novel titles scheduled for this month. If you would like to browse them at your leisure, click here. Instead, I have selected titles which caught my interest. These are not necessarily titles I will purchase, but which I will definitely look at once they arrive at my local comics shop or bookstore. Please be advised that publication dates are not set in stone. Also, your local comics shop might receive copies before your local neighborhood website or library. Links connected to publishers will link to the publisher's website, sometimes to the exact title. Links for the ISBN-13 (also known as the Bookland EAN) will take you to the title as featured on BarnesAndNoble.com . I consider my tastes to be rather eclectic. If you feel I've neglected or slighted a title, publisher, or creator, please feel free to mention it in the comments below.

Monthly lists such as this will be posted at the end of the previous month. I will also be posting specific subject lists (comic strips, comics history and surveys, superheroes...) for each season, but these will not have a set schedule.

So Darwyn Cooke got caught on video saying that superhero comics should "...stop catering to the perverted needs of forty-five-year-old men." He called out rape, children being forced to eat rats, explicit sex, foul language, and a lack of new characters. And now some people are getting upset. Oh come on, like you've never thought any of that. Unfortunately the whole thing got derailed by his swipe at turning Batwoman into a lesbian, which came off as rather homophobic to some. Personally, I have to admit, I read it more as the character continuity issue of a man who likes his Bronze and Silver Age comics, which is somewhat humorous, given that he's complaining about comics being ruled by the whims of forty-somethings, but he is large, he contains multitudes. (To which I say, Darwyn, it wasn't "overnight". She may have been around since 1956, but she hadn't made any significant appearances since Crisis on Infinite Earths which basically changed everything. SEE? I can be as big of a geek as you are.) So let's break this down from the point of view of someone who is not forty five or male -- me.

This brief video of creator Darwyn Cooke, captured at the Fan Expo Canada last weekend, managed to capture all the "grumpy old Eisner winner" complaints of those who would wish comics to return to a more noble time. Coming out swinging against anal rape, Cooke also had some sharp words for Kate Kane's reboot as a beautiful lipstick lesbian. This has understandably gotten some heat, especially from gay comics bloggers, but in a statement at 4th Letter, Cooke explains himself:

Mark Waid has reconstructed his controversial Harvey night speech and made what he was getting at much clearer:

“Yes, Professor Waid, you hippie freak, sharing is all well and good, but how does that pay my bills?”

Daniel Raeburn has made the entire four-issue run of his 1997-2002 fanzine The Imp available for PDF download. Single topic issues on Dan Clowes, Jack Chick, Chris Ware and Mexican historietas generally defined the direction of all future scholarship on such topics and this is one of the finest and most influential bits of comics scholarship/criticism of the last 20 years. So go download for your iPad or whatever.

In his “Emanata” column at Techland, Douglas Wolk looks at the promotional efforts for an upcoming Marvel story by Jonathan Hickman, singling out Fantastic Four as a series that particularly finds itself in the shadow of its creators:

“As Lee and Kirby established the FF, their premises are inflexible: they're a family. They're explorers. They have adventures together. […] If you stick to those axioms, you're not just making a Fantastic Four story, you're making one in the Lee/Kirby tradition […]. If you ignore any of those axioms, then it's not really the Fantastic Four any more, and the question becomes how, and how quickly, it's going to get back to being the ‘real’ Fantastic Four.”

The great fantasist/cartoonist Jim Woodring has only raised 49 percent of the $4500 he needs to construct a Giant Steel Dip Pen and Penholder which he will use to demonstrate art, cure cancer, open a portal to Vhoori, save Social Security and make kittens fly out of rainbows. In this dimension, Woodring's plans for the giant pen are equally noble:

Wow, shit gets very, very personal in this installment.

If you were following our live tweets of the Harveys last night, (and those from ComixMix and JahFurry) you saw portions of Mark Waid's keynote speech transcribed. While claiming it was a "vodka-fueled rant," Waid delivered a heartfelt, if off-the-cuff, talk on the importance of the idea and the supremacy of comics as a medium of ideas. He started off with remarks on the history of copyright, stating it was a means to allow ideas to go into the public domain where they could remain powerful. "No one would say we'd be better off if Shakespeare plays weren't allowed to be read and performed in high schools," he used as an example. While not advocating piracy, his main argument seemed to be that it's already done, the genie is out of the bottle, and struggling to keep ideas protected isn't as important as finding a way to profit from those ideas.

We're at the Harvey Awards banquet with Ramona Fradon, Michael Golden, and many other stars. We're live tweeting the winners at www.twitter.com/comixace. Please follow...