Culture

Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

If you follow our twitter feed, you may have gathered that The Beatwas once again on the road last week, and the week before, and before that it was moving, and a holiday and before that BEA and before that...oh I don't know what it was but it was something. It's been even crazier than usual, and we're definitely been shirking our blogging duty. Along the way we've been storing up all these hot news stories to add our own snark dignified commentary to, but we never had the time to build up a full head of steam. And based on the longer-than-anticipated lifespan of some of these "controversies," they deserved a full measure of well thought out snark dignified commentary, and not something half tossed off while I was babysitting or eating a piece of chicken or whatever. Which is a roundabout way of saying, yeah, this is all belated, but at least I'm not holding a chicken bone. As some kind of lagniappe, I will scatter a bit of my own reportage of things i saw/heard with my OWN EYES AND EARS over the last little while. Enjoy.

Via David Macho

Although there has been no official confirmation, close family friends have reported that EC artist Al WIlliamson has passed away. The youngest of the EC artists, Williamson joined the legendary crew at the age of 20, finding kindred spirits in

Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel and Angelo Torres

, the group known as the "Fleagle Gang." All shared a love of classic illustration -- influenced by Alex Raymond and Hal Foster -- which found expression in a lush, romantic style based in classical drawing.

Dealer Robert Beerbohm appears to have found a copy of a French comic book from either 1844 or 1856, called The History of Mr. Tuberculus.

The Rogue Taxidermy Show at La Luz De Jesus Gallery Past Shows. Above: "Turkelaeopteryx (aka Squirkey)" by Sarina Brewer.

Masters of Manga is a new web project by translator Marc Bernabé with interviews with such giants as Moto Hagio, Urasawa, Tako Saito and more many. First up, Hideshi Hirata (known for thre gekiga samurai yarn Satsuma Gishiden) and Ken Akamatsu (Love Hina, Negima.) BOOKMARK MUST.

Gary Panter has revamped his website, and of course this means hours of poring over comics, drawings, paintings and historical artifacts. Panter also has a few events coming up for you West Coasters.

This week: Marvel gets ready to shift serial business away from comics retailers; Comic-Salon Erlangen foto parade, with cocks and blue people; more conversations worth having from Tom Spurgeon; DC editor Ian Sattler calms the critics, ends debate; why translating from English is a challenge; and your new comics recommendation of the week, delicious like a bag of boogers.

Via PR, another swell-looking collection of vintage kids comics, this time collated by Craig Yoe as part of his line of books at IDW....

o "Form Can Determine Content More Than Even the People Making the Content Generally Realize" Douglas Wolk and the Techland crew discuss the hardcover edition of Wednesday Comics (so does the Comics Alliance crew, by the way). I'm in the liked-it-in-theory camp on Wednesday Comics. I bought all the issues, but found most of the strips so mind-numbingly dull and nostalgia-driven that I lost interest after the first one. Wednesday Comics has some great art by Paul Pope, Karl Kerschl, Ryan Sook, Kyle Baker and many others. But with few exceptions, it reads like a bunch of people paying homage to the kinds of comics strips they liked as kids, rather than some of the most promising storytellers in the field making a serious attempt at exploring an off-beat format.

As we alluded to the other day, concept art for Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Chris Evans as Captain America have been leaked....or "leaked,"...