§ We haven’t seen this “beautifully sad” comic BADGER: THEN AND NOW by Howard Hardiman, but after reading about it on the Forbidden Planet blog, we want to.
§ Colorist and teacher Jose Villarubia is profiled in the online bmore magazine.
§ The producers of Time’s Techland blog wanted us to alert you that they cover comic books.
§ Kurt Busiek has created many, many characters.
§ The Onion’s best comics of the decade got a lot of play but we hadn’t seen Paste Magazine’s way more mainstream-centric one.
§ Naruto joins Michael Jackson and Britney Spears among 2009’s most searched for terms on Yahoo. Side note: some props for Brit? She has managed to entrance the world for much longer than anyone would have thought possible.
§ At Newsarama, Vaneta Rogers polls some pros on whether the industry would be able to support two comics conventions on the same weekend, and Sean McKeever has the most pointed response:
I can recall (via reading about it in CBG and CompuServe at the time) that 15 years ago, Philadelphia’s ComicFest tried to go head to head in New York against the Great Eastern Convention. The end result of this particular game of chicken was a head-on collision. No more ComicFest in Philly — nor any other major Philly show for some years — and a greatly diminished (at best) GEC.
I can also recall still having a robust “weekend warrior” stable of local shows here in Columbus, Ohio, back when I moved here in 1997. Then two of the shows decided to go head-to-head, and that was the last Columbus saw of either of those.
So, sure, it’s a brilliant idea!
Interview roundup:
§ Esther Keller interviews Nadja Spiegelman whose Zig and Wikki is forthcoming from Toon Books.
I was always telling stories, from as early as I can remember. The very earliest were for my little brother, Dash, when we were walking home from school. We had three or four characters — a cat, a mouse, a magical bag — and they went on different adventures each time. I started writing stories down as soon as I learned how to type. All my stories back then were about magic, and I remember one specifically about a magical pencil — anything you drew with it became real. I still wish I had one of those. I’ve always loved drawing, and the sides of my notebooks are all filled with doodles, but I was incredibly lucky to have Trade to collaborate with on this project. Otherwise it would have been Zig and Wikki in Why Are We Stick Figures.
§ Brian Heater had a four-part interview with the fascinating Jerry Moriarty who describes his shift in thinking from fine art to comics:
Yeah, right. I mean, I was particularly amazed, because I had been away from comics for ten years, and I had a student that was a dealer at a comic convention. He brought in a Frontline Combat. And I was thinking that I was going to pretend to like it, because I’m a teacher. I thought it would be sad. I took it home and I fell on the floor. Not only was it better than I remembered, it was inspiring. I thought, ‘how many other things since that period have I not seen?’ so I started going to comic cons, and that’s where the collector in me started to awaken.
§ Tim O’Shea chats up Gary Phillips, whose webcomic-to-book BICYCLE COP DAVE explores gentrification:
Like any clogged sink fixing, lawn mowing, middle class bourgeois homeowner, I welcome gentrification as it increases my property values for Lord knows, we need them pilates studios and latte joints. Now as a mystery writer, gentrification, and what happens behind closed doors to make these development deals happen, offers colorful story material. Bicycle Cop Dave is, at least in my mind, bits of The Shield, Boomtown, my buddies John Shannon’s L.A. area detective novels (The Poison Sky, The Cracked Earth, etc.) Larry Fondation’s street-level lit (Fish, Soap and Bonds, Unintended Consequences, etc.) with a nod to Mister X, set in this changing part of downtown Los Angeles. It’s a mystery with this other stuff as backdrop, but the mini-series is about the various characters who may or may not be dealing straight up with each other. All of whom have their own agendas.
For a second I thought it was Mike Baron’s Badger…