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§ Nice Art: Carlton Waugh is probably best known to comics scholars as the author of a book called The Comics, (Catchy eh?) published in 1947, and one of the first serious discussions of the medium. But he also made really cool looking maps of Greenwich Village in the 20s. If this map only included kale and quinoa it could be torn from today’s apps!

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§ Chip Zdarsky is having a second Zdarscon and making his famous friends come along. If you’re in Toronto you’re going to want to go.

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§ A couple from the revamped Comics Bulletin: Daniel Elkin makes his picks for the Ignatz Awards

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§ And Chase Magnett looks at Inio Asano’s Goodnight Punpun, one of the best comics being published. It’s about growing up, but the awkward hero is portrayed as a bird, and this metaphor gives the book a lot of visual power;

What is most striking about Asano’s artwork in Punpun is not his attention to detail or sense of realism, but when he chooses to discard both. Punpun and his immediate family are all rendered as childish birds, floating like sheet-wrapped ghosts with stick limbs, two dots for eyes and a beak. Only height and one or two additional features (e.g. glasses) distinguish Punpun from his uncle or mother. This is never remarked upon within the story; they are simply designed differently and rest upon the page like a doodle in a Renaissance painting.

§ When Dynamite hired book market expert Alan Payne last year, we told you they’d be making more of a mark, and ICv2 confirms this.

Dynamite Entertainment is jumping its output of book format products from a recent four or five a month to 13 in October (including three limited editions), led by its biggest dollar book release ever, The Art of Atari (see “’The Art of Atari’ Video Game Retrospective”), with a 75,000 copy print run (also available as limited edition).  While Dynamite has had bigger book format piece sales in the past (see “Dynamite Plans Big Numbers for Second ‘Grumpy Cat’ Collection”), the high MSRP of the Atari book makes it the largest dollar print run for a book format product in Dynamite history, by our calculations.

§ That Sax Rohmer’s DOPE adaptation by Trina Robbins was funded in case you were wondering.

§ A guide to Basic questions to ask when reading a comic by Aaron Kashtan:

This is intended as a resource for students or for academics who are new to reading comics critically. It is a list of basic questions one might want to ask when reading a comic book or graphic novel. Most of these questions have to do with the visual or artistic aspect of a comic — what it looks like — rather than the literary or narrative side (storyline, themes, characterization, etc.). I focus on this because teachers and students tend to have a basic understanding of how to analyze the story of a graphic novel; in doing so, you can apply the techniques you learn in high school English classes. But no one really tells you how to analyze a comic book from a visual perspective, and that’s why a guide like this one might be useful.

§ I guess there was a shit show at WorldCon this year as far as creepy fan interactions goes. Alison Wilgus has some guidelines for how to approach creators you don’t know. Be polite and dont’ talk to them when they are eating or going to the bathroom for a start.

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§ There’s a comic-con in Bucharest, Romania, the East European Comics Con. Their big guest is not a comics person, but German actor Tom Wlaschiha who played Jaqen H’ghar on Game of Thrones cuz I guess he’s local. He’s that guy who said “A girl is no one” many many times. This is what he looks like without his faceless men hair.

East European Comic Con, the biggest comic convention in Romania, will take place at Romexpo between November 11 and November 13. Tickets are available online at eventim.ro, but can also be purchased from Orange, Germanos, and Vodafone stores, Humanitas and Carturesti bookshops, Carrefour Baneasa and Carrefour Militari, and OMV gas stations.

§ Nadja Spiegelman, daughter of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, has written a memoir about her relationship with her mother.

According to Spiegelman, we make ourselves and each other up as we live and grow. But, she says “the way we talk about the past changes the past.” She set out in her writing to forgive her mother. Instead, she and her mother came to an understanding. The result? “Impossible closeness.”  Along the way, she heard the harrowing and difficult details of her mother and grandmother’s pasts.

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