From all over:
§ Chris Sims rates the DC snack cakes:

Beneath the icing, they’re just the standard Hostess Cupcakes, and guys, cupcakes are already covered (see below). Yes, you could make a joke about how they’re guaranteed to “go fast” at your Halloween party, but that’s beneath all of us.

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§ Gosh! Comics surveys recent releases of note with many, many pictures. Above, Metaphrog’s Louis: Night Salad.

§ We may not be the world’s biggest Dave Sim fans, but asking for his autograph in the john is low.

§ USA Today covers the new comics bio of Anne Frank by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.

§ The Bay Area Chronicle looks at Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women exhibit opening tomorrow at the Cartoon Art Museum.

Thanks in part to Robbins and others who paved the way, personal problems and the absurdity of everyday existence have replaced gender politics as front-burner issues. Berkeley native Ariel Schrag, who was inspired as a tender adolescent by Ariel Bordeaux’s Deep Girl, a series featuring an insecure outsider striving mightily to be cool with only intermittent success, wrote, self-published and distributed graphic novels chronicling her years at Berkeley High School and her coming out as a lesbian.

§ Nevin Martell at the Washington City Paper reviews Krazy & Ignatz in Tiger Tea.

§ EW briefly returns to comics coverage with their columnist Stephen King by reprinting his intro to the new AMERICAN VAMPIRE collection; however, the plug-in they use for their page is so cutting edge that my Mac can’t find it.

Luckily, USA Today is also on the case, with the inspiring story of how King learned to write comics:

Along the way, he re-learned how to be brief and concise, especially with getting big ideas across in the finite space of a comic. But he also found out the thought balloons from comics of his youth were now verboten. “I tried that a couple of times in the book and they told me, not without embarrassment, that this just wasn’t done anymore,” King says. “It was a little bit like putting on my high-button shoes to go to a disco.”

To learn about the ins and outs of comic scripting, King not only looked to Snyder but also to editor Mark Doyle — who sent him scripts from Jason Aaron’s Scalped and Brian Wood‘s Northlanders— and King’s own son, novelist Joe Hill, who writes IDW’s Locke & Key series.

“It’s very important for me to have a format that I can work with,” King explains, “and once I have a structure and I can put my story in there, I feel a lot more comfortable and then I can be a lot more creative.”

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§ Crazy Ben Templesmith is drawing every significant Star Wars character in the OG trilogy, and eBaying the results. Here’s C3PO…in vibrant 2D!

§ Jeet Heer joins the pile on of love for LOVE & ROCKETS 3:

Gratitude. It’s so easy to take the Hernandez Bros. for granted: they’ve been around so long, put out work regularly, and often use the same characters. So the temptation is to just think that they’re a stable public resource, like the library or a museum: they’ll always be there and we can ignore them for years, checking in on them only when we need to. But really, these guys are among the best cartoonists who have ever lived. Like Seth, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, and Kim Deitch, they are constantly pushing themselves to do better work, and are now at a career peak. We need to give thanks for this, loudly and publicly.

§ Not comics: Before there was Oz, there was The Magical Monarch of Mo.

§ Chris Reilly’s SPX purchases inspected.

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