[comics] By Day, A Mild Mannered Comic Strip Artist … Chris Weston – He Fights Crime! … ‘I held up my drawings, and the policeman’s eyes widened with astonishment! “That’s him!” he splutterd. ” ‘Ere, come and have a look at this!” he called to his colleagues. They trotted over, took a look and exclaimed “That is spot-on! It IS him!”. Seems they’d already picked up a suspect who matched my drawings exactly…’ [via Metafilter]

[comics] The Top 70 Most Iconic Marvel Comic Panels … a really strong list of key moments in the Marvel Universe.

[funny] For Sale in Gotham London: Batmobile replica 4.2 engine 1 years Mot and 6mths Tax (£8,500) … ‘It has titanium cup holders as used in the Bugatti Veyron which I won in an auction and the arm rest is autographed by Batman himself Adam West.’ [via LDN]

[comics] Comica Festival 2009 … the website for the London’s comic festival – guests this year include Joe Sacco, Eddie Campbell and Bryan Talbot … ‘Preparations are well under way for the sixth Comica Festival scheduled for November 6 to 26, 2009, to be held at the ICA and other London venues.’

[comics] Recommended: Harker by Roger Gibson and Vince Danks … really nicely done British small-press crime comic. Harker – the classiest occult detective TV show you’ll never see (a review from Richard Bruton): ‘The genre trappings are all there. The police procedural investigation, the crime scene investigation, the autopsy, the legwork, the finding of the clues; it’s all there, exactly where it should be. Add to that the mysterious supernatural goings on to get one really great comic book series. But on top of a really lovely idea, really well executed the thing reads incredibly well…’

[comics] Watchmen’s Dave Gibbons on graphic art, computers and the dreaded Comic Sans … ‘There are people who specialise in lettering, and I’ve had my hand lettering made into a digital font. I picked up a copy of the Dandy the other week, and I was amazed to see that it was completely lettered in my hand-lettering font. It was quite a thrill, really, having been a Dandy reader years and years ago.’

[comics] Dan Clowes Interviewed … [via Waxy’s Links]

CLOWES: There’s a book that came out more than ten years ago − a 50th-anniversary index of the members of the National Cartoonists Society. It’s a book of photos and short bios of hundreds of old-time American cartoonists, and for some reason a few “younger” − I was thirty-seven at the time − non-members, such as myself, were included.

There are dozens of photos of these old codgers smiling with these stupid grins on their faces. But you can see the sadness underneath. It’s such a grim document. My friend [and fellow cartoonist] Chris Ware told me he had to actually hide his copy of the book, because he can’t bear to look at it.

QUESTION: What did you both find grim about it?

CLOWES: All these lives spent behind the drawing board; decades on a daily strip that no one remembers.

[comics] Hobo Darkseid is on Twitter: ‘SOME BELIEVE THIS SOCK OF NICKELS TO BE HALF EMPTY. DARKSEID BELIEVES IT TO BE HALF FULL. NOW HOLD STILL.’ [link]

[comics] The Official Creebobby Comics Archetype Times Table … containing a robot, a zombie, an astronaut, a monster, a Lincoln, a Vampire, a T. Rex, a ninja, an alien, a platypus and many many combinations…

[comics] Thoughts on the Forthcoming Howard Chaykin Blackhawk Collection … a look at one of Chaykin’s less well known comics from the 1980s … ‘This is a quintessentially Chaykin image. Why? Well, just gaze into Blackhawk’s eyes, and you’ll see the horrible truth: that Blackhawk totally seduced and bedded that swastika before shooting it to death and setting it on fire.’

[comics] Predator vs. Tintin …

[comics] Recommended First Comics … A bunch of writers from the Onion’s A.V. club discuss which comics to recommend to new readers … ‘Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta is the good book I reach for when preaching to the heathens. Moore’s dense, self-loathing Watchmen seemed to turn off as many people as it turned on, at least when I tried to recommend it to newbies. But V For Vendetta’s mix of comfort-food dystopia, muted humanism, bleak poetry, and technical virtuosity is a far more palatable icebreaker, and one that serves equally as an entree into mainstream and underground comics. And the bottom line? In spite of its grim tone and literary air, it’s still got a guy in a cape and a mask kicking ass.’

[comics] Charlie Adlard: giving life to the zombies of the Walking Dead … the English artist of fabulous zombie comic The Walking Dead interviewed by The Times … Adlard: ‘The zombies are the easiest thing to draw in the book. I make them up as I go along! The hardest thing I find is doing pages and pages of people just talking to each other. The Walking Dead has lots of that but the challenge is to make it look interesting.’

[comics] Time is a Four-Lettered Word by Grant T. Morrison … scans of Near Myths #2 from 1978 – some of Grant Morrison’s earliest published work.

[comics] Grant Morrison Interview By The Onion A.V. Club … On what appeals to him about comics as a storyteller: … ‘The essentially magical qualities of inert words and ink pictures working together with reader consciousness to create a holographic Sensurround emotional experience. What else?’

[comics] Robert Crumb’s Genesis … scans from a preview of Crumb’s latest work taken from the New Yorker … [via Metafilter]

[comics] Reinventing The Pencil: 21 Artists Who Changed Mainstream Comics (For Better Or Worse) … On Chris Ware: ‘Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.’

[comics] After Watchmen, What’s ‘Unfilmable’? These Legendary Texts … Wired looks at some susposedly unfilmable comics and books … On Sandman: ‘Too long. Spanning 74 issues and more than a decade, if you count spinoffs and standalones, Neil Gaiman’s decorated mythopoetic fantasy starring Dream, Death and other revered, abstract personifications is stuck in film limbo. “There is talk of an HBO Sandman,” Gaiman told Wired.com in March, “because no one quite knows what to do with it. But the truth is, if anybody is going to make [it] a movie, it will probably be a kid in film school right now to whom The Sandman was the most important thing ever. It will take the amount of commitment, dedication and madness that Peter Jackson brought to Lord of the Rings to get it on the screen…”‘

[comics] Stephen Frears drawn to Tamara Drewe … ‘Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds’s comic strip about a journalist who ruffles feathers in a rural writers’ retreat, is to be turned into a film by Stephen Frears. The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk.’

[comics] The Comic-Book Guide to SIM Hacking … report from the Register – you can download the comic here.

[comics] Go Look: Eight page preview of David Mazzuchelli’s new comic Asterios Polyp and a slideshow of Superheroes Decadence by Donald Soffritti (a look at what happens when comic heroes and villains get old).

[comics] The X-Men Universe Relationship Map … ‘Dashed Line – Signifies one of the parties is from an alternative reality.’ [via DYFL?]

[batman] What Batman Needs…

[comics] Alan Moore’s Youngblood Proposal … more notes from Moore on how to revamp some of Rob Liefeld’s Awesome characters … ‘Before I get onto the details of the first issue, however, I’d better run through some of my thinking on the restructuring of both the book and the Youngblood team into something at once new and at the same time “classic,” whatever that means in a field that produced Brother Power, the Geek…’

[comics] Grant Morrison Tells All About Batman and Robin …

One of my all-time favourite Batman panels was written by Haney and drawn by Jim Aparo and shows Batman strolling down the sunlit streets of Gotham, checking out the mini-skirted girls and accompanied by the line to end all lines: ‘Yes, Batman digs this day!”

[books] Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair … notes from a talk the three writers gave in London last night … ‘Alan Moore discusses deadlines, and the frenetic life-style involved in popular writing. To be a periodical writer becomes your life. [..] Alan Moore says “Stuff leaks in from the future.” Alan Moore talks about sleep deprivation. Alan Moore says that craft becomes less conscious.’ [via Moleitau]

[comics] Swamp Thing #21 – The Anatomy Lesson … The classic second issue of Alan Moore’s groundbreaking run on Swamp Thing available as a PDF. (But what a shame about the weak digital recolouring in this reprint) … ‘He should have let me finish. He should have listened. Then I’d have been able to explain the most important thing of all to him. I’d have been able to explain that you can’t kill a vegetable by shooting it through the head.’

[comics] Steve Bissette on the Creation of Swamp Thing #20 … Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 … a long multipart post (including many pages from the script!) on the first issue of Alan Moore’s run Swamp Thing. It’s an interesting issue – it was produced under considerable deadline pressure and has never been reprinted much because it’s a transitional issue as Moore deals with the plot the previous writer had left him with and sets up stage for the next issue – The Anatomy Lesson. [via Metafilter]

[funny] Dr Manhattan is… Awesome.

[comics] Chemical Salvation … the history of LSD as a Jack Chick Tract.

[comics] Grant Morrison on Batman and Robin … ‘It’s always important to remember that Gotham isn’t some derelict hellhole, it’s the most larger-than-life, exciting city in the world. It has to be like New York plus or no-one would want to live there, so we’re emphasizing the excitement and color and buzz of the place, as well as its more familiar gloomy and gargoyle-y shadows. Gotham is where Crime becomes Art, after all.’

[batman] The Mutation of the Batman Logo – 1941 to 2007 … animation showing how Batman’s logo has changed over time.

[comics] All American hero … Howard Chaykin Interview … Chaykin on American Flagg and the 1980’s: ‘The US was in a trough of political conservatism with Reagan, who was a fraud, thief, liar and a cheat. I also wanted to do a fun, violent, sexy, dirty story with a strong political underpinning and a streak of hysterical humour. I was laughing at the edge of the precipice. I was such a nihilist back then.’

[comics] For Sale on eBay: Maxx #1 by Sam Kieth.

[comics] Jess Nevins annotations for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Century 1910 … ‘Panel 6. “Misplaced memorials.” I trust one of my British readers can fill me in on what Moore is referring to. Is there a misplaced memorial at King’s Cross? There are memorials to veterans of World Wars One and Two-anything else? “Forgotten fires.” I’m assuming this is a reference to the King’s Cross fire on 18 November 1987, which killed 31 people in the King’s Cross St. Pancras station. I’m not particularly sure why this counts as “forgotten”-even I, American that I am, knew about it. (Is the King’s Cross fire memorial plaque in the station misplaced somehow?)’

[comics] Doonesbury — I Need Moral Clarity … (more…)

[comics] DC Comics 40 Years Ago … lovely blog looking at DC’s very varied output in the late Sixties.

[comics] Review of the Walking Dead Compendium Vol 1 … Tom Spurgeon reviews Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Apocalypse Soap-Opera … ‘Although the jury may still be out on its value as art simply because so much depends on choices to come, Walking Dead is an entertaining comic book that I imagine is a great boon for the Direct Market shops that have invested in its appealing mix of popular genre, serial pleasures and solid craft elements.’

[comics] David Mazzucchelli Master Post … great Scans_Daily posting showing the artistic evolution of David Mazzucchelli … ‘It was during his run on Daredevil where Mazzucchelli’s style grew beyond the Marvel House Style, especially during the “Born Again” storyline written by Frank Miller. Any of you guys heard of it? I hear it’s pretty good.’

[search] Wolfram Alpha … The Search Engine Of Choice for Supervillains … Who is Clark Kent? … Who is Bruce Wayne? … Who is Peter Parker? …

[comics] Grandville Trailer … a trailer for the latest comic from Bryan Talbot … (more…)

[comics] Grant Morrison’s Multiversity … interview with Morrison on his new project for DC … ‘ I’ve been working on this way in advance. I have started a lot of the books and I’ve almost finished a couple of them. I really want to do them ahead of time so every little detail is right. I want this to be big. I kind of thought “Final Crisis” would be the big one and then I realized I had to tell this Multiverse one. So this is the real big epic that comes up next.’

[comics] Canada’s Comic-book Hero … interview / profile of Seth …‘Seth characterizes his world as both “grandmotherly, in that it’s like this desire to create this cozy 1930s, 1940s kind of environment” and “kind of adolescent because the place has a lot of toys. There’s something about the teenage boy, trying to create your perfect teenage room. “I can’t live unless I’ve got control of the aesthetics,” he declares. “If I want a couch, it has to be an old couch – unless it’s really successful at pretending to be an old couch.” Luckily, his wife, a 32-year-old men’s hairstylist who met Seth while working as a model in a life-drawing class he was taking, doesn’t have strong views on decor (although they did “feud” briefly earlier this year over her wish to put a Sylvania colour TV set in the living room).’ [via Waxy]

[comics] Quimby The Mouse … an animation by Chris Ware for This American Life.

[lists] 10 Best Head-Scratching Stories, Explained … ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth: Jimmy relives his granddad’s life. He finally meets his father, who then dies. Superman can’t save him.’

[comics] Brendan McCarthy finds a lost Doom Patrol Script from Grant Morrison [Page 1 | Page 2] … ‘I found this DOOM PATROL script the other day that I had doodled all over, from Grant Morrison… It was an episode that Grant wrote for me to draw back in 1991/92 or thereabouts: I asked for an old style DC ‘imaginary story’ with Danny The Street as the central character. But by the time the script turned up, I had to do a film so I couldn’t draw it’ …

[comics] Steve Bell Interviewed … ‘For all that his politics may be congenial to Guardian readers, there’s something about Bell’s style that doesn’t seem to sit too well with the paper’s generally earnest attitude. “I did used to get quite a number of disapproving letters, though these days I don’t – I get emails slagging me off instead” he says. “It has been said that I’m the kind of Id of the Guardian, running around waving my arms in the air while everyone else is having these deliberations. I don’t know, to be honest”.’ [thanks Phil]

[comics] Dave Sim and Cerebus at Coventry Cathedral in 1989 … by Sim and Gerhard – the front cover to Fantasy Advertiser #115.

[comics] Alan Moore’s Glory Notes … a proposal from Moore on how to revamp one of Rob Liefeld’s Awesome characters … ‘I suppose this as good a time as any to discuss my ideas about how the sexuality in Glory should be handled. As with my notes on Youngblood, my central idea is to prime the story with plenty of open spaces for the readers’ filthy, disgusting thirteen year old minds to inhabit… which is only natural… without doing anything that is anything other than entirely innocent and in keeping with classic comic tradition. I think the word for our best approach is “disingenuous”.’

[comics] The Ten All-Time Best Long-Running Comics Series … great list from Tom Spurgeon … On Dave Sim: ‘I don’t know yet what I think of it as an artistic achievement, but I greatly enjoyed huge swaths of it. The further away from its published conclusion I get the more I’m convinced that it’s something special in terms of comics history, and the further along I get in my own artistic journey the more I’m certain that even if he doesn’t realize it, Dave won.’