Jeffrey Brown’s Haruki Murakami

Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!, the blog that posts portraits of authors by comic creators, recently posted one of Haruki Murakami by Jeffery Brown. You can see the back story on it, also by Brown, over at Kevin Church’s blog.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated

Sales charts | R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated climbs seven spots to No. 2 in its second month on BookScan’s list of top-selling adult graphic novels in bookstores. It’s bested, as most are, by the latest volume of Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto. But it’s another story on USA Today’s bestseller chart, where Crumb’s book drops 49 places in its second week to No. 129. [ICv2.com, USA Today]

Passings | Tom Spurgeon, NPR’s Mark Memmott and Ina Jaffe, and Michael Cieply of The New York Times have obituaries for Comic-Con co-founder Shel Dorf, who passed away on Nov. 3 at the age of 76.

Libraries | The Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subculture opened over the weekend at Meiji University’s Surugadai campus in Tokyo. Users can become one-day members of the library, where they can have access to about half of the 140,000 manga for about $1.10 per copy. The books can’t be removed from the library. [The Japan Times]

Internet | Tom Spurgeon points out that the review blog Guttergeek will move to the expanded TCJ.com, joining a stable of hosted blogs that will include The Hooded Utilitarian. [Guttergeek]

American Vampire #1

Publishing | Ben East pens the 123rd article about bestselling authors who answer the siren call of comic books. This time it’s keyed to the announcement that Stephen King will co-write the first story arc of Vertigo’s upcoming American Vampire. [The National]

Webcomics | Kyla Gorman, who’s pursuing a degree in game design from the University of Southern California, has been awarded the $10,000 Penny Arcade Scholarship, established in 2006 to honor one student each year who demonstrates the potential to positively affect the video-game industry. [GameLife]

Comic strips | Jill Schulz, daughter of the late Charles M. Schulz, talks about her father’s legacy, and why no one else will ever draw Peanuts: “Years ago, before my dad passed away, there were renewals on contracts, and there was a question — do we someday allow anyone else to write the strip, to continue it. A lot of people [said] you’ve got to get someone else to draw it, to keep the product out there. They were looking at it from purely a business standpoint. … [My dad] took great pride in the fact that he had never let anybody else letter or draw a single piece of any strip. And we said no, we don’t care if it ends up being a less financially beneficial decision. Our first and foremost concern is the integrity of our dad’s work, and the legend behind his work.” [ParentDish]

Joe Quesada, by Seth Kushner

Creators | Christopher Irving interviews Joe Quesada, who discusses success, Marvel Knights, becoming editor-in-chief of Marvel, breaking with the Comics Code Authority, and reader backlash: “No one at Marvel, especially the people who work with me, go in there going ‘How are we going to destroy the Marvel Universe?’ and twirling their moustaches. We go in there saying ‘How are we going to do the best possible stories? How are we going to keep our readers entertained and treat these characters in the best, most respectful way to tell great stories and keep them alive, not for tomorrow, but for ten, twenty, fifty years from now?’” [Graphic NYC]

Creators | Robot 6 contributor Sean T. Collins talks to Paul Hornschemeier and Jeffrey Brown about their stories for Marvel’s Strange Tales anthology miniseries. [Marvel.com]

Creators | Nick Miller profiles several Sacramento, California-area creators, including Strangeways creator Matt Maxwell. He also checks in with city native, but now New York-based, Adrian Tomine. [Sacramento News & Review]

Comics | Mick Martin remembers, remembers the fifth of November with an in-depth look at Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. [Trouble with Comics]

Comics | An auction earlier this week of more than 30,000 Silver Age comics discovered in the basement of a Missouri home brought in $1.1 million. A copy of The X-Men #1 fetched a world-record $101,000. [KMOX.com]

From "X"

Author, media theorist and sometimes-comics writer Douglas Rushkoff (Testament, Life, Inc.) has penned a graphic novel to promote an as-yet-unnamed video-game franchise from Smoking Gun Interactive.

Illustrated by Cheoljoo Lee and Younger Yang, the comic — it’s simply called X — is being previewed on this marketing site in installments that roll out over the next four weeks. The full graphic novel will be released next year. More stories are set to follow.

As you might expect from the mysterious title, the story of X involves secrets — specifically, “the secret history of mankind.”

So says the press release: “As a small, scattered group of people stumble onto the truth, they find that they are too late: every great power on earth has already aligned itself against humanity. The war is all but over. Their struggle to discover the truth will lead them into a massive conspiracy that predates humanity itself — from the world’s most ancient sites to the global centers of power.”