Comic Book Resources

Huizenga does Holmes

Elementary, my dear Ganges! Wildly acclaimed, prodigiously talented cartoonist Kevin Huizenga has taken a break from chronicling the vagaries of our daily existence in his series Ganges and (the late, lamented) Or Else to take on the greatest detective in literary history and his arch-nemesis. (No, not Batman and the Joker, but I like the way you think.)

At his blog, Huizenga has posted a two-page comic featuring the first and final face-to-face confrontations between none other than Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. The strip is part of the Famous Fictional Villains show at St. Louis's Mad Art Gallery, curated by Huizenga's friend, fellow cartoonist, and occasional collaborator Dan Zettwoch. The opening reception for the show -- which features baddies ranging from Macbeth's witches to Alien's facehugger, interpreted by Zettwoch, Huizenga and over a dozen other artists -- takes place tonight from 7pm to 11pm.

This weekend, it's King Con Brooklyn

King Con Brooklyn

Here's an event that makes me wish I lived close to New York City again: King Con Brooklyn, a comics and animation convention being held Saturday and Sunday at the Brooklyn Lyceum.

It has a great name, and boasts an impressive lineup of largely local guests, including Harvey Pekar, Al Jaffee, Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, Brian Wood, Alex Robinson, Molly Crabapple, Dave Roman, Raina Telgemeier, Kevin Colden, David Gallaher, Steve Ellis and Matt Loux.

In addition, there's a programming schedule that includes workshops, a DC Comics/Zuda portfolio review, creator spotlights, and panels devoted to kids' comics, European comics, digital comics, animation and Marvel's publishing plans.

The convention will be held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on both days at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 Fourth Ave., Brooklyn.

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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]

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Marvel

Business | Marvel Entertainment's third-quarter profits plunged 60 percent because of a steep decline in film revenue and licensing sales for the period. The publishing division declined 6 percent, or $2 million, compared to the third quarter of 2008, which the company attributes to a drop in custom publishing offset by an increase in book-market revenue. [Bloomberg, Marvel.com]

Publishing | The list of nominees for the Young Adult Library Services Association's annual Great Graphic Novels for Teens is, as usual, diverse, with titles ranging from R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated and Jamaica Dyer's Weird Fishes to Naoki Urasawa's Pluto and Mark Millar and Tommy Lee Edwards' 1985.

The nominations, divided into categories for fiction and nonfiction, are led by Marvel with 15 titles, DC Comics and its imprints with 13, Viz Media with 12 (but for 18 volumes), Dark Horse with eight and Del Rey and Yen Press with six each.

The final selections, chosen by an 11-person committee, will be presented in mid-January at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Boston. [YALSA]

Publishing | Marvel has hired Bon Alimagno, editorial director of Harris Publications, as its editorial talent coordinator, replacing Chris Allo, who left the company in September. [Bleeding Cool]

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Paul Pope, Dustin Harbin do Dune

Dune art by Paul Pope

Cartoonist and Heroes Con creative director Dustin Harbin is obviously a comics guy. But even for sequential-art partisans, every once in a while the literary spice must flow. Thus Harbin has created the Dune book club, a weekly discussion of the original science-fiction classic by author Frank Herbert, hosted on Harbin's blog. In addition to thought-provoking posts and comment-thread chats about the book, which Harbin calls "probably my favorite novel ever," the book club is also something of an art club, with Harbin, Paul Pope, Patrick Keck, Peter Lazarski, Pen Ward, Thomas "Smo" Smolenski, and Evan Dahm all providing luscious comics and stand-alone illustrations based on the book. (Pope, another big-time Dune devotee, had already drawn a scene from the book in the style of a Wednesday Comics page.) Personally, I'm waiting for someone to take a crack at a sandworm.

Straight for the art | Seth's New York Times ghost story illustrations

A black cat crosses Seth's path

Lately, acclaimed cartoonist Seth has mostly been busy delighting us with his designs for Drawn & Quarterly's John Stanley Library. But with Halloween only a day away, the artist behind George Sprott and Wimbledon Green has decided to spook us instead. Seth has provided illustrations for a series of New York City ghost stories, reported by writer Lizzy Ratner in The New York Times. Created in ghostly blue and white, they're like the artiest, most tastefully drawn episode of Ghost Hunters ever.

(Via Peggy Burns at the D&Q blog.)

Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes [Updated]

Stitches: A Memoir

Publishing | Publishers Weekly teases its forthcoming lists of the best books of the year with a Top 10 that includes David Small's National Book Award-nominated memoir Stitches. [Publishers Weekly]

Publishing | UK newspaper The Times rolls out a package marking the 70th anniversary of Marvel Comics with profiles of Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr., 70 facts "you didn't know" about the company, and a gallery. [Times Online]

Publishing | Back issues of Cerebus Archives, Dave Sim's bimonthly DVD extras-style collection of letters, stories and artwork, are now available through print-on-demand publisher ComiXpress. [ComiXpress]

Blogosphere | Mike Nebeker, co-host of the Geek Tragedy Podcast, passed away Oct. 27 from an apparent stroke. He was 41. According to this blog entry, his co-hosts plan on Tuesday to post a new episode that will contain their farewells and Nebeker's unaired interviews from the Alternative Press Expo. After that, they'll take some time off from the podcast. [Geek Tragedy Podnotes]

Comic strips | Amazon has announced the 10 finalists for its Comic Strip Superstar contest. [Digital Strips]

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Six by 6 by 6 | Six deeply creepy "alt-horror" cartoonists

Tom Neely's The Blot

What do you think of when you think of horror comics? Vintage EC shockers, black-clad Vertigo occult titles, weird and wild manga, modern-day success stories like 30 Days of Night and Hack/Slash, or the mother of all zombie comics The Walking Dead? For my money, the most reliably disturbing and disquieting work in the genre over recent years has come from artists who produce what you'd consider to be "alternative comics." These alt-horror cartoonists may not even think of themselves as horror-comics creators at all, eschewing as most of them do the rhythms and staples of conventional horror fiction. But by deploying altcomix' usual emphasis on tone and emotional effect in service of dark and macabre imagery, their comics haunt me all the more.

So for my contribution to Robot 666's daily horror-centric lists this week, I'm singing the praises of six talented alt-horror cartoonists. I could have listed quite a few more, mind you--some real giants of the field, including Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Charles Burns, Jim Woodring, and Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell have done tremendous work in this area. But for me right now, these were the six who demanded the spotlight.

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The Pirate Bay

Legal | A new study claim the shutdown two months ago of file-trading site The Pirate Bay by Swedish authorities "significantly, if temporarily, disrupted" the illegal trafficking of digital files worldwide. The emphasis is on temporarily. The white paper, released by anti-piracy company DtecNet, found the closing forced traffic to flood other BitTorrent trackers, "causing temporary secondary outages" for several days.

The study finds that BitTorrent traffic is soon expected to return to levels seen before the shutdown, with relatively new website OpenBitTorrent emerging as the successor to The Pirate Bay. [The Live Feed]

Sales charts | R. Crumb's much-publicized adaptation of The Book of Genesis debuts at No. 8 on USA Today's bestseller list. Meanwhile, the 46th volume of Masashi Kishimoto's popular shonen series Naruto inches up three spaces to No. 136. [USA Today]

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Straight for the art | J. Bone's Great Pumpkin-inspired cartoons

The Great Pumpkin, by J. Bone

The talented J. Bone uses the holiday classic It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown as the springboard for a couple of hilarious and, of course, well-drawn gags. (Warning: In the second cartoon, Charlie Brown employs off-color language!)

Poor, poor Linus ...

When I wake up in the morning and the 'larm lets out a warning ...

From "Saved by the Spell," by Lucy Knisley

The always-entertaining Lucy Knisley imagines what J.K. Rowling might've come up with had she been inspired to create Harry Potter some two decades earlier. The result? A Saved by the Bell-style TV series called Hogwarts High, starring John Cusack, Mark Paul Gosselaar and Brooke Shields, and featuring David Bowie as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Straight for the art | R. Crumb's "Varieties of Women"

R. Crumb takes on Abu Ghraib

Does this make Robert Crumb officially fashionable? The undeground comix legend and author of The Book of Genesis Illustrated is gracing the internet presence of fashion bible W magazine with a gallery titled "Varieties of Women." It's actually something of a history lesson, with featured females ranging from cavewomen to Egyptian gods to medieval German peasants to 19th-century asylum inmates to Crumb's own high school classmates to "friends" of Russ Meyer and Hugh Hefner. Yes, Abu Ghraib torturer/fall gal Lynndie England's in there too. And yes, portions of it are as NSFW as you might expect.

(Via Pop Candy.)

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Libraries | Two library employees in Nicholasville, Kentucky, were fired last month after they refused to allow an 11-year-old girl to check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which they dubbed pornographic. However, the policy of the Jessamine County Library states it's the responsibility of parents to decide what's appropriate for their child to read.

The fired employees, Beth Bovaire and Sharon Cook, stand behind their decision, asserting that the award-winning comic by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill contains lewd pictures that are inappropriate for children.

"If you give children pornography, a child, a 12 year old, can not understand and process the same way a 30 year old can," Cook told a local television news station. [WTVQ, WTVQ]

Tokyo International Manga Library

Libraries | A private university in Tokyo hopes to promote the serious study of manga by opening a library stocked with 2 million comics, anime drawings, video games and other artifacts. If everything goes as planned, the Tokyo International Manga Library would open on the campus of Meiji University in 2015. [AFP]

Publishing | Even after the closing last year of Virgin Comics, upbeat profiles of the Indian comics industry continue to appear regularly. But here Gaurav Jain, head of the Mumbai-based Illusion Interactive Animation, offers a more dismal assessment of the scene in India: "While competition has arrived, the local industry continues to live in its shell, churning out visually unappealing and terribly written local content with little or no film and television possibilities. One of the most widely read labels offers sanitized, vanilla retellings of Indian mythology and historical figures with visuals inspired from the works of Raja Ravi Verma. Derivative art work and bland writing, leads to visual fatigue." [The Wall Street Journal]

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Legal

Legal | Twin brothers in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, have been sentenced to three months in jail for possessing anime- and manga-style images depicting children in sexual situations.

David Scott Hammond and James Cory Hammond, 20, pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography after police discovered the images downloaded on their home computer last November. Although David Hammond's attorney said his client didn't realize it was illegal to download cartoon pornographic images of children, the prosecutor asserted that, "Every one of these images involves the victimization of children. The victimization wouldn’t happen in the first place if there weren’t people there to look at this material."

Earlier this month, lawmakers in Alaska began considering a bill that would expand the state's child-pornography laws to include cartoons. And in June a U.S. appeals court upheld the conviction of a Virginia man who was prosecuted, in part, under a 2003 federal statute outlawing possession of cartoon images depicting the sexual abuse of children. [The Chronicle Herald]

Viz Media

Publishing | The San Francisco headquarters of Viz Media was closed for two days this week after an unexpected downpour on Monday caused storm drains to overflow, flooding parts of the city. [Anime News Network]

Publishing | Just last week we were reporting that Villard had acquired the rights to Fated, a graphic novel written by Michael Jackson and Gotham Chopra. Now comes word that the Random House imprint paid $800,000 for it. Illustrated by Mukesh Singh, artist of Virgin Comics titles Gamekeeper, Devi and Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter, the black-and-white book is due out in June. [Crain's New York Business]

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Dragon Ball

Manga | Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball has been officially removed from Wicomico County schools in Maryland following a committee review of the popular series. The announcement was made Thursday by Superintendent John Fredericksen, slightly more than a week after a parent's complaint about depictions of nudity and sexual situations in the first volume triggered the school board to pull the manga from library shelves.

The committee also is reviewing the all-ages Dragon Ball Z; Dragon Ball is rated for teens. Both titles are published in North America by Viz Media. The Wicomico County Public Library announced last week that it is conducting an "internal reconsideration" of Dragon Ball, pulling the series from circulation while it decides where the manga should be shelved.

And in a timely post, Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide, addresses the Dragon Ball dust-up and other issues for io9.com. [WBOC.com]

Publishing | Random House imprint David Fickling Books will publish three collections of comics from its canceled U.K. comics anthology The DFC. The books -- Mezolith by Adam Brockbank and Ben Haggarty; Good Dog, Bad Dog by Dave Shelton; and Spider Moon by Kate Brown -- will be released in March, April and May 2010. [Booktrade, via Forbidden Planet International]

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