Downloading Optimism by Lucy Kinsley

Antisocial Personality Disorder by Darryl Cunningham (while you're at it, go read the rest of Cunningham's Psychiatric Tales)

Mannikinland by Mark Fenderson

Marvelous Mike by Bob Kuwahara

Sausage Pilot! by Hank Chapman and Irv Novick

Andy Pandy by John Stanley

Jim Bowie

Remote Control Jimmy by Mike Fontanelli and John K. (possibly NSFW)

Submarine and The Invincible Enemy by Jack Kirby

Toni Gayle by L.B. Cole

Weekly Astro Boy Magazine

Publishing | Tezuka Productions and D-Arc Inc. has launched Weekly Astro Boy Magazine, a service that delivers manga by Osamu Tezuka to iPhones and iPods in the United States. Announced last month, it's the first English-language manga service for mobile devices.

If I'm reading the site correctly, the premier "edition" of Weekly Astro Boy Magazine offers the first volume of Astro Boy for free. Subsequent volumes of that title, and other Tezuka classics like Phoenix, Dororo, Black Jack and Buddha, cost 99 cents each, and are available in weekly installments. [Weekly Astro Boy Magazine]

Education | Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza, creators of the webcomic Least I Could Do, have established The Rayne Summers Webcomic Scholarship at The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. Named for the protagonist of their nearly seven-year-old comic, the scholarship will cover tuition for one student each year who is working toward a career in webcomics. [Least I Could Do, via The Daily Cartoonist]

Eisner Awards

Awards | The judges have been named for the 2010 Eisner Awards: Craig Fischer, associate professor of English at Appalachian State University and comics critic; Francisca Goldsmith, director of branch services at the Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia, and author of The Readers' Advisory Guide to Graphic Novels; John Hogan, editor of Graphic Novel Reporter; James Hudnall, comics writer and publisher; and Wayne Winsett, owner of Time Warp Comics and Games in Boulder, Colorado. [Comic-Con]

Awards | Neil Gaiman has been awarded the Booktrust Teenage Prize for his novel The Graveyard Book. The award was established in 2003 to celebrate contemporary fiction in the UK written for teenagers. [Booktrust Children's Books]

Publishing | Publishers Weekly profiles five-year-old publisher Dynamite Entertainment, focusing on successes like The Lone Ranger and The Boys, and touching upon the risks associated with licensed properties. [PW Comics Week]

Hagar the Horrible: The Epic Chronicles

Publishing | Titan's Hägar collection pillages Seth's design for The Complete Peanuts. [FLOG! Blog]

Graphic novels | George Gene Gustines spotlights 11 graphic novels as part of The New York Times' holiday gift guide -- among them, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Bloom County: The Complete Library, and Criminal. [The New York Times]

Creators | Colleen Mondor chats with Jim Ottaviani about his latest graphic novel T-Minus. [Chasing Ray]

Creators | Author Kevin Baker discusses his Vertigo graphic novel Luna Park on NPR's Talk of the Nation. You can listen to the interview, or read the transcript. [NPR]

Creators | Brian Heater wraps up his three-part interview with Neil Swaab. [The Daily Cross Hatch]

Creators | Andi Ewington answers five questions about his graphic novel Forty-Five. [ArtPatient]

Comics | Graeme McMillan looks at seven superhero stories that are simply "too big for movies." [io9.com]

King Aroo by Jack Kent

Gossip Girlz by Johnny Ryan (probably nsfw)

Porter's Pinocchio (here, here, here, and here)

The Goofy Success Story

John Stanley's New Yorker cartoon

The Woman in the Tower by Jack Kirby

The Man in the Graveyard & Gone!

Never Kill A Demon by Neal Adams

Futura

Swamp Spirit by Dick Briefer

The Guided Comet

Nancy and Oona Goosepimple, by Seth

Man, that's a knockout, huh? Feast your eyes on George Sprott author (and all-around Dapper Dan) Seth's design for Nancy, Vol. 2, the forthcoming installment of Drawn & Quarterly's gorgeous John Stanley Library.

The image hails from this post by D&Q's Rebecca Rosen, which you really ought to read if the cult of Nancy has been a bit inscrutable to you like it has been to me. Just for example, the above image is a Seth drawing ... which graces a book containing the adventures of a character created by, and best known through the work of, Ernie Bushmiller ... but D&Q's Nancy books collect John Stanley's run on the character from her comic books, as opposed to Bushmiller's newspaper strips ... but those books were actually drawn by Dan Gormley, working off Stanley's storyboard-format scripts. Phew! And then there's the role that Mark Newgarden's abstractified tribute to Bushmiller's Nancy, "Love's Savage Fury," played in the character's popularity with cartoonists...and ditto Newgarden and Paul Karasik's landmark essay "How to Read Nancy" ... ah, let Rebecca explain it to you, and why it all matters.

One of the "Zits" strips in question

You have to hand it to readers of the incredibly shrinking comics section: Many of them have a clear vision for those pages, even if most newspaper editors don't.

The funnies largely go ignored in newsrooms, at least until word comes down that pages must be axed or, else, there's a once-in-a-blue-moon announcement that a cartoonist or syndicate is ending a strip. But those readers who turn to Cathy or Hagar or Rex Morgan each day know exactly what they want (usually that's for the page to look the same as it always has).

Take, for instance, Ted Trump of Orleans, Massachusetts. When he opens the Cape Cod Times, he expects to be entertained by Zits -- not to be confronted with the type of scandalous nudity that's been the trademark of Love Is ... for the past four decades.

As best as I can tell, the reader was offended by this three-day run (SFW!) of Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman's Zits, a nod to the long-running, single-panel comic originated by Kim Grove. If you're somehow unfamiliar with Love Is ..., it's an often-difficult-to-stomach ode to, well, love, that stars two characters who, despite their nudity, display no secondary sexual features. Except for their hair and eyelashes, they're indistinguishable from each other.

So for three days last week, Scott and Borgman adapted two of their characters to that visual style for a series of gags titled "Love Isn't ..." Harmless enough, right? Wrong.

Trump writes that he found the strips "to be inappropriate and offensive," and goes on to suggest the Times' editors "get to work monitoring such comic strip authors by not accepting this sort of deviation from enjoyable and proper comics."

What's more -- and you knew there would be more -- he asserts the cartoonists "should be penalized for submitting such inappropriate and offensive material in the future by a substantial monetary withholding."

That's right, dock their pay!

While the editors of the Cape Cod Times calculate how many pennies to deduct under Trump's plan, I'll be busy filing for reparations for a lifetime of exposure to Love Is ...

The Evil Stranger and Horror in the House

Tarzan by Roy Thomas and John Buscema

Buck O'Rue by Paul Murray

The Ringo Kid by Gene Colan

Cinderola and the Fore Bears by Walt Kelly

Hostess Flash ads

Stuck in the Middle

Libraries | There's still more follow-up to the removal this week of Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age from two middle-school libraries in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Teachers still have access to the anthology -- it depicts language and sexual reference that at least one parent found objectionable -- and may use it in class.

An editorial in the Argus Leader calls the school board's decision "a reasonable approach that balances the need to provide suitable guidance for kids when dealing with sensitive topics without falling prey to censorship." CBS affiliate KELO, meanwhile, continues its coverage of the story with a look at how books are selected for libraries. Tom Spurgeon also has reaction from two of the anthology's contributors. [Argus Leader, KELOLAND.com]

Creators | Jeet Heer digs up writings by a young Dave Sim expressing, in no uncertain terms, his disdain for the work of Jack Kirby. [Comics Comics]

Creators | Cartoonist Jeff Keane discusses the evolution of The Family Circus, IDW Publishing's new archival collection, and the future of newspapers. [ICv2.com]

Batman and Robin, by Frank Quitely

Creators | Thought Bubble interviews artists Frank Quitely and Charlie Adlard. "When you work on a title or character that everyone knows loads of people say 'I hate his Wolverine' or 'I hate his Superman' or whatever," Quitely says, "because it jars with their own favourite versions of the characters -- no one ever says 'I hate his We3 animals' because they didn’t start reading it with any preconceptions or prejudices. From that point of view it’s always easier to work on new stuff, or your own stuff, but I enjoy the challenge of getting to do well-known characters and I generally don’t really care if some folk don’t like what I do, it’s personal taste, and I’ve got a pretty thick skin." [via ArtPatient]

Creators | Collaborators Martin Conaghan and Will Pickering talk at length about their historical graphic novel Burke and Hare. [Forbidden Planet International]

Creators | Warren Ellis offers for download his scripts for issues of Fell, Desolation Jones and Ministry of Space. [Warren Ellis]

Webcomics | El Santo spotlights a handful of politically conservative webcomics. [The Webcomic Overlook]

Comics | The Son of Satan is back, baby! [The Cool Kids Table]

Hollywood Husbands by Jefferson Machamer

Lose by Michael Deforge

Slashr by Pete Toms

Star Spangled Banter by Bill Mauldin

The Bloody Ax by Matt Baker

Santo!

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 1 hardcover

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. One: 1980-1982
by Berkeley Breathed
IDW, 288 pages, $39.99.

The Family Circus Library, Vol. 1: 1960-61
by Bil Keane
IDW, 240 pages, $39.99

As more and more publishers realize that comic fans are interested in rummaging though the works of yesteryear, more and more of them are releasing sizable hardcover collections of allegedly classic comics at a breakneck pace. Some of those releases may cause question marks to rise above the heads of persnickety collectors. Take IDW's new volumes focusing on Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County and Bil Keane's Family Circus. Isn't the former readily available in easy-to-find collections in libraries and used bookstores across the country? Isn't the latter rather, well, overly precious and saccharine? Does this material really need to be reprinted in such lavish volumes? The answer, surprisingly, is yes and yes.

Even dedicated Bloom County fans may be surprised to discover the number of strips, especially in the early years, that up till now have never been collected. Apparently the strip's initial publisher, Andrews McMeel, was rather picky about what could and couldn't be published. The newly discovered material, therefore, not only gives fans a chance to find strips they haven't read in years, if ever, but also provides a useful glimpse into the strip's early development.

What's interesting to me is how long it took Breathed to find the right cast and tone for the strip. The first volume is filled with characters who make their appearance, tell a joke or two, and then quickly bow out to make room for the next hopeful. Remember Mr. Limekiller? Pops Popolov? Major Bloom? Bobbi Harlow? Ashley Dashley III? Otis Oracle? Of course you don't. Milo and Steve Dallas are here and fully developed, but it would take awhile before Breathed would have Opus, Binkley and the rest of the cast firmly cemented into place, and you can sense a bit of flailing about here (which Breathed fully cops to).

In many ways, the strip was the definitive child of the '80s, and these early strips drop tons of references to events like the Royal Wedding, the air controller's strike, and the dread possibility of nuclear war. Thankfully, Breathed and the editors leave helpful notes in the margins to aid readers unfamiliar in such things as, for instance, Dr Pepper

Despite the pop culture references and Breathed's furtive searching for a place to land, the strip remains fun and witty despite the passage of time. By the end of the book you can see the strip starting to coalesce and close the cover knowing the best awaits.

The Family Circus Vol. 1

You can't really say that about the Family Circus. Whatever merits the strip initially had have been drowned in a mire of utsey-cutesy mannerisms, mispronounced words, dotted line paths, dead grandpas and "Not Mes." Now largely put together by Keane's grown-up kids, it feels more like a placeholder on the comics page than anything else.

But hey, here's a surprise! In its first few years, the Family Circus was not only good, it was downright funny! Keane proves to be a witty and observant cartoonist and based upon the material in this first volume it's not too hard to see why it gained such popularity.

It's also interesting to note the differences between this strip and what it became. The dad is not a bespectacled Keane stand-in but a half-lidded, big nosed, perpetually weary nine-to-fiver who seems just as annoyed and perplexed by his kids as delighted in them, if not more so. Though Mom looks more or less identical to her current self, she's a lot more curvaceous and top-heavy, a cartoon style of the time perhaps.

As for the kids themselves, they remain initially a nameless, effervescent bunch, not necessarily prone to mischief as much as a tad hyperactive and eager to explore their world, rules be damned. Much of the gags then, deal with the parents desperately trying to maintain some semblance of order only to be constantly upended by their progeny. In some ways it's a gentler version of Doug Wright's Nipper strips, and revels in the same sort of observational humor. It's not as funny as Wright's work, perhaps because Wright goes for the jugular a bit more and he's a more talented craftsman, but these early Family Circus strips are for the most part a funny and sharp bunch, easily comparable to the best magazine gag cartoons from that period. If nothing else, we should be grateful to IDW for pointing out just how good this strip once was.

Love Punishes the Guilty by Tim Hensley

My Generation by Vanessa Davis

Rick Veitch and Peter Money's poetry comics

Pete the Pooch by Milt Gross

Stumbo in "Giant Removal Project"

The Record of Doom by Bill Ely

Inbad the Tailor by H.B. Martin

Water on the Brain by Virgil Partch