Pim & Francie In Golden Days

• The Comics Comics crew are having another cage match, although this time they're calling it a round table, about Al Columbia's Pim & Francie book.

• Curt Purcell continues his examination of the Blackest Night event, this time looking at some of the tie-in books.

• Ng Suat Tong examines the pleasures of owning original art and how that can change our appreciation for a particular cartoonist.

• Also at HU, Noah Berlatsky looks at the psychosexual underpinnings of the superhero genre, and how it's shifted over time.

• NPR's Glen Weldon talks about why Neil Gaiman's Sandman series matters: "[It] remains one of the most literate, imaginative and intricately plotted accomplishments in long-form comics storytelling out there."

• Sandy Bilus recommends Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms: "The book never feels preachy, but it certainly forces the reader to focus on this issue and raises his or her level of understanding about what the people of Hiroshima have endured."

• Joe McCulloch compares/contrasts the new Astro Boy movie with the original Tezuka manga.

• Johanna Draper Carlson reviews the first volume of The Lizard Prince: "This manga, a romance in a magical fantasy setting, has enough humor to make it an enjoyable read for the young and young-thinking."

• Tangognat on Vol. 5 of 2oth Century Boys: "Everytime I pick this series up I’m reminded again how great it is."

Footnotes in Gaza

• Tom Spurgeon once again beats everyone to the punch with a review of Joe Sacco's new book, Footnotes in Gaza: The first good news to report ... is that the cartoonist is in top form throughout." He also has good things to say about Prison Pit.

• Christopher Allen offers 60 ways of looking at Watchmen.

• Critics critique critics -- Robert Boyd reviews Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: "This is a thought-provoking book, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in comics-as-art."

• David Welsh gets schooled in college manga.

• Rob Clough calls MK Reed's new book, Cross Country "the most complex, ambitious and visually interesting of her comics."

• Perhaps if I link to Sean Collins' review of Refresh, Refresh, he'll forgive me for accidentally (I swear) stealing the title of his review feature.

• Nina Stone enjoyed the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love: "All the pieces of the story just started to fit together perfectly."

• Grant Goggans declares The Art of Osamu Tezuka "very highly recommended."

• Finally, Kristy Valenti looks at a 1999 graphic novel drawn by Mia Wolff and written by acclaimed sci-fi author Samuel Delany.

• Meanwhile, Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu reviews Robert Crumb's adaptation of Genesis for the New York Times:

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

Over at Comics Comics, Dan Nadel calls BS on Hajdu's review: "One wonders why an author would persist in writing about a subject he clearly disdains and isn't interested in actually learning about, but I guess that's between Hajdu and his own idea of the sacred."

Go read the whole takedown; it's fun.

• Once again, Brian Chippendale brings the awesome. This time, he talks about Master of Kung-Fu.

• Over at the Savage Critics, David Uzumeri doesn't care much for the latest issue of Brave & Bold:
"This comic is like being lectured to by your grandfather. This comic is like a video they put on in history class during a substitute session."

• Von Marlowe really like Marvel Adventures Amazing Spider-Man #55: "I will be buying the next issue, and the next after that, and the next after that."

• Paul Gravett, who is always worth reading, talks about Willy Linthout's The Year of the Elephant.

• Jeff VanderMeer calls Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black: "a charming and stylish escapade."

• Matthias Wivel reviews Asterios Polyp: "The originality of its vision, then, lies not in its portrayal of human emotion but rather in the art of its construction, and in what it leaves to our imagination."

• Down the Tubes declares The Misadventures of Jane: "another top quality book from Titan that is sure to appeal to aficionados of newspaper strips, glamour art and wartime memorabilia."

• Both Matthew Brady and Michael Buntag give Naoki Urasawa some love.

• Finally, Derik Badman reviews the first Oishinbo volume and then tries out one of the recipes, which I've been dying for someone to do.

Exit Wounds

• Eddie Campbell has been offering one great critique after another lately, first on
Asterios Polyp and David Mazzuchelli's ability to convey a sense of place, and then on Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds ("The impressive thing about Exit Wounds is that there is a keen organizing intelligence at work at every single level of it, from top to bottom."

• Jeet Heer ruminates on the concept of the "proto-graphic novel," i.e. graphic novels that were published before the term became ubiquitous.

• It's a few days old, but this review of R. Crumb's Genesis adaptation by Bill Kartalopoulos is still well worth your time.

• I don't always link to Tucker Stone's "Comics of the Weak" round-up, but this one's worth noting, as he mimics the prose of "controversial French writer Michel Houllebecq," which leads to bits like this one on Batman:

Gotham City has but two types of people-those who wreak violence, and those who have violence wreaked upon them. The first type are all men, for the most part, although the occasional lesbian is permitted participation, as long as she has previously received approval from whomever currently holds the title of most cruel. (Said participation is usually considered an important story point, further cementing the little respect or interest that these stories have for women--there are few other places in fiction where "the bitch can stay" is considered interesting or dynamic.

• David Welsh writes about the wonder that is Junko Mizuno.

• Katherine Dacey Rumiko Takahashi's Rin-Ni: "Takahashi’s latest series gives ample proof that while she may have a limited repertory, she’s the undisputed master of the supernatural mystery."

• Noah Berlatsky transcribes a lecture he gave last year on comics, homosexuality and gender. Part One. Part Two.

• Bill Sherman looks at Vol. 1 & 2 of Inio Asano's What A Wonderful World and declares: "If [Asano] occasionally over-iterates his themes, that’s consistent with World’s cast of rudderless urbanites still in the process of figuring out where they stand in the universe."

• Rob Clough calls Tom Gaud's Gigantic Robot "a beautiful-looking book about ugliness that is almost meta in the self-indulgence of the format."

• Matthew Brady on The Deformatory: "The beauty of Sophia Wiedeman's work is that one could come up with several possible interpretations."

• Johnny Bacardi does his usual pamphlet run-down, which is always worth reading.

• Late to the party, but still worth reading: Michael Buntag on Darwyn Cooke's Hunter.

• Our own Sean Collins reviews the Abstract Comics anthology: "What I liked, I liked for more than just the strips themselves--I liked them for the proof they offer that comics really is still a Wild West medium in which one's bliss can be followed even beyond the boundaries of what many or even most readers would care to define as 'comics.' "

Scott McCloud

For myself, I always consider reviews useful—even the hatchet jobs. It makes my heart sink a little when I hear other artists dismiss all reviews as irrelevant to their process. A common claim is that reviews tell us “only about the reviewer” and tell us “nothing about the work,” but I disagree. Yes, reviewers have biases. Yes, they miss the point sometimes. But there’s always some kind of information embedded in any reaction to any creative effort.

I tend to agree with Mark-Oliver Frisch's comment that most criticism is intended for the reader, not the artist, but still, that's a really healthy attitude to have.

• Matthew Brady on Masayuki Ishikawa's Moyasimon, volume 1: "Not only is it actually quirkily charming, the torrents of educational facts actually turn out to be pretty informative." He's also got a nice review of Ken Dahl's Monsters.

• Anyone interested in issues of comics criticism should check out this interview with columnist and TCJ assistant editor Kristy Valenti, where she offers nuggets like this:

You can use academic and critical tools to critique comics, such as close readings, theory, and thorough research. I think, though, that there’s a lot of what I dub “bad academia” going on: people who don’t bother to learn the material and technological history behind how comics were produced (fortunately, there are now excellent sources such as Men of Tomorrow and The Ten Cent Plague for that), so they don’t put comics in the proper context—theory for theory’s sake, divorced from the actual comic; bad comparisons based on lack of breadth of knowledge (Johnny Ryan is like Chris Ware, because they’re both alternative); people who feel guilty or ashamed for liking comics, and so use their academic credentials and training to justify it, or people who have a pet area of study and use comics to justify it (Blackest Night is like Paradise Lost); etc.

• Brian Heater calls the latest issue of the Mome anthology "the best addition to the quarterly series in recent memory."

• Sandy Bilus does the sort of thing I wish more online critics would do -- pull a forgotten artist out of the haystack and offer up a thoughtful essay on why they shouldn't be forgotten. In this case. it's Aron Wiesenfeld.

• In reviewing the latest Aya book, Rob Clough says the book owes more to Jane Austen than modern soap operas. He may have something there.

• Domingos Isabelinho writes about a eurocomic I like quite a bit, Yvan Alagbe's Negres Jaunes.

• Becky Ferreira reviews Jason's Low Moon: "Each line and frame could mean nothing or could mean everything in this quiet, gripping book."

• Greg McElhatton says Neptune by Aron Nels Steinke is "the sort of book whose cover promises exactly what it delivers on the inside."

• David Welsh looks at recent work by Jiro Taniguchi.

• Has Geoff Klock written the definitive review of Planetary #27? You decide.

• David Brothers reads the first volume of Inio Asano's What A Wonderful World and calls it "engaging and uplifting in a way that I respect, and honestly don’t see often enough."

• It's a bit old, but I did want to point out Tim O'Neil's review of the most recent issues of Outsiders and Woverine: Origins.

• I keep forgetting to link to this: The Things From Another World store has started posting comic book reviews every Wednesday.

• Jeff Lester and Graeme McMillan offer some more podcast craziness.

• And the Mindless Ones review a whole bunch of wacky pamphlet goodness.

Nancy

• Let's start off with Jeet Heer's short piece on the cult of Nancy. It really is all about Nancy, isn't it?

• Also at Comics Comics: Dash Shaw re-examines a panel he was on at TCAF on alternative and mainstream comics.

• The Hooded Utlilitarian blog, which never met a critical roundtable it didn't like, is doing a series of posts on French comics. I like the name of the series.

• I would be remiss if I didn't point to our new fellow Robot 6er Sean Collins' review of Kazimir Strzepek's ongoing fantasy series, The Mourning Star.

• Xavier Xerexes examines Jeff Smith's Bone spin-off Rose: "For any fan of the Bone series I would recommend this book."

• Jog reviews Bryan Talbot's latest opus, Grandville, and then looks at the new Surrogates film and how it relates to the comics industry.

• Bookslut's Martyn Pedler wonders if Image's recent series of Ted McKeever hardcover reprints aren't more suited to the artist's work than the original pamphlets were.

• It's not a review, but this seems as good a place to post Susie Cagle's critique of SPX as any.

• Writing for Guttergeek, Elizabeth Hewitt has nice things to say about A.D. New Orleans: "What was so splendid about A.D. is that it gives us such a multi-faceted portrait of responses to catastrophe and with no moralizing as to whose story was braver, about who did the right or wrong thing."

• Jen Vaughn enjoyed Corinne Mucha's My Every Single Thought: "These are great stories woven together by a young, masterful cartoonist."

• Christopher Allen reviews Black Salt #1 and Masterpiece Comics in one fell swoop.

Sandman

Let's try to run through some of the more notable links of the past several days. My apologies if this is old news to you or I missed something.

• Kicking things off, I should note that the gang at the Hooded Utilitarian are offering an in-depth analysis of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. In order: Noah Berlatsky, Ng Suat Tong,  Tom Crippen and Von Marlowe.

• Ken Parille looks at the work of his fellow blogmate Tim Hensley, specifically his Wally Gropius series: "I can’t think of another cartoonist who approaches space -- and what we might call 'spatial color' -- in such a rigorously strange way."

• Abhay Khosla talks about comics by way of crime novels:

So: a year from now, if we’re unlucky and Vertigo Crime no longer exists, and some so-and-so is screeching that “None of youse fools on the internet people could have done better because we are geniuses who thought of EVERYTHING” … I would suggest that maybe one thing they could have done differently is launched their crime line with crime fiction…? Just a silly thought.

• Meanwhile, Savage Critics cohort David Uzumeri gives his thoughts on  a potpourri of manga and indie titles.

• Jeet Heer examines in depth how Robert Crumb handled the translation of the Book of Genesis in his new adaptation.

• Greg McElhatton reads the first volume of The Awakening and says: "In some ways Awakening actually reminds me of a computer game, but one where the player keeps running in circles and taking forever to get to the plot points that will advance the game into the next stage."

• Katherine Dacey expresses reservations about Ooku: The Inner Chambers Vol. 1: "For all its dramatic and socio-political ambitions, volume one isn’t nearly as daring or weird or pointed as it might have been." (Also: go see Dacey's thoughts on establishing a manga canon.)

• Derik Haliday isn't impressed with X-Men: Misfits: "It's so typically Shoujo that there's almost nothing standout about it."

• Jen Vaughn revisits Paul Kirchner's The Bus, dubbing it "tripsy fun."

• Sean Collins reviews The Squirrel Machine: "Given what I've been reading lately I can't help but compare Hans Rickheit to Fort Thunder."

• Oliver Ho has a lengthy review of Seth's George Sprott for PopMatters.

• Kristy Valenti digs deep in the longbox and comes up with a collection of horror stories overseen by Italian gore master Dario Argento. How's that for an oddity?

From Miller and Mazzucchelli's 'Born Again

If Bendis and Maleev's take on Daredevil falters at times in its disregard for the formal properties of comics, it is also guilty of rolling out age old tropes for the "revival" of superhero titles. One is left with the impression that mainstream comics writing has not only stagnated but in all likelihood regressed in the last decade becoming competent yet mediocre.

Lots more good stuff at the link.

• Abhay Khosla declares the "3 Jacks" story from Daredevil #500 "pretty much the best Marvel comic of the year so far, right?"

• Jog looks at Jacques Tardi's West Coast Blues and compares/contrasts its noirist tendencies to Darwyn Cooke's recent Parker adaptation: "Both books contain framing images of Our Man on the road, a socio-economic subtext, and a dénouement that nod toward the inscrutability of these hard men and their achievements. You'd swear this was a response to Cooke's book, if you didn't know it was an English translation of a French album from 2005."

• The Comics Comics site has really been busting the mad skillz lately. Here's what went down over the weekend: Jeet Heer examined John Stanley's influence on Seth, among other things; and Dan Nadel raves about the new Prince Valiant collection.

• David Welsh examines the tricky business of translating a culture-specific manga like Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking: "Depending on the translator's thirst for a challenge, it sounds like either a dream job or a nightmare."

• Shaenon Garrity uses the upcoming release of issue #300 of the Comics Journal to muse on the magazine's history:

The Internet has, alas, killed off one of the other reliable sources of entertainment in TCJ, the "Blood and Thunder" letters column. Seen today, the old "Blood and Thunder"s form a near-complete record of everyone remotely interesting in comics for the last thirty years. Some great arguments raged in the dawn times. My personal favorite remains the long-running battle, waged over months of columns, between Harvey Pekar and everyone else. Pekar ultimately won, in my opinion, by arguing that modern indie comics would be better if cartoonists had taken their inspiration from Spain rather than Robert Crumb. He was right. Imagine how much less annoyingly emo everything would be, and how much more fun Seth would be at conventions.

• Rob Clough priases the Ed Emberly-themed anthology, Emberly Galaxy: "Even those unfamiliar with the artist will find something to enjoy."

• Derik Badman recommends the comics of Aidan Koch.

• Katherine Dacey rounds up the manga of note, while Tucker Stone just ... rounds 'em up. Then shoots 'em.

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

Trying to play catch-up on some of the more notable reviews this week. My apologies if I missed anything.

• Bookforum has what I believe is the first review of Robert Crumb's Genesis book, penned by Jeet Heer no less. The magazine also has a review of Asterios Polyp by Dan Nadel and a look at "oddball manga" by Jog.

• Wowzers, the mighty Ng Suat Tong is blogging over at the Hooded Utilitarian! His first post (which looks to be part of an ongoing series0 is spent looking at the critics' various responses to Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button.

• David Welsh is still crazy about Astral Project.

• Rob Clough looks at two new books from Sparkplug — Neptune and Sausage Hand.

• Guest blogger Sean Collins reviews the fourth issue of Flash: Rebirth. So, for that matter, does the Speed Force blog.

• Greg McElhatton disagrees with me about the Lunch Lady books.

• Paul Buhle really liked Carol Tyler's You'll Never Know.

• Graeme McMillan looks at how John Byrne changed the X-Men and superhero comics.

• Matthew Brady is kinda "meh" on The Haunted Life of Doctor Anomalous.

• Similar to Heer's review, I think Tom Spurgeon's review of Jack Survives is the first out the gate. It's certainly the only one I've seen so far.

• Johanna Draper Carlson declares Vol. 6 of Bizenghast a winner.

• Tim O'Neil heralds the return of Ann Nocenti to Daredevil in issue #500.

• Johnny Bacardi tears through some recent comic books.

• Derik Badman reads a book about reading comics (French comics, specifically). Ouroboros anyone?

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

• Pop Matters has an interesting essay comparing Mike Mignola's Hellboy series with the similarly themed Italian comic Dylan Dog.

As characters, they could be satanic siblings, or infernal in-laws: Hellboy, the Hades-born offspring of a witch and a demon; and Dylan Dog, in love with an undead woman who was likely his mother, and battling his nemesis, the devil, who could be his father. Despite their fantastic and often horrific circumstances, at heart each character is a working-class hero, just trying to get the job done.

• Sean Collins grapples with All-Star Batman and Robin: "The thing really is (to quote Grant Morrison's Mad Hatter) very much cleverer than its rep as a goddamn-Batman meme generator would indicate."

• Curt Purcell continues his ongoing look at the Blackest Night series and superhero decadence in general.

• Matthew Brady enjoyed Lamar Abrams' Remake: "It's pretty ridiculous stuff, but always funny."

• Greg McElhatton declares Neil Kleid's The Big Kahn "easily Kleid’s best work to date as a writer."

• Brian Hibbs was shocked — shocked I tell you — to discover that Archie #600 was a fun read: "I mean, I'm certainly a "Betty Man", and that makes a lot more sense to me than Veronica, but Mike Uslan's script here is remarkably crisp, as well as filled with real drama and pathos."

• Katherine Dacey on Ooku: The Inner Chamber: "For all its dramatic and socio-political ambitions, volume one isn’t nearly as daring or weird or pointed as it might have been. If anything, it reminds me of a BBC miniseries: it’s tasteful, meticulously researched, and a little too high-minded to be truly compelling."

• Kinukitty reads the yaoi manga Black Sun and says "I can't even think about this title without kind of flapping my hands and sputtering a bit."

• Rob Clough reads and reviews more minicomics, something we all should do more of.

• The Daily Cross Hatch on Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit: "True enjoyment of this volumes ultimately seems to fall on a willingness to embrace the complementary sensibilities of 'aw, fucking gross' and 'oh, fucking sweet,' ”

• KC Carlson reviews Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martel, a book I was completely unaware of until now.

• Finally, Tim O'Neil has some thoughts on what makes The Thing so awesome.