Slorge!

Want to re-enact Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit in the comfort of your own home? God, I hope not, but just in case you do (you disturbing person you), Ryan fan Andrea has made this little slorge doll, completely with lace-up hindquarters. Have at! (via)

Al Columbia's Pim & Francie

If fans of mercurial cartoonist Al Columbia have learned anything over the course of his sporadic but storied career, it's "get it while it's hot." He's got talent to burn, but he burned out on Alan Moore's Big Numbers, his groundbreaking work in Zero Zero and The Biologic Show has never been collected, and he kind of disappeared from the scene for a decade or so, infamously scrapping much of his own work before it could see the light of day. But after the recent release of his stunning art-comics-detritus collection Pim & Francie and signings at SPX and the Fantagraphics Bookstore, all is forgiven, right?

Let's hope so, because it seems Columbia's once again becoming an elusive commodity. First Columbia's signing at Brooklyn's Desert Island last Friday was canceled. Then, fellow artist Ashley Wood blogged that Columbia's planned installment of the Sparrow art-book series from IDW has been canceled as well.

But all is not lost: Pim & Francie is out and is awesome, Providence's Ada Books was still touting Columbia's scheduled December 11th appearance there yesterday afternoon, and as Robot 6 has noted, Floating World is selling a jaw-dropping print by Columbia titled "Toyland." (Thanks to Tom Spurgeon for the reminder.) Frankly, as long as the man produces work that looks like that, who cares what else he does (or doesn't do)?

The Comics Journal #300

Kiss your productivity goodbye, comics fans: Every last page of the 300th issue of The Comics Journal has been posted online.

The Journal team had already pulled all the stops to make this anniversary issue something special even before it was announced that this would be the venerable comics-criticism publication's final quasi-magazine-format installment. The result is a killer collection of cross-generational interviews between Art Spiegelman and Kevin Huizenga, Jean-Christophe Menu and Sammy Harkham, Frank Quitely and Dave Gibbons, David Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw, Alison Bechdel and Danica Novgorodoff, Howard Chaykin and Ho Che Anderson, Denny O'Neil and Matt Fraction, Jaime Hernandez and Zak Sally, Ted Rall and Matt Bors, Jim Borgman and Keith Knight, and Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer. There's also a comics-format interview with Gary Groth by Noah Van Sciver, reviews of some of the past year or so's most momentous comics -- including Breakdowns, Acme Novelty Library #19 and Asterios Polyp -- and retrospectives galore. Long story short, there's so much stuff in there you're probably best off calling out sick from work. Oh yeah, the print version hits stores soon. (Via Dirk Deppey)

West Coast Blues

West Coast Blues
by Jacques Tardi and Jean Patrick Manchette
Fantagraphics Books, 80 pages, $18.99.

You Are There
by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Claude Forest
Fantagraphics Books, 196 pages, $26.99.

It makes perfect sense that Fantagraphics would want to start their introduction (or should that be re-re-introduction) of French cartoonist Jacques Tardi to American readers with the release of West Coast Blues. The book, is after all, a tightly-plotted little crime noir, just the sort of thing that today's discerning comic book readers seem to be interested in these days, given the proliferation of crime books recently.

The story itself (adapted from a novel by famed French crime writer Jean Patrick Manchette) is simple: an innocent, middle-class man who leads a life of little consequence finds that a pair of violent thugs are trying to kill him. He and the reader don't know why initially. It's only about 3/4 into the book we are able to piece together the various threads from the story's opening and find out why our hero George Gerfaut has become a target.

Before that point, we watch the man go through an almost literal hell, enduring tragedy after indignity after tragedy before coming out the other side changed, but stuck in stasis; transformed but unable or unwilling to do anything but return to his old ways. It's noir by way of existential hell, which, let's face it is very French.

This is certainly an admirable book, tightly plotted and full of great cartooning moments. Tardi has certainly never been one to shy away from violence and the key scenes have a gory, brutal energy that's as powerful as it is upsetting. But I think the book suffers a bit in that Gerfaut, despite his ordeal, never comes across to the reader as anything more than a cardboard stand-in. Tardi draws him with the same bored expression at the beginning and end of the story, with little variation in the middle except for moments of extreme fear or disgust. As a result, it's hard to empathize or delve into Gerfaut's character too much. Despite his journey he seems to remain in the same emotional stasis at the end that he was in at the beginning. No doubt that's part of the point, but it's hard to find such a character identifiable, much less likable, making Blues seem more like an exercise or treatise than a story.

You Are There

A much more lively a protagonist is Arthur There, from You Are There, a seminal graphic novel Tardi did with cartoonist and writer Jean-Claude Forest (best known for Barbarella) that apparently was quite influential on a generation of artists when it was first published in 1979.

There is an easily perturbed young man, given to wearing a long morning coat and bowler hat, who lives atop a narrow but labyrinthine wall that snakes along and divvies up a countryside known as Mornmont. There's ancestors originally owned Mornmont but lost the property to a group of distant cousins, leaving There with little to do but engage in perpetual lawsuits with the landowners and operate the gates that allow access in and out of the area, charging a toll in some twisted form of revenge.

And, as you might guess by this point, we're a long ways away from the blunt simplicity of West Coast Blues. Indeed, You Are There is a heavily dense and convoluted book. A variety of subplots abound, many of them intersecting with There's own woes, such as Julie the weird but lovely girl There falls head over heels for, and the president and various politicians who attempt to use Mornmont as a pawn in their attempts to maintain political power.

All this is presented with a decidedly absurdist and surreal air. There's imagination frequently manifests itself in quite literal fashion, so that, for example, when he talks about "perking up an ear," we see a giant human ear blocking his path along the wall. Then there's things like There constantly talking to his mother on a phone that doesn't work, or the fact that his lawyers happily collect their fees in a big trash can. You Are There constantly skirts the edge of comedy -- it knows the language and does the dance -- but never becomes the outright farce it so clearly and consistently hints at evolving into.

Still, I liked You Are There, even if, despite it's manic behavior (and again, as in Blues), I felt a bit distanced at times from the proceedings. Several publishers over several decades have attempted to bring the glory that is Tardi to the philistine Americans. It's nigh-impossible to say if this newest attempt will stick at all. I can easily see readers dismissing work like this as "too arch" or  "too French" just as much as I can see them embracing thick, sloppy, black style and detailed compositions. I certainly hope it's the latter. Whatever flaws these two books might posses, they and Tardi remain too interesting and rich to be easily dismissed.

Mome contributor T. Edward Bak (and creator of the great comic Service Industry) has a new art blog up where he's posting sketches, illustrations and pages from his next Mome story, Wild Man. (via)

Little Nothings Vol. 3

• NBM announced over the weekend they will release a third volume in Lewis Trondheim's autobiographical Little Nothings series. You can read samples of the work on the company's blog.

• The University Press of Mississippi will be publishing My Life With Charlie Brown in April. It's a collection of essays, lectures and articles by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. If April seems to far away for you, this book is coming out next month.

• Fantagraphics unveils the covers for their next Krazy and Ignatz book (designed by Chris Ware), as well as the second volume of Prison Pit.

• Van Jensen gives readers the scoop on the upcoming book tour for Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer and announces plans for a sequel in winter of next year.

• Speaking of SLG, they will be releasing an omnibus collection of Gene Yang's early work, entitled Animal Crackers, in January.

• The Kingdom of New York is a new book featuring essays and articles from the New York Observer magazine. It also sports a spiffy cover and interior art by Drew Friedman. And apparently Fantagraphics will be releasing a collection of Friedman's celebrity portraits in summer of 2010.

• I don't know if we caught this on the blog yet, but apparently Chuck Dixon and Gary Kwapisz are forming a publishing company devoted to historical comics.

• Dash Shaw, who has redesigned his Web site, apparently completely reworked his 2006 book the Mother's Mouth, cutting out pages and changing colors. The alternations are only for the French and Spanish editions, however, which seems a shame.

Cat Burglar Black

Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is scholar and critic par excellance Craig Fischer, whose musings on comics can be regularly read on Thought Balloonists, the blog he shares with  Charles Hatfield.

To see what Craig and everyone else is currently reading, click on the link. And don't forget to let us know what you're reading this week as well.

Stumptown #1

Michael May: I enjoyed Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth's Stumptown #1 this week. It feels familiar in a couple of ways, but familiar can be good. Rucka is obviously fond of strong, but broken, women detectives and Dex certainly fits that description here. But I'm also fond of reading about that kind of character. It's one of the reasons I like Rucka's stuff.

But he hasn't exactly just renamed Renee Montoya or Carrie Stetko for this story. Stumptown doesn't feel as weighty and serious as those comics do. It's got a fun, Rockford Files/Magnum PI vibe to it that I didn't realize I'd been missing. Even down to Dex's relative whom she obviously loves, but is also exasperated by.

Reading it, I also realized that a well-drawn comic is my preferred way to take in a mystery story. Unlike books, where only the important details are described, or movies, where pictures move too fast for me to look for my own clues, comics allow me to explore the crime scene with the detective, pausing to stare at whatever I want; finding all sorts of things that may or may not be vital to the solution. I haven't had this much fun with a mystery story since the first arc of Fables.

Omega the Unknown

Matt Maxwell: OMEGA THE UNKNOWN: CLASSIC
Yes, I started reading this after buying it at SDCC. No, I didn't finish it. Got sidetracked. Picked it up again and marveled at how this book actually got published. 'Cause even for Bronze Age Marvel, this stuff is pretty out there. Gerber/Skyrene's caped superhero lives in Hell's Kitchen (long before Daredevil found it fashionable to do so) in a tenement storefront, occasionally crossing paths with villains like Electro (who's defused by a handicapped child) and El Gato (witch-man of the barrio), fighting for no reason other than to fight and generally questioning a lot of the assumptions that you have about superheroes. Oh, and there's a kid that Omega may or may not be. A kid raised by robots. The story here doesn't end so much as it concludes, written in another book by another writer altogether (though Steven Grant might've been working from notes/conversations with Steve Gerber, not sure on that) in an unsatisfactory manner, given the time that things had taken to get started. Still, for fans of Steve Gerber (and those who might want to get an inside glimpse into Gerber's HARD TIME, which had some relation to OMEGA, if not only obliquely), worth a read, though perhaps not the twenty five dollar cover price.

Also read BOB DYLAN REVISITED for the purposes of review. I'll just say there's a lot of very pretty and engaging art and leave it at that here. Finishing my re-reading of the remastered REBEL by Pepe Moreno. Some of the script revisions jump right out (but that's always the case when an older work is 'updated'), and I'm not in love with the remastered color, as part of the original's charm for me was the hyper-garish coloring, making the look unique (at least in comparison.)

Moyasimon

Brigid Alverson: Sometimes, it is good to be a comics journalist.

For instance, this week I am holding in my hot little hands an advance copy of the first volume of Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, which will be released later this month. The premise is at once familiar and original: A young man has the power to see bacteria and other microorganisms. Happily, he has decided to go to agricultural school with his friend, who is the son of a brewer. The two of them quickly hook up with an eccentric professor who is probably up to no good, his hard-edged female assistant, and a pair of sophomores who start a rogue sake brewery that ends badly early into the story. Sawaki, the main character, uses his powers to figure out all kinds of things, and there’s a lot of talk of fermentation and rot in this book, which is educational in an icky-science sort of way. Also, it’s a little more hyperactive than most manga because the editors left in creator Masayuki Ishakawa’s marginalia and doodles.

I’m also reading Garen Ewing’s The Rainbow Orchid, a Tintinesque adventure comic drawn in the ligne claire style. This one is set in the 1920s and has the lead character, an adventurous young man named Julius Chancer, heading off to find a rare orchid in the company of a movie star, in order to preserve her family estate. It’s cheerily old-fashioned stuff, and the story moves along nicely with lots of complications. Ewing’s style is a touch more realistic than Herge’s and appears stiff in places, but his palette is spot-on, and he really creates a sense of place. You can read a large chunk of the comic online, but it’s only being published in the UK; happily, when I expressed interest, Ewing sent me a copy. The book is beautifully produced, with rich color tones, and worth seeking out if you’re a fan of period adventures.

Stuffed arrived with a set of almost random review copies, and I read it in one sitting. It’s like Driving Mr. Albert meets Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The main character, Tim, is an ordinary suburban guy who has put an unhappy childhood behind him, until his father dies and leaves him a homemade museum of curiosities. One of the objects on display is a stuffed African warrior, and Tim has to figure out how to deal with that, both physically and mentally. It’s an interesting exploration of family dynamics and racial attitudes on both sides of the color line, as Tim negotiates his situation with both his aging-hippie brother and an African-American anthropologist. Happily, the outlandishness of the story keeps it from being too heavy, and the characters all ring true.

Captain America Reborn #4

Tim O'Shea: First off, I'll start with Paul Cornell's Black Widow. Why? Because I wished I had read it this week, but forgot to pick it up at the store. Saw it on the shelf, got distracted, did not snag it. I would love to hear if anyone read it among our readers? Should I be running out to get my copy?

There is a panel toward the end of Captain America Reborn 4 that I could have sworn Gene Colan stepped in do to a Cap facial reaction shot. I never notice that about Bryan Hitch or Butch Guice before. Maybe a little bit in Guice -- either way the art is the real asset to this story. I grow tire of Brubaker usig Sharon Carter merely as a prop to be bandied about in this story. Given how critical she is to the story's outcome, her perpetual victimhood undermines the appeal of the character and the strength of the story for me.

John Ostrander writing an issue of Secret Six? Interested. Story set in Gotham? More interested. The return of a great Ostrander character -- Father/Reverend (read the story it makes sense) Richard Craemer? Sold.

Assault on New Olympus One-shot with Hercules and Spider-Man is a fun story to me. I enjoy Van Lente's use of Spider-Man here -- and most notably the comedic homage to the Ditko/Spidey heavy machinery lifting scene of years ago.

Stumptown had me damn curious when I heard the Rockford Files comparison. And it is an apt one. I love reading Greg Rucka when he's unrestricted from corporate continuity. Dex lives in a rougher world than Rockford did, though--and fortunately she's smart enough to survive. Comics can always use more strong female leads and I'm grateful to Rucka for creating the character.

Secret Six

Tom Bondurant: One of my not-so-secret shames as a DC fan is that I'm woefully unfamiliar with the details of John Ostrander's Suicide Squad. I read a few issues here and there, but it was never a mainstay for me, and I didn't read his Deadshot miniseries from several years back. Therefore, I liked Secret Six #15 (drawn by Jim Calafiiore) for its standalone value: Deadshot's an antihero who used to be a Batman villain, and while he might not seem to care whether he murders everyone in a room, on the inside it's a constant struggle not to. (That reminds me -- I always think of Catman as the Secret Sixer who wants to be "good," but as this issue shows, Deadshot's actually had a taste of superherodom.) Given the people in his life, spotlighted herein, I can understand why he has these control issues. The Secret Sixers are each pretty fascinating on their own, and this issue shows why. Calafiore's art isn't a perfect match -- his faces and figures are sometimes a bit too stylized -- but it's helped mightily by Gregory Wright's colors. Still, if I weren't already reading the book, this issue would hook me pretty effectively.

Justiniano comes in as guest penciller of Doom Patrol #4, the Blackest Night tie-in (written by Keith Giffen and inked by Livesay), and I think he does a decent job. The book doesn't look terribly different, so I'd say Livesay and colorist Guy Major have a lot to do with that. The story is clever too: in what I thought was a darkly funny inversion of the DP's history, the "New Doom Patrol" of the '70s and '80s are all dead, and the formerly-martyred original DPers have to fight the new Black Lanterns. There's also a very clever Black Lantern who I really didn't see coming, so nicely done, Mr. Giffen. (When did Val Vostok die, though? I thought she was part of Checkmate.) It has a good capsule history of both teams, and the stars of the book react to Blackest Night with their by-now-
familiar jaded attitude. As always, the "Metal Men" co-feature is a joy, and I hope Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire hold those Old Navy mannequins in the same amount of contempt I do.

As with the Thanagarian "menace" of the past couple of issues, Superman: World Of New Krypton #9 (written by Greg Rucka and James Robinson, drawn by Pete Woods and Ron Randall) seems to promise a huge throwdown between the Kryptonians and the Saturnians -- including a couple of Faceless Hunters From Saturn (TM) -- but then Superman has to step in and be all diplomatic. However, there's more intrigue on Krypton and a locked-room mystery to boot, so it's not like the issue is dull. I can't tell, though, what the division of labor is with regard to the art. There didn't seem to be too many solo-Randall pages ... or maybe my eye's just not that discriminating. ("You got Woods in my Randall!" "You got Randall in my Woods!")

Finally, I've been enjoying the Let's Be Friends Again collection, which is basically fifty-odd pages of annotated strips and over a dozen pages of sketches, bonus material, and tributes from other cartoonists. Buy it just so you can have a print version of Kim Jong-Il in a Luthor battlesuit.

Zero Zero #2

Chris Mautner: Working on that big Collect This Now column on Al Columbia the other week had me rummaging through my back issues of Fantagraphics' late, lamented Zero Zero anthology. That in turn had me running to the company's Web site, where, lo and behold, the entire series was on sale for .99 cents an issue! I snatched up as many issues I was missing as I could and am only just now starting to delve into them. Re-reading this stuff, it really startles me just how good and how ignored this series was and continues to be. I mean, the level of talent in these pages is staggering. Kim Deitch's Search for Smilin' Ed! Dave Cooper's Crumple! Richard Sala's The Chuckling Whatsit! Joe Sacco's Christmas with Karadsic! Not to mention Max Andersson, Skip Williamson, Mack White, Sam Henderson, Michael Kupperman, David Mazzuchelli and so many more. This really was the best anthology of the 90s, bar none.

Children's author Michael Rosen pretty much gets a pass from me no matter what he does, having writing one of the most agonizing, astonishing and bittersweet picture books, Michael Rosen's Sad Book. His latest, Red Ted and the Lost Things, is nowhere near as impressive, but that doesn't mean it isn't amusing. Illustrated by Joel Stewart, it's a cute tale of a lost teddy bear who tries to find his owner again and succeeds, thanks to the help of a cat and a stuffed alligator. It's an amusing kids' comic; one I think small children will like. It's no Sad Book, but then I'm not sure any writer is capable of something like that twice in a lifetime.

The Summit of the Gods

Craig Fischer: So what am I reading?

Last night I finished Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black (First Second). For the past week, I'd been limiting myself to only a few pages of Cat at bedtime, trying to stretch it out into serial-like installments. Which is only appropriate: Sala's story -- his signature mélange of creepy houses, suspicious characters, narrative double-crosses and cute girls (a cadre dressed in black, the cat burglars of the title) -- reads like it should've been produced as a zero-budget serial by a Poverty Row studio like Republic or PRC in the mid-'40s. Great fun, and Sala's art looks lurid and purple in the paperback-sized, full-color First Second format.

As soon as I polished off Cat Burglar Black, I started the first volume of Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi’s The Summit of the Gods (Fanfare/Ponent Mon). I’m still in the early pages of the book (Fukamachi just bought the camera), and again I’m forcing myself to read slowly; I want to properly savor Taniguchi’s flabbergastingly detailed depictions of mountain vistas and Kathmandu streets.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve also read and enjoyed a few floppies: Astro City Astra Special #2 (Homage/Image), Citizen Rex #4 (Dark Horse), The Eternal Conflicts of the Cosmic Warrior (Image) and Strange Tales #3 (Marvel). And I’m not even counting the comics I bought for my kids, Simpsons Comics #158 (Bongo) and Archie #602 (Archie, duh). Did you know that Archie and Veronica have twins named Lil Archie and Lil Veronica?

The funniest book I've read recently is Alan Aldridge’s The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes (Abrams). Aldridge is an artist and graphic designer who began his career with book covers for Penguin UK -- I own a copy of J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1961) with an Aldridge cover illustration of psychedelically undulating ocean waves and bending buildings. Then Aldridge helmed several landmark hippie-era projects: he snapped the picture of the band in silver suits for Cream’s Goodbye record sleeve (1968), he drew album covers for The Who (A Quick One, 1966) and Elton John (Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, 1975), and (maybe of greatest interest to Robot 6 readers) co-edited The Penguin Book of Comics (1967) with George Perry. Kaleidoscope Eyes is primarily a showcase for Aldridge’s art, but it also features Aldridge’s rambling, episodic, eccentric autobiography in prose between the pictures. He knew everyone, and has hilarious tales to tell. Maybe someday I’ll meet Aldridge in a dive pub in Wales, where I’ll ply him with Jameson and persuade him to give me more details about his inadvertently embarrassing interview with Paul McCartney and his drawing duel with Dalí.

Heeding the recommendations of Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke, I've been plowing through Donald Westlake's novels, most recently Cops and Robbers (1972, though I read the Mysterious Press paperback from 1993). The blurb on the cover of Cops hypes Westlake as the king of “comic mystery novelists,” but I didn't find the book funny at all. Rather, it's a satisfyingly dour study of two NYC police detectives who turn to crime because they're fed up with their boring domestic lives and the carnage they see in their jobs. Here's a representative passage, told from the first-person POV of one of the detectives, Joe:

For a long time, it seemed as though there was always something else to take up the slack, keep me interested in life even when the job was dull. Getting married, for instance. Having kids. Moving out of the apartment out to Long Island. Those are like the mountains, and the valley is your dull everyday life.

It had been a long time between mountains.

Holy cow, is this a book for guys in mid-life crises ... which explains why I enjoyed it so much.

Finally, like everybody else, I have batters-up in a stack by my bedside table. Prose on deck includes Lucas Powe Jr.'s The Supreme Court and the American Elite and Stephen Prince's Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. The new book on graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister (Made You Look by Peter Hall) looks insanely lavish. And my forthcoming GNs? The Brendan Burford-edited Syncopated collection, and Hannah Berry's Britten and Brülighty. Of the making of books there is no end...

Polly and Her Pals

• IDW announced over the weekend that it will be collecting the Sunday strips from the Cliff Sterrett classic Polly and Her Pals. The first volume, encapsulating 1925-27, will be in stores this coming August.

The strip began in 1912, but it was in the 20s that Sterrett's art really took off. Influenced by the modernist art movements, he started incorporating abstract and surrealists motifs into his Sunday pages, and many historians and critics have compared this period favorably to strips like Krazy Kat.

Kitchen Sink attempted to publish these strips back in the 90s before going under but they were only able to get two volumes out the door. Having managed to find those books in a back issue bin years ago and devoured them several times since then, let me say this is fabulous news and I'm really looking forward to seeing this release.

• IDW also posted about their intention to publish a four-issue mini-series about the Weekly World News' Bat Boy, which I imagine will be quite different from Polly and Her Pals.

• Writer Clifford Meth reports on his blog that Marvel will be publishing The Invincible Gene Colan in February 2010. The 128 page book will feature art work by the master as well as appreciations by folks like Stan Lee, Marv Wolfman and John Romita Sr.

• Apparently Erik Larsen (and his Savage Dragon) is featured in the latest edition of McSweeney's newspaper. That's kinda cool.

• Jim Woodring says he's finished Weathercraft, his first Frank story in several years and is already hard at work on a new one.

• Bluewater Productions has entered into an agreement with famed young adult author S.E. Hinton. The company will adapt several of Hinton's books into comics, with Taming of the Star Runner being the first. Hinton will also create a new title for Bluewater that will see print next summer.

• Here's the cover for Dash Shaw's upcoming BodyWorld book from Pantheon.

• Noah van Sciver is letting it be known the fifth issue of his comic, Blammo, is out.

• And, in case you haven't seen it yet, Kiel Phegley gets the dope on just about everything there is to know (at least for now) about the upcoming revamp of The Comics Journal.

The Original Johnson

• IDW has announced the street dates for a couple of publishing ventures recently, including the their two Archie collections. The Best of Dan DeCarlo Vol. 1 will hit stores in May, while The Classic Newspaper Comics Vol. 1 will arrive in June.

More notably, the company also announced they would be collecting and releasing Trevor Von Eeden's The Original Johnson, about the life of boxer Jack Johnson, in December. In his recent interview with The Comics Journal, Von Eeden had discussed contract disputes he had been having with co-publisher ComicMix about the work so it's nice to book being completed and in print form.

• According to a press release that seems to be going around town, Fantagraphics and Supermen! editor (and former Fanta employee) Greg Sadowski will be working together on a series of seven collections of Golden Age comics. They are: Setting The Standard: Alex Toth at Standard Comics 1952-54, The Road To Plastic Man: The Golden Age Comics of Jack Cole 1937-41, Away From Home: EC Artists at Other Companies, Creeping Death From Neptune: Basil Wolverton’s Sci-Fi and Horror Comics 1938-55 and The Comic Book Frankenstein: The Monster According to Dick Briefer. That's a pretty amazing line-up. I'm especially excited for that Briefer book.

• Rex Libris author James Turner has let it be known that the third issue of his Warlord of Io series is now available for download from SLG.

• I think I mentioned this before, but just in case I haven't: McSweeney's is releasing a fancy hardcover reprint of the Justin Green classic Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. You'll probably want to get this.

• Things I wasn't aware of department: BOOM! Studios has entered into an agreement with Italycomics to publish a monthly anthology of the former's books in Italy. The "Boom Magazine Annual #!" will debut this weekend at the Lucca Comics festival.

• PictureBox is plugging a whole slew of new books, comics, zines and prints for those who are interested.

• Radical Publishing has unveiled their solicitations for January of next year. They include: the first issue of Aladdin: Legacy of the Lost, a three-issue mini-series written by Ian Edginton and illustrated by Patrick Reilly and Stjepan Sejic; Legends: The Enchanted #0, written and illustrated by Nick Percival. The Aladdin series will retail for $4.99 an issue. The complete Legends story will be released in April as a stand-alone graphic novel.

• You might be wanting to keep an eye out for this Dark Horse book soon I reckon.

The Comics Journal #300

Tom Spurgeon followed up his initial breaking news yesterday with a quick Q&A with publisher Gary Groth about the proposed changes to the venerable magazine. Among the revelations: The new site should launch next month, the magazine's staff will stay the same and no changes will be made to the daily Journalista feature or the message board.

Oh, and there will be more Kenneth Smith. Here's Groth speculating on some of the details:

I suspect that little of the material on the website will be reprinted in the print edition; rather, I'm anticipating that short pieces that appeared on the website may be expanded for the print edition -- or the reverse, an excerpt of something we plan for the print edition may be previewed on the website. But there's going to be a learning curve while we figure out the different editorial requirements for both the website and the print edition. My main goal is to maintain the editorial impetus of the magazine on the website, making it an intelligent and sometimes provocative source criticism and commentary.

The mood on the Internet regarding the planned changes seems tentatively positive, although a certain amount of nostalgia for the magazine as it was once still lingers, judging by the reactions from folks like Alan David Doane, Johnny Bacardi, Heidi MacDonald and folks on the TCJ message board.

UPDATE: Steven Grant considers the Journal's legacy in his latest column.