A comic titled The Rule of Death, in which a man who has died decides he doesn’t want to be dead anymore and comes back to life. The rest of the town is naturally a bit unsettled.

It’s a bit unsettling with a pace that reeks of marching towards doom, but it’s effectively done and I love the artwork. Very literal in terms of moving the story along but filled with illustrative touches that seem to impart so much more to the panels.

Meanwhile, Engrish.com has excellent instructions for washing clothes.

and finally, (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god: pure cartoon geek goodness is on the way. Fantagraphics is releasing “Willie & Joe The WWII Years” in March 2008. Willie and Joe (previously mentioned) is one the greatest comics ever made, done by Mill Mauldin, it captured the war through the infantry’s eye, boring, nerve wracking and tiring, criss crossed with moments terror.

I can’t wait.

Abstraction is a comic by Shintaro Kago that starts off normally and then slowly melts your brain, but in way you can love. Maybe.

Tom Hubberstone did a 24hour comic that describes in heartbreaking detail, what it’s like to live with Crohn’s disease. Lovely artwork and good storytelling. What really fascinates me though is rather than focusing on what the disease is, he tells of the effect it has had on life, a text book case of showing as opposed to telling.

I threw several comic books away today.

These were not old comics, carefully stored plastic bags, tucked in dark box in an air conditioned room. No, these were comics that had been sitting in the bathroom, along with a several books and magazines. They were a bit crumpled, steam had no doubt worked some of its magic on the paper and there sitting underneath several books. It felt weird to throw away comics because they always seem valuable to me, not in the money sense, but like a good book it would be something to come back to.

But fuck it.

They’re little crack pills designed to keep you buying and buying and it’s just not worth the time and effort. Because it order to keep this little treasure troves of fiction, I’d have to buy a special box, store them in it and then carefully go about keeping them in order and who has time for that? Who cares?

There were several books and magazines in that pile from the bathroom and most of them were kept. There were also several graphic novels (Blade of the Immortal, highly recommended), also kept. They’re easy to keep, just toss’em on the shelf with the books, organize’em later. See, easy.

But the little pamphlets are hard to keep track of, both in terms of buying and storying. I have boxes of them upstairs and they’ve rarely been read (hmmm, maybe fix that…) and who needs more boxes? I suppose if I found a series that was great, I’d get the monthly books, but if it’s that good, it’ll be collected in paperback, so why bother? There’s plenty of media around, from books, tv, movies, music, youtube and the web in general. Why bother chasing after stuff you know will be collected later or is subpar. Life is short, get your entertain fix elsewhere.

First, there’s a blog series from the occasional super-heroine titled Goodbye to Comics. It is the human equivalent of a mad dog on the loose, if that mad dog happened to be quiet woman who’s grown up with and worked in superhero comics and finally cracked up about it.


In other news, Dave Cockrum died. Don’t know him? Oh, he just created most of the X-men, that’s all. when I was younger I never thought much of his art, but now I see he was quite skilled and talented and came from a generation of comic book artist that produced a lot of stuff. A brief look at his career is over at silverbulletcomics.
There’s an example of his work from Uncanny X-men #107, in the extended entry (800k, 1260px wide)

Stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW. No, seriously, STOP IT. Go look at Jason Turner’s art and fall in love.


and while you’re at it, stop by S. Blake’s site for more gorgeous goodness.

Warren Ellis is damn good writer. Which is why I sometimes don’t like him putting images in my head, which happens a lot with Fell.

Ellis seems to look for and find all the messed up crapped people do to each other, which he jots down for use in a story elsewhere. Fell really brings this stuff out because it’s about Snowtown, a part of the city, where all the human trash has been place. Think ghetto on Riker’s Island and you get the idea. It has its own rules and brand of crazy and the rest of the city is only too glad to leave it there.

In Fell #6, the main character, Detective Richard Fell, takes a personal day, since his boss has decided to learn magic to deal with the crime in Snowtown. Yeah, it’s that kinda book, BUT GOOD. He tries to spend with a woman he’s interested in. Naturally he gets caught up a case, a domestic one, involving a mother, a father and a kid. It’s a messed up situation, one of those things you might read about from a social worker’s case notes. Just another slice of human cruelty, served up in well told story.

So yeah, it’s good, like all of Fell has been. But I’m starting to dread it each mouth, ‘cause it likes to linger in dark places.

Here’s a link to the first issue, all online.

Warren Ellis is at it again:


People who want to make webcomics are invited to submit their ideas to me for membership in the Rocket Pirates, a webcomics collective which will be housed at http://www.rocketpirates.com.


Basically it’s a web comics digest portal and Warren is editing it, so he gets to pick which ones appear. He’s looking for someting different, thank god, so not much superhero stuff unless it’s really different superheroes. This thing has legs, just due to Warren’s name.

“Them buttons wuz shot off when I took this town, sir.”






Just discovered Bill Mauldin, a cartoonist who was popular in the WWII era for his strips about soliders. There’s a great collection of his cartoons here.