For no direct reason, the New York Times has published a newly-written obituary of Kate Worley, the writer of 1980s/90s comics soap-opera-with-honest-sex, Omaha The Cat Dancer. Worley died of cancer in 2004. It covers the main points of Worley’s creative collaboration with Omaha creator turned artist-only, Reed Waller, including the Friendly Frank’s obscenity bust that […]
Category Archives: blerging
Best Of The Decade: debut
With only two weeks left, a storming contender for Best Debut Of The Decade in comics has come from a 12-year-old cartooning student of Laura Lannes. Without the rest of the piece, we can’t tell if that’s a standard kid-getting-bored twist at the end of the page, or the beginning of a new thematic direction. […]
Best Of The Decade: hell no
The explosion of comics across platforms and formats and distribution systems this decade should make any comprehensive roundup of the best a mammoth, months-long task for a staff and freelancers to collate. But! The SyFyWire website, a division of NBC / Universal / Comcast, has narrowed the scope by focusing only on the Most Influential […]
alan moore mondays: who doubles the doppelgangers
Last week saw two podcast episodes featuring return appearances by affectionate parody versions of Alan Moore. England’s Thought Bubble convention has featured live panel-show versions of the Mindless Ones’ SILENCE! podcast for the last six years, each with guest appearances by real and fake versions of international comics stars, and increasing silliness year-on-year. This year’s […]
Howard Cruse RIP
One of the lightest underground cartoonists, then founding editor of Gay Comics, and then creator of civil-rights roman-a-clef graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, Howard Cruse has died at 75. Having only worked in shorts and strips his whole career, when Cruse signed to do Stuck Rubber Baby with Piranha Press, the advance from DC’s alternative […]
alan moore mondays: swimming pools of blood
Out of print for decades, bootlegged on the web: Shadowplay – The Secret Team. (The reader is terrible: pick your download format further down.) Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’ half of the Christic Institute-researched non-fiction comic, the savage, scabrous 48 pages of paint and rage stomped in on the back of the Iran-Contra hearings to trace […]
alan moore mondays: misc musings
Started the day brushing my teeth before bed while listening to the beginning of the latest WTF podcast. It’s a weird vibe, listening to Marc Maron shill for the Official Podcast of HBO’s Watchmen sequel, just six years after he was begging and campaigning for donations and support to fight a podcast patent troll. By […]
Tom Spurgeon: RIP
Art comics has a tradition where not long ago its champions fell in love with the form when they had so little access to its history and lived in such artistically fallow times they had no choice but to believe in comics that hadn’t been made yet. In variable health for the last decade, Tom […]
wild palms, edgy postcards
A lovely, comics-micro-adjacent moment in this excerpt from an upcoming Carrie Fisher biography. The speaker is at her 60th birthday party, a year before she died: We all kind of realized, ‘Oh, we’re all here!’ Carrie and Nina Jacobson and Bruce Wagner and Gavin de Becker and Meg and Meryl and Beverly D’Angelo and Helen. […]
THE THIRTEENTH DAY OF HALLOWEEN: Dr. Drew
The unquestioned hagiography has slipped in the discourse somewhat, but I grew up reading about how much further ahead of the rest of comics The Spirit was, and how creative Eisner was as a letterer and businessman and stylistic pioneer, and so on. Getting to read a whole gang of Spirit sections and reprints when […]