I hope you guys like linkblogging because that's all you get tonight:

I have a short review of Drunk, an anthology of stories about drinking and bars by Las Vegas creators. You can read it here (And if you're in Vegas, you can check out a bunch of the art from the book here).

The above is from "A Vulgar Display of Power" written by Alex Getchell and drawn by Laurenn McCubbin, in which a young man gets in a fight with "this big townie asshole." The above is my favorite sequence; he's trying to do a martial arts maneuver in which he grabs the big townie asshole by the shirt and throws him over his hip to the floor, but, instead, something rather awkward occurs.

This is the very next panel on the next page:
I really like the way McCubbin mixes photo-referenced art with more traditional cartoon vocabulary, like the ear steam.


—I really enjoyed Andrew Weiss' "Nobody's Favorite" entry on Crucifer, a vampire character from John Byrne and Chris Claremont's "Tenth Circle" arc of JLA. I think I bowed out of that storyline before they even got around to introducing Crucifer that story was so bad, but I kind of regret it—I don't get to enjoy making-fun-of-Crucifer jokes as much I might have if I had read the whole "Tenth Circle" all the way through.

That storyline still strikes me as sort of significant though, as it was the first time I realized that my then-favorite DC super-title could, in fact, be so bad I wouldn't even want to read it anymore, and that this John Byre and this Chris Claremont character may not in fact be the comic book super-geniuses their reputations within comics fandom might lead one to believe (I hadn't read any of their classic Marvel work at that point, and knew their reputations better than their work).

Anyway, Crucifer! Go read that post! And tell me, how is it that there hasn't been a band named Crucifer before Byrne used that name for a vampire with a funny haircut?


—You know how much I like Kelley Jones, right? Well I enjoyed reading Ken Parille's write-up of the many virtues of Jones' Batman: Unseen. I think he explains Jones' awesomeness quite well, with lots of examples, and he makes special note of the coloring, something I think I've appreciated without even really noticing (if that makes any sense). Parille later had another post on the subject of Unseen, this one focusing on #3's cover.


—Check out this gorgeously illustrated version of an old traditional murder ballad, "On the Banks of the Ohio." It's not often I see the name of my home state used in relation to murder ballads. (Via Tom Spurgeon).