(links)

I can't remember why I saved this link to Abhay Khosla's enumerated essay on Saga. Like, did I have something particular to say about it, or did I just enjoy reading it and want to share it? If it was the former, I completely forgot what I wanted to say. If it was the latter...well, I guess it's the latter either way, at this point. It's an enjoyable piece on an enjoyable comic.

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Here's a gallery of Mitt Romney-as-comic book characters images by Ward Sutton. I sure hope I'll someday be able to un-see that image of Mitt Romney wearing move-Bane's mask...

(Via Spurgeon)

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Augie De Blieck Jr. asks and answers "Why 'Mark Waid's Daredevil'"?

I would guess the current run is Mark Waid's Daredevil because he's been the one creative constant whose name everyone knows. That is, since the relaunch, there's been on writer, but there have been pencil artists over the course of the 15 issues of the series that have been published so far. The colorist and letterers might have all been the same too, but I don't generally notice those folks' names unless the coloring or lettering are so awesome or so terrible that I feel compelled to look up their names in order to either publicly praise or curse them. (The coloring and lettering on Daredevil have been, to my eye, baby bear-just right).

Oh, I guess editor Steve Wacker has been a constant presence too, although "Steve Wacker's Daredevil" doesn't sound right, does it? Certainly not as right as "Mark Waid's Daredevil."

Now, "Mark Waid and company's version of Stan Lee and Bill Everett's Daredevil" is righter still, but it's hard to work into a well-crafted sentence.

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Bad-ass Scooby gang! (Via Robot 6)

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I am shocked, shocked to learn that rather than the well-thought-out, well-planned, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seize the zeitgeist and reclaim the mainstream for comics after years of Hollywood priming the pump, it turns out that DC's "New 52" reboot/relaunch was actually sort of completely fucked-up, nobody-knew-what-anybody-else-was-doing, fly-by-the-seat-DC's-colllective pants affair. At least according to George Perez, who I am paraphrasing the hell out of.

There are only two Superman comics (you know, the publisher's unofficial mascot), four is you count Supergirl and Superboy, and if you couldn't get the writers and editors of those two books on the same page at the same time, can you imagine how cluelessly the New 52-iverse must have been built...?

Yikes.

Now, let's watch closely and see what becomes of George Perez after he said something less-than-groveling about the folks that run DC Comics. Will he be booted off titles like the late Dwayne McDuffie was when he complained about the creative process on his Justice League of America run?

For DC's sake, I sure hope not; Perez is one of their best artists by far.

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Hey look, it's Eric Reynolds on MSNBC!

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I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report online on their respective websites the day after their air the shows on the TV, as I am currently living without a television or cable, and I have seen somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion commercials for the new Seth MacFarlane talking-teddy bear movie, Ted aired between segments. (Also, John Stewart interviewed him last week on his show).

I guess the similarities between the movie and a particular comic strip entitled Imagine This have surfaced and been repeated in several places(the first one I saw was here, although I should note one of my Google News alerts from over the weekend included three links to a piece entitled "'Ted' Creator Seth MacFarlane Accused of Ripping Off A Cartoonist...Again"

I haven't seen Ted, and I haven't read (or even heard of) Imagine This, although I should note that when I first saw a commercial for Ted, I thought of another comic strip about a guy living with his bad-influence teddy bear, Neil Swaab's Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles:

Swaab just brought the strip to a close—that's actually an excerpt from the very last strip above—but he launched in in 1999.

I feel pretty confident in stating that whatever hijinx Ted might get up to in Ted, they are going to pale in comparison to the deviancy that Mr. Wiggles gets up to in his strip, which you can read online or in four book-length collections. Mainly because Ted is rated R, rather than NC-17...

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Those aren't very well-drawn waffles in that first sequence, are they?

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I don't know; this Birds of Prey "porn parody" looks a lot closer to the Birds of Prey comics than the TV show did.

Some wealthy entrepreneur involved with whatever porn company is making and selling that movie (there is a lot of money in porn, right? At least compared to comics?) ought to hire Ed Benes to draw a comic adaptation of the film. I bet that would sell alright...at the very least, I imagine most of the people who read Benes' BOP would want to pick it up, as it was full of porn-faced drawings of ladies striking strange breasts-and-asses-out poses, without ever actually getting naked and doing it.

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Okay, now that I've finally written my review of Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, I was able to catch up on all the other reviews I've been holding off reading until my own was done. Here's Chris Mautner, Nicole Rudick, Ken Parille and Jeet Heer.


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Tucker Stone, Nate Bulmer and Abhay are back! Man, that Abhay...that gag about life in Morocco just went on and on and on, like, a half-dozen lines longer than I thought he could possibly take it, but I'll be damned, it totally worked. Hooray for Abhay!

I've got a review Kevin Huizenga's Gloriana this week; I'm afraid I'm not gonna be able to top Stone's, which is as good a review as it is an economical one.

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Say what you will about Geoff Johns—I do!—but there's no denying the fact that he's a handsome man.

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I was sorta surprised to hear that Tony Daniel would be leaving Detective Comics after the twelfth issue (and following a decent-sized run as writer/artist of Batman and Batman: Battle for the Cowl and one of the artists for Grant Morrison's Bat-comics).

Writing and drawing a Batman comic seems like a top-of-the-heap gig for an artist at DC right now, and Daniel didn't move of the character during the perfect jumping-off point for a creator, the recent-ish reboot for the entire DC COmics line.

I'm curious to see what DC has him doing next—his post makes it sound like he's leaving for something bigger and better, not leaving because someone suddenly noticed that he's not a very good artist and not a very good writer, and thus probably shouldn't be the guy drawing and writing the comic book the publisher is named after—as Justice League seems like the only bigger book he can move to at the moment, unless he's got some kind of crossover story or something showcase-y involving the whole DC stable, something akin to, say, Kingdom Come or New Frontier. (Although who knows, given what DC's been up to lately; he could be writing and drawing a new V for Vendetta ongoing series, or joining Geoff Jons on Sandman: Morpheus of The Endless series.

I'm just as curious who will be taking over TEC once Daniel leaves, as that's a plum assignment. Will they promote one of the creative teams from one of the second-tier Bat-books (Batman and Robin, Batman: The Dark Knight and Batman Incorporated)? Will they assemble a new creative team from their existing talent pool like, I don't know, Tony Bedard and George Perez or Peter Milligan and Marcus To?

Or will they actually look for some new blood to belatedly inject into the not-so-new-anymore New 52?

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Hey, wouldn't that be cool—and unexpected!—if they announced Jill Thompson was going to be the new writer/artist on TEC...? That would explain why she got one of those black-and-white portrait photos a few weeks back...

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AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaahhhhhh!

(Via Spurgeon's twitter account, via Jamie McKelvie's twitter account, via somewhere else, probably, I don't know)

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Cartoonist Matt Kindt (Superspy, 3 Story: The Secret History of Giant Man) illustrated this month's round of book coverage at Slate, providing roughly one illo per review. You can see him drawing Hunter S. Thompson, Sarah Palin, a mystery-solving cat, an owl man at a typewriter, a moon-walking ballerina and other stuff here.

Slate also has a comics-format review of Joe Sacco's Journalism which names Sacco "one of the world's best war correspondents." It's by Campbell Robertson, and you can read it here.