Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.
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Hello, I’m back. While I was in Spain I learned that Edward Gorey’s The Wuggly Ump is translated to El Wuggly Ump, and yesterday the Internet told me that REM’s Michael Stipe has a tattoo on his arm of Ignatz Mouse throwing a brick at Krazy Kat. I have travelled far, gained worldly knowledge.

I wouldn’t even know Krazy & Ignatz existed (and neither would Stipe) were it not for the work of Bill Blackbeard, who could have been an excellent pirate with a name like that but chose to be a comic strip historian instead. He died last month at the age of 84. Tributes are popping up all over the place but there’s a brilliantly written appreciation by Jeet Heer over at The Comics Journal which you should read immediately. A chunk:

If I had to sum up the achievement of the late Bill Blackbeard in one sentence, I would say that he was the man who gave comics its memory. Cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King were immensely popular in their heyday but they worked in a notoriously fleeting medium, the newspaper page, and once their work stopped being published they were relegated to the dusty corner of the cultural consciousness reserved for trivia questions (“Who created Gasoline Alley?”). Largely thanks to Blackbeard’s unparalleled work as a collector and archivist, McCay, King, and countless other cartoonists from the early 20th century aren’t just answers to trivia questions, but rather are living forces in the comics world, with their major works in print and vibrantly influential on the best young cartoonists of the day.

The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA) crypt in 1995
Photographed by R.C. Harvey.
Pinched from here.

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Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.
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Click the full post link below for a tentative list of titles due to ship next week.
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It’s a smallish one this week but hopefully that means you’ll get to the end of the blog without nodding off. As a special bonus it even includes a thing I was supposed to blog last week but totally forgot so you can help me out by pretending you’re in the past.

First up there’s Hellboy: Buster Oakley Gets His Wish, a one-shot illustrated by the very excellent Kevin Nowlan, who not only pencils and inks it but gets to do his own lettering and colouring too: “As a kid I always liked the issue where my favourite artist would take an issue and ink it himself. It always seemed to be the ones that stood out. And in a rare instance or two a guy might do his own colour guides. Barry Smith did that with his last issue of Conan, The Song of Red Sonja. Neal Adams did it with his last issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow. The Swamp Thing stories that Bernie Wrightson coloured really stand out in that series.” You can read the rest of that interview over at Newsarama where he also gives you tips on how to draw cows to exaggerate their “cowness”. Preview at Dark Horse.

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Click the full post link below for a list of items in store this week.
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