Fantagraphics Blog Jacob Covey

In the U.S. we get hack Superman:   In Europe they get Nicolas Mahler:

More "Behind the Scenes": Part of the sheet of Jason lettering for the translations in "Pocket Full of Rain." There wasn't much to translate so Jason just wrote it all out on a single sheet of paper. A fun bit of ephemera that went along with this stray bit of text.   

Below this post, Mike Baehr announced the release of Walt Kelly's Our Gang Volume 3. The covers for this series are being drawn by the great Jeff Smith, as tributes to one of his idols. A lot goes on "behind the scenes" when producing these collections. You may note that the purple cap pictured seems just a little bit more detailed than the rest of the kids' clothes. In this case lawyers from Another Publisher had seen an advance copy of the cover and required four variations on the cap before they were satisfied that it didn't infringe on a…

There are gems to be found in this I Can Has Comics interview with Johnny Ryan.  "I've been doing comics for all of these other countries, for all the other Vice magazines. I think it started when there was a Vice France and they asked me to do a comic that totally insulted the French people, so I did a page of gags that were insulting to the French. All of a sudden it started this avalanche of all these other countries being like, 'Oh, do us!' So I had to do one for Italy. I had to do one…

While Stevie Weissman's kid is away at camp he's asking people like you and Johnny Ryan (above) to "do battle" with li'l Charles' Shark Team drawing. Check Weissman's blog for updates– so far there are three contributions. Here is the template so you can be a part of the action!

Where "The Spirit" failed, "The Dark Knight" dominates. THAT is a great teaser poster. You could bother with posting three separate images to make one weak image for a teaser campaign or you could do THAT. (Maybe without the bogus Photoshopping– I've never graff'ed a day in my life but those lines would be more upset by the mortar than what's happening here.) If you're anywhere near an Imax theatre then you should consider seeing the movie there: complete with a simulated fight and some drinks in Seattle.

Yesterday I found out one of my previous Flog posts about a dollhouse ended up linked to at least one honest-to-god porn site. Who are these people looking for childhood memories thrown in with their porn? Today it's Google. I work in comics so, from time to time, I may look for an image of "manga porn" in a search engine in order to send an obnoxious joke email to a coworker. On the very first page of results this is what I got:   That would be Chris Ware in the bottom row, which was surprising. At least until…

  Knowing of my own Ninja Turtles sketchbook, Mike Baehr pointed me to this sketchbook with several TMNT interpretations from folks at Heroes Con. Turns out it's the sketchbook of SubSub, aka Joseph Lambert, one of the CCS grads. Impressed by the accuracy of the Krang illustration I looked into Matt Bernier's website and discovered he's friends with Jon Vermilyea, one of my favorite cartoonists/illustrators, which pointed me to Jon's portrait of Washington on the Vice website. If you're interested they've got five more portraits from people like Laura Park and Bald Eagles. But not by Kaz Strzepek who did…

I got this email from Eric Reynolds: "I love these pics so much, they're beautiful and heart-breaking at the same time. I sent these to Jeremy [Eaton] and he said, 'I could write a novel based on that photo of Captain America and the Hulk sitting in their respective apartments.'" Everyone seems so lonely. So human. I could stare at the image above for days. Even the way Wonder Woman is lying in the middle of this house of men, possibly masturbating, is accidental art on the grandest scale.  Thom Zahler was a lucky kid. 

In case anyone is still debating whether comics are in a heyday: Dash "Mr. Shaw" Shaw featured on the Wall Street Journal website.