Fantagraphics Blog Eric Reynolds

… about his next book, JESSICA FARM, as well as HOUSE and more. At the Pulse.

DOOFUS LIVES!

I haven't had a chance to really check this out yet, but Noah Berlatsky has, with the help of a few friends, put together this thing called the Gay Utopia symposium. Both Johnny Ryan and Dame Darcy contributed. There's lots of other comics related stuff too; contributions by Ariel Schrag, Michael Manning, Lilli Carré, Edie Fake, Dewayne Slightweight, and Nishizaka Hiromi, as well as essays and more.

Linda Medley is on a whirlwind tour of six French cities celebrating the release of CHATEAU L'ATTENTE, the French edition of CASTLE WAITING. Here she is in Paris (her first leg of the tour), where a comics store/gallery is holding a CASTLE WAITING art show (yes, those are all originals on the wall). After this it will be on to Angouleme, where CHATEAU L'ATTENTE is a nominee in contention for best French language graphic novel of the year. You can tell she's signing in France because she has been given a plate of cheese for sustenance. Over on this side of the…

  I meant to blog this over the holidays and simply forgot: a ten-minute documentary about Mark Morris' version of the Nutcracker, The Hard Nut. The Hard Nut was designed by Charles Burns, and Morris discusses their collaboration in detail.

  That's right: skating with Anders Nilsen. And some not so nice behavior at the end. Shame on you, Anders.

The latest Inkstuds interview features a fine talk with three fellas I consider friends but also have great respect for as writers and thinkers about comics: Jeet Heer, Tom Spurgeon, and Dan Nadel. It starts off a bit shaky – the show doesn't even start until ten minutes in, and then Dan and Tom are both late and the dialogue kind of stalls all over again when each one joins. But once they get going it's a great, thoughtful listen.

Jacob Covey emailed myself, Adam Grano and Mike Baehr a few minutes ago with THIS link to an eBay auction that ends in 22 hours, promising to wear this item to work EVERY DAY if we buy it for him. We don't make enough to go in on $4K three ways, but if there's a wealthy benefactor out there with a sick sense of humor, we would really like to call his bluff. You have no idea how much this would improve office morale (for most of us, anyway). P.S. Adam said he'd go $100 easy, as would I, and…

I honestly can't decide what to make of these "Lasagna Cat" live-action Garfield strip re-enactments and music videos that have been blogged about all over the place lately, but I've watched just about all of 'em and a few made me laugh out loud. I don't have the heart to embed one, but, well, watch this one. The laugh tracks at the end are brutal. And then? Garfield and Odie rockin' the Taxi theme? The music chosen for each video is usually inspiredly insipid or cliched. The Van Halen and MASH theme ("Suicide is Painless") videos were pretty funny. This…

CBR has a feature up on our fair city's biggest comics event, the Emerald City Con. The ECC continues to grow every year, it's become a pretty big show. I wanted to mention this story because all of you conventioneers out there should consider coming out for it. It's still a fairly mainstream show, but the organizer, Jim Demonakos, is a fine fellow who is actively trying to make a diverse show and we're working with him to cook up some good stuff for this year (which we'll divulge later). The show takes place May 10-11 in Seattle.