This week's batch of reviews from 'round the web:
• Comic Book Galaxy's Alan David Doane on Blake Bell's Stranger and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko
• Fantasy writer Icats Nitram discovers Linda Medley's Castle Waiting
• Art Blog by Bob looks at Explainers by Jules Feiffer
• PopMatters reviews Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button; meahwhile, Laura Hudson takes a close and thoughtful look at the animated trailer Dash made for the book and decodes the book's coded letters (spoiler alert applies to both links)
• PrettyFakes on the first two issues of Kevin Huizenga's Ganges
• The Austin Chronicle on The Number 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 by Thomas Ott
• Review Pull-Quote of the Month: "A lot of people’s Top Ten Favorite-est Comics of the Year lists this year will involve comics about Israel or the exquisite sadness of being an Asian man who likes blondes, all that stuff; mine will involve cheeseburger-flavored semen…? I got dropped on my head a lot as a baby." – Abhay Kholsa of The Savage Critics on Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix #14
Non-review links:
• Mike Sterling presents "The most horrible thing done to Charlie Brown by Lucy in The Complete Peanuts 1967-1968," and then rounds up links to postulated fates of the Peanuts characters
• I don't think I'd come across Sergio Ponchione's blog before
• Sean T. Collins continues rescuing his "I Can Has Comics?" interviews from WizardUniverse.com archive oblivion; this time, Johnny Ryan and (as Jacob already pointed out) Jordan Crane
• The Bad Genious, profiling a handful of alt-comix publishers, says "If Noam Chomsky read comics, I am positive he would dig Fantagraphics"
• On WFMU's Beware of the Blog, Irwin Chusid memorializes Jim Flora on the 10th anniversary of Flora's death (which was Wednesday)
• At Comics Comics, Frank Santoro presents the final installment of his recap of the "Craft in Comics" panel at HeroesCon that featured Jaime Hernandez
• Pig State Recon profiles the multifarious creativity of Tim Hensley
• Jenny Ryan (Mrs. Johnny) finds a surprise in her freezer