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Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "Surrealism is dangerous. Mostly, when you leave the rails, the result is less glorious freedom and more quick kablooie. It’s an easy method for the lazy writer, but somehow when Ray Fenwick does it, it works. Mascots, his second book, is short on — but not absent — narrative. Its pages are made up of paintings on book covers that are largely text-based… Somehow, they hang together enough to produce a fuzzy but charming impression." – Hillary Brown, Paste • Review: "…[T]he impressive thing about [Special Exits] is that, despite depressing subject matter,…

At The Woodring Monitor, another glimpse of Congress of the Animals: Frank and Quacky enter the amusement park.

  Musician John Heneghan, whom I've mentioned on this blog previously, is a frequent musical collaborator with R. Crumb. And now, he's been entrusted with selling off some of the more extraneous items in Crumb's legendary 78 record collection. Many of the items include hand-written notes by Crumb on the sleeve of each piece. These could make a super cool, ultra-unique gift for any Crumb fans in your life. 

Our old pal Ken Parille, one of the best comics critics in the business (see his posts on BlogFlumer), launched a modest online bibliography of the works of Daniel Clowes way back in 2001. Tomorrow, it celebrates its 10th anniversary on the web. It remains one of the most thorough bibliographies of any cartoonist on the web, and is a must-reference for any serious Clowes collector. Happy anniversary! 

This past week on TCJ.com: R.C. Harvey on comic strips and “Logic Gone Sane.” Rob Clough concluded his three-part series on recent D&Q issues with a look at the final installment of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions. Parts Four, Five and Six went up of Kristian Williams series of essays on Garth Ennis’ aerial combat comics. Rob Clough worked through his tcj.com slush pile. R.C. Harvey looked at comic strips that tackled religious subject matter. Rich Kreiner touted Tag Team. Rob Clough looked at Adrian Tomine’s Scenes from an Impending Marriage through the prism of wedding-induced psychosis. R.C. Harvey looked at…

 Here's this week's Weissman, plus links to other strips from around the web (including a new second run of an old fave): — Barack Hussein Obama by Steven Weissman (view at original size): — And elsewhere: The All-New Cartoon Boy Adventure Hour by John Kerschbaum (an encore presentation of John's Act-i-vate strip at MTV Geek) Belligerent Piano by Tim Lane: Ectiopiary by Hans Rickheit: Lucky by Gabrielle Bell: Maakies by Tony Millionaire: Truth Serum by Jon Adams:

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "It’s the details that distinguish what Jordan Crane does. He’s not breaking any conceptual or thematic or formal ground in the two stories comprising this fourth issue of his old-school solo-anthology alternative-comic-book series [Uptight]… ["Dark Day"] is part of your basic “kid explores a magical world beyond the watchful eyes of adults” set-up, while ["Trash Night"] presents love and sex through a sordid, hate-fucky lens, an approach I’ll always associate with the 1990s filmography of Jeremy Irons. But none of that accounts for the sticky, unexpected images he pours into these familiar templates….

From our colleagues at Dargaud comes this video footage of Jean Schulz at the opening of the Peanuts exhibit at the Angoulême Festival yesterday with U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin and other dignitaries in attendance. Vive le Snoopy! (Via Bleeding Cool.)

Roger Ash of Westfield Comics conducted a very informative Q&A with David Gerstein, co-editor (along with Gary Groth) of our forthcoming series of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse by Floyd Gottfredson. It's a must-read for anyone who's been looking forward to these reprints! A sample: "Mickey’s brave, witty, imaginative and incredibly daring in Gottfredson’s stories. He’s a scrapper, ready to fight for what he believes in; but he’s not always right about what he thinks is right, so he can create a mess for himself and have to do some great soul-searching afterwards – serious and funny at once (which is…

Another death in the family, alas. When I created Critters back in the 1980s, it was largely so that I'd have a publication in which I could publish the work of cartoonists within the funny-animal genre that I liked (Stan Sakai, Freddy Milton, J. Quagmire, and Steven Gallacci), as well as on occasion chiseling some work out of other cartoonists in the same ballpark (Jim Engel, Mike Kazaleh, Ty Templeton, and Mark Armstrong). A side benefit was that as the comic became better known, I started to receive submissions from other cartoonists, several of whom became regulars in the magazine….