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Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review: "The latest collection of Bill Griffith’s newspaper strip Zippy the Pinhead, Ding Dong Daddy from Dingburg is also my first exposure to the long-running underground. […] Zippy is unlike any comic strip, or comic book for that matter, I’ve thus encountered. […] Mixed into a steady stream of seemingly random silliness,… readers also uncover a singular worldview, a commentary on politics, religion, the stumbling newspaper industry and its technological replacements, and seemingly Griffith’s favorite windmill, pop culture. …Griffith [is] a sublimely witty observer." – Michael C. Lorah, Newsarama • Review: "I happy to…

From Harlan Ellison's website: HARLAN ELLISON– Wednesday, September 29 2010 18:36:3 DREW FRIEDMAN   Due to the (uh)(ahem) inordinately "strained" relations passim one of his publishers and me, I never got a chance to tell the astonishingly wonderful artist/caricaturist Drew Friedman that I am, and was from the beginning of his career, a cockeyed fan of his merciless honesty. He once did a caricature of me and I always wanted to tell him that I considered it a memento mori of exquisite meanness. His is absolutely imperial iconography, and next to his hilarious portrait of my friend Patton Oswalt, his…

The very first Peanuts strip ran on October 2nd, 1950, which means that tomorrow is the 60th Anniversary of the strip! It's been our honor and privilege to continue publishing the definitive collected edition of Charles M. Schulz's immortal masterwork, The Complete Peanuts, and we're joining in the celebration by offering every volume and box set of the series (to date) for 20% OFF from now through the end of October. Treat yourself and your loved ones (I hear there's some kind of gift-giving season coming up) to these beautifully designed and universally acclaimed collections of America's most beloved comic…

This afternoon Kim Thompson was showing off his newly-acquired import DVD copy of Estigmas, director Adan Aliaga's 2009 Spanish film adaptation of the graphic novel Stigmata by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti, which we will be publishing in English in December. The trailer in Spanish is embedded above; watch it with English subtitles and get more information about the film at the SIFF website (the film screened here in Seattle at the SIFF Cinema last week).

Meet Princess Kitty Look what I stumbled on when I went to watch a funny cat video: Johnny Ryan's illustration for the Found Footage Festival has been animated motion-comic style for the intro to the FFF's series of videos for The A.V. Club (see it following the commercial). Neat. Also: you tell 'em, kitty.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Review/Roundtable: TIME/Techland's "Comic Book Club" roundtable of critics (Douglas Wolk, Graeme McMillan, Evan Narcisse and Mike Williams) discusses You'll Never Know Book 2: Collateral Damage by C. Tyler. Wolk leads off: "The first volume of You'll Never Know, Carol Tyler's projected three-volume series about her father's experiences in World War II — and all the family history connected to it — was my favorite graphic novel of last year. The new volume, Collateral Damage, is even stronger in a lot of ways." • Photo of the Week: That's a funny one of Stuart Immonen…

At Wired.com Scott Thill presents a gallery of 8 images from Dave Cooper's Bent and writes "Canadian artist Dave Cooper's latest comic book collection, Bent, is stuffed to the breaking point with surreal, sexual grotesques and caricatures. Which is probably why Hollywood's own resident king of magical horror Guillermo Del Toro wrote the book's glowing introduction (and, like some of the city's other creative talents, snapped up Cooper's work for his own personal collection). […] Bent, out Oct. 27 from indie comics powerhouse Fantagraphics, collates Cooper's nightmarish nudes and bizarro dreamscapes from recent solo gallery shows in New York and…

The Sanctuary pt II from Andrew Perrine on Vimeo. Nate Neal and Chenukee offer a tutorial on the language in Nate’s new graphic novel The Sanctuary. (Follow the link for a higher-def version… or just hit the full-screen button.)

 …Or girls, for that matter. As work progresses on our first volume of Ernie Bushmiller's NANCY (yes, it's late, we admit it), collecting 1942 through 1945, we belatedly realize that our source for most of the strips is missing the first year. Oops. So we are sending out the plea to NANCY collectors: If you have clippings for 1942's NANCY daily strips, we would love to hear from you. (For that matter, as we are missing a handful of strips from 1943-1945, and some of the ones we do have are a little rough around the edges in terms of…