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Merry Christmas!

Bruce Paley & Carol Swain, writer and artist respectively of the graphic memoir Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock 'n' Roll Life, appear together on the Inkstuds radio/podcast interview program, and as a bonus, Paley put together a musical "mixtape" to accompany the book and interview. Download and listen while you read!

Publishers Weekly offers a 12-page preview of Dash Shaw's new book The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., with 3 pages each from 4 different stories. Man that's some good-looking art.

 Gilbert Hernandez receives a United States Artist Fellowship. A finer recipient there could not be. Jim Woodring, Joe Sacco and Chris Ware were recipients of the same grant in 2006. Hooray for United States Artists!

2010 will mark the fifth year of our anthology MOME and we've got some good stuff lined up for the next few issues. We just sent MOME 18 (Spring 2010) to the printer and are already prepping MOME 19 (Summer 2010), and I thought I'd share the covers to both.  The MOME 18 cover is by Nate Neal, who delivers "The Neurotic Nexus of Creation," a 15-page explication of the creative process that calls to mind his "Reality Comics Quartet" from MOME 12. The MOME 19 cover is by Josh Simmons, and the issue will feature the first part of his psychedelic…

Gahan Wilson will be appearing LIVE — and answering your questions — at 10AM west coast time this morning on Bob Andelman's excellent Mr. Media podcast. If you can't listen live, the show will be archived here after the fact. 

We've received a few questions about our announcement last week that Alec Baldwin will contribute an Introduction to an upcoming volume of The Complete Peanuts. The idea was inspired by this Vanity Fair "Proust Questionnaire" with Baldwin from earlier this year, wherein Baldwin names Charlie Brown his "hero of fiction." So there you go. Confidential to Gary Groth: here's a suggestion for another 30 Rock star to write a Peanuts intro sometime in the future (found while researching this post):

In addition to our previously posted official news-type announcement of the "hard launch" of the new Comics Journal website at TCJ.com, TCJ Executive Editor Gary Groth has composed an introductory hail-fellow-well-met-cum-statement of purpose titled "Welcome to TCJ.com and Oh, By the Way, A Brief History of Comics Criticism While I'm At It" which is well worth your attention. It's downright inspirational, I tells you.

The under-construction tarp wasn’t even off and The Comics Journal’s new website started sending ripples through the blogosphere. It’s still growing with new features being added almost daily, but check out the site’s hard launch today, Monday Dec. 14, and experience what everybody’s talking about. See top-tier critics R. Fiore and R. C. Harvey duke it out over 9 Chickweed Lane; Anne Ishii and Roland Kelts on the industry and aesthetics of manga; blogging by Shaenon Garrity; reviews of The Wolverton Bible and Junko Mizuno’s latest; a critical dissection of Gilbert Hernandez’s erotic Birdland; and essays and columns by Jeet Heer,…

Ectopia, Hans Rickheit's in-progress graphic novel following The Squirrel Machine, is well underway, and he is presenting it as a serialized webcomic, posting a new page each week at its own dedicated website. Learn more about the book-to-be here, and start reading page 1 here.