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Happy day-before-Halloween — lots of treats in today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • Bookmark: And I thought I was thorough! Hats off to Love and Rockets fan blog Love & Maggie, your one stop for comprehensive L&R/Hernandez Bros. link gathering, commentary and more (hat tip to Mike Sterling) • Profile: Newcity's Beatrice Smigasiewicz talks to Paul Hornschemeier about the conclusion of his Mome serial "Life with Mr. Dangerous" and other topics: “People are routinely surprised to find that in person I joke around all the time and am obsessed with comedy: they think that I must walk around in a…

The lovely and talented Dame Darcy will be gracing the fair city of Seattle for the Seattle International Cabaret Festival. Come enjoy music, a reading of Meat Cake, cabaret, and short films. Details follow, and check Dame Darcy's blog for all her latest news. Can Can Presents Seattle International Cabaret Festival Dame Darcy featured at Pensione Nichols (a Victorian Bed and Breakfast where we are doing parlour shows) 1923 1st Ave. downtown Near Pike Place market. These shows are early in the evening because the Cabaret shows are later at a selection of Related Venues. "Poe's Peculiar Parlour" shows will…

And, yes, that gag is on page 666 of our stupifying collection of the master cartoonist's Playboy work.

(click image to enlarge) See part 1 for more info about the book.

Monte Schulz will be participating in a real-time tweetchat today, hosted by LitChat from 4PM-5PM EST. Follow Monte on Twitter, or use tweetchat and the "#LitChat" hashtag. 

In light of our announcement about the newly revamped, semi-annual version of The Comics Journal debuting next year, we have new subscription options available for 6-issue (3 year) and 3-issue (18 month) subscriptions. Also, we are ceasing to offer online-only subscriptions. If you are a current subscriber, details about the transition from your old subscription to your new one have been sent to you in the mail. We've made sure that, in every case, current subscribers will come out ahead on the deal. Going forward, all new subscriptions will begin with the first issue of our new expanded semi-annual edition,…

We recently received the following email: "Hello, my name is Daniel Maw and I am a graduate art student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Recently, I worked with some of my fellow graduate colleagues (we range in age from 23 to 31) to curate a show highlighting contemporary print media in all its facets. I recommended we show the work of Chris Ware, including Jimmy Corrigan. In order to showcase the epic nature of this comic we elected to purchase two copies, cut the bindings off each, collate the pages, and display all [390] pages in a grid on…

FANTAGRAPHICS & EDITOR GREG SADOWSKI PARTNER ON SIX NEW BOOK COLLECTIONS OF CLASSIC COMIC BOOK MATERIAL

Fantagraphics Books is proud to announce that it has struck a deal with comics historian and editor Greg Sadowski to produce six new collections of classic comic book material for the Seattle publisher. Sadowski is a Harvey and Eisner Award-nominated editor who has previously overseen the publication of the acclaimed collections SUPERMEN: THE FIRST WAVE OF COMIC BOOK HEROES 1936-1941, as well as B. KRIGSTEIN and B. KRIGSTEIN COMICS. He is a former staff editor and designer for Fantagraphics Books and currently works freelance from his home on San Juan Island in Washington State's Puget Sound.

"Greg has written one of the landmark cartoonist biographies (and only the first half yet!) with B. Krigstein, and the collections of comics from the '40s and '50s that he's edited for us — B. Krigstein Comics and Supermen!, to date — have been meticulously assembled, with an eye toward selection, flow, and accompanying historical text. We're pleased that he's got such an ambitious agenda ahead," says Fantagraphics Publisher Gary Groth, who acquired the books.

The books will be released one per season, beginning with FOUR COLOR FEAR: FORGOTTEN HORROR COMICS OF THE 1950s in June 2010 and produced in collaboration with comics historian John Benson (SQUA TRONT). The second book, due in Fall 2010, will be a collection of legendary artist Alex Toth's work for Standard Comics in the 1950s. The remaining books will be release in subsequent seasons, with exact schedules to be announced. The full list of books follows after the jump below.

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions: • List: At Robot 6, Sean T. Collins's top 6 "deeply creepy 'alt-horror' cartoonists" includes Renee French ("her frequently deformed (more like unformed) characters and hazy, dreamlike, soft-focus pencils recall [David] Lynch's unnerving debut Eraserhead with its dust-mote cinematography and mewling infant thing"), Hans Rickheit ("It just so happens that his 'normal' is grotesque and harrowing to the rest of us"), Al Columbia ("It's as though a team of expert [animation] craftsmen became trapped in their office sometime during the Depression and were forgotten about for decades, reduced to inbreeding, feeding on their own dead,…