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It's time for your weekly installment of Steven Weissman's "Chocolate Cheeks"! In this week's strip: smokin' down by the culvert. (Remember, you must be registered and logged in to read.)

We've put a handful of preliminary pages from Deitch's Pictorama (due to debut in July at Comic-Con in San Diego) up on our Flickr page — browse manually or view a slideshow!

Presenting the great Tim Hensley:

If you're in New York, or will be in New York for the big New York Comicon, you won't want to miss this: If you've never heard Mark or Paul speak, you'll be hard-pressed to find two guys who can talk comics any better. And if you haven't checked out Desert Island yet, by all accounts you should.   Book Signing and "Show and Tell" with Garbage Pail Kids creator Mark Newgarden and cartoonist/archivist Paul Karasik at Williamsburg's newest comic and book store, Desert Island Desert Island is pleased to announce its inaugural event, a book signing and "show and tell" featuring Garbage Pail Kids…

This has been floating around the inter-tubes recently: a TV interview with Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith that ran on WFSB (channel 3, Hartford, CT) Eyewitness News on November 7, 2003. Dig that close-up camera work!

The audio isn't great, but it's there. Here's the legendary Milton Berle cock joke courtesy Freddie Roman at Drew Friedman's Friar's Club event:

A Cathy Malkasian sketch from Comicon 2007. 

Anyone heading to Portland for Stumptown later this month might wanna get to town a couple of nights early for this one:

  I am so grateful that my little girl will be born into a world where she'll think it's perfectly normal for her to have a portrait of herself done by one of the greatest men-of-ink alive. Thank you Tony Millionaire! (T minus 27 days til fatherhood… and I'm praying she'll have lost that stubble by the time kindergarten starts up.)

Now reprinted here on the Fantagraphics website for your reading enjoyment: the full Introduction to the forthcoming, revised softcover edition of Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosenkranz. It actually comprises 3 sections: the Foreword, "The Setting" and "Distant Early Warnings." Read it here.