Via Spurge come some record-breaking auction results: Charles Schulz's original art for the Sunday, April 10, 1955 Peanuts strip recently sold for $113,525, and Robert Crumb's original cover of Mr. Natural #1 sold in the same auction for $101,575, the first time either artist has cleared 6 figures. For about 0.025% of its sale price, that same Schulz strip can be had, along with 730 others, in The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956. Just saying.
Forney talks Lust
Newsarama has a very informative interview with Ellen Forney about her upcoming book Lust, with discussions of pegging (dirty) and kerning (not dirty), among other things.
Le Buddy
Your list of Official Selections at the 2008 Festival International de la Bande Desinée d'Angoulême includes: Peter Bagge's En Route Pour Le New Jersey, the French edition of Buddy Does Jersey… Jason's Le Dernier Mousquetaire, our English edition of which (The Last Musketeer) is coming soon… …and Linda Medley's Château l'Attente, known here in l'Amerique as Castle Waiting. Félicitations à tous les artistes.
This Saturday night in Brooklyn: FLETCHER HANKS!
What is “Ghost World?”
That was the unexpected $2000 'question' in yesterday's Double Jeopardy category of "Graphic Novels on Film." This a day after Spiegelman was name-checked in a category about New York City. What is going on here? The 'answer' was something like "In this film, Enid and Rebecca are best friends entering adulthood" or something like that (I honestly don't remember, it was too surreal, I was discombobulated). Sadly, none of the contestants responded. Other questions in the category were about 300, The Road to Perdition, The Crow, and From Hell.
Drew Friedman on Regis & Kelly!
Okay, not exactly. But his cover of yesterday's New York Observer was!
Keep Time with Leif Goldberg.
Wow.
Know your Burdens.
Robert Burden does large portraits of his childhood toys, then frames them atop the paintings, which gives you some idea of the enormous scale of his work. Bob Burden draws Flaming Carrot and writes Gumby comics.
Blog Flume
Tim Hensley, Jonathan Bennett, Todd Hignite, Alvin Buenaventura and Ken Parille have started a blog, and it's bound to become one of my very favorite cartooning-related blogs around. Two of my favorite cartoonists (Bennett & Hensley), my favorite comics mag editor (Hignite), one of my favorite comics critics (Parille), and one of my favorite publishers (Buenaventura). That's one heavy-hitting lineup. Add to your RSS feed, already.
What is an “Ink Stud”?
I did a doubletake last night at home as my wife and I were hanging out and JEOPARDY was on the television, and I heard Alex Trebek give an answer in a category about New York City. It was something to the effect of: "This neighborhood is home to artists Maya Lin and Art Spiegelman."* I thought I'd hallucinated it, but my wife heard it, too. First the Simpsons, now Jeopardy. What's next? Oprah? A run for the Senate? A spot in "The Surreal Life"? You go, Artie! * By the way, the answer is "SoHo."
