This is a meaty one:
• Review: For The Savage Critics, Sean T. Collins says The Last Lonely Saturday by Jordan Crane is "pretty much the best love story in comics form I've ever come across… It's an intelligent, moving, beautiful, terrific little comic."
• Review: Rob Clough says that Beasts! Book 2 "mingles myths, warnings, fairy tales, correctives, and genuinely unexplained phenomena and allows its artists to run with them. The end result is a consistently beautiful, lovingly assembled book that forms a kind of metacommentary on the entire notion of the fantastic."
• Review: For the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the wonderfully-named Burl Burlingame reviews Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert by Bill Schelly
• Review: For Robot 6's "What Are You Reading?" column, Tucker Stone encounters Duplex Planet Illustrated #2
• Review: The SF Site's "Nexus Graphica" says R. Crumb & David Zane Mairowitz's Kafka is "a terrific guide to Kafka's life and work — Mairowitz deftly sums up Franz' family/Jewish/pre-Holocaust European experiences and influences, and Crumb's heavy inkings lend the exact tones of darkness to recreations of both Kafka's life — and work." (See sidebar)
• Blurb: Gear Live's "Comix 411" "vote[s] yes" on Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti
• List: Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter weighs in with his Best of 2008 lists. In the top 10 "Archival Editions" there's Where Demented Wented by Rory Hayes at #7, Popeye Vol. 3 at #6, The Complete Peanuts Vols. 9-10 at #3, Explainers by Jules Feiffer at #2, and Willie & Joe: The WWII Years by Bill Mauldin at #1; Most Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester the Molester by Bob Levin is named "Best Book on the Subject of Comics"; the top 25 "Best Comics (First Run, First Translated, Definitively Collected) of 2008" includes Fuzz & Pluck: Splitsville by Ted Stearn at #19, Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw at #15, Sammy the Mouse #2 by Zak Sally at #12, and Ganges #2 by Kevin Huizenga at #4
• Interview: Robot 6 talks to Anders Nilsen about his most recent book, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes
• Interview: The final installment of The Daily Cross Hatch's interview with the great Al Jaffee finally gets around to Humbug
• Transcript: The Daily Cross Hatch presents our own Eric Reynolds's talk at MCAD at the opening of the MOMEntum exhibit
• Preview: The First Post presents a slideshow of images from Humbug, saying "the short-lived Humbug [was] an exquisite satirical work that, over its 11 issues, routinely equalled MAD in its displays of creative genius… providing a level of trenchant satire that was almost unheard of at the time."
• Preview: Notions & Potions excerpts a page from Ray Fenwick's Hall of Best Knowledge
• Preview: Bryan Munn, in "hyping" The Complete Peanuts 1971-1972, states "Now that two whole decades of Peanuts have been reprinted in the deluxe hardcover format published by Fantagraphics and designed by Seth, we can really get a sense of what a huge achievement this project is and will continue to be for a generation."
• Preview: SFScope covers our Tardi announcement
• Bookmark: Quotes on Comics gives you what's in the name, presented randomly for your diversion
• Things to see: Animated Gary Panter unaired commercial (via Comics Comics)
• Things to see: This month's Vice cartoons by Johnny Ryan