Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:
• Feature: At Maclean's, Jaime Weinman gets to the bottom of Pogo – Vol. 1 of the Complete Syndicated Comic Strips: Through the Wild Blue Wonder, talking to co-editor Kim Thompson and calling the volume "the first book that gives a full sense of what it was like to read Kelly’s pioneering strip from the beginning. The first volume goes up to 1950, when Kelly began to incorporate more pointed humour…; the McCarthy character hasn’t shown up yet, but allegories about Communist witch-hunting already pop up. But the darker daily strips alternate with cheerful Sunday installments, demonstrating that Kelly never lost his sense of charm and whimsy. And it helps that because of the book format, what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll called Kelly’s 'love of high-flown language' is more legible than it often was in newspapers."
• Review: "…Kevin Huizenga's latest volume of Ganges [is] a work that is so inventive and playful and thoughtful and that offers such a breathtaking level of technical virtuosity that it makes me want to climb up onto a rooftop and scream at the top of my voice 'COMICS ARE FUCKING AWESOME' like some sort of lovesick geeky schoolboy in a bad 1980s teen comedy asking the prom queen to date him." – Jason Sacks, Comics Bulletin
• Plug: Mark Kaufman spotlights Mark Twain's Autobiography 1910-2010 by Michael Kupperman at Illustration Age: "The very much alive Samuel Clemens’ story is told from WWI to the present. Twain details his careers as an ad man, astronaut, hypnotist, Yeti hunter, porn star, drifter, grifter and more. Find out why this book has been getting rave reviews from NPR to The Hollywood Reporter to Andy Richter’s Twitter stream."
• Commentary: Robot 6's Sean T. Collins takes note of the recent must-read Ron Regé Jr. interview at Vice