A bit late with the Online Commentary & Diversions today due to being a touch under the weather:
• Review: "OK, [Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons] is very expensive, but Wilson's a lot cheaper than Zoloft. Some people fly their inner freak flags as a sign of liberation. This strange dude isn't sure there's another type of flag out there. In his world, there's always something over the horizon ready to eat you, blow you up or turn you into a homicidal maniac. Sounds a lot like life." – Laurel Maury, San Francisco Chronicle
• Review: "…[An] exemplary republishing of Wilson’s Playboy cartoons… One of the many nice features of the new Fantagraphics book is that it is chronological and dated, so we can see Wilson responding to the changing social and political landscapes. … As a physical object Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons cannot be praised highly enough. …[L]ooking at Wilson’s work at length, eating it up with my eyes, I came to love his work. He is, in fact, a master. …[F]or all their morbidity and ghoulishness, Wilson’s cartoons affirm the value of cherishing life. As inhuman as his characters often are, Wilson is a deeply humane cartoonist." – Jeet Heer, Comics Comics
• Review: "Published soon after the conflict that it documents, Safe Area Goradze is an intense reading experience and an active call for the condemnation of tribal and international leaders who put politics ahead of humanity." – Suzette Chan, Sequential Tart
• Review: "There’s a remarkably spare and lean quality to the plot and characterization cooked up by Jean-Patrick Manchette’s West Coast Blues. … It’s a story that’s both grim and strangely detached (or at least restrained), eschewing the sort of cliches that an American might expect from a crime story. … If the text felt a bit detached, then Jacques Tardi added muscle, bone and fat to it with his delightfully chunky line. … It’s the first quotidian crime story that I’ve ever read, and Tardi’s commitment to the depiction of the everyday and the way nightmares crashed into daily life are what made this book work so well." – Rob Clough, The Comics Journal (warning: spoilers)
• Feature: Comic Book Resources' Brian Cronin spotlights Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle as part of "A Year of Cool Comics": "Tales Designed to Thrizzle is one of those books where you might really need to see it to believe it. Michael Kupperman delivers thirty-odd pages of the most delightfully absurd ideas that you can imagine, to the point where I don't know if simply describing the comic would do it justice… I, for one, think it's one of the very best comics currently made."
• Interview: Graphic Novel Reporter's John Hogan has a Q&A about Sublife with John Pham: "I hope to have established a sort of model for the upcoming issues with Volumes 1 and 2. So basically, continuing serializations of either Sycamore St. or Deep Space, accompanied by various, shorter strips where I can experiment and joke around."
• Things to see/Bookmark: STL Drawing Club, for fan art and sketchbookery by Huizenga, May, Zettwoch, and several others
• Things to see: "California" by Gabrielle Bell
• Things to see: Page 8 of Hans Rickheit's Ectopiary, plus a poster for an amazing 2003 exhibit of comic art
• Things to see: A new comic in Finnish and a sexy animated drawing by Lilli Carré
• Things to see: Michael Kupperman says "Another week, another illustration for The New Yorker" (the article's pretty funny too)
• Whoa, Nellie: The Beat spots a similarity. Of course, it's not an uncommon one