Daily OCD: 5/24/11

Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:

• Review: "It's a smart-looking book, and the choice to go color-free really allows Gilbert Hernandez's cartooning to shine. But make no mistake: this is vintage Bagge. Sure, we're minus the delicious Buddy Bradley angst, and the goofiness is rated PG, but the increasingly ridiculous situations that the girls of Yeah!… get themselves into [are] very much in Bagge's wheelhouse…. Yeah! also has in spades something that HATE! rarely, if ever, did: cuteness. Some of the hijinx and situations that the band finds itself in are, well, adorable. Hernandez's pen is as much to credit for that as is Bagge's turn to the 'pop side.'" – Jeremy Nisen, Under the Radar

• Review: "This slim graphic novel [Toys in the Basement] is nominally for children, but the art of the Frenchman Blanquet takes a children's story to an unexpected level…. This surrealist book by writer-artist Blanquet brings to the young reader a simple message: retribution will come, and you never know from which side." – Ray Garraty, Endless Falls Up

• Interview: At Comic Book Resources, Chris Mautner talks to Dave McKean about his new erotic graphic novel Celluloid: "The depressing majority of comics seem to be about violence of one sort or another, yet how much violence does the average person have to deal with in their everyday lives?… But sex is happily part of most people's lives, and crosses the mind most days, I would say, even if it's just watching your partner get out of bed in the morning."

• Interview: Time Out Chicago's Web Behrens goes back for a second helping with Paul Hornschemeier: "'I remember — well, I don’t actually remember this, but my mom told me this story many times: I was walking with her when I was little, 3 or 4. I looked up at her and said, 'Mom, sometimes I miss you even when you’re here.' What a sad — well, it’s cute, but gosh, I was lonely even then, walking with my mom! It’s just kind of how I’m wired."

• Panel: The Daily Cross Hatch begins transcribing the MoCCA panel on political cartooning that Tim Kreider was on: "My early cartoons were surreal non-sequiturs, but I feel like I was kind of conscripted into duty as a political cartoonist. I didn’t feel like the Bush years were just the opposition in charge. It felt like a true aberration in history, like the McCarthy years. It’s something I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut about. Once it was over, I was very, very happy to quit, but I wasn’t going to quit before George did."