A fresh heap of Online Commentary & Diversions:
• Review: "You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!… collects all the [Fletcher] Hanks material not included in the first book. Hanks' hyperactive, colorful, robust, and crazily disproportionate art is perfectly matched to his over-the-top storytelling… There are few artists, from the Golden Age to today, that so deftly blended goofy dialogue with terrifying violence and surreal situations; for better or worse, Hanks was a real original. [Grade] B+" – The A.V. Club
• Review: "[Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti] is a brutally funny and disturbing attempt to push some buttons, either uncomfortably or comfortably mired in taboo. The aesthetic of freaks, geeks, nerds and ugly men and women, all with dark pasts, dirty fetishes, sociopathic tendencies, and murderous habits all play out over 120 odd pages of frenetic cartoon violence, sometimes sexual, sometimes suicidal, sometimes offensive, but always funny." – Geek Pie
• Review: "Explainers [is] a veritable Bible of middle class American dysfunction… [Jules] Feiffer reveals the depths of his subject not only through the dialogue — which are filled with psychological, social and politic depths that few cartoonists have ever plumbed — but also through an amazing skill to capture the body language so crucial to human communication… Explainers is 500 pages of startling truth captured in sequential squiggles on paper, a real masterpiece worth delving into." – John E. Mitchell, North Adams Transcript
• Review: "[Nell] Brinkley was an amazing artist and craftsman and there are pages here [in The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley's Cartoons 1913-1940] that will stun you in their detail and composition." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
• Profile/Review: Robert Birnbaum of The Morning News proposes "a Mount Rushmore of American illustration" consisting of Bill Mauldin, Jules Feiffer, Ed Sorel, Seymour Chwast, and David Levine, adding "American Presidents is a 128-page compilation that assembles Levine’s survey of American leaders and their coteries and skewers them with delightful results. It should be a required text in American history courses—Levine’s images powerfully expose the venality, duplicity, and hypocrisy of the upper reaches of our government."
• Interviews: Inkstuds presents a two-fer of audio talks with newly-minted Mome contributors: first up, it's Noah Van Sciver (whose comics "read like they came from the mind of a crazed hobo. Seriously, they are great"); up second, it's T. Edward Bak (described simply as "great")
• Plug: Worth Your Attention discovers The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley's Cartoons 1913-1940
• Plug: "Olivier Schrauwen is one of my favourite new cartoonists, and one of the best artists to appear in recent issues of Mome." – Richard Cowdry, Love the Line
• Things to see: "The Press Is Hungry for Explanations" by Michael Kupperman
• Things to see: Can you imagine a Judy Drood television cartoon? Someone in TV did, and Richard Sala did some production art for it