Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:
• Review: "Gottfredson's strips are jammed with incident and detail, energized with a loopy energy that matches the spunky determination of Mickey himself. Running pell-mell from one dangerous escapade to the next (spooky houses and runaway trains predominate), Mickey is all spit and fire as he confronts louts like Pegleg Pete and the Fox while protecting his risk-prone flapper girlfriend, Minnie: 'Give up?? Never!!' The quite visible specter of the Depression and occasional dark humor, as when Mickey tries multiple times to kill himself and fails comically, only add to the sense of heroic grit." – Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
• Review: "The first and probably best compliment that I can give to Wilfred Santiago, the writer and illustrator of 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, is that I wish that I’d read it when I was a kid. In brilliantly transforming Clemente’s life into a graphic novel, Santiago creates an artwork that retells a story familiar to most baseball fans as a superhero legend and, in so doing, stands alongside the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman comic books that many of us read in our youth." – Paul Gleason, Legacy Sports Ent.
• Interview: Legacy Sports Ent.'s Paul Gleason talks to Wilfred Santiago about 21: "Having never watched Clemente play, he was more of a legend to me growing up in Puerto Rico. After the release of the book, I can see how much Clemente has meant to the older generations who followed him and to the younger generations who learned to love him because of their parents. This inter-generational bond transcends gender and cultures, and it has been rewarding to witness people’s responses."
• Profile: Antolín Maldonado Ríos of El Nuevo Día introduces Wilfred Santiago to readers of Puerto Rico's largest daily newspaper: "'I have over a decade doing comic books, and most were superheroes. When I finished my first graphic novel, I had the idea of doing a biography, and thus had more potential subjects. Roberto Clemente was one of them,' said the Puerto Rican artist, a native of Ponce, to explain the background of his recent book, 21 – The Story of Roberto Clemente." (translated from Spanish)