Online Commentary & Diversions will return Monday. Have a great holiday in the US of A.
• Review: "Like many mysteries, there's something initially frustrating about the end of 'Emily Says Hello,' but it's the best by Jason for a while… it's in the new Low Moon collection… Worth it for 'Emily' alone." – Graham Linehan (The IT Crowd, Father Ted), via Twitter (part 1, part 2)
• Review: "A thin line exists between [Basil] Wolverton’s jokey grotesqueries and the horrors of disfigurement and mutilation that appear in his postwar illustrations of the Book of Revelations (recently published in The Wolverton Bible)… Wolverton’s unsparing depictions of nightmarish prophecies are relentlessly grim but absorbingly so. There are hints of Goya’s crazed, melancholic Saturn and predictions of Charles Burns’s brooding mutant teens." – Nicole Rudick, Artforum (reviewing the Wolverton exhibit currently on view at Gladstone Gallery; hat tip to Drew Friedman)
• Review: "Oh my god. It’s like someone wheeled my senile, racist grandfather onto a metropolitan sidewalk and let him free associate. Unfortunately, my grandfather’s psychosis might have more acuity and humor than Everyone is Stupid [Except for Me]." – Ashley Cardiff, CC2K (via Reason link below; don't say we never post negative reviews)
• Review: "Michael Kupperman is the funniest cartoonist alive, and Tales Designed to Thrizzle is his funniest comic book… Thrizzle has the manic joy of a really good sketch-comedy series… Thrizzle was originally published as four comics, and Kupperman has recolored the series for its hardcover release… [It] should amuse just about anyone who can read." – Paul Constant, The Stranger
• Review: "[Fletcher] Hanks's stuff burns itself into and onto the brain like a giant scalding iron of dementedness." – fústar
• Review: "Certainly nobody takes umbrage with the claim that these are four awesome comics, collected in one hardcover edition [Blazing Combat]… Fantagraphics have done us a big favor by reprinting them all." – The Comic Book Haters (streaming video)
• Plug: "…Reason's own beloved Peter Bagge has a fantastic collection of a near-decade's worth of political cartooning coming out from Fantagraphics [Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me]. The content is king but the actual production is nothing short of stunning, filled with the bright, bright colors that Paul Simon used to sing about back when Kodak was still making film." – Nick Gillespie, Reason
• Plug: "Some good stuff that came out this week includes… Tales Designed to Thrizzle hardcover (the first four issues, now with the black and white bits in color, but still just as fantastic and funny), Prince Valiant Volume 1 (a new and gorgeous hardcover reprinting the Hal Foster original strips from 1937 and 1938)…" – Mike Sterling
• Interview: Michael Fiffe presents outtakes from his interview with Trevor Von Eeden from The Comics Journal #298
• Interview: At comiXology, Tucker Stone interviews The Comics Journal online editor, the ista! in ¡Journalista!, my comrade-in-linkblogging-arms, Dirk Deppey. Pull quote of all pull quotes: "I got the job at Fantagraphics by making fun of The Comics Journal's website on its message board, basically."
• Things to see: Drew Friedman's Monkey Girl
• Things to see: Further proof that Roger Langridge is awesome
• Oddity: The Beat offers sartorial advice for those proportioned like a Gilbert Hernandez character
• Apropos of nothing: Here's a disturbing photoshopped image of Thora "Enid Coleslaw" Birch, submitted by The Comics Journal's Matt Silvie