The newest, brightest bulb Online Commentaries & Diversions:
•Review: Sarah Hansen of Autostraddle looks at No Straight Lines. "I like my queer comic anthologies like I like my women. Handy AND beautiful. . .What No Straight Lines really achieves is putting all of these influential comics in one place. Together, they contextualize each other and the LGBTQ scene at the same time."
•Review: Paste's 'breeder' journalist Sean Edgar cracks open No Straight Lines and has a baller time. "The work in this book illustrates a sweeping chronology of our generation’s greatest civil conflict with all of the tears and smiles that follow. It’s a fascinating read and an essential perspective historically and socially. Even if you’re a breeder."
•Commentary: Publishers Weekly's coverage of Comic Con International in San Diego is THOROUGH. Shannon O'Leary talks up No Straight Lines. " . . .Hall focused on collecting 'literary queer comics in danger of being lost' with the focus instead on literary, self-contained works that would give the reader the experience of being 'satisfied' with each of the stories."
•Review: From the Librairie Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore, Jade reviews her six years of love for Love and Rockets, including keeping the store stocked with them."After all these years, the Hernandez Brothers continue to knock it out of the park with some of the best work in the industry."
•Commentary: Heidi MacDonald runs down the things that stuck out to her at Comic-Con in San Diego. The 30th Anniversary of Love and Rockets was a big one featured on THE BEAT. "While Los. Bros didn’t get the skywriting and theme park they deserved, they got a lot of love, and that will last longer. . . .We’ll give the final word to Jamie Hernandez, because he is the final word."
•Commentary: Eisner Award winner, Charles Hatfield, writes at Hand of Fire speaks about the Hernandez Brothers at Comic-Con International. "I love L&R, and credit it for keeping me in comics as a grownup. Great, great work."
•Plug: Longtime Love and Rockets reader, Robert Boyd, created a long and annotated list of the music found in the thirty-year series. "Each brother does his own very different stories, but both were (and presumably still are) punk rock fanatics and music lovers in general. This is reflected in their work."
•Plug: Sean T. Collins was spotted sporting the newest Love and Rockets shirts on television while discussing the tragic events of Aurora, CO.
•Review: Shelfari picked up two of our titles for the Graphic Novel Friday. Alex Carr starts with Joe Daly's Dungeon Quest Vol. 3: "if you can laugh at your obsession while still poring over weapon and armor upgrades, the Dungeon Quest series should be on your couch next to the game manual and open laptop. . .It's absurd, engrossing, very adult, and pitch perfect." On Jaime Hernandez's God and Science: Return of the Ti-Girls, "It's oversized and billed as a director's cut, with 30 additional pages."
•Interview: Timothy Callahan over at Comic Book Resources got the shimmy on new(er) cartoonist, Chuck Forsman, who has two books out next year from Fantagraphics: Celebrated Summer and The End of the Fucking World. "While at Forsman's studio, I saw the finished pages for 'Celebrated Summer' and it's such a fully-realized work, it's no surprise [Associate Publisher Eric] Reynolds was so quick to jump on it, even after seeing only a few pages."
•Commentary: The Best-Manga-Worst Manga panel of 2012 Comic-Con International has transcribed their views a la Deb Aoki at About.com. Shimura Takako's Wandering Son falls into the BEST MANGA (series) for Kids/Teens. Shaenon Garrity said, "I picked this as best manga for kids, but it's really a great manga for everybody. . . It's done in such a beautiful, sensitive way." Meanwhile, The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio is one of the Most Anticipated. Garrity again states, "Moto Hagio is probably the greatest manga artist after Osamu Tezuka. . . It's one of the two manga stories that practically invented the boys' love genre, along with Keiko Takemiya's Song of the Wind and Trees.
•Review: Jazz-Institute covers Listen, Whitey!: The Sights and Sounds of Black Poewr 1965-1975 and via a rough translation, Wolfram Knauer says, "Pat Thomas's book is a very valuable addition to the musical history of the 1960s and 1970s, precisely because the author attempts to establish and explain the political context. The coffee-table book is generously illustrated with album covers, rare photos, newspaper articles, and ads. A thorough index and a separately available CD with examples of the music mentioned in the text complete the concept."
•Review: Forbidden Planet makes people choose their eight favorite comics should they ever end up on the dreaded desert island. Some of those books included E.C. Segar's Popeye and Daniel Clowes' Twentieth Century Eightball. Across-the-pond artist Steve Tillotson states, "The Fantagraphics collections are great, and the character of Popeye is brilliant- I like how he just punches anyone who pisses him off, but he’s also got a really strong sense of morality, and he talks funny."
•Plug: Did you know Carl Barks was unknown for the first 16 years of his work on Disney comics? He was merely known as the good Disney artist, more on THE BEAT and MetaFilter.