Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:
• Review: "…[T]he [Comics] Journal returns in a new bricklike bookshelf format (seriously, this thing has like 600 pages!), anchored by a massive Robert Crumb interview, and a whole freakin’ lot of really strong criticism. I most especially liked the Cerebus retrospective by Tim Krieder…. Great great great read!" – Brian Hibbs, The Savage Critics
• Review: "The artists that create worlds that start with the alphabet — these are the ones who have been getting in my head lately, motivating me to sort through my response to their art and settle my own ideas on alphabets. Mascots by Ray Fenwick is a great place to start. The book announces itself boldly — it is small, but its hot pink cloth cover is difficult to ignore. The title breaks across a few lines, so it is less a word than a jumble of letters — a mascot for the word 'Mascot,' so to speak. The book is appropriately titled: from the very beginning, everything announces itself as something else – forms are always changing, names are invented 'mercifully' (to use one of the narrators’ parlance) for things that are unnamable, faces that smile when the book is held in one direction are revealed as faces that frown when the book is flipped. The book conveys a sense of being stuck just outside of where everything makes sense and fits together." – Jordan Hurder, Chance Press
• Opinion: I don't think Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle knew about our upcoming series of Pogo collections when he wrote his reminiscences about the strip — "Pogo had it all: love, fear, friendship, ambivalence, pails of water, morality, plus a love of high-flown language and, not incidentally, wonderful draftsmanship" — and bemoaned the scarcity and high prices of past collections (via The Daily Cartoonist)
• Interview (Audio): Mome contributor Laura Park is the guest on the latest episode of The Ink Panthers podcast