Your Online Commentary & Diversions for today:
• Review: "With The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, [Joe] Daly maintains some of the psychedelic trappings of his earlier stories but puts them within a framework of stoner noir (ala the film Pineapple Express) buddy story, only with Big Lebowski-style absurdity. However, the book can't really be reduced to familiar genre markers all that easily, and [a] firm, eccentric sense of place is the biggest reason why it works." – Rob Clough
• Review: "Needless to say, one could study the art found within Abstract Comics: The Anthology (published by Fantagraphics Books) for months, or one could flip through the entire thing in five minutes, and the conclusions one could draw from either experience of the volume could easily be justified as informed and insightful." – Alan David Doane, Comic Book Galaxy
• Review: "[Prince Valiant] creator Hal Foster is justly hailed for his stupendous full-pagers, full of panorama and carefully-researched settings…. We moderns are fortunate that superb reprint editions of these classics are readily available…" – Brenda Clough, Book View Cafe Blog
• Review: "I love [Richard Sala's] older work and newer work alike – the evolution of Sala's inky, angular charmers is a treat to see – and [Delphine] (a retelling of Snow White) has been such a wonderful foreboding wander through the twisty, turn-y, dark forest." – Emily Martin, Inside a Black Apple
• Plug: "This week I started reading Prison Pit Vol. 1 and … I … it … um … the thing is … it's …. wow." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
• Analysis: Blog Flume's Ken Parille on Tim Hensley: "I can’t think of another cartoonist who approaches space — and what we might call 'spatial color' — in such a rigorously strange way."
• Interview: At The Daily Cross Hatch, part 3 of 4 of their interview with Hans Rickheit: "I can’t work from a script. If the book were really tightly scripted, I promise you I’d lose interest in it, and I might force myself to draw it, but the artwork would just become a lifeless thing. The book would suffer dramatically."
• Things to see: Baby vs. kangaroo and other absurdity from Tim Lane