Comedian Steve Martin Partners With Cartoonist Harry Bliss For New Book
Rachel Martin
November 17, 2020
Friday, November 20, 2020
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Cavna's picks for 2020's best of comics
2020 graphic novels and comic books: Five trends that defined the year
Washington Post November 19, 2020
P&P Live! Tommy Siegel | I HOPE THIS HELPS with Ben Thornewill
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Fantom Comics newsletter excerpts
>>> SATURDAY, 11/21 ONLY - "FILL-A-BAG" DEAL:
Come in Saturday, 11/21, and buy a Fantom Tote Bag for $5 (normally $20) and fill it with as much product from the store as possible to get 25% pff your entire purchase! Only items excluded are Magic the Gathering and we will have a limit of one bag per customer, so that means anything else you can fit into one Fantom Tote is good for the discount! With many families unable to see their loved ones this season, graphic novels are the perfect gift that can be mailed and keep your loved ones entertained while quarantining! Not to mention some early Black Friday goodness!
>>> SUNDAYS ARE BACK AT FANTOM COMICS:
Beginning this Sunday, 11/22, we'll be open Sundays again! In store Sunday hours will be 11am-6pm with requirements of a face mask and social distancing! We know it can be tough to get in during the week, so we're super excited about helping folks out on another day of the weekend!
Come in Saturday, 11/21, and buy a Fantom Tote Bag for $5 (normally $20) and fill it with as much product from the store as possible to get 25% pff your entire purchase! Only items excluded are Magic the Gathering and we will have a limit of one bag per customer, so that means anything else you can fit into one Fantom Tote is good for the discount! With many families unable to see their loved ones this season, graphic novels are the perfect gift that can be mailed and keep your loved ones entertained while quarantining! Not to mention some early Black Friday goodness!
>>> SUNDAYS ARE BACK AT FANTOM COMICS:
Beginning this Sunday, 11/22, we'll be open Sundays again! In store Sunday hours will be 11am-6pm with requirements of a face mask and social distancing! We know it can be tough to get in during the week, so we're super excited about helping folks out on another day of the weekend!
Tommy Siegel, I Hope This Helps: Comics and Cures for 21st Century Panic
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Beyond Comics in-store sales
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Fredericksburg political cartoonist Clay Jones has covid-19
Clay Jones, who is a friend of mine, has announced via his blog and other media that he's contracted covid-19. Fortunately he appears to be doing ok and has put up a new cartoon and blog today discussing his thoughts on having it and the wider epidemic.
We at ComicsDC send our best wishes to Clay and his family, and since that won't buy him a cup of coffee, I'm sending him $40 for a print of yesterday's cartoon, Goodbye, Dumpster.
Tip Jar: if you want to support the cartoonist, please send a donation through PayPal to clayjonz@gmail.com. You can also snail it to P.O. Box 9103, Fredericksburg, VA 22403. And since someone asked this morning, yes. You can still get a signed print for $40.
Monday, November 16, 2020
NPR checks in on Judge Parker's election
'Judge Parker' Cartoonist On Comic Strip's Election Storyline
Michel Martin
All Things Considered November 14, 2020
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Nov 18: P&P Live!: G.B. Trudeau — DBURY@50 - in conversation with David Stanford
P&P Live!: G.B. Trudeau — DBURY@50 - in conversation with David Stanford
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - 6 p.m.
This event will be streamed online as part of our P&P Live! Series.
The ultimate Doonesbury package celebrating a half-century of G.B. Trudeau's celebrated comic strip. This limited-edition deluxe set includes: A USB flash drive with all 50 years of Doonesbury comics, including 26 years of Sunday comics available for the first time in digital format. Includes a searchable calendar archive, character biographies, and a week-by-week description of the strip's contents. The Dbury@50 User's Guide, a 224-page wire-bound book taking readers through each year of the strip's storied history, with historical trivia, milestone strips, featured storylines and characters, and much more. A commemorative 16" x 20" poster featuring a grid with new sketches of all the strip's characters.
G. B. Trudeau has been drawing his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip for more than forty years. In addition to cartooning, Trudeau has worked in theater, film, and television. He also has been a contributing columnist for the New York Times op-ed page and later an essayist for Time magazine. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jane Pauley. They have three grown children.
David Stanford is an independent editor who has worked on books by authors ranging from Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs to Charles Schulz, Art Spiegelman, and G.B. Trudeau. For the past 40+ years he has worked with Garry Trudeau on innumerable fascinating projects, and since1995 has served as Duty Officer of Doonesbury.com. For eight years he oversaw the Doonesbury milblog The Sandbox, editing over 700 posts by more than 150 soldiers, spouses, and caregivers. On Fridays, he works at Oblong Books and Music in Millerton, New York.
Instead of a set ticket price, we have provided a couple different ways for you to attend this event. If you'd like to purchase a copy of the book, you will not be charged an extra fee for a ticket, and we can either ship your copy, or you can retrieve it at one of our stores.
Troy-Jeffrey Allen interviews ACO on 'American Ronin'
Got It Covered: ACO's Mesmerizing 'American Ronin'
by Troy-Jeffrey Allen
PREVIEWSworld. Nov 14, 2020
Friday, November 13, 2020
Kleefeld on Webcomics - now on YouTube!
Tom King interviews Dave Gibbons
Dave Gibbons and Tom King at Baltimore Comic Con
Tom King
Mainframe Comic Con Oct 28, 2020
Tom King on Strange Adventures Panel at Baltimore Comic Con
Strange Adventures Panel at Baltimore Comic Con
Sal Crivelli with Tom King, MItch Gerard and Doc Shaner
•Oct 28, 2020
Second Scooby-Doo creator dies this fall - Ken Spears RIP
Ken Spears, Scooby-Doo co-creator who set Mystery Machine in motion, dies at 82
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Nov 18: Tommy Siegel, author of I Hope This Helps: Comics and Cures for 21st Century Panic
Nov 18: Tommy Siegel, author of I Hope This Helps: Comics and Cures for 21st Century Panic
Tommy Siegel and his new book are here to help! I Hope This Helps: Comics and Cures for 21st Century Panic has had our staff laughing since it arrived last month, and we are pleased to bring him to you (virtually) in November!
-->>> This event is free, but please Register
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The event will stream on Facebook and YouTube (links will be added here a few days in advance). If you register, you will receive direct links via email.
An illustrated guide to the absurdities of our phone-obsessed modern life from one of the sharpest wits in webcomics.
Tommy Siegel's debut book collection includes 200+ pages of comics, essays, and extremely helpful guides to coping with 21st-century panic. With comics titled "Choose your social anxiety coping mechanism" and "What your coffee drink of choice says about you," I Hope This Helps offers clever and sardonic commentary on our phone-obsessed, social media-driven culture, as well as a series of devastatingly funny relationship comics starring his popular Candy Hearts characters.
Tommy Siegel's comics began as doodles in the back of a van as a touring rock musician, and quickly earned a viral global fanbase and shout-outs from cultural heavyweights ranging from Ringo Starr to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. With a perfect balance of absurd humor and insightful writing, I Hope This Helps outlines the journey from the author's earliest "van doodles" all the way to the socially-distanced awkwardness of the present day.
Tommy Siegel is a cartoonist and musician who tries his best to juggle both pastimes with assistance from copious amounts of coffee. As lead guitarist and singer for his solo projects and his power pop trio Jukebox The Ghost, Tommy has played over 1,000 shows around the world, including festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza and late-night television programs like Letterman and Conan. As a cartoonist, his challenge to draw 500 consecutive days of comics led to a viral fanbase of hundreds of thousands worldwide.
Event date:
Wednesday, November 18, 2020 - 7:00pm
Event address:
online
Arlington, VA 22213
$16.99
SKU: s9781524860738
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Kleefeld on Webcomics - a ComicsDC video interview
By Mike Rhode
Sean Kleefeld, independent comics scholar and author of the new book, Webcomics, was the subject of our first video interview (via Zoom). Sean's been writing about comics for 14 years at his blog, Kleefeld on Comics, and Webcomics (Bloomsbury, 2020; $33) is the first academic book on various aspects of a newish form of cartooning. 
I was joined today by two local experts on webcomics - Robb Tanner, who as Xavier Xerxes, was one of the main comics journalists covering the early days of the field - and Megan Halsband, curator of the web comics collections at the Library of Congress.
Sean joined us from Chicago to discuss his definition of webcomics, the process of writing a book on them, his choices for 7 key texts in the field based on trying to capture the field's diversity, the role of social media and collectives in creating and distributing webcomics, the difficulties in preserving an ephemeral field and other issues.
I would recommend this book as a key text in an understudied area of the comics arts. I found it very readable and a good, solid explanation of the field whose prehistory dates from 1987, but in reality which took off in 1997, not quite 25 years ago.
Click here to go to the video at the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/comics-dc-kleefeld-on-webcomics in case you missed it.
A couple of footnotes -
Robb notes (21:25), "There were four anthology Joey Manley sites: Modern Tales, Serializer, Girlamatic, and GraphicSmash."
Sean's final words (36:01) are "...and make money." so just insert that in your head when you listen.
For more information on the Library of Congress' webcomics initiative, use these links -
Small Press Expo Comic and Comic Art Web Archive
Comics Literature and Criticism Web ArchiveQuick review of Under the Cape: An Anthology of Superhero Romance
Under the Cape: An Anthology of Superhero Romance, Rachel Kenley (ed.), Riverdale Avenue Books, 2020, 320 pp., $17. http://www.riverdaleavebooks.com
From the Amazon description: Super speed, incredible strength, the ability to fly, throw fire, read minds or change forms. What superpower would you choose if you could? Would you be the hero or the villain? And how would it affect your relationships? From heat levels mild to wild, these authors explore the universal truths of love and romance and the happy endings we all desire.The challenge of connection, secrets, and the murky line between good and evil are explored in this collection of 11 original romances by:
-Kim Strattford – Flying Fast, Falling Hard (M/F)
-E.D. Gonzalez – Where There’s Smoke (M/M)
-Naomi Hinchen – The Trust Paradox (M/F)
-Elizabeth Schechter – Time for No Mercy (F/F)
-David Valentin -No Words Needed (M/M)
-Stella B. James – Swiftly In Love (M/F)
-Julie Behrens – Supergay (F/F)
-Christopher Peruzzi -The Little Push (M/F)
-Louisa Bacio – Foolproof (F/F)
-Rachel Kenley – Just Be Yourself (M/F)
-Austin Worley – Love, Law and the Whippoorwill (F/F)
When I was a kid in the 1970s, I really wanted superhero prose, but there wasn't much to be had - a couple of Batman tv series tie-ins done in the '60s, some Superman movie novels by Elliot S! Maggin, and a short-lived line of Marvel novels. The main way to get longer super-heroic stories was to read the pulps that were being reprinted at the time - the Avenger, Doc Savage (with covers by James Bama) and The Shadow (covers by Steranko), but these pulp heroes weren't quite the same as the later comic book heroes. The desire for longer stories, which lasted more than 15 minutes to read, and could give more backstory than a comic, was strong for me.
Now, Marvel and DC have regularly published novels about their characters, and many other people have written stories about generic heroes. In fact, Washington's Tom King got his start that way with his 2012 novel A Once Crowded Sky.
The stories are generally competent, although none of them particularly stood out for me. I just enjoyed them as a light fiction read. The heroes' powers and names are often secondary to the plot, as expected, and there's plenty of hero-villain cross-romance, also as expected.
This anthology is probably a bit of a hodgepodge as far as finding an audience, due to its laudable attempt at diversity. As you can see above, the tales vary between hetero- and homosexual, with 5 hetero, 4 lesbian and 2 male stories. The stories are further divided into "sweet" (no sex) and "heat" (explicit sex). I have no idea how romance audiences select their books, but there might not be enough specific content here for anyone but the devoted superhero fan.
Speaking of the devoted superhero fan, Peruzzi's The Little Push does a deep dive into comics fandom and the ending is almost certainly incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't map his Mistress Marvella and Captain Photon onto Shazam-powered Mary Marvel (Fawcett / DC Comics) and Captain Marvel (the original Marvel Comics version). Both of those characters ended up with a superhero form bonded to a human form.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this book for what it was. Other reader's mileage will certainly vary. I appreciate the publisher's agent providing a free copy for me to review.
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