Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive says:

Today, we posted another installment in our ongoing overview of the life and career of "Li'l Abner" creator, Al Capp. This one is a doozy... It features a 1967 parable on the subject of venereal disease titled "The Lips Of Marcia Perkins." The only explanation for why this comic strip was allowed to run in family newspapers is that editors at the time were just too dense to understand it!

Also included is a drop dead funny sequence where Li'l Abner invades the competing strips, "Mary Worth" and "Steve Canyon;" pressbooks, puzzles and ads featuring the characters; and vintage cover stories on Capp from Life and Time magazines. This series of posts is turning into a definitive online book on Al Capp. Enjoy!

CAPPital Ideas: The Modus Operandi of Li'l Abner | (All Al Capp Posts at the the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive)

Cory visits his favorite comic book store in all the world -- Secret Headquarters, in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. With shop owner Dave Pifer, he walks us through some of the graphic novels and comics he loves, everything from manga to zine howto manuals to Jodorowsky to Warren Ellis. Cory is particularly fond (as are all of us at BBtv) of the shop's awesome simultaneous tribute to Stan Lee and the Sex Pistols in this t-shirt, "God Save Stan Lee."

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions on how to subscribe to the BBtv video podcast.

Infinite Matrix editor Eileen Gunn sez, "I've put up a new issue of the Infinite Matrix -- in honor of Cory's birthday and because I have three great stories the world needs to read: a reprint of Cory's fine Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers and two excellent stories by writers from Eastern Europe: Serbian activist and writer Yasmina Tesanovic's charming Cats and Cars at and Ukrainian SF writer Yana Dubinianska's spine-tingling Barge over Black Water. "

Nimby and the D-Hoppers is one of my most widely reprinted stories, and it's one of a very small handful of stories that I hadn't yet published for free online, though it has been released as CC-licensed podcasts and a CC licensed comic. As with the other adaptations, the text is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

And yup, yesterday was my birthday! I'm 37, which means I'm now in my prime. It sure beats being a total square at 36. Link

Reason's Hit & Run blog has a couple of scans of a funny comic book from a homophobic politician who's under fire for abusing his office.

Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart is facing a tough reelection campaign. He's been accused of abusing his office for personal gain, and will go on trial in the fall on felony campaign finance charges. But apparently, this is all a conspiracy of homosexuals, liberal do gooders, and good ol' boys to force Rinehart out of office. Rinehart lays out his case in a comic book he's sending out to voters, which—you may be surprised to learn—he wrote himself.

You can download the highly entertaining comic book in its entirety here: Brent Rinehart for Oklahoma County Commissioner comic book PDF

Craftster user Chris Wass knit an entire Wonder Woman costume (complete with bracelets!) for ComiCon. Alas, I won't be there to see it in person this year, but I'm already subbed to the Flickr tag and can't wait to do some virtual cosplayer watching. Link (via Craft)

E. Paul Zehr has a book coming out in October called Becoming Batman: The Possibility of A Superhero, about the physical and mental training one would need to become a superhero without any supernatural powers. Zehr, a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, is also a karate expert. Over at Scientific American, JR Minkel interviews Zehr about how one might train as the Dark Knight. From SciAm:

What's most plausible about portrayals of Batman's skills? You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We're seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics.

What's less realistic? A great example is in the movies where Batman is fighting multiple opponents and all of a sudden he's taking on 10 people. If you just estimate how fast somebody could punch and kick, and how many times you could hit one person in a second, you wind up with numbers like five or six. This doesn't mean you could fight four or five people. But it's also hard for four or five people to simultaneously attack somebody, because they get in each other's way. More realistic is a couple of attackers.

Batman and science (Scientific American), Pre-order Becoming Batman (Amazon)

Indie comics publsher Boom! Studios is putting a bunch of its backlist comics (including the excellent Zombie Tales) online as free downloads:

The titles they’re offering include Ninja Tales, Zombie Tales, Hero Squared, 2 Guns, Shmobots and Cthulhu Tales.

“This is a great way to get the word out about BOOM! titles,” said Chip Mosher in a press release. “When people come to the site for free comics, they’ll be able to take a look at the other quality books we’re putting out. The interface ties all the parts of our website - the store, current titles, free stuff - into one beautiful package. New fans who might be stopping by for cool zombie or Cthulhu content can get turned on to what BOOM!’s doing across the board and check out the print editions in local comic book shops or at Amazon.com and mass market bookstores via our distribution deal with Perseus Books. We expect that people who aren’t BOOM! fans will discover our series and titles and be excited to own print copies.”

Link (Thanks, Dr. Webcomics!)

See also: Zombie Tales: comics anthology

Tavie sez, Possibly spurred by the new interest generated when Elfquest started offering their entire series for free online - Hollywood Reporter says that after almost 30 years of false start, Elfquest is finally going to become a movie. I'm cautiously, but intensely, excited. This series was originally designed with animation in mind, so a good, traditionally-animated feature film with the creators' involvement/blessing will be a dream come true for a lot of fans."

"Elfquest," the cult comic by Wendy and Richard Pini, is heading to the big screen courtesy of Warners Bros. and Rawson Thurber.

Thurber will write, direct and produce the feature, whose format is undetermined.

Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

See also: Every issue of Elfquest free -- oldest independent comic goes online

I just got word from IDW, the publishers of my graphic novel Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories, adapted for comics by a team of talented writers and artists), that Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million have both taken very large orders of the hardcover, every copy of which is signed and numbered (yes, I signed thousands and thousands of tip-in sheets, by hand, until I thought my arm would fall off). They're available online, of course, but practically every BN and BAM store nationwide is bound to have them. The book has also seen great orders from independents across the nation -- and, of course, it's available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download. Futuristic Tales on BN.com, Futuristic Tales at Books-a-Million, Futuristic Tales at independent booksellers near you, Download Futuristic Tales for free!

Jeff Vandermeer sez, "These old Indian comics were one of the three pillars of my childhood reading, the other two being Tintin and Asterix & Obelix. We lived in the Fiji Islands, which had a large Indian population. I’d buy these from the corner Chinese grocery store, about a quarter-mile from the beach." Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Scott says:

One of my favorite comics from the last year is The Amazing Joy Buzzards, an over-the-top title about the world's greatest rock 'n roll adventure band. With their trusty sidekick, the mythical Mexican wrestling genie, El Campeon, in tow, the Buzzards hop from one fast-paced adventure to the next, saving mankind from monsters, super-villains and evil beasties while living the rock 'n roll lifestyle to the fullest. Writer Mark Andrew Smith (Aqua Leung, Pop Gun) and and Artist Dan Hipp (GYAKUSHU!) have created a zany tour de force that will remind any reader that comics can still be fun without sacrificing story. Image Comics has just released a new "director's cut" super-deluxe trade paperback.

Amazing Joy Buzzards Volume 1: Here Come The Spiders ($14.99 at Amazon) | ($15.99 at Heavy Ink)

Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive says:

Funny animal comics don't get enough respect.

Many incredibly talented artists worked in funny animal comics... some, like Kurtzman and Frazetta, went on to fame in other genres. Yet the only artist working in this field that most people are familiar with is Carl Barks. Uncle Scrooge comics are fine, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. In the 1940s and 50s, there was a wealth of funny animal comics all drawn in completely unique styles. I have to admit that comics aren't my strong suit, but when I see a comic like this one, I want to know more about the people responsible for them.

Here is Supermouse Comics number 4, drawn by Milt Stein. Little is known about Stein's career. Tom Sito points out that he was an animator at Famous for a time, and he worked on Tubby the Tuba for Dr. Alexander Shure's Westbury Long Island Company, the tradtional forerunner of NY Tech's Computer Animation Program. He committed suicide in 1977. Milton Knight adds, that Stein "animated some very expressive scenes at Terry in the early 40s (the girl mouse puppet in Down With Cats). And in the 60s, he animated the humorous characters on an independent TV pilot that Jerry Beck likes to include in his "Worst" ASIFA shows, titled Cosmic Raymond. I think Stein was one of the most neglected artists of all time; and he drew far better than Barks!"

Supermouse Comics number 4

A Google engineer has tracked down, munged and XMLified the copyright renewal notices for all the books the US Copyright Office knows about -- now there's a one-click way to discover if an old book is in the public domain (more or less) and who holds the copyright if it isn't.

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.

How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

Link (Thanks, Frances!)

This incredibly detailed Quake 3 Simpsons map looks like it'd be a hell of a lot of fun to play -- especially if you skinned the bad guys as Worker and Parasite. Link (via Waxy)

TJ Dietsch reviews Jack Kirby's OMAC.

I bought the first issue off the newsstand in 1974, and the story, about suicide-bomber sex-robots, blew my mind.

DC recently released an anthology of all 8 issues of the short-lived series.

Which brings us to Buddy Blank, a regular dude who works for Build-A-Friend until he’s selected by the faceless Peace Agency to become the One Man Army Corps. When OMAC takes over, Buddy disappears, but does return later on in the series.

Over the next 8 issues, Kirby throws OMAC against everything from a rented city of assassins trying to kill him, a giant spider-like monster, future gangsters, a vast cloning ring, a mad scientist stealing the Earth’s water and more. Kirby’s wild pencils really bring these out-there concepts to life, punching you in the eyes with incredibly crisp pencils.

Link | Buy OMAC anthology on Amazon. (via Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat)

This is probably the cutest/coolest thing I've seen on a network television website in a while: free papercraft cartoon characters for kids, including Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, shown flayed above and assembled at left (the rest of the TMNT gang is there, too). Download the PDF, print, cut, and assemble, then blow spitballs at it from across your cubicle.

Link (thanks, Jolon Bankey!)

Beijing-based graphic novelist Coco Wang has produced a moving series of "Earthquake Strips" about the recent (well, really, ongoing) disaster in China. Link (thanks, Marianne Shaneen)

Rstevens, creator of the wonderful webcomic Diesel Sweeties, sez, "I finally got off my ass and finished my 10 volme set of CC-ebooks. Opted out of Wowio or any of those stinky services that are ad-supported because not all countries can sign up. Just some weekend reading for the blogosphere!"

Ten volumes of Diesel Sweeties! w00t! Link (Thanks, R!)

T. Campbell writes in to announce that he's revived his long-running webcomic, Fans: "One of the first science-fiction webcomics, "Fans," returned this February. The premise's appeal is pretty obvious: science-fiction fans are the ones most qualified to save the world from science-fictiony threats. From such beginnings, the series has pushed outward in all directions, mixing humor and intensity, science-fiction and fantasy, historical and pop-cultural references, tributes to the power of imagination and portraits of flawed dreamers. The latest stories have seen the creation of a fan-based armed services division, and the beginnings of a menage a trois between three central characters. With over 1600 installments, the series is a time-wasting treat for fans everywhere. Hope you enjoy!" Link

Just look at this beautifully faded sign for the Super Museum in Metropolis, Illinois. Four generations of Supermans, scorched by the yellow light of the Terran sun. Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Canadian copyfightin' law prof Michael Geist sez, "Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art has created a remarkable comic book [PDF - 2.8 MB] chronicling the recent battle over Canadian copyright reform. The book includes over 100 links to websites, articles, and other resources as every quote or reference is hyperlinked. It concludes with references to groups actively involved in copyright issues and suggestions for how to get active. This left me absolutely speechless."

I concur 100 percent -- this is just staggeringly great, the perfect primer on the shameful attempt by Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice to smuggle the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law without debate or public input. Link to PDF of comic book, Link to Appropriation Art

(via Michael Geist)

Matt sez, "I thought that you might like to know about 'Brave Men Run,' a mash-up superhero/thriller novel by author Matthew Selznick, published by Swarm Press. What's really cool is that the author and publisher have released this as a multiple-format DRM-free e-book, remix-friendly Creative Commons audio book AND in the traditional print format, so readers are free to enjoy 'Brave Men Run' in any way that they choose. It's another sign that times are changing and the publishing industry is light years ahead of their brethren in the music industry." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

IDW have just published the collected issues of "Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now," a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers (and I do mean incredible: Dara Naraghi, Esteve Polls, Sam Keith, Robert Studio, J.C. Vaughn, Daniel Warner, Scott Morse, Paul McCaffrey, Paul Pope, Dan Taylor, Dustin Evans, Ben Templesmith, Erich Owens, Ashley Wood, James Anthony Kuhoric, Guiu Vilanova, German Torres, Danny Parsons, Robbie Robbins, Neil Uyetake, Chris Mowry, and Amauri Osorio).

As with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it's on a non-commercial basis. I've uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories "Craphound," "Anda's Game," "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," "After the Siege," "I, Robot" and "Nimby and the D-Hoppers."

Have at it! Link to "Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now" on Amazon, Link to free downloads of "Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now"

Warning: obscure technical questions ahead!

Hey, Lazyweb, here's one for ya! I've got a 153-page PDF, made up mostly of high-rez raster images (8.5x11, 300DPI) with some vector text (page numbers a few blocks of text) here and there. I want to turn this into a .cbr file by bursting the PDF into individual PNGs or JPEGs and then RARing them, using Ubuntu and free tools. That's where you all come in: use the comments below to kibbitz -- I've been playing with ImageMagick's "convert" tool all day (using lines like "convert -geometry 4414x3123 -density 300x300 -quality 100 pdf:original.pdf[1-153] converted.png") with no success. Either it churns for hours and nothing happens (is there a verbose mode for "convert"?) or the output is really low-rez and crummy.

Dinosaurs and Robots guest blogger Robyn Miller (who created the Myst series of computer games with his brother, Rand), discovered this 1930s ad for Mickey Mouse tucked into a book in Paris.

This French Mickey seems to be flaunting the extra digit lacking in his US relative. Link

Bottomless Belly Button, a 720-page(!) graphic novel takes place during a couple of days in the life of the Loony family, which includes two elderly parents, three children, and a couple of grandchildren. The family has gathered together at the coastal home of the elder Loonys who have called everyone together to announce that, after 50 years of marriage, they are getting a divorce, because they no longer love each other.

Each child and grandchild takes the news differently, and author Dash Shaw brilliantly weaves the multiple story lines together to create a funny/tragic tale of a family at the brink of falling apart. I like Dash's intelligently-restrained creativity with the comic medium, such as portraying one of the adult Loony children as a frog, because he thinks the rest of the family members see him as one. I was mesmerized through the entire book.

From the Amazon.com review:

The eldest child, Dennis, struggles with his parents' decision while facing difficulties of his own in his recent marriage. Believing that his parents are hiding the true reasons behind their estrangement, Dennis embarks on a quest to discover the truth and searches through clues, trap doors, and secret tunnels in attempt to find an answer. Claire, the middle child, is a single mother whose 16-year-old daughter, Jill, is apathetic to the divorce but confounded by Claire and troubled by her own "mannish" appearance. The youngest child, Peter, is a hack filmmaker suffering from paralyzing insecurities who establishes an unorthodox romance with a mysterious day care counselor at the beach.

In a six-day period rich with atmospheric sequences, these characters stumble blindly around one another, often ignoring their surroundings and consumed by their own daily conflicts. Visually, Shaw employs a leisurely storytelling pace that allows room for exploring the interconnecting relationships among the characters and plays to his strength as a cartoonist—small gestural details and nuanced expressions that bring the characters to vivid and intimate life.

If the controversial R.D. Laing wrote an episode of The Simpsons, it might read something like The Bottomless Belly Button.

Buy from Amazon | Buy from HeavyInk

In the NY Times, John Hodgman reviewed Jack Kirby's groundbreaking Fourth World comic book series from DC in the 1970s.

Kirby’s “Fourth World” — a weird saga of warring gods that for a brief moment hijacked the normally staid line of DC Comics and plunged it into bracing, beautiful oddness, and which is now fully and lovingly collected in the four-volume Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus (DC Comics, $49.99 each).

Besides the psychedelic jump-start he gave to Jimmy Olsen, Kirby started three new titles — “The Forever People,” “The New Gods” and “Mister Miracle.” All chart the conflict between two families of the New Gods: those on the peace-loving planet of New Genesis, and those living in the warlike world of Apokolips. Apokolips is ruled by the evil Darkseid, who seeks the “anti-life equation” that will erase all free will in the universe but his own. Pitted against him is his son, the monstrous yet noble Orion, raised on New Genesis to love peace but ultimately doomed by his addiction to war.

It was a cosmic “epic for our times,” with one foot in ancient myth and the other in the wildest science fiction. And unusually for a comic book story, it was designed to be told slowly, over many years, and to come to an end.

But it was also a personal epic. Kirby, as you ought to know, was the King. He got the nickname while working at Marvel comics, where, with Joe Simon, he created Captain America. Later, with Stan Lee, he helped fashion a completely new, psychologically rich aesthetic in comics, reviving a flagging industry and unveiling a pantheon of pop-culture deities — the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer — that still walk the earth today.

Link (Thanks, Dad!)

Daniel Pink, author of many well-regarded business books, wrote his first manga business book, Johnny Bunko, after receiving a fellowship to live in Japan and study manga. Bunko is a quick, funny, and extremely, inspiringly sensible book on career-planning that throws out all the traditional bullshit about getting a straight job to fall back on if your creative gig fails on you. Instead, Bunko makes a convincing case for pursuing your dreams, working to your strengths, throwing out the idea of planning, and persevering rather than relying on talent to make it.

I spent a lot of my life ignoring (with some difficulty), the advice of well-meaning people who wanted me to know that I'd never, ever be able to live on what I made from writing. Instead, I took on a series of careers in fields that hadn't even existed when I was a student, each one bringing me closer to my dream of being a full-time scribbler. If I'd listened to the software aptitude test my high-school guidance counsellor gave me, I'd be a "geriatric nutritionist" (cook in a senior's home) today.

Johnny Bunko is a miserable accounting drone who finds a bundle of magic chopsticks. Every time he separates a pair, a genie emerges to help him navigate his way to career freedom. It's a great little device, and the manga artwork -- from the award-winning Rob Ten Pas -- is simple and clean and often very funny.

Bunko is a refreshingly frank and optimistic (but clear-eyed) story about the perils of choosing a safe, lucrative and hateful job that you'll never be able to afford to leave, and the joys of failing in interesting ways, learning from your mistakes, and making more of yourself. I wish someone had given me a copy when I was 16 or so, and forced me to re-read it every year until I was in my mid-twenties. Link

See also: Johnny Bunko Book Trailer

Earlier this week, Ruben Bolling's TOM THE DANCING BUG toon let fly with some trenchant commentary on Disney and copyright. Link (Thanks, Cori!)