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As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen to its Self-Defense Forces deployments.

“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”

Such characters have long been used in Japan to win hearts and minds and to soften the image of authority.

(via Making Light)

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Packaged sets of Comics Comics issues one and two are shipping to comic shops through Diamond this week.

Pick ’em up.

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The great caricaturist Drew Friedman has contributed a typically excellent strip to the New York Observer this week, about the guilty pleasures of great literary figures. In the process, he touches on a Vladimir Nabokov anecdote you may remember from here a while back. Funny stuff.

(Via Bookninja.)

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Sometimes I think the much-respected Jog tends to write at greater length than he really needs to, but he’s still the best, most reliable, and easily the hardest working regular online comics critic I’ve encountered.

He is also, inexplicably, one of the very few who even try to understand where Paper Rad is coming from, and he’s just delivered a sharp review of their latest.

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The fine reception for Brian Chippendale’s Ninja continues with this excellent piece in Salon by Douglas Wolk.

Check it out.

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This is decidedly Not Comics (©Tom Spurgeon), but since it’s from the author of two voluminous Alan Moore reference guides, and concerns one of the wellsprings that nourished (or malnourished, I suppose, depending on your point of view) the birth of the modern comic book, I think it’s still of interest.

More importantly: Six-Gun Gorilla!

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Minicomics master Matthew Thurber has posted a portfolio. Check it out.

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Jack Kirby, one of the great artistic figures in comics, was also one of its great tragic characters. A true visionary in terms of drawing, composition and sheer conceptual heft, he has, in a way, never gotten his due. This astounding interview with him from 1980 offers a moving insight into his ideas and limitations (i.e. what the market dictated).

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Peter Bagge, guest essayist from Comics Comics #2, rules, and proves it in this interview in Nerve.

(Nicked, again, from Eric R.)