Read Comments (3)

Your Pshaw! for the day!

Post Comment

Today’s your last day to cast or change your vote in the Cage Match poll over in the sidebar, so if you haven’t done it yet, now’s the time. The race is pretty incredibly tight — Persepolis and Heavy Liquid have been running neck and neck all week — but it’s still not impossible for any of the books to win, if enough people organized or something. (I doubt that will happen, but I kind of like imagining that people care enough about this to canvas for votes.) In any case, this is the last chance for those of you who haven’t voted yet to make your voice heard.

Also, in a daring move that you may not have noticed because it was buried in the comments, Frank (CC‘s resident fashion director) has proposed special Cage Match-related headgear. You won’t be able to see us, but during the competition, we’ll all be wearing masks:

We encourage you to locate a Comics Comics t-shirt and a pair of scissors.

Post Comment

Your Stickboy for the day. By Dennis Worden.

Read Comment (1)

He’s first over the line one more time.

Read Comments (3)

image copyright Shaky Kane

Read Comments (10)

Speaking of Brendan McCarthy, he’s got some original art up for sale right now on Artdroids, including a bunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuff. I assume Jacob Covey will be all over this.

(Via.)

Read Comments (3)

Your Pshaw! for the day.

Read Comments (2)

Shaky has landed. We are speaking through translators.
image copyright Shaky Kane

Read Comments (5)

Thanks to everyone who submitted nominations for our next Cage Match debate topic. (If you aren’t familiar with the concept, check out the first one here.) Over the weekend, we whittled your suggestions down to ten possibilities, and have now put a poll up in the sidebar. Please vote for your favorite argument-starter.

Don’t be too devastated if your horse doesn’t win, by the way; these are all good choices, and if we keep doing Cage Matches, many of these (as well as some nominations that didn’t quite make it this time around) will more than likely return for later rounds.

Sorry for the dragged-out, too-many-early-primaries nature of this process. We’re still experimenting, but next time around this will be a streamlined super-train.

Read Comments (33)

Readers of Comics Comics may know (but more likely don’t) that Frank and I share a fondness for the British cartoonist Brendan McCarthy. Frank reviewed his book, Swimini Purpose, in our first issue. I only knew a little bit about him, but Frank knew and knows a lot, and has shared much. Anyhow, I like McCarthy for some of the same reasons I like Steve Ditko — he combines a nuts-and-bolts drawing ability with a genuinely eccentric vision of human distortion and psychedelia. When he draws astral planes they seem solid, constructed and utterly believable. He doesn’t dabble in flat-planed, cartoony, Peter Max-ian psychedelia (a type I love) but instead sets out to make a “realistic” psych-world. Just like Ditko. That made him the perfect cover artist for Peter Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man and a wonderfully off-kilter realizer of mainstream visions. It also, like Ditko, left him without a good match for his abilities. One needs a special kind of writer (like Milligan or some of the 2000 A.D.) guys to capitalize on those kind of abilities: sci-fi, surreal, and a bit silly. Perfectly British. Like that other great stylist, Steranko, one gets the feeling from reading the occasional interview and his previous web site, that lately McCarthy believes his own hype a bit too much and, as of late is proudly (and depressingly) doing storyboards and the odd comic book cover, as well as a disappointing issue of SOLO. Without strong content the stuff kinda turns to mush (like the drawing above). Remember The Stone Roses second record? It’s like that. So much talent, but not entirely sure how to use it. Anyhow, he has started a blog, and it’s a good way to keep up with his evolving vision. I hope he’ll hunker down, tighten up, and make something worthy of his talents. Presumptuously enough, I have my fingers crossed. It’s a fan’s lament, and not really fair (because who I am to have unrealistic expectations?), but isn’t that what fans are for?