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I know everyone’s excited about Punisher: War Zone Watchmen, but this is the comic I’d really like to see adapted into a movie. (Click to enlarge.)

Actually, it would present even greater adaptation problems than Watchmen does, but no need to get into that now. (And yes, I’m aware of The Jazz Singer. Why do you ask?)

(The above cartoon nicked from O. Soglow‘s excellent out-of-print collection Pretty Pictures, by the way.)

Also, a few links:

1. A David Heatley interview, for Frank’s reading pleasure.

2. Charles Hatfield has written the most in-depth review of The Goddess of War I’ve seen to date.

3. Probably 90% of Comics Comics readers have already heard this, but Sammy Harkham (perhaps best known as a CC cover artist) gave a predictably great interview to Inkstuds.

4. Not many of you will find it as train-wreck entertaining as I do, but I can’t keep myself from linking to The Comics Journal‘s go-to superhero guy Tom Crippen, and his hilariously prolonged quest [more (!) here, here, and here] to get other people to read and explicate an essay by the legendary Donald Phelps for him. (I won’t speculate on why Crippen can’t read it himself.) No real point here. I just want to feed the beast so it keeps running, though a wiser man than I has advised me against it. In any case, the whole saga captures the recent flavor of the Journal quite nicely.

[UPDATE: No one has said anything to me about it, but upon reflection I think that posting #4 was a little juvenile. In my defense, I value Phelps’s writing a lot, and I didn’t like the way Crippen and his blogmate Noah Berlatsky were treating such an accomplished guy with so little of the respect he’s earned. I mean, it’s not like they didn’t deserve being slammed. But still. Bill Randall and Jon Hastings both displayed a lot more maturity and reasonableness in their responses. Anyway: lesson learned, and new leaf turned. Merry Christmas, everybody!]

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Nabokov‘s interest in comic strips was not limited to his childhood. Axel Rex, protagonist of Laughter in the Dark, is a cartoonist, the creator of Cheepy. Bend Sinister also features an invented comic strip (Etermon) and Speak, Memory pays its coded tribute to Otto Soglow‘s strip The Little King. Alfred Appel, whose 1974 Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (New York, Oxford UP) remains the best introduction to Nabokov’s use of images from popular culture, surveys his American comic strip allusions (pp. 74-85). Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake figure in Lolita, as does Lo’s favorite strip Penny. Appel also quotes a personal conversation in which Nabokov mused: “Dennis the Menace doesn’t look like his father. Could he be illegitimate?” (31). When he ponders writing a letter about it to The Herald Tribune, “he is dissuaded by Vèra who remarks that the paper had not printed his earlier letter about plot inconsistencies in Rex Morgan.”