Via Joshua Glenn's Hermenaut:

Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics sez: "Jenny Ryan embroidered this awesome cover for Nickelodeon Mag's "Comic Book" section this month, based on a drawing by her husband, Johnny Ryan." Link

The punchline on today's Jack of All Blades web-comic riffs off my fave xkcd episode -- the one where I'm outed for my practice of blogging from a hot-air balloon while wearing goggles and a red cape. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

See also:
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Cory Doctorow cosplayers at the XKCD picnic

Update: From the comments, "Cory (A Different One)"'s revelation that this was his Hallowe'en costume!

Tim K sez, "I thought you'd enjoy seeing this set of Flickr pix I took at a Hollywood Day of the Dead festival: Bugs and the gang as Looney Tunes skeletons." Link (Thanks, Tim K!)

Dwiff sez, "Norwegian artist Matt Skull has built a large, detailed scale model of Uncle Scrooge's money bin based on plans done by Duck Artists Don Rosa and Dan Shane." Link

Andrew sez, "I'm the owner of Chapel Hill Comics in Chapel hill, NC. We participated in the international event 24 Hour Comics Day last weekend, where folks attempt to create 24-page comics over the course of 24 hours. We currently have 2 of the 24-page comics (created by 9 year old Kevin Collins and 12 year old Saul Zimet) and a 5-page preview of another at the store's website, with much more to come!"

Sweet! If you participated in 24 Hour Comics Day, post a link to your creation in the comments! Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Ohio comic book fans are celebrating one of their state's greatest exports, Milton Caniff, creator of the influential mid-twentieth century adventure strips "Terry and the Pirates" and "Steve Canyon." Caniff was only 12-years-old when his first strip ran in the Dayton Daily News. He'd go on to produce a daily feature for more than five decades, helping define the genre of sequential storytelling through his intensely patriotic strips. Today, the Associated Press profiles Caniff, whose work will be fêtted during this week's Festival of Cartoon Art in Columbus, Ohio. For more about Caniff's life and impact, check out the new biography "Meanwhile... A Biography of Milton Caniff," by Robert C. Harvey and published by Fantagraphics. From the Associated Press article:

In 1934, the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate commissioned Caniff to create a cartoon based on news reports of a band of Chinese pirates led by a woman. "Terry and the Pirates" debuted 73 years ago on October 22, 1934...

Caniff brought a cinematic technique to his strips, with close-ups, panoramas and angled views of characters out of the corner of panels. He used the "chiaroscuro" artistic style to create black-and-white contrasting images.

He insisted on accuracy in his drawings, subscribing to dozens of magazines to aid his research and amassing a collection of guns, knives and swords to get the details right on weapons. He relied on "spies" in the armed services to keep him up to date on military lingo and procedures and welcomed readers who caught mistakes in his strips...

Themes of war and violence ran through the cartoon. Men were strong, women were sultry and sexual relations were implied. He created a lesbian character, Sanjak, decades before cartoons like "Doonesbury" and "For Better or for Worse" addressed homosexuality.

In 1947, Caniff created a new strip, Steve Canyon, an event so anticipated it landed Caniff on the cover of Time magazine.

Link to Associated Press article, Link to buy "Meanwhile... A Biography of Milton Caniff", Link to 2007 Festival of Cartoon Art

Here's a collection of rare early Bill "Calvin and Hobbes" Watterson's toons from The Kenyon Collegian, his college paper from Kenyon, Ohio. They're a little edgier than the Calvin and Hobbes strips (but not as funny). Link (Thanks, Pat!)

See also:
Real-snow versions of Calvin and Hobbes's gory snowmen
Interview with Bill "Calvin and Hobbes" Watterson's mom
Will there be a Calvin and Hobbes movie?
Calvin and Hobbes slipcased complete collection coming
Bill Watterson reviews the new Charles Schulz bio

Nad Shot is a blog that posts comic book panels of violent punches and kicks to the groin. Link (Via Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror)

Wired continues its series of excellent features about manga -- following up on this morning's mini-comic with a lucid and fascinating story by Daniel Pink about the faltering market for manga in Japan and the way that copyright infringing donjishi (fan-comics) are helping to staunch the bleeding, and thus attracting support from the giant wealthy corporations they appropriate from.

Also up is a great little survey of "weighty" subjects covered in manga form, from Shakespeare to college test prep.

Yet the role of manga in the broader economic ecosystem is perhaps more important than its actual sales figures. Japan's vaunted pop culture apparatus, it turns out, is really a manga industrial complex. Nearly every aspect of cultural production — which is now Japan's most influential export — is rooted in manga. Most anime (animated) movies and television series, as well as many videogames and collectible figures, began life as comics. Dragonball — now a multibillion-dollar international franchise comprising movies, games, and cards — debuted as an installment in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984. Uzumaki Naruto, the protagonist of the mega-property that bears his name, first showed his blond ninja head in the pages of the same magazine eight years ago. Trace any of Japan's most successful media franchises back to their origins and you'll likely end up inside a colorful brick of newsprint, where 20 pages of exquisitely matched words and drawings tell the inaugural story.

But manga has become a bit like network television in the US. It reaches a wide but inexorably shrinking audience. Weekly magazine circulation is on a steep and steady downward slope; book sales are no higher than they were a decade ago despite a rise in population. Still, manga is more influential in Japan than network television is in the US. Comics occupy the center, feeding the rest of the media system. If they dry up, other media players risk losing their deepest and most vital source of material. If manga gets creaky, and by all accounts it is heading that way, it could undermine Japan's entire pop culture machine. What the industry needs is something that can rescue it from decline — a force that can reenergize its fans, restock its talent pools, and revive its creative mojo. The sound of those flapping backpacks may herald the arrival of that savior.

Link to Japanese manga industry story, Link to "Manga Shakespeare" story

See also: American Manga: Wired's downloadable mini-comic explains the history of the form

Again With the Comics has a scan from a mid-90s comic series called 1963. The third issue was called Tales of the Uncanny and featured a story written by Alan Moore, penciled by Steve Bissette, and inked by Chester Brown. The result is a brain bending homage to Marvel's 1960s Tales of Suspense. Link

Today's Wired bears a nice primer on manga in the USA, a 1.9MB PDF of a comic tracing the history of English manga. It's laid out "backwards," which is unbelievably hard to read off a screen (go to the last page, read, go back two pages, read, go forward one page, read, go back two pages, read, etc), but it rewards patience (or printing). This is some fascinating stuff, and it's superbly presented. Link

Yale students dressed as ninjas staged a mock attack on Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman last week, reenacting a great installment from xkcd, a fantastic webcomic. Stallman came to Yale to give a talk on DRM at the debating society, and confronted the ninjas "with good humor and grace." Link to Yale Political Union blog, Link to the xkcd comic in question (via /.)

See also:
Short Links Roundup
Cory Doctorow cosplayers at the XKCD picnic
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters

With Guy Fawkes day looming, how about a little V for Vendetta cosplay? Brian Chan folded this origami Guy Fawkes/V for Vendetta mask out of a single, uncut sheet of paper. Link (via Neatorama)

For just over $1,000, GlamGuns will sell you this super-custom Hello Kitty AK-47 assault rifle. Comes with hand-crocheted shoulder-stock muffler. Link (via Neatorama)

Today's Wondermark webtoon invites us to think beyond "ninja monkey robots fighting pirate Jesus" and imagine what next year's Internet memes might be. Link (Thanks, Carol!)

See also:
Comic about Harry Potter spoliers (no actual spoliers)
Strategy behind using liquids to threaten planes

Bill "Calvin and Hobbes" Watterson has a fascinating review of Shulz and Peanuts: A Biography in last weekend's Wall Street Journal. Schulz and Peanuts is a controversial biography of Charles M Schulz, the creator of the ginormously popular strip "Peanuts." The strip's tone veered around over the years, from schmaltzy to dark, antic to pensive, and David Michaelis, Schulz's biographer, suggests that these shifts are suggestive of Schulz's own moods and demons. Waterson's commentary on this is fascinating stuff:

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

Link (Thanks, Pat!)

Joel on Boing Boing Gadgets has word that Atwood's handsome little single-piece multi-knives are going into production again, after a hiatus due to Peter Atwood's illness. Joel sums up: "Atwood's multitools, unlike the common flip-out models, tend to be made from just a single piece of metal with various nubs that enhance the functionality. For instance, the 'Mini Son of PryThing' above has a prying tool, a blade, and a bottle opener, wrapped with a simple cord around the hilt that is easily replaceable." Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Proof that Randall from xkcd is wiretapping my brain in today's nose-sprayingly funny toon. I've always wanted to same a kid with a MySQL code-injection attack, or "+++ATH" or "^d^d^c^c^g^g^g^g". Anything to mess with database nation. Link

See also:
Xkcd webcomic on online sexism
Cory Doctorow cosplayers at the XKCD picnic
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Bloggin' 'bout my generation
Pi joke
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Where LOLCats come from
Ironic Internet malapropism grid

Get Your War On's trenchant commentary on Blackwater makes a good point -- if you're gonna call your savage private army of war criminals "Blackwater," why not go whole hog and call it "Deathfang's Midnight Posse of Merciless Skull Warriors?" Link

Dan from Silicon Valley's Hijinx Comics writes,

I own and operate a comic book shop in San Jose, CA which was recently voted best comic shop in Silicon Valley. I write free comic retailing software and I also run an online graphic novel store called ComicBookShelf.com .

The recent teacher ousting over Eightball #22 was a real wakeup call that there is a lot of work to do on making the public understand what a vital and important artform comics can be. A world where an educator loses their job for recommending Dan Clowes is a world I don't want to live in!

That's just one of the reasons I'm proud to announce that ComicBookShelf.com will donate 5% of every online sale to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund which supports comics-related first amendment cases.

We're also donating an additional 5% to the Hero Initiative which helps get financial help to golden age comic artists who never made any royalties from their priceless creations.

Furthermore, until the end of October 2007 we will double the donation to both organizations, meaning 20% of every sale will go to these worthy organizations.

Shipping is always free anywhere in the US and we support Google checkout for safe and secure payment processing. We carry a wide array of books and our open source bookstore recommendation algorithms let you rate books and get recommendations. Kind of like Netflix does, but for graphic novels.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)