Since the month of December is typically a slow month for the publishing industry, and since the wintry weather is conductive for this sort of thing, and since I have received several enticing graphic novels over the past few months, in December, I plan to devote these pages to investigating many of these volumes — while also gradually releasing the fifteen (!) podcasts I have in my backlog. In addition, I’ll also be covering the New York Anime Festival in a few weeks. If you are a comics publisher who would like to have your titles considered, feel free to email me or send me titles to the Flatbush address.

I’ve just learned from Eric Reynolds that Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, and Alan Moore will appear on the October 7 episode of The Simpsons. Sayeth Reynolds:

The plot concerns Comic Book Guy, who gets some competition in Springfield from a new store, “Coolsville Comics & Toys,” run by “hipster” Milo, voiced by Jack Black.

No word yet on whether either of these folks will appear with a bag on his head.

Harvey Pekar meets Anthony Bourdain.

Editor & Publisher: “At least 25 of the 200 or so “Opus” client newspapers might not run the Sunday-only comic’s next two episodes, which feature Islamic references and a sex joke.”

One of the very funny strips in question can be found here.

Peanuts by Charles Bukowski. (via Fimoculous)

I used to think that Rachel Cooke’s columns were authored by some sheltered journalist who never left her house and who simply wasn’t paying much attention to rudimentary trends developing in the publishing industry. Here, after all, was an idiot, who was actually collecting a regular paycheck for her foolish generalizations, castigating the litblogosphere based on one day of indolent Web surfing. Maybe she simply didn’t have the smarts to engage with the world around her. Maybe she preferred to furtively pick her nose and watch bad movies instead of doing a bit of thinking or even hard investigation of a genre.

But now, Ms. Cooke declares she’s seen the light! She’s one of us now! These things called graphic novels actually have literary merit! Never mind that Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer in 1992 — a good fifteen years ago — and Maus‘s two volumes were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle. Ms. Cooke dutifully read Art Spiegelman and she could clearly see “how brilliant it was, of course.” But being cast of an utterly lazy and incurious mental disposition, Ms. Cooke, perhaps incapable of tracking down Will Eisner or Alan Moore or any of the countless graphic novelists working around the time, privately declared in 1986 that the landscape to be devoid of any additional talent. The “strips” that Ms. Cooke identified — as opposed to comic books or graphic novels, which every other neophyte was jumping up and down over; presumably, Ms. Cooke was confused and didn’t have a clue as to where to look — were giving her a headache.

But now no more! For comics are now mainstream! And this means that Ms. Cooke can rethink her prejudices against this retrograde medium because, well, these books are now too omnipresent to discount.

I’m very glad that Ms. Cooke has written this column. It is now entirely clear that she lives underneath a rock.

(Thanks to Andrew for the link.)

David Ulin raises a provocative point about Harvey Pekar’s recent prolificity, contemplating whether Pekar is authoring too many books for his own good, while likewise pondering whether Pekar’s concentration upon other personalities comes at the expense of Pekar skillfully depicting his own personal experiences.

While there exists plenty of evidence to confirm Ulin’s point about Pekar writing “work for hire” (Pekar intimated this during a 2006 appearance on The Bat Segundo Show), I don’t think these circumstances translate into an automatic critical condemnation of Pekar’s material. Ulin not only ignored 2005’s The Quitter, an inarguably raw and mature portrait of a younger Pekar developing some of his anger while being tormented on the Cleveland streets, but he failed to cite specifics about why he feels Ego & Hubris and Macedonia are lesser works. Ulin may very well prefer Pekar to his peripheral subjects. But if this is the case, why not simply state this?

I haven’t read Macedonia yet. But in Ego & Hubris, Michael Malice’s story (as conveyed through Pekar) struck me as a narrative uncannily similar to a Pekar-centric American Splendor issue: the case of a misunderstood and sometimes unpleasant misfit struggling against idiotic thinking and the everyday shackles of conformist instincts. Malice may not be as charismatic a figure as Pekar, but Ego & Hubris‘s deliberately boxy framings (as convincingly inked by Gary Dumm) and Malice’s obdurate Ayn Rand-influenced dialogue collectively serve up a new spin on the Pekar maxim: “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” Malice — indeed “a piece of work” — may be a less ordinary figure than Pekar, but his struggles are just as complex as Pekar’s, if only because Malice’s “ordinary life” collides against the demands of paranoid security protocol, working at VH1, and his own self-serving instincts. It’s all pretty complex stuff, if you closely examine the many points at which contrarian philosophies run against each other.

Thought I’d take a moment just to introduce myself after yesterday’s dive into the world of blogging. I have a novel coming out in September titled When One Man Dies. I’ve written several short stories over the years, which are available at my website.

Right now, reading wise I’m into comic books. I don’t know where that came from, but it’s probably a combination of things. Seeing Spider-man 3–which I actually liked–and reading a really, really fast paced novel by Duane Swierczynski called SEVERANCE PAKCAGE. It’s one of my favorite books and it comes out in the fall too.

Anyway, the book was so high paced that everything I read after wasn’t fast enough for me. So I figured I’d try some highly recommended comic books. And boom, now I’m back into trade paperbacks and graphic novels, and especially digging Ed Brubaker.

Heidi McDonald reports on this extremely important contest: America’s Top Toon-a-MILF.

John Brownlee: “You know, I remember when I thought New Yorker cartoons were cutting-edge stuff, clever and bold. Now it’s like Family Circus for smug metropolitan pseudo-intellectuals. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t always like that, though.”

Adam Rogers: “To me, Cap is supposed to be chasing the American dream, and fighting whoever’s keeping it from happening. Some days that’ll be the government, some days it’ll be the Red Skull. Would Cap be fighting in Iraq right now? Probably—but he’d be over there uncovering the malfeasance that got us there in the first place, too. So here’s my question: If the government does something that smells a little fascist, a little un-American, and Captain America stands up and says, nope, this is wrong, won’t do it. Wouldn’t most people…um…believe him?”

Barfield Loses His Lunch. (via Bill Peschel)

I didn’t know that Eddie Campbell had a blog until I read about it on Bookslut. One standout entry: comparisons between Campbell’s art and Alan Moore’s script from From Hell. And, yes, Moore’s a detail man, even when it comes to fellatio. One can only imagine how the script for Lost Girls looked like.

The Nietzsche Family Circus (via Fimoculous)

Editor & Publisher: “United Media sent an advisory to ‘Pearls Before Swine’ clients warning them that ‘language some readers may find inappropriate’ will appear in Stephan Pastis’ Dec. 2 strip. The term used is ‘bite me.'”

I’m a little late on this, but I think it can be said with almost complete certainty that Tony Long is a moron. It’s bad enough that Long has diminished local illustrator Gene Leun Yang’s accomplishments by claiming that his book American Born Chinese should be ineligible for the National Book Award because it is composed of pictures, but Tony Long, a superlative skybald content to toss around his uninformed opinions the way culinary naïfs want to take you to Domino’s for “really good pizza,” hasn’t even read the book in question. Like a hayseed fundamentalist who will always be right, even when having nothing more than a cursory understanding of what he’s talking about, Long is content to remark upon a work that he hasn’t even bothered to crack open.

Long claims that his essay is “not about denigrating the comic book, or graphic novel” and then proceeds to belittle Yang’s work by declaring, “I’ll bet for what it is, it’s pretty good,” as if “what it is” is not only as different as “apples and oranges,” but somehow lesser.

In bashing the book, Long notes that he is “familiar with the genre,” as if this generalized pronouncement of casual expertise, presumably originating from the deity now occupying Long’s head, justifies his capacity to remark upon a book that he is ignorant about by his own admission. Well, I’m “familiar” with the work of April Flowers, but I’m not going to comment upon WMB: Weapons of Masturbation until I’ve seen the film.

For a guy who seems to be “familiar” with comic books, Long can’t even get his terminology right. Like a milliner trying to sell you an asshat, Long refers to Yang’s work falls into interchangeably as “graphic novels,” “illustrated stories,” “comic books,” when these are entirely different forms. A graphic novel, for example, may be a collection of previously published comic books. You can call many children’s books or even some postmodern literary experiments “illustrated stories.” But if graphic novels “don’t belong” even in a juvenile literature class, then how are we to categorize the quest for meaning contained within Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or the shifting perceptions of lust within Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls? Surely, these are books. These works, among many, chronicle the human condition. They are laced with plots, characters, narratives, subtext, and visual and verbal language just as intricate in their creation and execution as blueblood word-centric novels. And yet we continue to throw them in a separate section in the bookstore and deny these books their credentials, imputing by taxonomy that they will never drink from the whites only drinking fountain occupied by FICTION.

The Tony Longs of the universe, who regale us with their callow and deliberately ignorant banter, will continue to offer the hard line that these are lesser works without proof. They will continue to comment upon subjects without studying what they purportedly examine or providing us with specific examples. It’s sadly telling that a publication like Wired, which reports on advances technology and is thus progressive in some sense, would employ an atavistic microbe to mold up the boss stone.

Berkeley Breathed nails it. (Thanks Suzanne!)

The incomparable Professor Fury has a fantastic post on a particularly interesting Captain America storyline. Captain America said some particularly compelling stuff, worth keeping in mind for tomorrow’s elections.