Alan Rose checks in via email with a link to his memoir comic L’il Rose of Corn, a Sunday Paper-style strip about growing up in Nebraska, complete with newsprint colors to complete the illusion that it’s been printed (it hasn’t—yet).

I was impressed by the confidence and craftsmanship of both writing and art on display. It has a classic feel to it; bolstered by the simple fact that Alan’s stories are genuinely interesting.

In his email Alan shared a great quote attributed (perhaps wrongly) to H. L. Mencken about the great Nebraska-based writer Willa Cather: “I don’t care how great of writer she is, nobody wants to read about Nebraska.”

After reading Rose’s memoir comic, I’ll upgrade “nobody” to “one” at least.

First of all, you knew I would link to the new Scott Pilgrim Trailer, so here it is (link via everyone on Earth).

Also in the news [via The Beat in my case] is a teaser trailer by Dash Shaw and Frank Santoro for an animated feature-to-be called The Ruined Cast (co-produced by John Cameron Mitchell who, I discovered a few years back, looks a bit like Ron Regé when not in Hedwig make-up, but that’s neither here nor there).

Funny thing is, when looking at the two trailers rubbing shoulders in their separate browser tabs, and considering how different they were, I realized there was a big part of my old ’80s-era lizard brain that wanted to label them “mainstream” and “alternative”—even though those terms have mutated beyond recognition in the last ten years.

After all, O’Malley’s comic, for all its rabid fans, is hardly the X-Men (and Edgar Wright is hardly James Cameron). The Scott Pilgrim movie is more geared to “mainstream audiences” than Shaw and Santoro’s project, but both have their roots in what my generation would have unhesitatingly championed as independent sensibilities.

Maybe, the best way for me to get a handle on what “mainstream” means is to just go to what I assume is the root of the term and look to see where the money flows like a big river; and know that rivers split all the time.