More than a year and a half ago, I wrote about four upcoming books and promised to post updates as each became available.

Those books were David Small’s Stitches, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, Hope Larson’s Mercury, and Vera Brosgol’s then-untitled graphic novel for First Second.

Well, the first three came out to well-deserved acclaim, and now at last that fourth one—quite possibly my favorite of the whole bunch—is finally available for pre-order. And it has a name!: Anya’s Ghost.

Brosgol points out on her blog that now’s the time to tell your local comics store to put in their orders through Diamond. I can very highly recommend this one (as does a rather famous Neil on that cover, above, in case you didn’t notice).

Vera Brosgol is the kind of cartoonist I want to be when I grow up, and I know several other cartoonists who feel the same way. Get a copy of Anya’s Ghost for yourself and find out why.

Lots of people may enjoy this hilarious deconstruction by Laura Hudson and David Wolkin of DC’s recent Batman: Odyssey (a book which, I must admit, I kinda want to buy now). It’s some, uh… amazing stuff, no doubt about it.

But I’m really just posting this link for one person’s benefit: the woman I love.

Ivy: Click on this link right now. Trust me. You will not be sorry.

Here’s a cool project: A comics anthology site adapting all 69 love songs from 69 Love Songs, the legendary album from The Magnetic Fields.

If I had the spare time, I so would’ve taken a crack at The Book Of Love…

[Thanks to our friend Kate for the link]

Doctor Cat is a comic about a cat who is also a doctor.

Doctor Cat does doctor stuff. And also cat stuff. As a result, sometimes things happen.

Discuss.

…

Doctor Cat!

[via Bonzi77]

Google is celebrating the birthday of the late, great Will Eisner today with a terrific Eisneresque Google Doodle, and I had the pleasure of contributing a guest blog post to help celebrate the occasion as well.

Thanks to everybody at the Big G for honoring a truly important cartoonist, and a great friend to a century’s worth of comics-lovers.

Fondly remembered. Sorely missed. And now celebrated across the internet. Happy birthday, Will.

[Please note: Some news outlets are reporting that I drew the finished art for the Doodle. Not true. I was involved in early design discussions, but the final version was by artist Mike Dutton]

From G. Alan Rhodes comes this unusual and innovative project. Be sure to view the demonstration video to get the full visual impact.

Rhodes writes:

I sometimes check-in with your website, and seeing your writeup of 5 Card Nancy (fantastic!), it occurred to me that you might like this project I’ve been showing around: 52 Card Psycho. It’s basically an Augmented Reality installation where the shower scene of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ is made into a deck of cards. Writing to you now, I can see that this work strongly relates to the inspiration I had when reading Understanding Comics back in ’93: how can I made films into comics (the inverse of that has been done a lot lately…).

Maybe it will inspire an idea– I’m currently making several new projects with the same technology.

That’s it for today. Have a great weekend!

Let’s all contemplate our mortality, shall we?

Welcome to Pine Point is a “creative non-fiction interactive documentary” by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons for the National Film Board of Canada.

Despite the rough, hand-animated photo-collages and humble lettering, Welcome to Pine Point achieves sophisticated and haunting effects as it chronicles a small Canadian town that was literally wiped off the map, and the lives of those who once called it home. I especially liked the use of music.

I highly recommend setting aside some free time, hitting full screen and diving in.

It’s not comics, but shares some of our visual vocabulary, and it should be of interest to anyone studying visual communication, storytelling, and the power of shared memories.

Yup. I’m totally going to be a part of this.

A fun project for a great cause.

It’s by an Israeli art director, going by the name of “Baboon” and all the traffic from a recent Very Short List link has blown out his site, so here’s an alternate link for now.

(Original link here)

See how many paths you can discover. It’s pretty addictive.

[Thanks to Lori Matsumoto.]

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

I had the pleasure of meeting Tan briefly in New York in 2009, not long after The Arrival was released.

Tan famously realized only halfway through The Arrival that he was working on a graphic novel. Fortunately, so did the rest of us, and it’s won many well-deserved honors since. Congratulations to Tan for racking up another great honor, this time in the field of animation.

Tan’s personal site is here. More on the film here.