New Tom Hart comic! Everything is right with the world.

[Thanks to Heidi for the heads-up]

…is a bit scary sometimes.

New Trondheim strips in my iPhone every day for a month? For a buck? I’m there.

Despite the long load times (a problem with all iPhone apps due to the fact that we actually USE the things), I like the format of the comics. They look like they were actually designed for the device instead of repurposed from print.

Also: Trondheim!

Last night, the family and I ate at a new burger place and I noticed that it was next to the cemetery where Jack and Rosalind Kirby are buried. This morning, Tom reminds us that Jack Kirby would have been Ninety-Two today.

I sometimes go for mid-day walks in that neighborhood and occasionally stop to pay my respects. And I always think of this story.

Kane Lynch has a lot on his mind. His site features comics, videos, and photocomics, each section with its own oddball set of sensibilities. It’s hit-and-miss, but I liked several bits for different reasons which is always refreshing in a sea of mono-talents.

Of special interest to comics fans is his ongoing long-form comic The Relics. The figure drawing is pretty raw, but the story feels solid and well-planned, and you can see the art gradually improve as it runs to catch up. Given enough time, (and life drawing courses) you could see Lynch developing in a similar fashion to Jeph Jacques (compare: early JJ vs recent JJ).

Or he might just make music videos. The guy is obviously restless.

Either way, another one to keep an eye on.

Patrick Farley’s webcomics have been sorely missed in recent months due to his former domain, e-sheep.com, being hijacked by zombies.

Now he’s restored most of his terrific comics to the newly-minted domain electricsheepcomix.com and added a one-bit placeholder front page that had a lot of us old fogey’s shaking our 5.25 inch floppy bones laughing.

Despite the antique placeholder though, Farley remains one of the most forward-thinking artists in webcomics. Check out his archive if you’ve never seen it, and keep an eye out for new work in the coming months.

I got a TON of books at San Diego. It would take me half a day just to list and show them all, much less review them, but a couple which caught my eye toward the end of the day on Sunday offered some interesting contrasts I thought worth noting here.

I Want You by Lisa Hanawalt is a 32-page black and white pamphlet with color covers from Buenaventura Press. It’s filled with weird, sexually-charged or scatological short subjects. Some are funny, some are disturbing, many are both. It would look at home in Kramers Ergot.

The Imposter’s Daughter by Laurie Sandell is a 245-page full color graphic novel from Hachette Book Group. It’s an autobiographical account of the author’s relationship with her father, an Argentine immigrant whom she gradually discovers is a fraud who’s taken advantage of everyone around him for years, including his own family. The art is simplistic and straightforward.

The number of comics readers in San Diego’s mammoth exhibit hall who’d be likely to bring home and enjoy both comics could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, but I’m apparently one of them. I liked both for different reasons.

Hanawalt’s pages are aggressively experimental. She takes her art seriously, even when the subject matter seems tossed-off. Her line-work crackles with energy. The details almost overwhelm her jumbled compositions, but bold contours always step in just in time to make sure the form isn’t lost. There’s no pretense of a “story,” but there is content; an echo chamber of fleshy obsessions and violently upturned social mores.

Meanwhile, Sandell’s graphic novel is a mainstream book in nearly every sense. The (presumably) true story is told as literally as possible. Sandell is no virtuoso artist, but her layouts are sensible and the drawings get the job done. Cars look like cars, bottles look like bottles, and hands have five fingers. Every line and color choice serve the story, and the story is an engaging one, filled with mystery, sex, addiction, and the parade of celebrities Sandell encountered as a reporter and contributing editor at Glamour. It’s a beach read.

Whereas Hanawalt was showing her wares in person at Buenaventura’s table—a venue so lovably alternative that you might expect denizens to refer to Fantagraphics as “The Man”—Sandell’s book was being offered in a tidy, cookie-cutter Hachette booth that looked like it hopped directly over from Book Expo, and being given away, perhaps on the assumption that everyone is a retailer (and thanks to a great cover designed by Julianna Lee it had no trouble finding takers).

I can imagine each of these books rubbing someone the wrong way. In some respects, Sandell’s glamour-sprinkled tell-all is a hard-core comics lover’s worst nightmare; a book deal fueled by celebrity, completely bypassing comics history and craft, ready to leapfrog more serious or well-crafted graphic novels onto The Today Show or even Oprah. Meanwhile, Hanawalt’s work is the type often dismissed by artists I know as “pretentious” or “self-indulgent.”

I like Sandell’s book though, because it was a fun read. It can gently coax new readers into comics who would have never cracked open an Asterios Polyp much less a Blankets, and because a healthy mainstream has never precluded a healthy alternative. And I like Hanawalt’s work because it creates sensations I’ve never seen comics achieve and opened my eyes to radical possibilities.

It’s a good sign that 2009’s comics scene can accommodate both. I hope neither feels squeezed out in coming years.

It seems almost redundant to link to something that had been featured with a direct link from the Google homepage, but it occurred to me that some of you, like me, may have been too busy with Comic-Con to do much surfing over the weekend and might have missed where that great Jim Lee logo was actually sending people.

Check out some of the very cool themes from indy comics and webcomics greats like Jim Woodring, Rich Stevens, Daniel Clowes, Jaime Hernandez, Gene Yang, Derek Kirk Kim, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, Lark Pien, Renee French, and many others.

We’re heading down to Comic-Con early Wednesday morning, and frantically getting ready tomorrow, so blog updates will be spotty at best starting tomorrow. Here are a few distractions in the meantime:

Merlin has a new hypercomic up, The Four Derangements. Gorgeous, inventive stuff as always.

Johanna Draper Carlson offers some in-depth thoughts on our recent Zot! Collection.

The gang at the Human Creativity Project sent along an adorable gift for our family in the mail, possibly in response to our recent discussion of see-through comics. (Thanks, HCP people!)

Our family’s in-depth review of 500 Days of Summer: We liked it. It was good.

Larry Marder has his own convention schedule up. Gotta see Larry!

And of course, for those of you going to Comic-Con you can find me Thursday at Noon interviewing Bryan Lee O’Malley on stage, and otherwise relaxing with the family this year. (Yay! Off years = no pressure). If anything else does come up, I’ll try to post it here, or for more timely updates, you can follow me on Twitter.

First of all, if you haven’t read David Mazzucchelli’s fantastic graphic novel Asterios Polyp, I strongly recommend getting yourself a copy. And stop reading this post now until after you’ve read the book.

If you’ve read Asterios Polyp once…

Read it again.

Seriously, Mazzucchelli’s book is a great re-reading experience. There are things you’re only likely to notice the second or third time around, and at least a few locked doorways in early sections that only open with keys from later chapters. And they’re much more fun if you find them on your own, so again you might want to ignore the rest of these ramblings if you haven’t plunged back in yet.

If you’ve read Asterios Polyp more than once…

Okay, NOW we can talk.

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