“I’m very happy to announce that I have a new essay online: Navigating Comics: Reading Strategies of Page Layouts. This paper reports the findings of an experiment I conducted looking at how people navigate through comic pages. The big finding: people don’t just mimic text going left-to-right and down.”

“Al Jaffee’s fold-ins for Mad magazine, from the 1960s to the present, in interactive form.” And here’s the full article: A Veteran Mad Man Remains in the Fold.

“We’re roommates. We make call-and-response baroque scenes on a dry erase board. They usually have nerdy characters from nerdy things in them. We’re Pat Barrett and Todd McArthur.” (Thanks Drawn!)

“It’s an Online Comic Strip, Made by YOU! Got a funny joke or a story to tell? Get ready to share it in a whole new way. Our FREE online toys make it FAST, FUN and EASY to create awesome comics.”

“Celebrating great art in humble places: the glorious talents of the artists who illustrated stories, advertisements and comics in the 20th century.”

“A while back we had a roundabout discussion about the term illustration and its limitations. Bob Flynn and Jaleen Grove both pushed back a little against my impatience with the term, and the supposed tyranny of the word which I decried… Frustrated by the lack of a larger narrative in which to locate genres, careers, and achievements, I have been working on visualizations of the development of commerical images. This week I have blundered into print with one such attempt: Commercial Images: An Evolutionary Scheme, a two-page infographic that occupies a central spread in the new Modern Graphic History Library catalogue, out this week. It posits two basic strands in commercial image history: illustration and cartooning, increasingly intermingled but distinct.”

“This is a DIY [video] I did on how to make a one sheet zine. D-I-Y — a real American Hero! Remember kids, Folding is half the battle. You’ll need: One piece of paper, scissors and a Pen…” (And here’s a step-by-step on Flickr: Wanna make a neat, fun zine that only uses one sheet of paper? Of course you do.)

“Who was the real Charles M. Schulz? Was he the man who suffered anxiety attacks, remembered slights for decades and put every ounce of existential angst into his comic strip, ‘Peanuts’? Was he the grandfatherly cartoonist hailed as a towering figure in American popular culture, who revolutionized the comic strip and created not only a multimillion-dollar business, but a daily touchstone for fans worldwide? Or was he between the lines in ‘Peanuts’ itself, in the melancholy of Charlie Brown, the exuberance of Snoopy, the intellectualism of Linus, the directness of Lucy and the bafflement of Peppermint Patty?”

“The other day I got an e-mail from Carson Van Osten, a famous Disney artist who did many Disney Comic Books and created the famous “Comic Strip Artist’s Kit”. It was created to help beginning comic artists deal with perspective problems and other drawing difficulties. I scanned my old xeroxes a while ago. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever seen about practical staging and drawing for storyboards or comic books.

Anyway Carson saw it on my blog and read what nice things people had said about it and it really meant a lot to him. And he offered to send me an original copy of the handout, which is 11 x 17. I’ll scan it big so you can really see it well and print it out on 11 x 17 paper if you want to. He was even nice enough to inscribe it to me and if you print it out big you can read it.

Here’s the history of the handout, in Carson’s own words…”

“The infinite canvas is the idea that the size of a digital comics page is theoretically infinite, and that online comics are therefore not limited by conventional page sizes. An artist could conceivably display a complete comics story of indefinite length on a single ‘page’. Scott McCloud introduced the concept in his book Reinventing Comics.

Although McCloud asserted that this freedom was one of the most important qualities of the online comics medium, relatively few webcomics have taken advantage of it; most produce work in more traditional formats such as the serialized comic strip and the rectangular page, rarely exceeding two screens in height.”

The Bookslut review: “Norman Rockwell’s best painting may very well be Blood Brothers, a grim depiction of two dead soldiers, one white and one black, laid out beside each other with their blood intermixing on a Vietnamese battlefield. The white soldier’s eyes are closed, but the black one’s are wide open in a perpetual expression of shock. Unfortunately, it was killed by Look magazine in 1968.”

“Chris Ware is the author of the award-winning book, Jimmy Corrigan — The Smartest Kid on Earth. He talks about the difficulty of drawing cartoons, and why Tintin never caught on in America.”

At MoMA: “This exhibition brings together thirteen contemporary artists whose works offer a rich account of the interplay between abstraction and comic models of representation.” (Thanks HOWBlog!)

Holy crap, this really is a list of 1,000 things to like about comics! Part of Tom Spurgeon’s web site of comics news, reviews, interviews and commentary.

“¡Journalista! is TCJ.com’s news and commentary weblog, updated every weekday. Its author, Dirk Deppey, served as Managing Editor of The Comics Journal for just over two years. He lives somewhere in Southern Arizona, and hopes to someday figure out how to fix the timestamp on this page.”