Let’s check out these links!
Item: Leif Tande’s L’Origine de la Vie (from La Pasteque) launches at the Quebec City Comics Festival April 8th.
Item: Colin Upton was among the old-school minicomics gang interviewed on Inkstuds about that new 80s anthology from Fantagraphics.
Item: Tom Spurgeon’s exhaustive report from the San Francisco WonderCon mentioned that James Turner’s Warlord of Io would get a book collection from Slave Labor. There is a teaser for the book on Turner’s site, mentioning July.
Item: Speaking of Wondercon, Darwyn Cooke was one of the featured guests at the con, hyping Jonah Hex and the new Parker book (Spurgeon reviews the preview here), and also attended the of DC’s latest Jonah Hex project at San Fran’s Isotope comic shop, where the photo was snapped.
Item: I’d heard a short version of this tale, courtesy of Jeet Heer, but you should go read it yourself, especially if you are a fan of Chris Ware or of classic newspaper comic strips.
Item: Vancouver journalist Jeffrey Simpson follows-up his previous column about digital comics readers with an argument for digitizing the delivery of comics (by which I think he must mean superhero comics –because publishers like Viz, Fantagraphics, D+Q, First Second, Oni, etc do at least half their trade through bookstores on a returnable basis). Worth checking out the article, and while I think that reading digital comics will be the norm soon enough, I find it equally likely that Warner or Disney will kill the Direct Market simply by refusing to publish floppies and overexpose their billion dollar characters by having some hack writer or artist churn out half-a-dozen titles per week about them.
Item: A propos of nothing, it’s so much fun watching Gary Panter draw a chalk mural in California (courtesy Dirk Deppey/Sammy Harkham).