The C-List

Item: So Geneviève Castrée has a new record out in her current musical incarnation of Ô Paon. She used to be Woelv, now she’s Ô Paon. The cover is beautiful but I don’t think there is a book included like with some of her previous releases. Not sure about the music? but my musical tastes are not that developed. If it doesn’t sound like a farmer singing into a tin can or like a bunch of noise and pretentious shouting with power chords made by British art school drop-outs, I’m pretty much at a loss. Is music too emotional for my nerd mind to process in what I laughingly call an objective manner? How can I trust my comics taste, then? Isn’t our main response to visual art simply emotional?
Item: So I’ve decided that since the always (since, let’s say, approximately, 1972) thin line between modern superhero comics and fanfiction has finally broken down, and Marvel basically resembles nerds making small circulation fanzines for nerds, with 20 different comics for each character, and Stuart Immonen doesn’t even draw the Avengers anymore, I’ve decided that it’s cheaper to just read straight fanfic and imagine the pictures myself and I’m glad I did because this is the best Avengers comic I’ve ever read!
Item: Oh yeah, there’s an Italian edition of Kathryn and Stuart Immonen’s Moving Pictures, and a relatively fresh interview to go along with it.
Item: I was reading the Globe and Mail’s list of the best books of of 2010, The Globe 100, on Saturday, wondering if they took my advice from last year and added some Canadian comics. Sure enough, there on the last page, just after “Miscellaneous,” under the category heading “Poetry,” were the two comics chosen by the Globe editors, Wilson by Dan Clowes and Tangles by Sarah Leavitt, representing one Canadian cartoonist and two Canadian publishers (D+Q and Freehand Books). At first I thought that the Globe editors were lumping comics in with poetry because of the similarities between the two categories, a sort of backhanded compliment. Then I thought that they were dumping comics at the end with the three (only 3?) poetry books because they couldn’t think of what to do with them and had to squeeze them in somewhere to avoid another rant from me. Checking the online version of the list, it seems the answer lies somewhere between dumping and lumping, as the final category is there titled “Poetry and Graphica” –Graphica being the Globe’s favoured catch-all nomenclature for comics. Then I looked over, saw that Leslie Nielson had died, and spent the next half hour reading his wikipedia page and watching clips of Forbidden Planet, Police Squad, which my dad loved, and Men with Brooms.
Item: Yikes! James Stokoe shares the prologue for a temporarily abandoned comic series he was working on before Orc Stain, Murderbullets. So harsh to put so much work into something and just put it in a drawer for a few years… (link via @inkstuds on twitter).
Item: You don’t see too many toys based on comic book characters from Canada. This Scott Pilgrim action figure will be available in April 2011.
Item: The Inkstuds book reviewed at the St. John Telegraph-Journal.
Item: Penguin will publish a graphic bio of early feminist and suffragette Nellie McClung by Willow Dawson. Hyena in Petticoats is due fall 2011.
Item: Regina cartoonist creates Jason of New York comic book.
Item: Don’t know if we linked it before, but Diane Obomsawin (aka Obom) has a book out from L’Oie de Cravan this year, Pink Mimi Drink. She previously rocked us with Kaspar, translated by D+Q.
Item: Jillian Tamaki t-shirts.