Comic Round-Up: June 1, 2015

"Spider Wars" by In-Hyuk Lee

Event: The City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, has an exhibit of original and reproduction art titled “A Lifetime of Making Comics,” dedicated to the late Dondi creator Irwin Hasen but also featuring work by other local artists Chance Brown, Frank McLaughlin, and Mort, Brian and Greg Walker.

Event: Long Beach, California, Mayor Robert Garcia will give a talk on “DC Universe 101: Comic Book Mayhem” at this year’s IdeaFest.

Interview: Chinese cartoonist Wang Liming, who’s living in Japan because he is afraid he will be arrested if he returns to his native country, says he believes the Chinese government is running a smear campaign against him

Interview: Zippy creator Bill Griffith is working on a graphic memoir, Invisible Ink, about his mother’s affair with a well-known cartoonist.

News: A group of armed bikers plan to draw Muhammed while set up outside of a mosque.  I expect this will make national headlines, eventually.  What could possibly go wrong?

News: DC begins to play around with partial-page ad placement, which hasn't been a thing for years and years, and no one likes it.

News: Mark Paniccia has been promoted to Senior Editor of the X-Men Line at Marvel

Reviews: Henry Chamberlain on This Is Van Gogh.  Prajna Desai on The Vanished Path. Joe Gordon on Mike's Place.  J. Caleb Mozzocco on a bunch of different comics. Cynthia Rose reviews Catharsis. Douglas Wolk returns to the NY Timeswith reviews of the seasons top books, including Unflattening.

Amazon Japan has removed the manga Paradise of Innocence (Mujaki no Rakuen) from its listings of print books, and has labeled it as unavailable on Kindle as well. While no official reason is given, it’s possible the manga was removed because it falls afoul of Tokyo’s Youth Healthy Development Ordinance. The series, published by Hakusensha, is about a loser-ish young man who, after being mocked by the more successful women at his class reunion, travels back in time to when his classmates were young girls.

Beautiful HG Peter Wonder Woman Covers

Clunky exposition, plot detours, and other ways in which superhero movie storylines fall apart.

Film critic and journalism professor Gerald Peary spent years tracking down the identities of the people who inspired the iconic Archie Comics characters, and his documentary about them will premiere this weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Gary Tyrrell discuses the two on-line winners from the NCS Divisional Awards given out Memorial Day weekend: he approves.

Heidi MacDonald reports on a symposium on French graphic novels that took place just before this week’s Book Expo America.

Here’s a very detailed report on the Book Con 2015: Women of Marvel panel which featured Adri Cowan and Margaret Stohl, who’s written a Black Widow prose novel.

Here’s is the latest “Comic-Con should leave San Diego!”

James Hudnall has updated his GoFundMe page with one final push. Back in October, Hudnall had his foot amputated just as he had moved to Austin for a new job, and since then he’s had a lot of setbacks, but he’s been approved for disability but needs one more cash infusion to get back to San Diego for further treatment. Please consider helping him out.

Theo Moudakis explains the approach of his latest cartoon on Charlie Hebdo.

Writer and critic Zainab Akhtar notes that Jake Wyatt's Necropolis is being run on-line again, as part of an on-line/print hybrid strategy.