Did you know that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries Image and Multimedia Collections is online and that it contains scans of over 1500 comics and comics-related documents? Now you do. You're welcome.

Random recent items of possible interest to comics fans...

• Comiket announced they'll be holding their next convention in early May, after having been on hiatus for differing reasons (most recently, COVID) since December 2018. While they also announced they will need to severely curtail attendance due to COVID, the event regularly draws about 3/4 of a million people! Even a quarter of that still blows the doors off even the largest American comic conventions! At one point, they say they'll limit attendance to "tens of thousands" but that's still potentially larger than all but the largest American comic shows!
• In lieu of an in-person ICAF this year, like many other conferences and conventions, they've moved online. For a couple weeks now, and running into early 2021, they're running guest posts and holding virtual roundtable discussions. You can check out the pieces they've already had here, as well as check out what they've got scheduled.
• Alex Archbold, owner of Curiosity Inc., recently discovered what's being called "The Quick Draw Collection" -- one of the largest collections of Western genre comic books.
• Earlier this week, Institut français Norge held a webinar entitled "Comics Books in the Age of Social Media and Online Platforms." I haven't watched the nearly two hour presentation yet myself, but from the snippet I did see, it seemed quite interesting.
• And then there's this...

There are, of course, an ongoing variety of presentations, panels, and shows that have moved online this year thanks to COVID. I thought I'd collect a handful of upcoming ones here.

• Starting tomorrow through Saturday, SÕL-CON: The Brown & Black Comix Expo will bring together Columbus area youth, as well as industry insiders, indie comic creators and exhibitors, for a comic convention unlike any other. It will feature academics such as Adrienne Resha, Deborah Whaley, Stanford Carpenter, and John Jennings among others, as well as creators like J.M. Hunter, Robert Liu-Trujillo, Khaila Carr, and MariNaomi among others. The full schedule can (and registration info) be found here.
• Not directly comics, but The Prints & Photographs Division of the Library of Congress is offering a virtual tour of their digitized collections, finding aids, and guides on Tuesday, September 15 at noon EDT. Presented by Sara Duke. Register for free.
• The New York Adventure Club will explore the specific Jewish creations of the American superhero and its antecedents in older, ancient myths — from Ben Grimm to the Golem — as well as the significant contributions Jews have made to the medium of comic book art itself. Presented by Arlen Schumer on Wednesday, September 16 at 1:00pm EDT. Tickets are $10.
• The New York Adventure Club also will explore the artworks and inspirations of pop art artist Roy Lichtenstein, whose stylized pieces showcasing everyday objects and motifs throughout commercial and popular culture simultaneously earned him the praise of art critics and accusations of plagiarism. Presented by Arlen Schumer on Thursday, September 24 at 8:00pm EDT. Tickets are $10.
• Comics Crossroads Columbus (CXC) has a number of events online between October 1-4, including spotlights on Faith Erin Hicks, Gene Luen Yang, Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Blue Delliquanti, Liz Montague, and Amy Hwang among others. The full schedule can be found here.

• The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium has posted a listing of all their events through the end of the year. Normally, these would only be availble in person, but this year, they're all being held online.
• I don't know that I've mentioned it previously but Rhymes With Orange's Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo have been playing with making interactive cartoons in Mental Canvas. The comics are created in a virtual 3-D space that viewers can navigate around to encounter different jokes and gags. Piccolo will actually be doing a live demo/webinar on September 15 at 1:00pm ET. You can register for the free event here.
• Ken Eppstein has posted the results of another survey he did on creators who table at shows. "The primary goal of this survey was to get some context on how artists participate with these transient marketplaces, what are the goals they have related to that participation, and what barriers they face in participation." He doesn't get into a whole lot of analysis here, but the results suggest a lot of flux was happening even before the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into public gatherings.
• Over at BoingBoing, Thomas Dunn has a nice piece on David F. Walker's and Sanford Greene's Bitter Root.
• 10 years of comics in Russian libraries. Pros and cons. Featuring Scott McCloud, Paul Gravette, Alexander Kunin, Stepan Shmytinsky, Dmitry Yakovlev, and Mikhail Wiesel. September 5th, 9:15-10:00pm Moscow time. How many more details do you need?
• Channel eNews has a brief report on how Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Hyung-Ju Ko -- the creative team behind Banned Book Club -- met with Changwon's Mayor Heo Seong-moo.

End of the week, and I'm about out of steam, so let's throw together a quick links post!

• Tonight at 7:30 pm EST, Webtoons is hosting an Instagram Live session to talk about developing comics on their Canvas platform. I've seen some creators recently question how exactly it works -- and I'm pretty curious myself -- so it might be enlightening to sit in even if you don't have immediate intentions on trying to get on Webtoons.
• Tomorrow afternoon at 3pm ET, I will be interviewed live by Mark Allard-Will of Cuckoo's Nest Press. We'll be talking about my work here and on my recent Webcomics book.
• Josh Adams and Anthony Del Col put together a biographic comic for Insider, covering how/why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle chose to distance themselves from the Royal Family. I don't tend to follow that type of news much, but I found it a very insightful and fascinating piece.
• The Hollywood Reporter has a good interview with John Ridely about his upcoming The Other History of the DC Universe which looks at DC's history within the context of characters from traiditionally disenfranchised groups. People like Black Lightning, The Question, Katana, and Thunder.
• The Jack Kirby Museum has been hosting a series of "Fourth World Summer" sessions looking at Kirby's work on that saga. Yesterday, they hosted their fifth episode, looking in particular at Happyland and Barda!

Partially due to one of these links basically becoming useless in a couple days, I'm going to start this week off with some links...

• First, and most egotistically, Matt Kuhns has provided the first actual review of my book Webcomics. Until now, I've only heard a handful of comments, but this is the first full-on review I've seen so far. The short version is that he liked, even though he doesn't really like webcomics. Thanks, Matt!
• Danica Davidson interviewed author Michael Howard about his book, The Salaryman. The original book is about his experiences as an American working in Japan, and a new manga edition with art by Rena Saiya was released last month.
  
• On Wednesday, August 5, The New York Adventure Club is presenting a webinar about comic legend Carmine Infantino. It will be presented by Arlen Schumer and tickets cost $10, with the ability to watch the presentation afterwards if you're not able to attend live. They also have similar webinars for Steve Ditko (on August 12) and Joe Kubert (on August 20), both also $10 and presented by Schumer.
• Uncivilized Books' Tom Kaczynski examines Omniverse: The Journal of Fictional Reality, a fanzine that Mark Gruenwald started in 1977. "The entire magazine is devoted to explicating, explaining, and justifying the connections between the various inconsistent realities of the Marvel & DC universes." Some of the ideas that originated here, Gruenwald would later bring into the Marvel Universe when he became a writer and editor for that publisher.
  
• Ben Towle pointed me to this documentary about another comics legend, Alex Toth, is available for free on YouTube.
  

I'm running late right now, so I'm just going to share a few links today...

1. First, Michael Dean over at The Comics Journal posted an incredible piece about misconduct at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. What makes it incredible is the depth of the problems he uncovers. What we heard last week about Brownstein that led to his resignation is only the tip of the iceberg! This is very damning for pretty much EVERYONE at the CBLDF!
2. I was recently interviewed about my book on Webcomics over at FreakSugar! Jed had some great questions, and I think the piece gives some insight into how the book itself reads!
   
3. Like just about every comics convention and festival this year, the Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE) cancelled its original in-person venue. However, founder Bob Corby just posted a schedule of programming for an online SPACE show over the same weekend. It includes a lot of the same types of presentations as the in-person show normally would, and it looks as if there will be retail component as well! If I'm reading into this right, it looks like many of the local small press comics folks in/around the Columbus area will be able to sell their books through a special Laughing Ogre "table." More details to come, I'm sure!
4. What if one of Dr. Doom's famous Doombots broke ranks and set out to carve its own place in the universe? What if that place turned out to be a gas station in rural Illinois? Matt Geuther decided to depict how he thought that might happen in a short fan film called "Doombo."
   

Since no one is able to get together in person, a lot of people have been resorting to video conferencing. And while that's typically not as satisfying for the individuals involved, it does mean that a lot more is being recorded and is made available online for others to enjoy. Here's some of what I've found over the past few days...

• Tales from the Grim has hosted a pair Marvel superheroes RPG games called "Avengers: Until the End of the World" for charity. The players are all folks from the comics creators community. Here's Part 1 and Part 2. One more should be coming soon!
  
• Comics Relief from FirstSecond Books was an online festival where a lot of comics folks talking about various aspects of their process. They've got six videos with folks like Gene Luen Yang, Lucy Knisley and Kat Leyh.
• Gene Luen Yang was also the keynote speaker for Everywhere Book Fest! This one's not exclusively comics, but there's more than a few comics folks that show up including Marie Lu, Scottie Young, Preti Chhibber, and Saladin Ahmed, among others!
  
• Mark Allard-Will has been running a Quaratine Reads series where he interviews comics creators. His most recent was with Brian Bolland!
  
• This one is a little more widely reported (it's coming from The Beat, after all) but since Dan Shahin did talk with Steve Geppi, Mike Richardson, Gary Groth, Dirk Wood, and Ross Richie, I did want to call out the video itself. I suspect a number of folks read through the summary and forgot the video was even there to take in for yourself!
  
• The Ohio State University Libraries has been posting short Curator Talks pieces from their collections, and two of them so far feature Jenny Robb, curator of The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, talking about "A Female Suffrage Fancy" and "Jiji Manga."
  

There's enough here for at least a few days of non-stop binge-watching if you're so inclined!

I've come across several interesting audio creator interviews in the past day or so, and thought I'd share them here...

• The Center for Cartoon Studies has been posting a variety of dispatches from cartoonists such as veterans Art Spiegleman and Seth, and alumni Melissa Mendes and Chuck Forsman. One of their most recent is a dispatch from Roz Chast.
• France Culture spoke with Joann Sfar. The audio is obviously in French, but several snippets are pulled out as text and can be readily translated by your browser.
• The Cashing in on Creativity Podcast spent some time talking with cartoonist Rina Piccolo about her career, her style, and what cartoonists need to know about the cartoon industry.
• Finally, this one was from a week ago, but Damian Duffy, John Jennings, Nalo Hopkinson, and N.K. Jemisin got together to talk about the graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower.
  
  

I don't know that I'll necessarily be getting back into regular links posts, but I did come across a few in the past day or two that are worth sharing without much commentary from me...

• Carol Tilley has uncovered documentation from 1968 showing what DC Comics executives were making.
• Bob Corby has posted the nominees for the 2019 SPACE Prize. I haven't read any of the works that are nominated, but I am familiar with several of the creators who I know do good work; there are definitely some comics worth checking out there!
• You may have seen that Jerry Craft's New Kid just won the Newbery Medal, the first time a graphic novel has won. Here's the official announcement.
• Deb Aoki is making her way to Angoulême International Comics Festival by way of a few other comics-related stops in Europe, and she's tweeting a slew of (threaded!) wonderful photos and anecdotes. Given that she's traveling with Heidi MacDonald, Karen Green, and Ronald Wimberly, there is TONS of appreciation of the comics exhibits and artifacts they're seeing.
  

It's the last official day of Black Panther Month, and we've still got plenty of links to share...

• Michael Maher talks with Hannah Beachler, the production designer who designed the afrofuturistic look of the film.
• Tasha Robinson spoke with Joel Harlow, Black Panther's makeup designer.
  
• Aisha Harris interviews Beth McGuire, Black Panther's dialect coach, on how she's trying to raise the bar for African accents.
  
• Rosie Knight talks with Don McGregor about creating Killmonger.
• Ryan Parker and Aaron Couch get the low-down on Wesley Snipes' attempt to make a Black Panther movie back in the 1990s.
• Abraham Riesman profiles Christopher Priest, who's seminal run on Black Panther had a huge influence on how the character has been used in all media since then, argueably defining the character more than anyone else since his inception.

• A few years ago, Dr. Walter Greason of Monmouth University began something he called The Wakanda Syllabus as a way to use Black Panther as "an opportunity for global audiences to study the traditions of black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the variety of African indigenous cultures."
• You know what a lot Black people asked after watching Black Panther? "How'd they get everybody's hair to look so good?!" (White people, don't laugh! You probably didn't hear them ask, but they did! Trust me!) Ashley Weatherford talked to Camille Friend, head of Black Panther’s hair department, to get what all when into everybody's locks.
• Ryan Parker talked to Jack Kirby's family, who say that Jack would've love the film.
• Jamie Broadnax and Abraham Riesman have a short chat with Florence Kasumba about the lack of LGBTQ representation in Black Panther.
  
  
  

• You know that guy who was raising money to send underprivileged kids to see Black Panther? He's raised over $300,000 so far!
• Ryan Daly reads A Little Golden Book: Marvel’s Black Panther to his son, Rhys. I don't think Rhys is overly impressed though. Also, apparently there's a Little Golden Book featuring Black Panther.
• Donna-Claire Chesman interviewed Nikolas A. Draper-Ivey about creating the artwork for Black Panther: The Album.
• Victoria Johnson interviewed Draper-Ivey as well.
• Madeleine Brand speaks to Jamil Smith and John Jennings about the cultural significance of Black Panther for people of color.
  

• Last week saw the red carpet world premier of Black Panther in Hollywood, complete with Dora Milaje on guard. Marvel streamed the event live and you can watch a recording of the proceedings here.
• Hollywood Reporter collected and collated some of the initial reviews, and what they found was "overwhelmingly positive."
• This io9 piece notes how Ryan Coogler convinced Kendrick Lamar to do the entire soundtrack for the movie.
• Anyang Nyong'o (Lupita's father), writing for The Star, Kenya, has a strong piece about what the people of Africa should take from Black Panther.
  

Photo by Jesse Grant / Stringer/ Getty Images

• Emily Wilson has a nice profile of natural treasure Trina Robbins.
• Audy Bernadus asks Ibu Herlina what happened to the once powerful local comic scene in Indonesia.
  
  

• Dan Gearino has an appreciation of Jonni Levas, who co-founded Sea Gate Distributors with Phil Seuling.
• Kate Williams profiles Kate Eilertsen, the chief curator at the Charles M. Schulz Museum.
• Michael "Doc V" Vassallo recently discovered some previously unknown Jack Kirby work from when he ghosted the Davy Crocket, Frontiersman comic strip briefly in 1957.
  

• This is an older post about an old cartoon, but Thierry Smolderen posits that George Cruikshank's penultimate illustration for Oliver Twist is based off Rodolphe Töpffer's Mr. Vieux Bois.
• Teddy Jamieson writes about how a new hotel in Glasgow, Scotland commissioned Frank Quietly to design their interior walls.
• History teacher Tim Smythe has started posting videos about he uses graphic novels in the classroom. His first one is on using Joe Sacco's The Great War in his lesson on World War I.
  

• Comics creator and indie publisher Ken Eppstein asks, "How Do We Save Comic Books?"
• Comics historian Ian Gordon talks about some of the research he was able to do at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
• The Comics Studies Society recently announced several prizes available for scholarship (both academic and not) in the field of comics. (I think, technically, my work would be eligible for the Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship, but I'm not about to nominate myself. I think it's pretty much all crap, so I don't think I could select three pieces that would be worthy of judging. But, hey, I'll fully cop to my own biases. If there was anything I wrote last year that you thought was particularly insightful, feel free to let them know! I might not think my stuff is that great, but if someone wants to put me up for a $300 prize, I won't say no!)
  
  

• At The Atlantic, Shaan Amin talks about how India's Amar Chitra Katha comics reinforced many forms of intolerance and, despite some changes, continue to do so.
• Over at Huffington Post, Vamsee Juluri disputes several of Amin's fundamental points.
• (And can I just stop a moment to say how amazing it is that we have here two notable American outlets debating Indian comics in public? They're not just talking about comics; they're talking about comics that the vast majority of Americans who like comics have never even heard of!)
  
  

• NHK World has a half-hour piece on how Chinese comics are trying to get the same visibility and global reach as the Japanese counterparts.
• Christine Ro discusses how lettering norms in comics have a negative impact for readers with dyslexia.
• Mike Korcek and Gary Colabuono look back at how comic books were banned entirely in the 1950s in the city of Mount Prospect, IL.
• Over at Tilburg's humanities department, they're trying to gather more information about readers' reaction and recognition of comic thought bubbles and speech balloons. Check out their survey.