Thursday Link Party: A More Sincere Pumpkin Patch

Man, I love It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Comics Alliance caught a great image from artist Steven Sanders (S.W.O.R.D., Five Fists of Science) featuring Lockheed and Kitty Pryde doing their best Chuck D and Flavor Flav impersonation. So cool. Have I mentioned lately how excited I am for S.W.O.R.D., basically The Thin Man in space starring the X-Men's Beast and Agent Brand? I am very excited for S.W.O.R.D., yes, I am.

Twitter pal Scott Cederlund has a great review up of a somewhat under-the-radar book from a few weeks back, the Joss Whedon/Fabio Moon one-shot Sugarshock, collecting comics they put together for the online-only compilation MySpace Dark Horse Presents. Reading it, I found myself sharing many of Scott's observations although he's far more articulate in phrasing them than I could ever be. It's a very scattered book, lacking focus and heft, but it has a slight goofy charm, and more Fabio Moon is always a good idea. Guy could draw the phone book and I'd buy it.

I have a feeling I'm going to enjoy James Hem's new comics movie column over at Bleeding Cool, as long as he keeps contributing turns of phrase like this:

Paul Cornell has been hawking his Black Widow series to SFX. It only exists to plug the Iron Man 2 film right? And to get people “ready for” Scarlett Johannsons’ character? Surely what the typical fanboy needs to do to get ready for Johansson in a catsuit is to sit on their hand for half an hour?

Ha ha ha! It's funny cause it's true cause we masturbate.

Sean T. Collins over at Savage Critics has a great defense up of The Dark Knight Strikes Again that puts the work in a really fitting cultural context. I'm still torn on the book myself but I do think it says something that there's still intelligent things to say about it years after its release.

Inspired by a recent post over at Bat-Blog, I put the term "comic book" into Google's new Life magazine archive and in ten minutes dug up a few gems:

• A January 1964 profile of Roy Lichtenstein
• A June 1946 piece on Li'l Abner and artist Al Capp
• A November 1944 story on "junior geniuses" contributing war inventions to the Captain Midnight comic, including a brilliant machine gun/palm tree mashup that, like DKSA, was years ahead of its time

Anyway, I'm sure there are a multitude of treasures within that archive waiting to be uncovered by other intrepid internet explorers, so have at it.

NOT COMICS: The world's only analog blog.

(Post image courtesy Cape and The Bat-Blog)