Unfortunately, not the one recently spotted on TV, but this one is also all squirrel.

Actually, I guess that post below should be Superhero™. (More at Newsarama).

How To Tell If You're A Superhero

Now accepting applications at the DCC: Aarggh!, a grant program for aspiring young comic creators in the Washington, DC area.

Missed the latest episode of Lost, out at V and forgot to tape. Apparently I missed a particularly egregious typo. So, for the writers at ABC, a little advice from my favorite angry flower.

V for Vendetta last night. Wasn't bad, but I didn't find it particularly compelling either. They did a respectable job of adapting the story to a new format and to the modern era, but keeping the episodic nature of the book kind of worked against it. A few specific beefs here and there (removing some things that I thought really made the story), and a few bits of dialogue that got dropped. And the end kind of lost its way.

The mask was amazing. Stuck to the original design. Very dramatic. And we swear it had slightly different expressions in different scenes...

Over at the DCC blog (note new address to go with Monica's new design), Evan's got some pencils up at for his upcoming League of Lincoln. When I first met him over a year ago, this action epic of a team of superpowered Abraham Lincolns was still an idea, so I'm happy to see it taking shape.

I doubt he's going to have anything printed before APE, but I know he'll have the second installment of his serial comic concert posters for Death by Sexy, one of my favorite of his projects.

You kids today, with your fancy "electronic files" for your logos. Back in my day, we didn't have files for our logos. We didn't even have logos. We had a logo. Just the one. For the whole company. So if somebody wanted to use it for letterhead, and you wanted it for a brochure, you were just out of luck. And if we were running an ad in two different publications, I had to bring it from one to the other, walking uphill in the driving snow, with no shoes...

Writin' and thumbnailin', powered by Oakenfold.

A week after it closed, I ran across interview with one of the curators of the Masters of American Comics exhibition. Interesting, he disagreed with the show's premise that newspaper comic innovation ended in the last half of the century.

The exhibit (in a somewhat reduced form) is moving on to Milwaukee Art Museum, then travels the New York area at two museums, The Jewish Museum and The Newark Musuem.

This week's This American Life was a repeat. The good news — it's the Superpowers episode. Of course, it does remind me how bummed I am that Gone and Forgotten hasn't been updated in more than a year.

OK, I've read Dubliners. Heck, I've read — and even enjoyed — Ulysses (I took a whole course on Joyce in college). But Coudal's Irish-oriented links today sent me to an article that finally identified the source for the title of the play whose Paula Scher-designed poster has dominated whatever room it's hung in in our home for the past decade.

Marten was nice enough to contact us with compliments on RBS. His sig file pulled me into the wonderfully weird world of his blog, full of literary observations, mortal danger, and, of course, squirrels.

Courtesy of Duke Law, a comic about copyright and intellectual property law. Available for download, appropriately enough.

It's a flurry of activity over here at Squirrel Central. I've just reviewed some sketches for one of the guest-artist projects that's coming together, and artwork for issue 1.8 is well underway. We're aiming to have new work done for APE (where we'll be represented by some of our fellow 7000 B.C. members) and for SPACE. Of course, new issues will be available here at the site.

In Milwaukee last week, one of the high points was getting to the Milwaukee Art Museum before I really had to get to work. Spent a couple hours with just a part of the impressive permanent collection, and enjoyed Calatrava's modern-yet-mod addition. Though, as Steffen points out, some have been enjoying it a bit too much.

Raphael made sure to email me this column from The Onion — but, in Milwaukee, I'd already got my hands on a print edition. One of the funniest things: they're actually running an ad for an Accounts Receivable Manager. What — tha H-Dog not available?

At the tail end of my business trip, made very welcome at the huge operation at the main branch of Collector's Edge Comics in Milwaukee.

A writer with, even by my standards, an obsession with conspiracies has managed to link together some of my pop-culture favorities: Planetary, Lost, and H.P. Lovecraft. Link via fellow New Mexican The Comics Reporter

Been on (actually still on) a business trip out of town, busy and sleep-deprived, but with high-speed internet access. More regular posting should resume soon.

comments?

Bram will often describe our publishing schedule as "spectacularly infrequent." Mainly because of me, and the fact that I take forever on the art + production.

That's one of the reasons we started this blog on our site a year ago — to provide more regularly-updated comics- and squirrel-related content. But we have no idea, really, if anyone reads it. There's a link to email us, but I have a feeling people are more likely to comment on blog posts, than to just email someone out of the blue.

So, here's my question: Should we enable comments? Has there been anything you wanted to tell us? (Besides "Monica, get off your butt and draw the next issue!") Any blog entries that you particularly liked? or thought were stupid? I'm going to enable comments on this post — please let us know what you think.

Yeah, so, watched the Ultimate Avengers movie last night. Wasn't that bad, but it suffered from not really being able to decide what it wanted to be — an action movie that just happened to be animated or an extended Saturday morning cartoon. Story was a reasonable adaptation of the first couple arcs of the comic, and Natasha (or in this version, Natalia, inexplicably) was one of the cooler characters. Jarring, after having just read Ultimates 2 #10.

In the extras was a "teaser," maybe :30 or so. The artwork (all rapidly flashed on the screen), was obviously more derived from Hitch's artwork and followed the comic's storyline more closely. What happened to that?

I still miss Richard Thomspon's comics in The Washington Post. So, today, the text from one of the cartoons in his book. It's even funnier with illustrations, but I think it still holds up.

And Now, March

March comes in on clumsy feet,
Kicks the trash cans down the street.

Spills some garbage on the lawn,
Blows the rest to Hellandgone.

Knocks the branches off the trees,
Gives the powerlines a squeeze.

Then March leaves & as it goes
the sun comes out. Then it snows.

I've returned from a visit to the in laws' with a real treat — my late grandfather-in-law's copy first-edition copy of Up Front by Bill Mauldin. I've always thought his work was just amazing. Deceptively simple artwork, and a keen understanding of how to capture a human story in a few strokes and a couple lines of text elevate his cartooning to a level rarely seen. This book was published before the conclusion of WWII, so it's written in the present tense and gives a portrait of the artist as a man in the trenches, not sure if he's going to make it home.