Razed by Squirrels.

"For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome." Via Coudal. Does anybody else remember From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?

Update: Jeff, who did a spot of urban exploration back in the day and remembers The Mixed-Up Files, found photos from the project.

Understanding the Sunday comics.

Via my fencing coach, this video of human flying squirrels.

"They're attacking us," notes Andy, a bit too calmly I think.

The Comic Book Periodic Table of Elements. It's been a long time since Chemistry class, but I still have a few favorite elements that I looked up. Note the headers on each page, if you're lucky enough to choose the right ones. Via Andy.

About two-thirds of the way through The Black Dossier, and onto the second stretch of the Dossier itself. I'm a reasonably educated guy with a strong liberal arts background, and I'm sure I'm missing out on plenty of the references; I plan to spend some time with the annotations (via the Newsarama blog) later. But, so far, it's stitching together our literary history, ranging further and further back than even Planetary.

A while back, I was lucky enough to get Marc to agree to do a Squirrel Tale for the next RBS arc — still in the works (but it's coming). We got to emailing about Target, the character he'll be doing. For grins, I cooked up a little four-page vignette to "test drive" the character. Now it's finished and available to download. We had such a great time, I'm working on turning that into the first four pages of a full-length comic.

It's been added to the "Some of our other work" section below, along with Death, Cold As Steel.

I — along with the folks at the LCS — just discovered that The Black Dossier would finally be available tomorrow. It's gonna be a good weekend of reading.

Raph reminded me I need to post a link to this Venn diagram. Good soldier.

"I guess my scripts are fairly detailed, but always explicit that my panel descriptions are just suggestions. I learned early on that good artists will spend at least an entire day working on a page that I may have dashed off in an hour, and they'll invariably come up with brilliant ideas in that time. So while I like to build each individual page as its own specific three-act story, I also try to allow the artist a lot of freedom in interpreting it."

Kevin passed along that quote from a Brian K. Vaughn inteview. I've just run through the nine trades of Y: The Last Man (on loan from Michael, in exchange for Queen and Country). It's truly amazing stuff, that series. The way it builds a larger story while keeping each individual issue captivating. And no character gets left behind.

"The conclusion of this mini-series elevated it to a 4-star effort and shows that this organization and its operatives are more than an ample medium for creating memorable and compelling stories." Four stars at Indy Comic Review for issues 2 and 3 of Death, Cold As Steel.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is interviewed over at the Freakonomics blog. Some pretty interesting insight into the process of writing a daily strip and the nature of comic storytelling.

A gallery of The Many Faces of Batman, via Lines and Colors. It does put me in the mind of the old Far Side, "The Many Moods of an Irish Setter," a drawing of a happy, goofy dog, indentically repeated across the page, but with different labels underneath like sad, happy, angry, hungry, and so on.

7000 BC meeting tomorrow in Albuqueruque, 2:00 at Winning Coffee Company, 111 Harvard Dr SE. If you enjoy making comics, or even just talking about them, stop on by.

Guh. I did not need this today.

Via Andy, the "official" story behind the Manhattan Project's name. If you've read Los Alamos, you'll have gotten a glimpse of the real story. But there's still some interesting lost history in the article.