You’ll want to linger in Aisle 1500, not only does it feature Buenaventura Press, but Global Hobo, Sparkplug and The Honeybunch Squad. That means folks like Dylan Williams, Alixopulos, Jesse Reklaw, Andrice Arp, Johnny Ryan, Steve Weissman and Jordan Crane, among MANY OTHERS. It’s a mini MoCCA. Attendees and debut books, courtesy Alvin Buenaventura at the Comics Journal board, below the fold.

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Marc Silvestri, Seth Green, David Wohl, David Nakayama and a replica Mazda RX-8 from the book Revved liven things up in the Top Cow booth. There will be numerous convention exclusives available, as well.
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Ted Rall, David Axe, Richard Moore, Cad Michael Ward and Jerry Carr are featured. Details below.
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George Perez, John Romita, Bill Willingham, Gene Ha and…SOFTBALL! It’s all at A.C.T.O.R> the charity devoted to helping creators in need.
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Becky Cloonan, Tom Beland, Joe Casey, Gabriel Ba, Charlie adlard, Mike Brennan AND MANY MORE sign at the AIT booth. Deets in the jump.

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Just a quick FYI re Comicon San Diego. Stuart Moore will be signing and showing advance copies of FIRESTORM: THE NUCLEAR MAN and JSA CLASSIFIED (DC Comics), STARGATE ATLANTIS (Avatar), PARA (Penny-Farthing Press), and other books throughout the show. Here are the confirmed booths/times:

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We’re not exactly sure what this is but it looks awfully cool and it comes with a Viewmaster:

Come pick up a copy of the new release complete with Viewmaster reel, buy a viewer, and say hello to Hi F founders Annie Owens and Atta with special guests signing below:

Thurs.
12-1: Jeff Soto

Fri:
11 Am Kaiju Big Battel’s Dr. Cube
2 Pm Craola Signing
3 Pm alex Pardee

Sat.:
1Pm Brian McCArty
2 Pm Ira Gobler from Gobler toys

Sun:
11 Attaboy

Cartoonist Mazen Kerbaj blogs from Beirut.

Oddly enough, an LA Times profile of manga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Adrian Tomine touches on the late Mickey Spillane’s wide-ranging influence:

Tatsumi’s work, appropriately, was shaped less by other Japanese comics than by local police reports and hard-boiled American novelists. “I was very moved by his descriptions,” he says, through a translator, of the work of Mickey Spillane. “For example, in a Spillane novel, a man never merely falls to the floor. Instead, he would write something like, ‘The floor rushed up and smacked me in the face.’ That sort of writing was an enormous influence on gekiga, through which I was trying to find a new mode of expression.

CNN is reporting that writer Mickey Spillane has died at age 88 after a long illness. Spillane’s hardboiled pulp novels, including I, The Jury sold millions of copies and influenced a generation of writers, and his tough-guy private eye Mike Hammer starred in both film and television.

Early in his career, Spillane dabbled in comics writing, writing text pages for Timely Comics. It is even rumored that Mike Hammer was originally created as a comics character, a rumor that Max Allan Collins brought to life in the 90s with a Mike Danger comic.

And speaking of Smithhere’s what he had to say about Rosario Dawson:

Q: Rosario is kind of a sci-fi nerd, right?

KS: It’s cool because a lot of people don’t know that. People said she’s so famous so why would she do my movie and I wondered the same thing and she said it was because of the Donkey Show. She said she always wanted to see that. I told her no one is actually going to fuck the donkey and she said she knew that but wanted to be on the set when it happened. You meet her and realize she’s into some weird stuff. She said her biggest career regret is being cut out of the Devil’s Rejects. She did a 5-minute cameo that got cut and she’s upset because she loves horror movies and Rob Zombie. She can speak knowledgably about Johnny The Homicidal Maniac comic book. Very few women know about comic books and no one who looks like Rosario knows black and white independent comic books. Even though she’s a goddess she makes you feel like she’s normal. The first conversation I had with her was about anal bleaching.

If nerd-as-underdog culture has an icon, it’s probably director Kevin Smith, a common man made good at the pinnacle of Hollywood, aka sleeing over at Skywalker Ranch, even while remaining approachable and utterly knowable. The LA Times has an in-depth, revealing profile of the director which wonders if CLERKS II will “brand him a boy wonder also-ran or a comeback king?”

His notoriously dedicated fan base, feverishly reciting quotes and rabidly buying up his merchandise, sees him as a regular guy made good. Critics, by and large, have come to see him as self-satisfied and lazy. Coming off the critical and commercial implosion of his previous film, “Jersey Girl,” which was a conscious attempt at making a more conventional mainstream movie, Smith finds himself back where he started. Though it may be easy to dismiss the dour reception of “Jersey Girl” as simply a part of the backlash against the tabloid romance of its stars, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, there is certainly more to it than that, as the film exposed cracks in the foundation of Smith’s work.

As if to encapsulate the rather uncertain position Smith now occupies in the Hollywood landscape, HBO’s insider comedy “Entourage” recently dropped Smith’s name (alongside Michael Bay, no less) as shorthand for sloppy, soulless filmmaking. By reviving the characters from his first feature in “Clerks II,” Smith now takes stock of his emotional life in his mid-30s in the same way “Clerks” surveyed his 20s. A freewheeling farce on lack of direction, stillborn ambitions and a life of mindless drudgery has given way to a rueful examination of unfulfilled promises, dashed dreams and the resigned acceptance of one’s lot in life.

The piece also touches on Smith’s sidelines, including the comics:

ASIDE from his role as writer-director of feature films, Smith has also created a number of sideline endeavors for himself. He makes appearances on the college lecture circuit, has done a series of spots for “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” has written comic books, done various guest spots, co-owns comic book and memorabilia stores in New Jersey and Los Angeles and, perhaps most important, has an extremely active and direct role online in a circle of Internet sites. The websites allow him to interact with a broad swath of fans, sell merchandise and, as with the case of “Clerks II,” heavily promote his upcoming releases.

Smith recently co-published the first in a series of graphic novel prequels to Richard Kelly’s feature film “Southland Tales,” a futuristic fable of the apocalypse starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and The Rock. At a recent signing event, Smith showed just how deep his commitment to and connection with his fans goes. He patiently listened as fans told him about themselves, he posed for pictures, he talked to people’s friends on their cellphones, and never hurried a single one. If things are moving toward a niche-oriented, long-tail model of cultural consumption, Smith already has self-created and corralled his piece of the niche.

A bitter controversy is tearing the otherwise peace-loving city of Toronto apart, and it involves comic books. The enmity between Hobbystar, which puts on the Canadian National Expo, a large pop culture show, and Paradise Comics, which puts on the Toronto Comicon has been growing over the years, with the two shows locked in a turf war. Hobbystar is run by a promoter named Aman Gupta.

Now, normally we try not to take sides in such things. We can say that we were guests of the Toronto Comicon this April, and were treated exceptionally well by organizer Pete Dixon and company, so we have nothing but nice things to say about Paradise Comics. We can also say that Hobbystar’s actions — putting on a show the weekend before the Toronto Comicon this year, and planning one next year for the same weekend — has been pretty hardball, to say the least. Paradise Comics has retaliated by throwing a one day show the week before two weeks before this year’s Canadian National Expo.

We’ve heard that the town is big enough for both show without all the nastiness, and most folks have put on a neutral face, in public, anyway. But now Daryl Collison, owner of 3rd Quadrant Comics, has been circulating a letter claiming that Gupta will not allow exhibitors at the Paradise show to exhibit at the Expo, and suggesting it’s time to take a stand one way or the other, so things may be heating up. You can read it all in the jump.
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A while ago we told you about budding filmmaker Matt Busch reporting on his LiveJournal about a nasty breakup with his girlfriend, actress Sarah Wilkinson, with writer Steve Niles as the third party. We’re not going to rehash all the story because it’s just ugly stuff that should have been kept private, but in the interests of fairness, the other shoe has dropped, and Wilkinson tells her story.

A surprisingly touching tribute to 120 years of cartoonists in the Philippines. Did they all go to the same eyeglass shop or what?

Over at his blog, Modern Tales founder Joey Manleytalks about major changes, including moving away from a subscription model for webcomics:

As you may have heard, we’ve decided to open up the vast majority of the site to non-paying readers, and to recruit even more webcomics to join us on a free basis, while maintaining our tightly-focused editorial mission. You’ll see those new free strips roll out in the coming weeks and months. The new editor for the free section of our site, who will be posting here soon, will have more to say on that subject. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the new Modern Tales, and I hope you tell your friends, who may have been curious about the site in the past, but were maybe turned off by the need to pay.

Don’t get me wrong. The subscription model is not going away. If you are a subscriber, we thank you tremendously much; we owe everything to you — and you can look forward to a fresh set of subscriber-only webcomics coming your way in the coming weeks and months. Subscriptions still make up an important part of our business, and we will continue to take that part of the site seriously. Expansions in the subscription-only part of the site are made possible by the new business model, and will keep pace with the free expansion. I trust that our subscribers will be the people who actually gain the most by this new Modern Tales.

Continuing its team coverage of SDCC, the San Diego Union-Tribune offers and the most useful and yet arbitrary guide to comics term ever. Sample entries:

Costumed athlete: An adventurer in sartorial splendor who has no enhanced abilities or superpowers.

Cyborg: A living entity melded from human and machine.

Dumb fun: A name for amusing anime that’s not too deep.

Ectoplasm: An intangible and vaporous substance that forms astral phenomena.

Imprint: Smaller publishers either created or acquired by the bigger comic corporations. La Jolla’s Wildstorm, for example, was bought by megafirm DC Comics in 1998 and continues to thrive under that corporate umbrella.

Manga, Manhua, Manhwa: A comic book or graphic novel. The Japanese manga is the most common to Westerners; manhua (Chinese) and manhwa (South Korean) are less known.

Dark Horse has a MAMMOTH and memorable signing schedule, with such folks as Eric Powell, Yoshitaka Amano, Tony Millionaire, Frank Miller, Kazuo Koike, the Conan crew, the Escapist team, and of course, more more more. Read all about it in the jump.
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Marvel will be set up at the Marvel/Activision booth this year, (#4315) and will be looking at portfolios. This could be your chance! They will also have a full-line-up of signings and panels.

Expect to see the biggest names in the industry all Con long at the Marvel Booth, #4315, as an all-star cast that includes J. Michael Straczynski, Jeph Loeb, Damon Lindelof, Daniel & Charles Knauf, Reginald Hudlin, Paul Jenkins, Ed Brubaker, Moebius, Charlie Huston, John Romita Sr., John Romita Jr., and Marvel’s own EiC Joe Quesada meet, greet and sign autographs! And on Saturday don’t miss out on the opportunity to get your own exclusive Iron Man movie poster signed by upcoming Iron Man director Jon Favreau and screenplay character designer & Iron Man comic book cover artist Adi Granov!

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Who’s who at the Last Gasp booth? A lot of amazing fine artists that’s who: Peter Maresca, Tim Biskup, Shag, Glenn Barr, Gary Baseman, Mark Ryden, Carlos Batts, David Choong Lee, Ron English, Michael Manning, Attaboy, Liz McGrath and S. Clay Wilson!
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Manhwa specializt ICE Kunion is having a contest to give away some rare artwork by the artist group Kara at the show.

The ICE Kunion imprint has been creating a stir by introducing the hottest Korean comics (aka ‘manhwa’) to English audiences, and now they’re heating things up in San Diego as well with some great giveaways and a chance to win a piece of extremely rare original artwork! During the 2006 SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON, being held July 19-23, the Korean Culture & Content Agency booth (#2543) is where you need to be to get in on all of ICE Kunion’s manhwa giveaway action!

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Do you have a way with sculpey? You may be just the person DC is looking for:

Following the incredible success at last year’s COMIC-CON INTERNATIONAL - SAN DIEGO, DC Direct will be holding its second annual Sculptor Search - “A Cut Above”.

Join us this year and meet Georg Brewer, DC’s VP - Design & DC Direct Creative, Jim Fletcher, Senior Art Director, and Shawn Knapp, Associate Art Director. The creative team behind DC Direct will be discussing the unique challenges of turning some of world’s greatest characters from comic art into amazing 3-D product.

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Who will be who at the Silent Devil booth?

Silent Devil, publishers of Dracula vs. King Arthur, The Devil’s Panties collections and a line of critically acclaimed comics, has announced their creator line-up for the San Diego Comicon. The Silent Devil booth, Table D1, will host creators Adam and Christian Beranek (Dracula vs. King Arthur, Tyrannosaurus West, Unhappy White Girls), Tony Fleecs (In My Lifetime), Josh Medors (Runes of Ragnan), M. Sean McManus (The Last Sin of Mark Grimm), Chris Moreno (Monkey vs. Lemur, artist for Sidekick, DvK, DvC, Super Frat, etc.) and Tony DiGerolamo (Super Frat, writer of Bart Simpson and the Simpson comics). Also on hand will be SD’s support staff: Philip Clark, Hannah Sutin and Lauren Perry.

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Udon Studios has a ton of convention exclusives, you can read about in the jump, and booth appearances by: Alvin Lee, Omar Dogan, M3TH, Joe Ng, Scott Hepburn, Christine Choi, SVEN, Susan Lou, Tom Liu, Jen Chen, Jo Chen & Rey, Ken Siu-Chong, Jim Zubkavich, Erik Ko, Marshall Dillon, Clarence Lim and George Louro. More in Jump!
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A heat wave is engulfing many regions of this nation. :

A HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM BUILDING IN FROM THE WEST WILL PROVIDE US
WITH MOSTLY CLEAR SKIES BUT ALSO SOME INCREASINGLY OPPRESSIVE CONDITIONS.