Jim Woodring is one of my favorite living artists. His comic books and graphic novels (usually wordless) are funny, power, and awe-inspiring. I'm so excited he is about to embark on a new crowdfunded graphic novel. — Read the rest

Last night saw the announcement of the 2012 nominees for science fiction's prestigious Hugo Award. It's a particularly fine ballot, reflecting a record number of nominating ballots (wisdom of the crowds and all that). Included on the ballot are our own moderator Avram (as part of the team that publishes The New York Review of Science Fiction) and one of my all-time favorite books, Among Others. — Read the rest

Though we're delighted to have our own online toystore up this holiday season, there are a thousand things we could recommend from elsewhere. Cutting it down to a couple of hundred, for our fourth annual gift guide, wasn't easy; this year was a fantastic one for books, games, gadgets and much else besides. From stocking stuffers to silly cars, take yer pick.

Boing Boing Gift Guide 2011

The dilemma of how to reconcile the needs of security with the desire for humanity is the defining question of the twenty-first century.

This sentence opens my thesis, "Loss Prevention: Customer Service as Border Security," written for the strategic foresight and innovation program that I just graduated. — Read the rest

DMZ: MIA is the ninth collection of Brian Wood's spectacular (anti-)war comic set in a Manhattan ravaged by an American civil war that is fuelled by scumbag profiteer military contractors, sensationalist right-wing cable news, hard-ass pandering politicos, and a redneck separatist army who've all converged on New York for a decade of house-to-house fighting amid gangs and co-ops and losers and heroes. — Read the rest

John Scalzi sez,

Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi and Subterranean Press are proud to announce the publication of CLASH OF THE GEEKS, a special and fantastical electronic chapbook. It features stories by Wheaton, Scalzi, New York Times bestseller Patrick Rothfuss, Norton Award winner and Hugo Best Novel nominee Catherynne M.

Here's Yeshmin, a YouTube character whose schtick is somewhere between Yakov Smirnov and Andy Kauffman, wandering the halls of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX: a nerdgasmic gamer/culture convention run by the Penny Arcade webcomic), chatting with the likes of Wil Wheaton and Jonathan Coulton. — Read the rest

One of the strongest graphic novel debuts I read in 2010 was the first collection of The Unwritten, a story that peeks into the secret life of narrative and the blood and teeth lurking beneath our fantasies and fairy tales. — Read the rest

Unwritten Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity collects the first series of Mike Carey and Peter Gross's Unwritten comic. It's a fine, mature graphic novel in the tradition of Bill Willingham's Fables (Willingham wrote the intro to the collection): Tom Taylor is best known for inspiring his father's character "Tommy Taylor," the star of a mega-best-selling series of kids' fantasy novels. — Read the rest

The publishers of Erik Bergstrom's Grimmer Tales: A Wicked Collection of Happily Never After Stories were kind enough to send me a review copy, which I've just had a very entertaining half-hour chuckling over. The book consists of a series of extremely nasty comic-strips telling the aftermath of the classic folkloric fairy tales. — Read the rest

Though comic fandom's often held to be an unwelcoming place for girls, one correspondent remembers fondly her trip to the 1978 San Diego Comic-Con, when she was only 8 years old. Other females were few and far between—but one of them was Wendy Pini, who embodied the classic fantasy persona of Red Sonja—and who had a story of her own to tell.

Ottawa artist Howie Tsui paints fantastical, evil, and beautiful landscapes of monsters, ghosts, demons, and deities. He tells me that his new large paintings, "Horror Fables," are in the form of Ming Dynasty scrolls and were influenced by "a variety of dark subjects, including Asian ghost stories, Buddhist hell scrolls, Hong Kong vampire films, neo-conservative propaganda, and twentieth-century genocides such as the Nanking massacre." — Read the rest

Stephen Worth says:

When people of the past envisioned what the inhabitants of other planets might be like, they conceived of gods and spirits who lived lives like those of the heroes and villains found in fables and ancient myths. Around the turn of the 20th century, mankind's conception of the world underwent a huge shift.

Dan Wells, publisher at Biblioasis, wrote to me about Three Balconies, an anthology written by illustrator Drew Friedman's dad, and I asked him to provide a brief description about it.

Three Balconies, the first collection of new short stories in nearly two decades by Bruce Jay Friedman (who, if you're keeping track of such things, is the father of the fabulous portrait artist Drew Friedman) has just been released.

Rick Veitch is the comics writer and artist who got famous for the Swamp Thing issues he drew for Alan Moore, and is probably still best known for a later issue he planned (the infamous cancelled #88) in which Swamp Thing went back in time, met Jesus and served as the cross on which the messiah was crucified. — Read the rest

I've just finished DMZ: Friendly Fire, the fourth collection for Brian Wood's incredible, next-gen war comic that is busily redefining the genre as something more relevant and important than it ever was before. In the DMZ storyline, America is plunged into civil war, a war between the redneck Free States movement and the authoritarian, Iraq-shocked US military. — Read the rest

Incredible pop surrealist painter James Jean, known also for his covers for comix series like Fables, Umbrella Academy, and others, worked with Prada to design fabrics for the fashion company's Spring line. Beautiful stuff, 'natch. Comics212 has more.
Link (via Drawn! — Read the rest

Snip from NYT obituary (urls added):

Madeleine L'Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Natalie says:

Felt Club: XL Summer is happening this Sunday, July 15th at the Ukranian Cultural Center (4315 Melrose Ave) in Los Angeles from 11am to 7pm. CRAFT Magazine's own Carla Sinclair and Goli Mohammadi will be there on hand to do gocco demos and you can take home a special Felt Club print.

Once in a long while, a new comic book series comes along that just kicks the hell out of you, melding words and pictures in a way that is impossible in any other medium, telling a story that you can't put down, one that changes the way you see the world. — Read the rest