Wow Cool

Welcome to the linkdown and shop update for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend. My five-year-old told a very curious tale about King Luther, whose ‘last name is Junior’, when he came home from school the other day. He also executed the assemblage above out of junk we gathered by the train tracks near the Wow Cool office in Cupertino. Note the wooden train track. We found several of these. If you follow Wow Cool on Twitter, you might have noticed there was a fire near those same tracks last week. We’re fine, the office is fine, but it sure stunk like smoke that afternoon.

I managed to skip doing any kind of best of 2011 lists for music, comics or anything else, but I did note several others. The best rundown you could want of those for comics is provided by Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter. On the music side of things, you should welcome Kid Kameleon to the lineup at Peter Kirn’s excellent Create Digital Music, and spend a few hours with his The (electronic) Music of 2011 list. Of special note is the Kid Kameleon mix of Om Unit further down in the post. You will also want to check out Om Unit’s end-of-year mix for XLR8R from a month ago. We ran a little piece on Kid Kameleon here just a few weeks ago. He knows his stuff.

In other news:
On the ‘How Mid-Westerners See The North East’ side of things, you should check out John Porcellino’s King Cat Winter Tour Diary posts on Maybe Blogging Will Help.

Jeffrey Lewis talks about Bob Dylan on American Songwriter.

Steve Ditko’s cover to his new book Sixteen is previewed.

Alan Moore gets the ‘comics aren’t for kids anymore treatment’, but worse, and also better, in the following:

OK. New in the Wow Cool shop.
The big stars this week are two solid hardcovers that are much less than a million miles apart.

Although originally seen at some shows and available some places back in October, due to a distributor switch it has not been until now that we are able to offer the excellent collection of Jesse Moynihan’s Forming from NoBrow Press. We also have his previous book Follow Me available.

And then there is Kramers Ergot #8. The book made it’s debut at December’s BCGF in Brooklyn, but is only just now on general release. It is a package seemingly designed to encourage discussion (or argument of plate throwing). Few reviews have surfaced yet, but this short write-up and interview with editor Sammy Harkham by the very knowledgeable James Romberger on Publisher’s Weekly is well worth your time.

In the meanwhile, there is not much NEW new stuff in the shop this week, but a number of older titles of interest have been floating in. You may have missed these: Funny (Not Funny), edited by Ryan Standfest who also gave us Black Eye; several books by David King, including his recent Lemon Styles and a stellar contribution to the new Study Group Magazine; the serious gem of a jamcomic Play Overlord by Sean Christensen, Amy Kuttab & Theo Ellsworth; we got some of the last available Wowee Zonk #3 in; one we’ve had for a while that deserves another look is the Stalagmite anthology with Kevin Scalzo and Brian Ralph; and, then there’s Grendel Tales: Homecoming by Dave Cooper, Pat McEown & Matt Wagner… about the oddest thing Dave Cooper worked on, but a real classic.

Thanks for giving!