After a heavy duty couple of weeks that included Free Comic Book Day and two comic book artist signings at the Wow Cool Alternative Comics shop, it was time to take a day off and head to the beach. The high winds and barely 60º temperatures cut into the beach time as it cut into
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Unbelievable news today: first, this morning, that comic book artist and animator Darwyn Cooke had gone through a very serious battle with cancer; and then, this evening, that he was dead. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually properly met or talked to Darwyn, but we’ve stood very...
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Once upon a time I was the Art Director at the comic book publisher Fantagraphics. I worked most closely there with Kim Thompson, who should have turned 58 today. Probably the two biggest projects we worked on together were the revised and expanded Ultimate Catalog and 10 issues of the...
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I went to SPX 2014 and all I got were these seven crappy phone photos, a Hidden Fortress T-Shirt and the new Charles Burns book (signed, with the numbered bookplate and the paper mask). I picked up a ton of new books from various parts of the show for the Wow Cool shop. We expect
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Capitol Contingency: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, and Noise Pop in Washington, D.C., 1991-1999 by Brandon Gentry is the sort of book about the D.C. indie scene(s) I’ve long wanted to read. My needs were pretty simple on this, something along the lines of ‘a book that covers Shudder To...
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Gary Panter is well deservedly a much revered artist for his scratchy line and his many very influential works scattered across various media in a long career. Whether by accident or chance or plan, many of these works – as well as some obvious examples by his peer cohorts Matt Groening...
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In case you hadn’t heard, we are having a big sale on Saturday at our Cupertino, California store and on WowCool.com all weekend. You will have to make it to Cupertino to dig through the 17 longboxes of comics we are selling at a quarter a pop (or 25 for five dollars, as it says
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I was about ten or eleven when I was first exposed to the writing of the recently deceased Steve Moore in the pages of Doctor Who Weekly. He and Alan Moore (no relation) wrote back-up stories in the magazine. Some of the ones that first caught my attention were the tales of the Cyberman who
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If he was not dead. Today is reported to be his birthday. Joe Brainard was born some 72 years ago. He was one of the most legendary of the Nancy boys (as seen above). I hold onto that otherwise very boring book for his cover art. Thank you to my old band mate Steve Dore
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I had some time to kill with the kids yesterday evening and we happened to be near the “Comic Collector” shop (yes, that’s it’s name) in Sunnyvale, CA. They have many bins of strange old comics, typically for a dollar. In one stack of beat up coverless comic books I found...
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Now that the dust has settled a little from Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary celebrations this past Saturday, November 23, I want to point you toward some coverage of the many types of music and sounds that were featured on the show during its long history. First up is “50 Years in Time...
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As you have probably heard by now, writer and musician Lou Reed has passed away at age 71. I’d listened to his music for years, but there was a side to him I had not heard about that I became very familiar with through my work for Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine. Lou was a committed practitioner...
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As we do nearly every time Adam Curtis opens his mouth, as it were, we are posting a little something about his latest post over on his BBC blog. This one’s a real hoot and a serious time commitment. It deals with the innate idiocy of having a state-funded domestic counterintelligence...
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Sam Henderson has a few things to tell you about this reading comics on your phone business. Visit MagicWhistle.com Sam Henderson on Wow Cool
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Wow Cool got a whole page in the old small press comics tabloid Comics F/X back in July 1989. The man incorrectly identified as Marc is actually the sculptor Paul Komoda. Sam cleverly altered minor details of Wow Cool history to protect the guilty parties.
Read moreI’m afraid you’ve already missed it. It happened. The Journalist Adam Curtis and Robert Del Naja and his band Massive Attack — with vocalists Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins) and Horace Andy — staged a show over some nine days at an abandoned railway station as part of...
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The latest issue of Maximum RockNRoll will be on newsstands any day now. It contains the expanded print version of the memoriam of Ramones creative director Arturo Vega that I put together with Punk Magazine guy John Holmstrom and photographer Godlis. You should go get that. There is a short...
Read moreI seriously can’t I cannot imagine a world that does not have Kim Thompson in it. One of my longest continuos professional relationships in the strange world of American comic books has suddenly come to an end. Nothing I can do about it. A big cosmic fuck you. I think I first dealt with...
Read moreIt seems fitting somehow to present some recent sounds from members of Brown Cuts Neighbors on Memorial Day, since one of our main members – James Kopta – has been gone from us for over a decade. The work lives on, however, and many of our videos will be presented by Jason Martin as...
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OK… That’s not really true. But this thing is a major potential time-suck of unusual proportion. Well… size of the earth proportion… or, the bit of it that Google Street View has gotten to… or the portion that developer Anton Wallein has deemed fit to drop you in...
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In PF Chang’s restaurants around the land there exists something like this… A former pay telephone alcove, with a shelf and an empty phone jack, guarded not by terracotta warriors, but by enlarged Family Circus cartoons by Bil Keane. PF Chang’s opened its first restaurant in...
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We just got a new scanner here in Wow Cool land, and instead of picking some stunning and masterful piece of art, I chose this crappy jam comic from long ago. Phil Felix stopped by Harvey Kurtzman’s class at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) one day back in the mid-late 80s to do a
Read moreNearly 25 years ago Scott McCloud – creator of Zot! and Understanding Comics – composed a draft of a Creators Bill of Rights for comic book artists. In recognition of World Intellectual Property Day we reproduce it here, and ask, have things improved in the quarter century since...
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In a classic case of ‘It always comes back to comics’ in my life, Pat ‘The Human Vise’ Povilaitis – who was the star of the Great Black Swamp Olde Time Strongman Picnic DVD that I made a few years ago with Atomic Athletic and Tiger Claw Martial Arts – appeared...
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