• Like Snopes, But For Comics … Metafilter post on comics ‘urban legends’. For example, which Pet Shop Boy was a Marvel Editor?
  
  
• Defining the Mentalist in Fundamentalist … this post links to Stewart Lee’s TV program on blasphamy in comedy which is available on YouTube. The post includes a fabulous description of Alan Moore as ‘a strikingly hirsuite man in the manner of a wilderness prophet.’
  
  
• They Saved Hitler’s Self-Hating Jewish Sea-Monkeys … another comics urban legend… The twisted man behind those Sea-Monkeys and X-Ray Specs adverts in comics. From the post: ‘I think there’s some subclause to Godwin whereby the phrase “Sea-Monkeys” un-Godwins any post.’

‘I want to see a Batman that combines the cynic, the scholar, the daredevil, the businessman, the superhero, the wit, the lateral thinker , the aristocrat. He terrifies the guilty but he has great compassion for the weak and the downtrodden and will lay his life on the line for anybody who’s in trouble. He’s a master of yoga and meditation who has as much control over his body and his feelings as any human. He has a wider range of experiences than most people will dream of in ten lifetimes. This is not a one-note character! So, while I won’t pretend we all live on Sunnybrook Farm, I don’t think its appropriate – particularly in trying times – to present our fictional heroes as unsmiling vengeance machines. I’d rather Batman embodied the best that secular humanism has to offer – a sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim ‘n’ gritty Batman would be more likely to join the Taliban surely?’

‘The way that we worked on Lost Girls was actually different than the way I’ve worked on any other comic I’ve done. I’m known for turning out book-sized scripts with detailed written descriptions of each panel and all the dialogue and captions and sound effects. But Melinda had never worked with a scriptwriter before, so she looked at these enormous scripts I’d written for the first four or five episodes, and I think it crushed her spirit. She wasn’t comfortable, and she suggested that maybe I could do thumbnails, which is something I haven’t really done for other artists because I’m so lousy at drawing thumbnails. I have to write pages of explanation to tell them that this little blob down in the right-hand corner is actually the leading character’s head and shoulders. But Melinda, since she was living up here, I could talk her through all the breakdowns. She’d take my rough thumbnails and a pep talk and would go and turn out these lovely pages. Then I would do the dialoguing after the artwork was done, so that I could have a look at the expression that Melinda brought to the work. I could fine-tune the dialogue for the images so everything was much more synchronized. Lost Girls probably marks the closest that I’ve worked with an artist on a comic, perhaps unsurprisingly. With the nature of the material, it more or less demands an intimate relationship between the creators. Not just intimate in the usual physical sense, but also intimate in a mental and creative sense.’

Alan Moore: ‘…if we have any optimism in [Watchmen] it’ll be valid optimism because it won’t simply be based on ignoring the nasty facts of life. To me, just in that last panel, in Godfrey’s last line “I leave it entirely in your hands” – that’s talking to the reader as well… I leave it entirely in your hands, how do we sort out this Gordian Knot? If the question is who makes the world? then if there’s an answer it is that everybody does. Yeah, there’s people that seem to be in more immediate power than others but really the world is an elaborate series of accidents, coincidences and unbelievable synchronicities that people appear to be in control of but… well, think about the events in your own life, the things that have made really dramatic changes in you can be traced back to deciding to pick up a ballpoint pen or not pick it up.’