Found a really, really ratty secondhand copy of this, so I made an old-fashioned book cover out of a Whole Foods bag. 

My wife is always reading craft blogs, and I think I actually impressed her with this.  She should’ve seen my bookcovers in junior high!  (I think I could draw the whole Dookie cover from memory…)

Gerry Canavan pointed out this great paragraph from a review of Haruki Murakami’s new book:

Over the past 25 years, literary fiction has increasingly disdained the strict tenets of social realism. Our finest writers are now producing what is essentially science fiction (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), alternate history (Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) and absurdist fantasy (the short stories of George Saunders). A hot author such as Jonathan Lethem proudly introduces the work of Philip K. Dick for the Library of America. Neil Gaiman, creator of the Sandman series, has achieved rock-star status. We are living in an age when genre fiction — whether thrillers or graphic novels, children’s books or sf — seems far more exciting and relevant than well-wrought stories of adultery in Connecticut.

Hehe, I really hope that last sentence was a swipe at John Updike.

If you haven’t made your way over to UCLA’s new archive, “Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990,” you’re really in for a treat: 5,000 photographs from the LA Times and LA Daily News archives, all fully searchable by keyword and subject.

Here are a couple of comics-related photos:

Matt Groening in “The Bat Cave” (check out the cool comics/magazine rack):

Dr. Seuss at a book-signing

Councilman holding up “smutty” comic books, 1958

And, not comics related, but a pretty great picture of James Baldwin: