Back Where We Don’t Belong

Pood joins the thronging masses in the repopulation of paper! As the miniature monoliths of electronic com accessories glitter in the distance, we squat in the abandoned forests of converted pulp!

It’s zeitgeist o’clock; the advertising circulars of old are replaced by the Desert Island comic-shoppe’s Smoke Signal paper, full of diverse crazy comic pioneering (www.desertislandbrooklyn.com). It’s like the comic section took over the whole paper, and the proprietor told me their printer was thankful for the salvation of the comic millennium as the newspapers they used to produce suffer a spot of extinction.

McSweeney’s bid for re-evolution, The San Francisco Panorama (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/SFPanoramaPR.html), had a great funnypaper filling, with a surprising volume of spaceman & superhero flavoring from unusual suspects like Tomine and Clowes and some character-breaking futility from a hilarious indie-fied Erik Larsen.

The New York Times Magazine has lost its comics section again, but one snuck into the new lit journal Cousin Corinne’s Reminder (http://www.bookcourt.org/cousincorinne/), from the back of the truck straight to the Mocca Fest where pood débyood. A high-culture colony tellingly stocked by inhabitants of the leading webcomics outpost ACT-I-VATE (http://www.act-i-vate.com/), reclaiming print with a great pop-noir cover by Mike Cavallaro, post-Eisner coloring-book memoir and anonymous portraiture by Jonathan Lethem & Dean Haspiel, global-suburb slapstick by Tim Hall & Jennifer Hayden, a quiet odyssey of learning how to let things not fit by Michel Fiffe, a microbial romance comic by Kat Roberts and a post-New Yorker Easter Bunny candid back-cover from Jen Ferguson.

And there’s always pood, blanketing the earth’s parkbench and listening for the trees falling in the woods. Start the presses and full speed aft!