BIG BIG BIG pood News!!! Comics great Joe Staton in Pood no. 4!

Hey There Poodsters!This is without a doubt, the biggest, most spectacular PoodNews yet!  The legendary Mr. JOE STATON--he of the beloved E-Man, Scooby-Doo, Green Lantern and now one half of the heralded team in charge of revitalizing the legendary-DICK TRACY--- will be joining the pood crew for issue no. 4 of the world's biggest comics newspaper!
Kevin and I are both big, big fanboys when it comes to the great, great E-Man-- one of the most original and entertaining creations of the bronze age of comics-so we couldn't be more thrilled to welcome Joe aboard. We can't wait to see what he's cooking up for this ish!(my own early-90's comic hero, Dr. Speck, is in no small way indebted to the work of Joe and partner Nick Cuti on E-Man, so this is a big thrill for me, believe me!)
So--the details:
Pood no.  4 can be ordered in the July issue of Previews; page 246 under the BIG IF COMICS imprint, order code: JUL110903 F POOD #4(MR).
July's Previews is available at your local comic shop on June 29th!
(*** retailers--be sure to check out the incentive offer!)

Pood no.4 is shaping up to be our biggest, most spectacular issue yet--with some exciting new faces added to the mix! For example:
the esteemed Eisner -winner Nick Abadzis,  

"Henry and Glenn Forever"'s Tom Neely

order Tom's newest graphic novel; "The Wolf" here

and most recently, the dynamic Avi Spivak.

but WAIT!!!
that's not all!

Eisner nominee Jim Rugg had told us he has something truly astounding planned for this ish--SO astounding in fact, that we've given him the entirety of the double-page centerfold to work his magic upon!
And finally-last but not least
-pood 4 continues to feature the work of some of comicdom's brightest lights!
creators such as:

Hans Rickheit
Andres Vera Martinez
Ines Estrada
Tobias Tak
J.T. Dockery
Adam McGovern
Paolo Leandri
Kevin Mutch
& yours truly, GG

So what's the next step? What do you need to do to make your life complete?
ORDER POOD NO.4 from the JULY "PREVIEWS"--out on June 29th!
Go directly to PAGE 246, BIG IF COMICS--look for the image at the top of this blog entry--and write in the order number: JUL110903 F POOD #4(MR)

stay tuned! We'll keep you posted with the latest, greatest pood no.4 news! This one's got it all!

Not Your Parents’ Basement

Deep in the heart of pood (the free city-state of Brooklyn), I ventured to the second annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival on Dec. 4.

Just as pood’s newsprint glory reverse-engineers the iPad, the Yeah Dude Comics collective downsampled Avatar with the giant blue-and-red-cellophane-shades 3-D print comic Math Fiction. Like some optional universe’s blacklight posters from the 1930s, the black-and-white pages of “Emonman” (I think) don’t pitch extraterrestrial spears toward you but yank you into a weird geometric valhalla; Ian Harker’s “Solipso,” while tamping down the 3-D, cracks the tenth wall of narrative experience with the simple device of text you need to rotate the page to read, making you physically move through the comic, while a narrative drone blows your mind with quantum slang like the dropped connections of some subspace radio station with only two faces of its dodecahedral hard-text visible in this plane. True to his self-centric name, Solipso travels through sheer willed shifts of perspective. After that, Josh Burggraf’s “LHC” (I guess) carves new braingrooves with its Scioli-Mucha nuclear-grail epic of whateverness. After the third time I read Math Fiction a few pages began to come out in my hands, and that was awesome, too.

The same folks and others produce one of pood’s partners in the pulp uprising, Secret Prison, and you could find all three issues at the Fest. Free and worth five times that, in the new one Steve Peters & Bianca Alu-Marr navigate not just the scale but the scope of big pages, with a spiraling Buddhist narrative; their poster-like projection is as deep as it is tall. Aidan Koch supplies a lovely cover and center-spread of gallery-like floating images, and pood’s own Jim Rugg rips out a random page of some retro-modern romance comic.

…with his own visual response-single from some mythic pending-divorce comic in the new 7th issue of Smoke Signal, produced by the Desert Island comic ’n’ art shop, co-presenters of the Fest. Always the anti-predictable anthology you find out you were waiting for, the issue is also distinguished by great post-psychedelic excess from Doug Allen & Gary Leib, eloquent abstraction from Charles Frickin’ Burns, and sprawlingly intricate two-page tabloid massifs from Dan Zettwoch and Tim Lane.

Smoke Signal is as well-selected as the Fest itself’s cast of characters was curated; diagonal from the Yeah Dude Comics table was the shrewdly named Traditional Comics, front operation for the seditious press of Ben Marra. New to the show and just in time for the Valerie Plame movie and the national Republican remake, Marra’s The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd casts the mildly dissident columnist in everyone’s secret-agent daydream, shooting it out with Cheney’s ninja goons, seducing Scooter Libby and keeping America safe for gratuitous cheesecake and self-important crusades in the most hopeless, hilarious romp of deadly oversimplification and propaganda-spewing unintentional clowns since Harker’s The Epic and True* Life Story of Che Guevara and Rugg’s Rambo 3.5 (just to show how mystically aligned all elements of this show were).

I also liked the well-mannered melancholy of Sully’s The Hipless Boy (Conundrum Press) and the dystopian sitcoms and Darwinian funny animals of Joshua W. Cotter’s Barbara in the Sky with Neil Diamonds (AdHouse) -- both from ’09 but new-to-me -- and the fake Sunday-supplement The Enquirer Dharbin, a one-man jam comic from the many voices in Dustin Harbin’s head (just to show how foolish it is to impose narrative on so fruitfully diverse a show. Except for The Dharbin’s newsprint tie-in and Cotter’s collection being sourced from his own indie strips in the Kansas City Star. It’s still weird enough.).

They moved it to a bigger church basement this year but it will always be the right place to plot a revolution.

Look Out!Monsters Sale!

It's a SALE! A big, oversize comic book basement clearing bonanza! That's right poodsters--It's time to put a new roof on the barn--and that means we need cash, cold hard cash gang! So--the first big Look Out!Monsters publishing-- blow-out the old stock- summer-steel roof and gutter sale is taking place over at www.lookoutmonsters.com- RIGHT NOW!--where you will find all kinds of groovy goodies at low,low prices! You heard it! Low LOW Prices! Prices have been slashed-SLASHED- to make room for new models and to help me buy some metal roofing! That's right-I'm practically giving this stuff away--cos I have boxes of my own AWARD-WINNING Comics--that's right-comics that have won an award--just waiting for some lucky investment conscious comics collector to abscond with! Think of it! A comic that has won an award-for your very own--all for $5. that's right-a comic book that has won an award--for five smackeroos! You don't get an award--just to make that clear--but you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you own a comic book that at one time won an award.
And then there are other NON-AWARD WINNING comic books for sale! Even better! Comics that have not won awards! So--put that in you pipe and smoke it! You can have non-award winning comics by this very artist at cheap, bargain basement prices
and they are going fast-FAST--over at www.lookoutmonsters.com! So hurry up! Don't let this momentous occasion pass you by! head on over to www.lookoutmonsters.com today! Tell em pood sent ya--and see what it gets you!