Weekend Reading: Steve Ditko, Larry Doyle, Wonder Woman and Doc Savage

Hey America, happy birthday to you this weekend. If you find yourself too full of Pabst Blue Ribbon, overcooked hamburgers, runny macaroni salad and apple pie with too much HFCS in it, and it’s too early to start shooting off those fireworks you smuggled over from North Carolina, do what I do: surf the internet.

Oh, Brother: Bob Weber, Jr. (creator of Slylock Fox) and Jay Stephens (Tutenstein, Land of Nod), have joined forces and launched a brand new comic strip. Alan Gardner at The Daily Cartoonist has the announcement and some samples, and it all looks really, really good.

Wonder Woman: When Nikki Finke calls recent changes to one of your iconic characters “dumbass stuff,” shouldn’t it be rethought?

Twin Spica: Looking for some good manga to spend your hard-earned money on? Rod Lott at Bookgasm has a recommendation for you, Twin Spica Volume O2 by Kou Yaginuma.

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Gray Morrow’s Batman as James Bond

I love looking at concept art, pencil drawings, and preliminary sketches. I find the best ones can make the gears in my overly-caffeinated brain go: Yeah, I’d totally buy something that looked like that.

I like Gray Morrow’s art a lot. I thought he was an excellent draftsman who never really got the credit that a lot of his contemporaries did. He also did a lot of work for relatively low-profile companies, which while it paid the bills probably didn’t contribute to his fanboy cred. You don’t hear fans going “Man, I loved that Morrow run on Superman/Conan/Avengers!” like you do about other artists of his generation because he didn’t have long runs on the bigger titles of his day. Since he was also an in-demand commercial artist who painted tons of book covers, worked on newspaper strips like Tarzan, and did other illustration work, I assume he was too busy to do three years on Thor.

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