* At Robot 6, Renee French discusses her new book H Day with Tim O’Shea. She also updates the status of work-in-progress Towcester Lodge: ” I filled two notebooks cover to cover with dialogue and story and drawings for Towcester Lodge and then one day a friend came over and we did a timeline of the story on a roll of tracing paper. It took all day. Totally ridiculous. And then I unrolled the timeline and no kidding it went down the hall and hit the far end of the house and there was still more to go. I realized it would take me like 10 years to finish a book like that, and I didn’t feel I could spend that much time on that book.”

* At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon shares his thoughts on the just-concluded New York Comic Con. Tom also had a links to a number of interesting items, including: New Ditko, Repaneled, and how Scott Pilgrim is Saving Comics (told you so back in ‘04!).

* At Comics Comics, Jeet Heer revisits David Hajdu’s great comics history book The Ten-Cent Plague: “I thought he was a bit too dismissive of humour comics, which were as much an industry mainstay as superheroes or horror. You don’t get a sense from the book that far more kids were reading Dell comics, including the best work of Barks and Stanley, than reading EC. And many kids, like the young Crumb or S. Clay Wilson, read both.” More in the link.

* Love and Rocktober continues at Jaunty Sean T.’s place as Mr. Collins looks at Penny Century: “Jaime takes this opportunity to indulge himself, if not his characters. He transforms Ray D. into a sort of hard-boiled hard-luck case, whose first-person narration captions speak of falling in with femme fatale Penny and cruising for action like the least violent installment of Sin City ever. ” More in the link.

— Alan David Doane

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