Shaenon K. Garrity's Journal

New Smithson!
Just the black-and-white art right now. Colors to follow.

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/smithson/series.php

I met the brilliant superstar French cartoonist Joann Sfar last night. He did a signing at Comic Relief in Berkeley, and then a bunch of us went out for dinner, mainly because Sfar wanted to meet Derek Kim (a.k.a. the poor man's Gene Yang, but Gene was out of town). Check out the amazing sketch he did in my copy of Vampire Loves:

I just read in Time that Sid Davis died last month. You may not know this, but I'm a big fan of educational and industrial filmstrips (yes really), and Sid Davis made some of the grimmest classroom social-guidance films of the 1950s, generally on such bleak subjects as drug abuse, gang violence, car accidents, and the dangers of trusting strangers. He might be most infamous for the frankly homophobic "Boys Beware" ("What Jimmy didn't realize was that Ralph was sick...a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual"), but it's only one of countless Sid Davis films in which children suffer hideous fates for minor infractions or, often, just bad attitudes. I'm bummed by the news. I mean, he was no Herk Harvey, but he was a major social-guidance filmmaker in the heyday of the era.

What else? Oh, right. It's time for another installment of Overlooked Manga Festival!

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