Shaenon K. Garrity's Journal

New Smithson!
http://www.smithsoncomic.com

Is there anything more exciting in a superhero comic than people at lunch talking? How about people at lunch NOT talking? Now we're gettin' revved up!

Gemma's T-shirt, as any culturally literate person should be well aware, was famously modelled by Curtis "Booger" Armstrong in the original Revenge of the Nerds.

And I certainly hope you didn't miss Andrew's latest installment of The Chronicles of William Bazillion!

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/andrew/bazillion

If you click the Books and Merchandise link at the top of Andrew's site, you'll see that he now has a ton of minicomics for sale, including a brand-new, only-available-in-print William Bazillion prequel, The Max O'Millions Adventure Society in: The Idol of Svarbald, drawn by Andrew and written by me.

I'm out of town this week, so no Overlooked Manga Festival today. I promise it'll be back next week with some serious hardboiled 1970s action, and I think the cool manga nerds in the audience know what that means. In the meantime, I might as well recommend a couple of American-type comics instead. Friends of Lulu has just released its latest anthology, The Girls' Guide to Guys' Stuff, featuring comics by a ton of great cartoonists like Lark Pien, Hellen Jo, Julia Wertz, Leigh Dragoon, Tatiana Gill, Abby Denson, Dorothy Gambrell, Emily Flake, Debbie Huey...actually, the list goes on for a while. Plus illustrations by Raina Telgemeier! So check that out.

Also, you absolutely positively without question have to read Bookhunter, the latest graphic novel by real-life mad genius Jason Shiga. Shiga, an Oakland librarian with a degree in pure mathematics from Berkeley, has created an hardboiled 1970s crime thriller (that genre just seems to keep coming up lately wherever comics are awesome) about the library police. It's brilliant, hilarious, and unfathomable in that special Shiga way, and you owe it to yourself to read it. Shaenon out.