Blokhedz Act 2: Paid in Full is up over at MissionG.

Title kind of says it all, doesn’t it? Check out this preview of The Essex County Complete, including an introduction by Darwyn Cooke, at Top Shelf’s page.

Rafael Grampa’s Batman & Robin, that is. I found this via Sean Witzke, who found it via Grampa’s flickr.

I dig it.

Jack Johnson was the son of two slaves and one of the greatest boxers who ever lived. He entered a sport that had previously been the province of white males and dominated. It’s probably fair to say that he was one of the first high-profile black athletes. He had endorsement deals, interviews, and was probably even the originator of black athletes marrying white chicks (no oj simpson). He may have been a little more Mike Tyson than Muhammad Ali, but the man’s skills were undeniable. You couldn’t ignore him if you wanted to.

A lot of people probably wanted to ignore him. Jack was loud, brash, and could lean almost anybody who stepped into the ring. He was a demolisher, and he’s the reason why the idea of a “Great White Hope” exists. His wins were seen as a genuine insult to many people of the time, to the point that James Jeffries came out of retirement for the express purpose of putting him down to show that whites were better than blacks. Spoiler: Jeffries lost in the 15th.

Jack Johnson was a monster, and an inspiration to many. The relationship between blacks and sports has often been a contentious one, but it’s also one that’s given many a kid hope for the future. Heroes are heroes, and if you see someone like you doing something amazing, that sticks with you.

Why am I talking about this? A friend pointed me to a Miles Davis album last night, “A Tribute to Jack Johnson.” Two tracks, 50 minutes of music. I figured I’d hop on AmazonMP3 and buy it. Once I got there, I found a surprise. Click this picture.

Ten bucks for the album!? But, look closer. Each track costs .99. You can get 50 minutes of good jazz for a buck ninety-eight. That’s two dollars. That’s not even lunch money, you probably spend more than that on coffee.

So order A Tribute To Jack Johnson and find me somebody who wants to draw, or has drawn, a comic about black boxers.

Cheryl Lynn has another entry in her Black Trinity run. This time, it’s on Martha Washington, one of my favorite characters, as the Black Reality.

For the Black Reality is that you have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition. Martha works four times as hard and gets all of it. She saves her country numerous times. She exposes her detractors for the dangerous and deluded beings they are. Not for glory, but because her will and desire for freedom is simply that strong. She is that special.

DC’s The Source blog put up a preview of the new Joe Casey/Chriscross joint, Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance.

FINAL CRISIS AFTERMATH: DANCE #1
Written by Joe Casey
Art by ChrisCross
Cover by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau
Japan’s Super Young Team wants nothing more than to be seen as heroes in the eyes of their adoring public. Unfortunately, their adventures during FINAL CRISIS have gone unnoticed, and they’ve been reduced to performing at public appearances and on various TV shows literally dancing for their livelihood. But the appearance of a new American teammate and a deadly threat complicates the motives of the team as they try and find what truly makes somebody not just a hero, but a sensational hero. Discover the path to greatness in this exciting 6-issue miniseries!

Even better, Brandon Thomas interviewed Joe Casey about the book and his other work. Casey is off Youngblood, so I’m off that book, too. Plus, he says something I agree with 100% on Obama comics:

JC: No way. That move is so played out. Let the guy be the President now, for chrissakes. I think he’s all through being a cheap marketing ploy, a shortcut to making a quick blast of cash in the Direct Market, don’t you?

Let me tell you about James Howard. He’s a stand up gentlemen and one of my oldest internet friends. If I was Jigsaw, he’d be Loony Bin Jim, only instead of being held up in an asylum where a disgusting fat man steals his applesauce, he’s in Canada where… I’m sorry, I completely lost track of where I was going with this.

James is currently writing a blog called Gone East to Western. At first I was curious as to why we didn’t have a link to it until now, but then I realized, oh yeah, he only started updating it recently. Maybe he’s busy writing that guest article I commissioned him to do like two years ago.

Anyway, he did a recent update about a library mural that he’s forced to see day in and day out. Despite the butt-ugly painting that suggest that different cultures (which includes people without legs, judging from the people in the center) can enjoy library services together, the mural is ripe of things that would get your ass kicked out of any self-respecting library.

Give it a read. It’s funny stuff.

Today’s Sunday interview is Tom Spurgeon versus Darwyn Cooke, with tag team assists from Scott Dunbier and Ed Brubaker. This is an interview that’s essentially custom built for me, as Brubaker and Cooke have, together and separately, created some of my favorite comics. Selina’s Big Score and their work on Catwoman are some of the best crime comics via superheroes ever, hands down.

It’s a conversation about Cooke’s Parker books, at least to begin with. However, it soon spirals off into a discussion of Donald Westlake’s body of work, what makes a good crime tale, and other must-read topics.

COOKE: It wasn’t news, but he wrote me the one time that the whole point of the series was an exercise at the beginning to see if he could write a character who’s completely internal. Where all the emotional content is internalized to the point where the only indication you get of how they might be feeling is how they act physically. I guess the book 361, which has the Westlake name on it, not the Stark name, is the first book where he first experimented with that approach. And then he rolled right into The Hunter. I’d say by the time you get to The Outfit, the third book in the series, he’s caught lightning in a bottle.

It’s another long and excellent read, like the rest of Spurgeon’s interviews.

Cheryl Lynn and I play this game on twitter. I’ll post a link to something I find interesting/funny/horrible, and she’ll click it and end up thirsting for vengeance and retaliate a few days later. I’m pretty sure that being linked to this essay on scans_daily is the latest volley in our cold war 2.0, and probably payback for the time that I called Brother Voodoo the Cam’ron of comics.

I’d actually slotted the post away to write about today, because it’s so wholly horrible. Setting aside the word “Thorm,” I could take issue with

Because as a starting point for hooking up 2 characters go, “storm deities living in New York” makes a heck of a lot more sense than “two black Africans who have met maybe twice”.

or

I always liked that aspect about how Storm’s features were the distilation of the best of the various human racial groups, something that pretty much seems to have been tossed by the wayside.

or

Who drew it? (i can’t read the signature) Storm’s features are so unique and diverse.

I mean, the last one bugs me on a grammar level (you can’t be “so” unique like lights can’t be “so” off) and a race level. I would’ve had this short-ish essay springboarding from the topic of Storm being some ridiculous mesh of all races into my absolute loathing of use of the terms urban/ethnic/exotic/diverse when all you really want to say is “black” or “not white.”

I think it would’ve been pretty good, honestly. I haven’t really dug into race&comics since black history month, and I rarely see other people doing it regularly. I was starting to feel that itch again. But, Cheryl beat me to it with this jawn, her long-awaited essay on the female half of Black Trinity. I wrote last year about Luke Cage as the Black Reality, Shilo Norman as the Black Fantasy, and Black Panther as the Black Ideal. Three aspects of one people: pure wish fulfillment, reality, and then the best we can hope to be.

Cheryl’s first entry is on Storm as the Black Fantasy. In her own words:

Today we are going to talk about the Black Fantasy from the female perspective. And the Black Fantasy is Storm. Storm is what black women want, or are constantly informed by the media that they should want, but are also told that they never will achieve. To be loved and to be beautiful. To be free. To be special.

Basically, you need to read it, and after you read it, you need to digg it. Link it around if you can. I noticed that it’s on Comics Blips, which is kind of like a baby digg. Get it out there.

Cheryl Lynn threw a link to Wide Awake Online up on Twitter yesterday, with a comment about how she liked the art. I figured I’d give it a look since she’s an Adam Warren fan, like all right-minded people.

What I found was pretty interesting. The artist, Mirco Pierfederici (some slight NSFW down the page), is an Italian cat who’s only done a few works in English, near as I can tell. I read Wide Awake, though, and was pretty impressed. His style has shades of Adam Hughes, Daniel Acuña, and Ryan Sook. I’m fairly certain that he does his own colors, as well, which is very neat. It’s an attractive style, and one that’s good enough for me to keep reading.

It’s a short look at the series, but pretty neat. Interesting, Greg Rucka’s buddy Eric Trautmann and Brandon Jerwa are writing it. Two decently established comics pros doing a free webcomic seems like it should be a bigger deal than it is. The only other guy I can think of who’s doing that off the top of my head is Warren Ellis, and maybe some of the Zuda crew.

The dreams of Amanda Carter, the main character, come to life every time she sleeps. It’s clear that there’s something else behind it, and finding out what that’s going to be is going to be pretty cool, I hope. Trautmann wrote a post about the series here with some background info. It updates weekly.

Johanna Draper-Carlson wrote a post about another new webcomic. 2D Goggles is a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Grandparents of modern computing. It’s a fun little ditty about equations, numbers, and science, but manages to be amazingly entertaining despite all of the gross science involved.

It’s a pretty clever strip, with lots of fun bits for careful readers. The Twitter joke is probably my favorite, but Ada thinking “Ponies + Numbers = :D” is also very funny to me. It’s totally a “Girls like ponies” joke, but it works. If you like historical fiction and comedy, or either of them, click on through.