If I don’t note this down now I will totally forget. Meredith Yayanos, whom many of you probably now know as co-founder of COILHOUSE magazine, is on the radio today:

Good old Greg Scharpen has a show over on KALX Radio called "Women Hold Up Half the Sky" and he’ll be chatting with me tomorrow (Saturday) about music, madness, magazine-running and lawd knows what else. If you’d like some Mercentric brunch-time entertainment, please do tune in at 11am PST and have a mimosa with us.

That’s 11am PST at this link.

From episode 36. Available right here. 11" x 17".

(Embiggened image)

Shit, it’s been such an insane day, I totally forgot to post the reminder here: FREAKANGELS episode 37 went up at noon.

Buy the collection so I can buy firewood.

Just a quick sweep:

* Ha ha ha Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada’s joined Twitter and already people are warning him not to click on links I post. Fraction and McKelvie are spoiling my fun. Again.

* Zofia Szeretlek:

* Coilhouse report that SKIN TWO magazine is shutting down, therefore ruining the lives of a generation of alt.boys who were expecting to be able to buy the magazine and wank themselves into a foamy coma while assuring themselves it wasn’t really porn.

* A general reminder that Jean Snow always finds fascinating stuff in Tokyo and you should read him if you don’t already.

* Jamais Cascio on the probability of new political power structures by 2030.

* As I mentioned yesterday on Bad Signal, Jamaica Dyer’s new webcomic is wonderful and also fucked-up:

* From Molly Porkshanks’ sketchbook:

I’ve been following Imran Schah’s photography on Flickr for some while now, as he has a fantastic eye and travels extensively. Today’s post from him is striking:

A tragic incident in Peshawar, a bomb exploded killed 22 and injured more than
60 people, I was on the spot, a fire broke out…

Someone called Julia, who plainly didn’t include her last name for fear of reprisals, sent me a link. It came with the message "I’m just sending you this because you posted that damned video of the couple fucking in the dead bear. Revenge is sweet!"

So, you know… I clicked it.

And it bears reposting, because it is instructional. People like the man in the video, you see, are all around you. Every day. Every single day, you bump into someone like this, and you don’t know it. You must understand the true nature of the 21st Century Western human.

It is here.

I am sorry.

Been meaning to write something up about the general phenomenon for weeks, but a news story today kind of puts it front and centre:

Police in south-east Nigeria have arrested a man who claimed to have killed 110 child "witches".

See, this isn’t a cute funny story for silly season, and it’s not even "weird" in the way that gets it passed around the internet for lulz. What it is, is this:

Belief in witchcraft is strong across the country but a fear of child witches has become widespread in Akwa Ibom State since 1990s. Now children are blamed for all kinds of misfortune that befalls their families. They are abandoned or sold to child traffickers who then indenture them as house-workers in other parts of Nigeria or into prostitution. Others are violently exorcised to rid the child of the "demons".

Exorcism victims seen by CRARN in the past include a child who had nails driven into her head.

Earlier this week Mr Ikpe-Itauma said a six-year-old child was brought to their rescue centre after clambering out of a fast-flowing river. "The boy’s uncle was experiencing painful swelling in his legs," Mr Ikpe-Itauma told the BBC. "He concluded the child was a witch and had placed a curse on him, so he took him on his bicycle to the river and threw him in."

Six pages at CBR.

And remember: I don’t set the prices on Marvel comics.

Just a frightening shitload of things to get done today, so I’m just going to take a quick pass through FeedDemon and then disappear. I’m leaving Twitter on, but reserving actual brainpower for the hideous pile of work that has manifested itself today. So…

* This is now available for sale. I may have to dust the dead bats out of my wallet.

* D’Israeli’s poster for the Aviles comics festival. Click for embiggening options.

* Tristan Crane:

* Siege:

* How Kieron Gillen structures a piece of fiction. It involves a fridge.

* Comics artist Ben Oliver has started posting new pieces again.

* Kid Shirt, wearing the head that he usually keeps in his stomach that has the name kek-w, writes a brain-mangling summation of fringe musics in 2008. Sort of.

• Scar literature – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "Scar literature or literature of the wounded is a genre of Chinese literature which emerged in the late 1970s, soon after the death of Mao Zedong, portraying the sufferings of cadres and intellectuals during the the tragic experiences of the Cultural Revolution and the rule of the Gang of Four"
  (tags:culture books pol )

As seen on Channel 4’s THE IT CROWD, the Diesel Sweeties Elitism Diagram is now available on a hoodie as well as a t-shirt and tote. Buy one to throw in the face of the snotty git in your life today.

Kemper Norton, whom a few thousand of you will know from the 4am podcasts, has released a new EP into the wild, for free. It’s called A23, and what he’s done is put the link to the zipfile in the header to the post I’m linking you to. I would link you directly to it, but when I tried it completely crashed my blogging client program. That filthy fucking drunk Norton has done Cornish magic on it or something.

Anyway, it’s four tracks and a document full of ephemera and notes, and it’s great.

…four tracks based on our experiences traveling that thoroughfare. These include glazed boredom , traffic rage , and visions of places glimpsed through tired rain-spattered windows. Enjoy!

For those unfamiliar , the A23 is a commuter artery , an accident greyspot and a cursed Sussex institution.

She’s got four of these shirts left at her Etsy store:

For those of you who don’t drop into the Ignition City diary thread on Whitechapel, here’s Gianluca’s pencilled art for the cover to #1, due next spring:

1. Untitled, 2. fabrica-17, 3. hexed 3, 4. 36add, 5. Major Arcana card draft, 6. CLOSING DREAMS

Michael Chabon interviewed:

"At different times, I’ve had various favorites," he said. "I’ll just say one of the ones I’ve most enjoyed recently is ’Planetary,’ a series by Warren Ellis, drawn by John Cassaday. It’s wonderful stuff, very self-aware.

And for those who will inevitably ask, John seems to now be into the last half of #27.

I’ve never read KAVALIER AND CLAY, because, really, I don’t need to spend spare time reading about dying in comics, but if you’ve gotten through the last two years without reading THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION then you are a fool.

• Here Comes “Atompunk.” And It’s Dutch. So there | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
  "Sovjet styling, underground cinema, Googie architectuur, Space and Sputnik, moonlanding, superhero-comi, art & radioactivity, the rise of the US military/industrial complex & the fall-out of Tsjernobyl"
  (tags:ATOMPUNK )

And now I have your attention: the memorial benefit Lenora organised in remembrance of her longtime friend, the recently deceased bassist Gidget Gein, is on tonight in Los Angeles: Dragonfly, 6510 Santa Monica Blvd, doors open at 9pm, $10 entry.

1. Testing the Nikon : Caen – Chateau, 2. Santa Monica ice rink, near Boing Boing tv studio., 3. Eating bugs by the door, 4. I HAVE THIRTY-THREE BIG IDEAS, 5. Keep It Bottled Up, 6. sad plant