I wonder if the person who made the first OM NOM NOM image ever feels like R Crumb after his “Keep On Trucking” earned millions for someone else.

• The Associated Press: AP IMPACT: Before the CIA, there was the Pond
  "Created during World War II as a purely U.S. operation free of the perceived taint of European allies, the Pond existed for 13 years and was shrouded in secrecy for more than 50 years. It used sources that ranged from Nazi officials to Stalinists and, at one point, a French serial killer"
  (tags:pol war spy )

A composite of the character posters that came before.

If you were interested in the Lastwear waistcoat offer but their site crapped out on you due to, um, me having sent quite a lot of people there and thus vaporising their hosting… we’ve given Lastwear a home on Whitechapel to take questions, give further details on their scheme and basically do their business.

Kat Foisy is really good live.

And we’re back.

PDF-mag, this issue focussing on Parisian alt.culture. 4 euros a pop for this one, previous issues are free downloads.

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

• Extremely Bad Advice: Harassment Resources – National Post
  just fucking genius, really
  (tags:peopleiknow funny )

"…nobody should be older than Warren Ellis except maybe Alan Moore."

Norman Spinrad just emailed me this link to what appears to be the first of a series of posts about The Publishing Death Spiral, the core of which is this:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called “order to net.”

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Jess Nevins never fails to amaze me.

…if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that? Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet (Yes, I’m a stat wonk, I guess)…

And, at the link, you will find the link to said spreadsheet, as well as all the relevant history, explanations and details.

I like to think that if Cranes had formed last month rather than 20 years ago, this is what they’d sound like. "See Birds," Balam Acab.

(“Dan Delion”)

On my message board tonight:

* QUICK CENSUS Because I’m Senile – Who Here Makes Magazines?

* SUPERGOD #4 Preview

* New Comics Talk (28jul10)

* Exotic Virology

* R.I.P. JOHN CALLAHAN

Clothing company Lastwear are trying something interesting. They are offering a tunic-styled waistcoat for men and an underbust waistcoat for women for… whatever price you’re willing to pay over the base cost of the materials (USD $45 for the men’s, $40 for the women’s).

All the details are here. Lastwear make interesting clothes, and this is an interesting way to spread the word.

Laurenn McCubbin’s issue of DC Vertigo Comics’ MADAME XANADU is out this week. Laurenn’s an old friend and previous collaborator, and the online comic she did for us at Artbomb.net is still up for free reading.