Too lazy to Google.

I would like to know two things:

1. When "No quarter asked, none given." was first used in a comic book.
2. When it was used a second time.

The first is forgivable. The second is not.

Comic book writers: Please never use this cliché or any of its variants, except in the broadest of parodies, or, I suppose, in reference to a mute, unsuccessful beggar.

Thank you.

Bonus link!

The reluctant comics-based Valentine.

(click for slightly larger version)

This would have been timely if Blogger had let me publish it. Oh well.

Why I love comics.

Sometimes, I'll read something—a story, a page, a single panel—and realize that an artist I've never met has tapped into a part of my life, rendering it for a worldwide audience.

Or as Roberta Flack sang,

I felt all flushed with fever, embarrassed by the crowd,
I felt he found my letters and read each one out loud.

Of course, one usually hopes that it wouldn't be as embarrassing as the page that spoke to me in Craig Thompson's Carnet De Voyage. This was my life from 1997 to 2002:

(Click to see the full page.)

I laughed until I stopped[1].

From the same book, here are some adorable porcupines:


______
[1] For further hilarity, see also: John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise. The list of 700 hobo names is of particular interest to those conversant in the nerdly arts.

Shock! Horror!

I'm outraged, let me tell you.

Thanks to Mike's post last week, I was looking forward to tonight's Bones, only to find a disturbingly biased portrayal of comic readers.

While investigating the death of a teenager who dressed like a superhero, Bones and Angel come across a handful of elderly teenagers on the roof of a comic shop, also dressed vaguely as superheroes.

What about the dozens of us who hang out on the roof of Borders and pretend to travel though Europe or to North Korea, grow up in Iran, pee on our brothers, become involved in a pansexual love triangle, go to a school of badasses in Japan, live in a Bronx tenement, collect comic books, or wreak vengeance on an Irish mob family who betrayed us?

Shame on you, 20th Century Fox Television.