At the risk of being called a dweeb, I confess that I think the Post’s new blog on comic strips, Comic Riffs, is pretty great. In its first few days, cartoonist Michael Cavna has interviewed Garry Trudeau, taken his shots at Garfield and Sally Forth, and questioned the very necessity of Beetle Bailey. My questions: Why is Bizarro, the best one-panel strip currently going, relegated to Express? Who came up with the truly brilliant idea of running the Spanish version of Ziggy in the Onion? And why didn’t Just Posted, the Post blog that’s supposed to tell me about all the cool new stuff the Post is doing, tell me about Comic Riffs?

There’s more to Woodley Park than feuding Indian restaurants. Who knew? While wandering around in the rain yesterday, I found one of the neighborhood’s new assets: the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in what used to be a nasty little restaurant, Thai Town. (”Trust me,” says Stanford in Washington’s program cooridinator Janine Chen, “you should have seen the kitchen.”)

The building was built in the early 1900s and included a grocery store front, which has been partially restored, says Chen. It also includes Stanford U’s program, where students work at internships during the day and live in the building the rest of the time. The gallery space at 2655 Connecticut Ave. NW opened in October and is currently showing its third and most popular exhibit, “Leadership: Oliphant Cartoons & Sculpture from the Bush Years.”

Pat Oliphant, a classic and fantastic skewerist, lets loose on Bush and Cheney, of couse, with fine contributions to the Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Gonzales canons. One of his most brilliant works, though, concerns the Clintons‘ departure. Both are shown walking out of the White House gates loaded down with lamps, rugs, artwork—a lambast on B.C.’s obsession with his legacy and the prospect of H.C.’s return down the road. For a native Australian, Oliphant’s pretty prescient about U.S. politics.

But the exhibit’s greatest highlight, by my estimation anyway, was Oliphant’s description of a speech he gave to a D.C. room lousy with Republicans, including the sitting president at the time, Gerald R. Ford. Oliphant always drew Ford with a Band-Aid across his head, a comment on the late prez’s trademark clumsiness. Following Oliphant’s speech, the artist walked over to Ford and actually drew said Band-Aid on the man’s actual head. Ford, with his also-trademark good humor, sat perfectly still and grinned the whole time. A secret service agent, while also grinning, let Oliphant know that he would not be drawing on the president ever again. Later and as a tribute, Oliphant drew a panel with a laughing , handsome Ford—sans Band-Aid.

The traveling exhibit will be up through July 11.

photo by dbking

Brenda Starr Reporter is raising eyebrows if not other things with a suggestive series of strips that has Timothy J. McNulty, the Chicago Tribune’s public editor asking questions. The strip he’s talking about features this panel, which he says despite appearances isn’t about sex. Subsequent strips seem to weaken this argument somewhat.

What I’m wondering is: When did Brenda Starr Reporter get so edgy? Next thing you know, we’re gonna find out Mark Trail’s a bear! I always lumped Brenda Starr in with Mary Worth and Rex Morgan, M.D. as the “boring comics.” That seems to have been a mistake.

Screw Washingtonians out of bluegrass. Deny them decent bagels, deprive them of congressional representation, suggest that perhaps the dead aren’t guiding the results of their football games.

But mess with their comics and you’ve got trouble.

Even the comics you’ve barely glanced at have their partisans, and they write letters!

Last November, faced with budget cuts demanded by our new owners, we decided to stop running comics in the classifieds section and to cease commissioning weekly illustrations for Savage Love and News of the Weird. This was not a fun decision—we’re big fans of Robert Ullman and Shawn Belschwender, the columns’ respective illustrators. I grew up reading “Refrigerator Johnny” in the City Paper and loved Shawn’s work in Chickfactor (like this one, which still haunts me).

We made the best of a bad situation: Both artists agreed to do permanent illustrations for their columns, both of which debuted last week. And we’ll use them as illustrators when we can; Rob illustrated last week’s Young & Hungry column, for instance.

On his blog, Rob encouraged fans of his work to write in and complain that we were discontinuing the Savage Love illustrations. He asked me if I’d mind; I said I didn’t, but I think he was a bit disingenuous in the post: “I think it’s more of a budget thing than a they-think-I-suck thing,” he wrote, knowing well that it was a budget thing. He also neglected to mention that we’d hired him to do the permanent illustration.

Write in they did. The cause was taken up by ComicsDC. We got a few letters every week from then on; unfortunately, after publishing the first two we were hit with even worse budget news and had to lay off five people. I’m sympathetic to those who think dropping weekly illustrations is the death knell of this paper, but since we can’t afford to keep, say, our food critic on staff, artwork for syndicated content is not foremost in my thoughts. Last week we ran a letter about dropping our comics. Apparently, swearing in a letter will get you mentioned on Editor & Publisher’s blog.

There’s no end in sight for this new era of austerity at the City Paper (and it’s not like we were stirring organic milk from monogamous, grass-fed cows into our coffee to begin with). I hope our readers will continue letting us know how these changes affect their experience with the paper. Even if it means I’m gritting my teeth about yet another friend of Rob’s writing in.

Starting early next year, the Weekend section of the Washington Post will no longer be running the hilarious musings of Ken Fisher, aka “Ruben Bolling,” creator of the “Tom the Dancing Bug” strip. The decision ends a run of 10-plus years for the strip, which is a staple of the alternative news universe and runs in approximately 50 papers.

Weekend editor Tracy Grant reports that when she mentioned the strip to her staffers, no one said, “Oh, we must keep it!” After such a long run, says Grant, the strip has “probably run its course.”

Fisher pronounced himself “extremely disappointed” in the decision, noting that the Weekend section placement was “a jewel of my syndication efforts.” But Fisher reports that Grant said the decision isn’t irreversible, meaning that “readers should know that they have that power if they should choose to exercise it.” Let the angry e-mails begin!

I’ve been spending more money on music than clothes and reading comic books (well, graphic novels). I realize that’s a ridiculously gender-biased thing to say. What I mean is I wish my mom had bought me X-Men instead of Archie. She also tried to replace my Stephen King novels with Nancy Drew. Mom, what were you trying to do to me?!

To her credit, she came home with an electronics kit after I started dissecting all the radios in the house.

Anyway, I sort of guiltily devoured the first in the Last Man series. It’s about what happens when all the men on earth die — except for one — and the women take over. As a dude I know pointed out last night, the ladies kinda screw everything up. Yeah. But I wonder what would happen if the men were left without women.

Newspaper folks with highfalutin attitudes about how they’re doing God’s work are easily brought down to earth by their readers, who have a way of getting outraged at the relatively irrelevant things newspapers do. Run a 10,000-word story about corruption and a nation snoozes; cancel Zippy the Pinhead and prepare for readers storming the lobby of the building. An editor I know is still disappointed that City Paper no longer runs Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, which we removed from our pages nearly a decade ago. It’s a no-win situation. Making room for fresh blood gets you accused of messing with tradition; sticking with longtime favorites generates bitchy letters from local experimental musicians.

I have no real say in the matter—if I did, we’d be running this strip every week. But I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to say that anybody who cares about comics can get excited about this Friday’s PEN/Faulkner event featuring Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, and Chris Ware. All three are elders to an extent, gaining fame in the ’90s for (respectively) Dykes to Watch Out For, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and Jimmy Corrigan. But none of them have worn out their welcome, particularly Bechdel—I’m generally allergic to memoirs, but her 2006 book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a fiercely honest and detailed portrait of her reckoning with her father’s suicide and her own homosexuality.

Moderating the event is Dan Raeburn, whose comics zine The Imp was a must-read during its run—his essay on Chick tracts, featured in an issue of The Imp designed to look like one, is the last word the subject. The evening starts at 8 p.m. at the DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street, NW; tickets are $15.

In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, cartoonist Rutu Modan threw the pressures facing the still-nascent Israeli comics movement in sharp relief: “People expect me to make the Middle East situation clear in my comics, but it’s something I cannot do—it’s too complicated.” Of course, the al-Aqsa intifada looms large in Modan’s graphic novel Exit Wounds, which details an encounter between a cab driver and a female soldier and their search to uncover information about the unidentified victim of a suicide bombing. Despite Modan’s reservations about acting as a mouthpiece, her somber meditation on death, numbing violence, and identity speaks volumes about the social fallout from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Modan’s artwork, a slightly more stylized take on Belgian master Hergé’s clean line approach in his Tintin series, is expressive and eye-popping throughout. When words fail—or rather, when Modan resists igniting the narrative’s political spark—her depictions of cafes, graveyards, and street scenes create a vivid portrait of a culture that’s still alien in the eyes of the Western world. Modan discusses and signs copies of her work at 7:30 p.m. at the Washington District of Columbia’s Jewish Community Center, 1519 16th St. NW. $8. (202) 777-3250; in conjunction with the “Hyman S. and Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival.” —Nick Green

With the sour taste of the overwhelmingly disappointing Spider-Man 3 still lingering in many filmgoers’ mouths, we now divert our attention to this summer’s upcoming blockbusters in search of big-budget satisfaction. High on many nerds’ list of hopefuls is Michael Bay’s Transformers—quite possibly the most eagerly anticipated outer-space-baddies-coming-to-destroy-the-American-way-of-life sci-fi action flick to be released the week of July 4th since Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day—the latest trailer of which was released yesterday.

Many of the clips featured in this new trailer will be familiar to those who have been keeping tabs on the film: used-car salesman Bernie Mac explaining the relationship between a man and his car to lead actor Shia LaBeouf; a massive robot pulling itself out of the desert sands and lunging after a trio of terrified troops; a balls-out soldier angrily shouting “Bring it!” to an unseen-yet-presumably mechanical foe who he’d probably be better off not having “it” broughten by. But, unlike previous teasers, television spots, and trailers—which, for the most part, contained only brief and partial shots of the titular robots—this trailer offers several extended shots of Transformers in action. Such scenes include a Decepticon rollerblading a path of destruction across a freeway, bitchin’ Chevy Camero Bumblebee getting the shit shocked out of him by the military, and several shots of Autobots leader Optimus Prime in all of his full, red-and-blue-chrome 18-wheeler glory. In addition, die-hard fans of the television series will be pleased to hear the familiar “transforming sound” at 1:39 into the trailer, during the tail-end of Prime’s transformation.

Noticeably missing from the trailer, however, are the voices behind the robots in disguise. Thankfully, the film’s imdb.com entry contains a list of the voice actors, quelling any concerns that the mechanical stars go silent throughout the length of the flick. Among the credited actors are Peter Cullen (reprising his role as Optimus Prime), Hugo Weaving (as Decepticon leader Megatron), and Keith David (as Decepticon Barricade). What, no Casey Kasem?

Gene Weingarten’s piece about violinist Joshua Bell playing at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station has rightly been much-discussed, and the Post is giving it prominent play on its home page. But if the paper really wanted to capitalize on the current fit of Weingartenmania, it might consider freeing from its archives a 1999 Weingarten piece on B.C. creator Johnny Hart, who died over the weekend.

You can read the piece here , though signing up for a trial registration is required. The lengthy (nearly 5,000-word) piece covers Hart’s conversion to Christianity and the provocative strips he drew as a product of it.

A section of the piece reflecting its Weingartenian prose:

“What’s the problem — that, God forbid, Johnny Hart still believes in God? These are good,” [Doonesbury creator Garry] Trudeau said. “What’s important is that he still honors his first professional obligation, which is to entertain. If he wants to stimulate people into thinking about the nature of faith, more power to him. I don’t disagree with the law professor. [Hart] is writing about his values as much as I am writing about mine.”

That’s what Garry Trudeau thinks about Johnny Hart.

This is what Johnny Hart thinks about Garry Trudeau: “Too liberal.”

Hi there. So. Are you OK? Are you…coping? I ask because, as you might be aware, the Post is pretty concerned with how you’re feeling today. Starting last week a recurring note in the Style section warned readers that March 19 would mark some changes to the comics section. In are two strips, Agnes and Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, and a panel, Brevity. Out are Mary Worth, Cathy, and Broom Hilda, among other tweaks.

“We realize change is unsettling but trust that you will quickly adjust to the new lineup,” read the closing paragraph of the anonymous editor’s note. I’m OK, thanks; I hardly noticed Mary Worth’s existence until its imminent demise was announced, and though I think Brewster Rockit is a snooze, it’s not the worst comic strip in creation. But many newspaper readers famously become apoplectic when their favorite strips disappear, hence the the weeklong effort of hand-holding and collective mourning.

Are notes like these overly concerned? I don’t think so. In fact, I think these solemn, comforting dispatches ought to appear in daily papers more often. For instance:

• Local News: “Starting this month we’ll begin reworking our local news section by cutting staff and using stories written by you, the reader, as part of our ongoing “mojo” initiative. We realize that change is unsettling but trust you will enjoy writing for the paper that you pay for.”
• International News: “Starting this week we’ll be closing a number of our international bureaus. We realize that change is unsettling but trust that you weren’t all that interested in foreign news anyway.”
• Book Review: “Starting today we’ll be scaling back our book review section. As a result we will have less space to cover the nonfiction books that got written because newsrooms can no longer prioritize enterprise reporting. We realize that change is unsettling but trust that you will quickly adjust.”

After 20 years in Georgetown under various names, Big Monkey Comics is pulling up stakes and moving to 14th Street NW. “The rent just got too high,” says head manager Devon Sanders. “Georgetown doesn’t favor small businesses.”

That goes double when your small business’ lead product has a $3 price point. Chain stores and rent hikes aren’t the only reason for the move, however. Sanders admits that after years of battling bitter neighborhood rivals Big Planet for nerd-market dominance, Big Monkey (formerly Another Universe and Beyond Comics under different owners) was ready to throw in the towel. “We’ve been fighting the dragon down the street for years. After a while it’s like, why fight the dragon? Why not just move to where there is no dragon?”

But Sanders doesn’t feel like Big Monkey has lost the battle or ceded turf. “As far as I’m concerned, if they want Georgetown, they can have it,” he says. “Georgetown is a piece of dead property.”

When Big Monkey’s arrives at their new location, at 1722 14th St. NW, they will be part of a more vital community, Sanders believes. “It’s a bigger space with more things to do in a happening neighborhood,” he says. “It will be a destination spot.”

Big Monkey also plans to revitalize its approach to comic book retail—mainly by concentrating on books. “Our new space will be more of a comic-book store instead of a boutique. There will be more stock, more focus on the comic-book side of things.”

“There will still be toys,” says Sanders. “But there will be no doubt as to what it is a comic book store.” But what will it not be? “It won’t be ‘modeled after an English bookstore,’” jokes Sanders—referencing his Big Planet’s self-description from a year-old City Paper story about the two stores’ rivalry.

There are plenty of subjects that are guaranteed to make bloggers mad­: politics, DRM, other bloggers. But apparently nothing gets them angrier than news of Spider-Man’s deadly radioactive spunk. An upcoming issue of Spider-Man: Reign (which is set 35 years in the future) explains that Peter Parker’s wife, Mary Jane, dies from cancer caused by Spidey’s fluids. The Comics Journal’s blog, Journalista, has collected a few comments; Brian Hibbs, owner of San Francisco comic-book store Comix Experience, lost his shit.

The ew factor here is obvious, but the anger isn’t surprising—­comics readers always get worked up whenever reality starts showing up in their fantasy world. (“Reality” being a relative term here­in the Marvel world, a tale about Spider-Man’s mutant biohazardous love muscle practically qualifies as documentary-level verite.) A couple weeks back the books blog Galley Cat pitched a fit at a storyline in For Better or For Worse in which a character instantaneously scored a book deal for an unsolicited manuscript of his first novel. “The current plot in the comic strip For Better of for Worse makes me want to punch Lynn Johnson dead in the face,” one pundit wrote. “A debut novel, submitted without an agent, gets a $25,000 offer just like that?” huffed Ron Hogan.

Well, to be fair, it’s $25,000 Canadian. But what was perhaps most surprising about the foofaraw was that it revealed how many bloggers read For Better or For Worse. Perhaps they’re all still angry at Johnston for killing off Farley?