Last weekend in San Francisco, the Alternative Press Expo–Comic-Con’s punky kid brother–brought small-press and self-published comics together with a few major figures and provided two pleasant, low-key afternoons for local comics fans to check out new talent and hear from the masters. Jim Woodring, Sergio Aragones and Los Bros. Hernandez were the stars, doing signings and giving talks about their careers.  Aragones, after 50 years in comics, remains a humble and entertaining man.  Asked about doing an autobiography, he pointed out that many of his comics are autobiographical, so eventually he’ll have chronicled his...

For Asians -- and Asians alone -- a simple image search returns page after page of women with breasts the size of volleyballs doing things their mothers would not approve of. This obviously says something about how sexy Asians are (or far more likely, how horny American men are.) I wish I could give more commentary, but frankly, I'm not sure I can quite wrap my head around what this means, if anything. It appears that far more Americans than I would ever have thought have "Yellow Fever." The American sexualization of an entire continent is one of the more bizarre things I've ever come across on the Internet, and it is something I will try to keep in mind the next time I want to poke fun at the Japanese and their Used Schoolgirl Panties Vending Machines.

Inventive, grindhouse violence to download immediately.

With the passing of Frank Frazetta, the world is a little less fantastic.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

America's not-so-secret love affair with Steve Urkel

  Bettie Page died today. I’d heard, several days ago, that she’d suffered a heart attack, and as I was typing a movie review on one laptop, my girlfriend was on the other and said, “Bettie Page died. Who was Bettie Page?” (Forgive her, she is young, and was born behind the Iron Curtain.) It was a sad thing to hear. Knowing of her illness, there was context, of course, but still, it’s awful when an icon who meant something to you passes away. The Internet will be full of obituaries (Reuters, BBC) and fan ramblings, so I’ll just say that I was the right age to discover Bettie on her second coming. As a...

There isn't much doubt who's going to get California's electoral votes this year, because our yummy blue urban centers simply outweigh the hard candy shell of rural red conservatism. But much more up in the air, and the subject of a divisive and lie-filled campaign being waged on our TV sets, is the Prop. 8 battle, in which the forces of darkness are attempting to rewrite the state's constitution to deny gay couples access to the word "marriage." It's hot stuff in these parts. Even in Oakland, safe in the liberal bastion of the inner Bay Area, a streetcorner cabal of screeching freaks just this week attacked an innocent young woman for using a small video camera in a public space. That, my friends, is the face of Prop 8, and it is some crazy shit.