An interview with writer Derek McCulloch, with whom I am collaborating on Gone to Amerikay for DC/Vertigo, and whose work you can see here on this nifty T Runt preview. Also, Derek wrote the short story I illustrated for Tori Amos: Comic Book Tattoo.

Almost forgot: Tori Amos: Comic Book Tattoo has been nominated for two Eisner Awards: Best Anthology and Best Design.

Also, special props to our buddy JMS for his noms as Best Writer and for Best Continuing Series on Thor.

A Wall Street Journal scribe learns a hard lesson about speculating in comic books. I learned that one when I tried to sell of my Teen Titans collection to pay for my college textbooks. Selling your comics to a dealer won’t make you much dough. Then again, years later the Titans‘ popularity tanked, and I ended up buying back all the issues I had sold for 30 cents a piece.

PBS is launching a video web function.

Among the shows available on the new portal (PBS.org/video) are American Masters, Antiques Road Show, Masterpiece Theater Nature and Nova. Classic series, such as the various programs featuring cooking legend Julia Child, will also eventually be available in their entirety on the site.

Two thumbs way up for that. Every time I see NOVA on my digital satellite schedule, it refers to some shopping channel. That makes me sad.

The founder of the web is sad about the deterioration of online privacy. File under “unintended consequences”, dude.

JG Ballard passed on this week, and the UK Daily Mail remembers him with an excerpt from his book about his childhood in a Japanese internment camp.

A stash of letters from Benjamin Franklin have been found at the British Library. It is believed these letters have not been seen in 250 years.

The letters are, in fact, contemporary copies of originals long since lost. They were painstakingly penned by Thomas Birch, a friend of Franklin and an inveterate, almost obsessive, transcriber of the important documents of his time.

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Early yesterday Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein’s all-new, full-color ongoing crime series for the 9th century, VIKING, debuted in a big way with a distribution-level pre-release sell out weeks in advance and nation-wide reports of store sell through!

“I can barely believe any of it. The response to this book has been crazier than anything I’ve ever worked on,” Ivan Brandon said. “Nic and I are completely and totally blown away by the kind of retailer support and subsequent reader reaction we’ve been seeing. We were knocked out by the initial distribution-level sell out, but the reports we’ve received of subsequent sell-through are completely unbelievable. I’m getting notes from Los Angeles, Chicago…people are selling out all over. Nic and I are trying to keep our heads down and work to make the rest of the series even better. Thanks so much to everyone involved for their support!”

VIKING has received praise not only for its thrilling storyline as well as its lush, full color artwork, but also the high-end production values and oversized Golden Age dimensions unlike any other title on the stands. Even with the prestige production values on the series, it will maintain a $2.99 price point and the level of painted, full color artwork Nic produces on a bi-monthly basis. For those missing out in the initial print run, a second printing will be made available this May with a second issue coming in June.

VIKING 2nd Ptg (FEB098570), a 24-page full color comic book for $2.99, will be in stores May 6th, 2009. VIKING #2 (APR090396), also a 24-page full color comic book for $2.99, will be in-stores June 13, 2009.

The famous Gerber baby, the chubby-cheeked infant who has graced Gerber food products for nearly 8 decades, has been incorrectly identified time and again as a portrait of the infant Humphrey Bogart, classic film actor. His mother, Maud Humphrey Bogart, was a successful illustrator. She often used little Humphrey in her pictures, and once used his baby face to advertise Mellin’s baby food.

However, Humphrey Bogart was nearly thirty-years-old when Gerber began manufacturing baby food.

The real Gerber baby has a comics connection.

She’s Ann Cook (nee Turner), daughter of comic strip creator Leslie Turner, the man who wrote Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy for a whopping 27 years. The original baby sketch was by the artist Dorothy Hope Smith. She submitted the sketch and was paid $300 for it. It became the official Gerber trademark in 1931. Ann Cook was paid a cash settlement of $5,000 for the use of her image in 1951.

Cook became a mystery writer and lives in Florida.

Photo from Anne Turner Cook’s website.

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