Nope, not Mark Evanier’s big Kirby tome that surprisingly no one is really talking about.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by American cultural historian David Hajdu takes a look at the federal probe into the supposed “negative effects” of comic books on kids that took place during the early to mid 50s, and eventually gave rise to the Comics Code Authority.

Apparently it’s pretty good.

In a stroke of needless melodrama, Mr. Hajdu frames the comics’ collapse with a prologue glimpse of one artist whose career was extinguished: Janice Valleau Winkleman, who for 50 years never told anyone, even her daughter, that she had once had a career in comics. She warrants Mr. Hajdu’s sympathy and admiration. But the events recounted in “The Ten-Cent Plague” need no such histrionics. On its own, this book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination.

Spread the word!

Knoxville, TN-based online bookseller Abunga.com is making headlines for allowing its buyers to ban books they believe to be indecent. Launched last fall, according to the article the site refused to carry 65,000 titles at the outset, and has banned anywhere from 100 to 200 books since then. A recent victim of Abunga’s policy? Go-to evil tome incarnate The Golden Compass, of course.

Martin insists his company has no agenda. “If you look at the books, we have a complete rainbow range of books, and we give to non-Christian ministries.” “We rely on the community to create a warehouse full of books they want,” he said. “Frankly, I know personally I am viscerally angry about the spread of pornography.”

Being a big fat hippie, I don’t agree with what these guys are doing. But hey, it’s a free country and people should be able to sell what they want and say what they want, which means I can suggest that you never buy anything from Abunga.com.

Spread the word!

It seems that Anne Rice’s vow to never write another vampire story again after she found God a few years ago…wasn’t what she really meant. The writer just announced yet another Lestat book is on the way.

“One more book.” Those are the words Anne Rice fans have been dying to hear about the Vampire Chronicles ever since her shocking — and dismaying to many of his followers — turn to religious writing. Long seen as a committed atheist, four years ago the best-selling author drove a stake through the hearts of her followers when she vowed to abandon her sinister stories and instead write only of the Lord.

Turns out, vampires aren’t that easy to kill. In an interview with TIME, the best-selling author of Interview with the Vampire and The Queen of the Damned has revealed that she plans to write one last book about Lestat, the feared yet beloved blood-sucking main character in her gothic novel series. “When I published my first book about the Lord I said I would never write about those characters again,” Rice acknowledged. “But I have one more book that I would really like to write. It will be a story that I need to tell.”

Upon returning to the church after a more than three-decade absence, the author in 2005 dramatically and publicly declared that she would never again return to writing about vampires. Said Rice in an interview with Christianity Today: “I would never go back, not even if they say you will be financially ruined. I would be a fool for all eternity to turn my back on God like that.”

Do all that many people really care about this anymore? I mean, I read the original Lestat books back in the day, but that was mainly in a useless attempt at scoring with hot artsy chicks in college.

EDIT: Looks like Anne Rice dropped in by way of the comments section below with something to say about “fan” reaction.

Spread the word!

Apparently somebody thought it was a good idea to name a furniture line about the title character in Nabokov’s unbelievably brilliant novel Lolita. Some mummies got upset, and perhaps rightfully so.

Granted, I’m sure the guys who developed the product name were thinking of the term itself, which has a life of its own outside the book. But, really, would you unironically name anything after the character Dolores Haze, a 12-year-old who has a sexual relationship with her stepfather?

Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

Spread the word!

Ever wondered what exactly the deal was with fortune cookies? I kind of did. Turns out they actually might be Japanese.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. “I am surprised,” said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”

Interesting side note — the person who wrote the above article has a neat-o looking non-fiction book coming out about Chinese restaurants (purportedly the most ubiquitous in the U.S.): The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

Spread the word!

Sure, we like to read comics, or, in my case, graphic novels. But it’s usually months (often several) after they’ve already been released. I like to think it’s that I have other things to do…but really I’m just kind of lazy.

LEGENDS OF THE DARK CRYSTAL: Volume 1
By Barbara Randall Kesel, Heidi Arnhold, and Max Kim

In a moment of nostalgia/weakness, I decided to pick this up, the first volume of a manga series that ties in to a film that blew my little kid mind 26 years ago. Although very nicely drawn, disappointingly (but perhaps not surprisingly), Legends of the Dark Crystal is basically a workmanlike retelling of the same plot as the film. When the village of a male Gelfling (the humanoid inhabitants of The Dark Crystal’s world) is razed by Garthim (evil giant beetles), he sets off to search for survivors and runs into a female Gelfling who suffered the same fate. Together, they’ll try to unite other Gelflings against the Garthim and scheming, bird-like Skeksis.

Sound familiar? For such a rich sandbox to play in, Legends of the Dark Crystal is sadly bland and routine.

Grade: C

THE GOON: CHINATOWN AND THE MYSTERY OF MR. WICKER
By Eric Powell

Powell interweaves a noirish tale concerning a femme fatale with the Goon’s strange and tragic origin in this original hardcover graphic novel.

Although a strong final third thankfully saves the book from being entirely inconsequential, Chinatown isn’t exactly the extraordinarily talented Powell’s strongest work. Serious to a fault, Chinatown plays everything straight and loses the melancholic depth Powell usually accomplishes by effortlessly mixing anarchic pulp action and strong characterization with black humor. Here, the misery is forced. We get a weak supporting cast with muddled motivations, and two separate, predictable plots that feel rushed. Still, Powell is probably the best artist in comics today, and the book looks stunning.

Grade: B-

Spread the word!

Was it the brilliant William Gibson or the visionary Argentinian genius Jorge Luis Borges (a KFR fave — if you like Grant Morrison, read this) who predicted the internet?

Recently, a number of people have started leaning towards the latter.

Yet a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web. One recent book, “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” by Perla Sassón-Henry, explores the connections between the decentralized Internet of YouTube, blogs and Wikipedia — the so-called Internet 2.0 — and Borges’s stories, which “make the reader an active participant.” Ms. Sassón-Henry, an associate professor in the language studies department of the United States Naval Academy, describes Borges as “from the Old World with a futuristic vision.” Another work, a collection of essays on the topic from Bucknell University Press, has the provocative title “Cy-Borges” and is expected to appear this year.

Among the scores of Borges stories, a core group — including “Funes the Memorious,” “The Library of Babel” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — first appeared in the United States as “Labyrinths” in the early 1960s. With their infinite libraries and unforgetting men, collaborative encyclopedias and virtual worlds conjured up from the printed page and portals that watch over the entire planet, these stories (along with a few others like “The Aleph”) have become a canon for those at the intersection of new technology and literature.

Spread the word!

Thanks to the dark elf coven of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, preeminent raconteur and perennial nerd ladeez pin-up Neil Gaiman now has a series of perfumes inspired by his work. Sales benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

I know, you were expecting some snark. But fun fact: I like goths because they tend to have a good sense of humor. So there.

So now let us all sip absinthe in our frilly shirts and pretend we’re asexual Oscar Wilde vampires.

Spread the word!