1850's graphic novel By stbalbach The Comic History of Rome (1852), illustrated by John Leech (1817-64). Image index. The Victorian Web on John Leech. The John Leech sketch archive from Punch (over 600 images). A recent reprint. via the always great BiblioOdyssey.

Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny? By nuclear_soup Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

MetaFilter

No Context By escabeche "A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me." Goodbye to George W.S. Trow, one of the strangest, wisest, disturbingest writer ever to gape at, marvel at, and love his fellow Americans. His 1980 essay "Within the Context of No Context" (which shared with J.D. Salinger's last published story the distinction of taking up an entire issue of the New Yorker) placed television, irony, and distance at the center of the new United States. He also wrote the less well-known (but equally beautiful) short story collection Bullies, along with a novel and several screenplays, helped found National Lampoon, and was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1966 until 1994, when he quit in protest of Roseanne Barr's guest-editing stint. He died on November 24, in Naples, at the age of 63. Appreciations from the New York Observer, Slate, and Gawker.

Blog of a Bookslut

Over at The Washington Times, a publication I do not usually read, Kelly Jane Torrance asks why on earth PW named Jane Friedman its Publishing Person of the Year: Remember the O.J. book scandal?...The publishing world seems to have forgotten.... The president and chief executive of HarperCollins was one of those responsible for the O.J. fiasco -- she approved the reported $2 million to $3.5 million paid to Mr. Simpson's representatives for his participation. Instead of being chastised for her misreading of the public mood -- not to mention a shocking lapse of taste -- she's being rewarded by the very industry she tainted. Permalink

Charitable giving guide for the end-of-year By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow) Cory Doctorow: It's time to donate -- the time of year when you have to give your money to charity or turn it over to the gubmint. I've just done a marathon round of end-of-year charitable giving: US Charities Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF always gets my largest annual donation. No organization works harder, spends smarter and gets more done for your personal long-term technological liberty than EFF. I spent years inside the org and I know for a fact that every dime donated makes a difference. Creative Commons: Just four years after launching CC has turned into a global movement. More than 160,000,000 works have been released under CC licenses. It's good news for creators and audiences -- but it's amazing news for the public interest. The proof that there's more than one kind of rightsholder using technology today has stayed the hand of more than one regulator. CC keeps getting better, smarter and more global. Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design: It's wonderful to see a campaigning group based on fighting DRM. Defective by Design has pulled off a number of audacious and clever actions that have raised public awareness of DRM. The fight starts here. The Internet Archive: What would we do without it? I use it every day. Its mission: Universal access to all human knowledge. What could be more noble? The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library. The MetaBrainz Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands. The Participatory Culture Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which produces ass-kicking media software in the public interest. The best-known of these is Democracy Player, an Internet TV program that just works -- add feeds based on YouTube keywords, or published feeds from creators, and new video arrive automagically and just play. Because TV is too important to leave up to Microsoft and Apple. The Clarion Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Sheppard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and I'll be back in 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year. Hospice Net: I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts. ACLU: For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society. Consumer Project on Technology: CPTech was the first copyright activist group to take the fight to WIPO, the UN agency that makes copyright treaties (you can thank WIPO for the DMCA -- they have the same relationship to bad copyright laws that Sauron has to evil, a kind of origin-node for all the crap that's destroying the infosphere). They marshalled a huge and effective activist opposition there, and are presently turning the agency upside down with a progressive treaty called Access to Knowledge. Public Knowledge: Public Knowledge are the best copyfighters on the Hill, real DC insiders who know the ins and outs of fighting in the halls of administrative agencies like the FCC. We never could have killed the Broadcast Flag without PK, and I'm grateful that someone else is willing to be the person who puts on a suit and explains things in plain language to Congressional staffers. It's a thankless task. These days, they're leading the charge on Net Neutrality, a fight that we have to win if we're going to have any online future to speak of. Canadian Charities Online Rights Canada: ORC (awesome acronym, huh?) is Canada's leading cyber-activist group, a collaboration between EFF and CIPPIC at the University of Ottawa. They really mobilized during the last Canadian federal election and managed to kick out a corrupt politician who took campaign contributions from huge multinational media, software and pharmaceutical companies and then wrote laws in their favour. Youth Challenge International: YCI sends young Canadians abroad to work on sustainable, community initiated development projects. Challengers work in international teams that include Costa Ricans, Guyanese, and Australians. I'm an alumnus, having done a hitch in a Nicaraguan squatter village in rural Costa Rica when I was 21, and it changed my life forever. Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation: My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause. UK Charities Open Rights Group: Danny O'Brien and I co-founded ORG a couple years ago and I continue to serve on its advisory board. ORG has done stupendous work since its founding, culminating in its aggressive lobbying of the Gowers Commission review of copyright. The Gowers Report is out now, and ORG won -- the Commission has strongly recommended that UK music recording copyrights not be extended to 95 years. This is the first time that I know of that a copyright term extension has been shot down, and it's in no small part thanks to ORG. NO2ID: As the UK sleepwalks into a surveillance state, NO2ID stands as the nation's best, last bulwark against an Orwellian nightmare of universal tracking. NO2ID has won substantial victories against the Blair regime's compulsive move towards a national ID card, keeping it at bay for years. MySociety: Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers.

Boing Boing

Scherezade meets every fable of every land - comic By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow) Cory Doctorow: Bill Willingham's Fables is one of the select, wonderful group of long-running graphic novels that I follow religiously. The premise is that all the mythical creatures of our fables have been chased from their homeworlds by the Adversary, a shadowy figure who sends an army of goblin warriors before him to rape and plunder. The Fables have settled on our world, in New York, back in the days when it was New Amsterdam, and they have lived there ever since, hidden in plain sight. A new volume in the series, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, has just been published. It is set outside of the main action of the series, with Snow White visiting Scheherezade's Sultan to beg his help in rallying the Arabian fables to fight the Adversary, who even now marches on their worlds. The Sultan imprisons and threatens to kill Snow White, but she charms him with her life's story -- a retelling of the Snow White myth from the dankest, filthiest Grimm rendition, mixed with enough vivid detail to curl your hair. The Sultan spares her life, but promises to kill her the next night if she doesn't have another story. So the next night she tells the origin stories of two more of the Fables whom we've met through the long-running series, and then again the next night, and the next. I love origins-of comics, Peter Parker and his radioactive spider and all that. But this is absolutely the cleverest frame for an origins story I've ever read, capturing (as all the Fables storylines do) the true feeling of old legends and the odd dissonance of imagining them unfolding today. The wonder of Fables is the treat that comes from the mixing of all the fables together, the great mythic 16-car collision. Willingham wrings genuinely original stories out of these old, old characters. Of course, he's just the latest steward of their storylines, in a centuries-old tradition of storytelling that has every generation reimagining its heroes and villains, fools and tricksters. It's the path that goes from Pygmalion to My Fair Lady to Trading Places. 1001 Nights of Snowfall mixes the artistic styles of several guest illustrators, each a loving tribute to the subject and each different from the ones that preceded it. This is a handsome hardcover gift-book, and it was certainly part of my Christmas present to myself. Link, Link to all Fables collections Update: Jeremy sez, "the first issue of the Fables series is available for free from the Vertigo website."

Boing Boing

Great list of underappreciated blogs By noemail@noemail.org (Cory Doctorow) Cory Doctorow: Fimoculous's "Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren't Reading" post has some real gems in it. I picked up a couple of new RSS subscriptions out of it. 27. T-Shirt Critic I've got this theory that the t-shirt is becoming its own legitimate form of media -- informative yet dispensable. Probably the most frequent email query I get is "where do you get all those t-shirt links?" The answer is all over the freaking place -- but this site is one of the best. (See also: Preshrunk & iloveyourtshirt.) 26. Pruned Ostensibly, this is a blog about landscape architecture, but it actually illustrates how any discipline has complexity and hybridity behind it, usually by gathering all sorts of random pieces of visual culture. (See also: BLDG BLOG & Things Magazine.) Link (via Waxy)