NOT QUITE MINDY NEWELL: Happy Times In New Jersey
Nope, this is not Mindy writing. Mindy’s a bit tied up right now. This weekend, her daughter Alixandra Gould married Jeffrey Gonzalez at the Newark New Jersey Art Museum.
Yes, Newark New Jersey has an art museum. Grow up.
People with Y-chromosomes who have never studied the process aren’t as appreciative as we should be about this process and its impact upon the mother of the bride. It’s far easier for us guys to simply do as we’re told (weddings aren’t really about us anyway) and stay away from the battlefield until it’s time to do the transformative I Do voodoo. For the mother of the bride, however, and in another fashion for the bride herself the experience consists of long periods of intense work separated by somewhat briefer periods of frantic behavior and occasional military acts, followed by an undefined period of complete collapse. It even takes its toll on those who do not have a day job; lucky for Mindy, I strongly suspect her years of service to humanity as an operating room nurse prepared her for this endeavor.
We-all at ComicMix congratulate Alixandra and Jeffrey and wish them a long, healthy and fun life together.
– Venerable Boy Editor
(photo by Adam Haley)
TUESDAY: Michael Davis, unless he’s getting married or something
edition. (Particularly since the 
book is out now, all shiny and new, so this is terribly old news.) Each editor shifts the material somewhat — Gaiman’s volume leads off with a long excerpt from the Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple/Gary Panter Omega the Unknown, the first Big Two story in the series, which feels significant — but the core of each book is very similar, drawing from the same group of major mid-career “alternative” cartoonists, from Gilbert Hernandez (here represented by a story done with his vastly less-prolific brother Mario) to Ben Katchor to Chris Ware to Peter Bagge to Bryan Lee O’Malley to C. Tyler to Robert Crumb. As usual, the series editors, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, picked a hundred notable works from their year — September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009 — and sent those to Gaiman, who chose from them (and, possibly, from a few things he discovered on his own) to make this collection. Gaiman’s introduction makes it clear that this isn’t the “best” comics of the year — nor even the best “American” comics of the year, whatever that may mean — but it is a big collection of a lot of very good comics (and a few clunkers, though precisely which ones are clunkers may be a matter of personal taste) at a reasonable price. The whole series is a great way to discover what’s going on over on the more interesting, less punchy side of the modern comics world, so I recommend this book, as I do its predecessors, for people who like stories told in comics form, though probably not for the kind of people who like the things that draw in the crowds of maladapted boy-men every Wednesday. 
