pornokitsch

More lists: Top 100 Hard-Boiled Characters (from 2002). Love the diversity - and seeing modern favorites Hap Collins/Leonard Pine & Nick Stefanos both tied at #14. A few baffling selections (Hannibal Lecter is hard-boiled?), but overall, tough to complain.

London GeekMap

Dom (London Loves Comics), Den (YLLALKWAB) and I teamed up to make a map of London geekery. Whether you're in town as a tourist or a native in search of more shopping, this is our personal map of London's geeky treasures: markets, shops, museums & more. 

We've also added our own tips & tricks where we can... what's the fun of discovering something great if you don't get to brag about it?

View London GeekMap in a larger map

I really enjoyed doing this - great opportunity to swap favorites with some other local "experts" in the field of Unified Geekery. Please add comments, suggestions, oversights & omissions!

Also, if any local bloggers & geekish experts want to contribute, contact me with names & cities. 

"Hail Spawner of Demons..." thus begins the postcard from HP Lovecraft up for auction. Check out the neat signature from Bram Stoker as well.

Underground Reading: The Black Satin Jungle by Bart Frame

The Black Satin Jungle (1953) is a vaguely exotic behind-the-scenes expose of the fashion business. Originally titled "Indiscretions of a French Model", the book is heavy on the indiscretions and light on the modeling. 

Our heroine is Louise, a young, French woman who comes over the the US to marry her American soldier. Upon arrival, she discovers that the streets aren't paved with cheese - in fact, her husband is an ass and her in-laws are rude, drunk, smelly and perverted. The best of them - her brother-in-law - is a lazy blackmailer. 

Fortunately, Louise is a knockout. 

She flees the cheese-less slums and moves in with a dumpy (and therefore completely uninteresting) friend who works in the fashion industry. Dumpy friend gets Louise a walk-on as a lingerie model, and everything starts looking up.

IGN has put together an ambitious list of the top 100 comic book villains. It is crowded at the top, but Magneto (1) over Joker (2) and Lex Luthor (4) is a travesty. And that's said as a Marvel fan.

Big Dave's NerdGasm Quiz is back. The best of geek-natured pub quizzes will take place on Sunday at The Green Man & French Horn pub (WC2), from 7 pm. (From London Loves Comics)

"In Squid We Trust": The latest tentacular spectacle from Ben Templesmith. Templesmith gets credit for being well ahead of the curve in general squiditude. With this, Mieville's Kraken and the multitude of Lovecraft-ghouls hitting the shelves, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of the cephalopod.

Post-Script: Art Spiegelman @ Kansas City, 1996ish

Finding this image reminded me of an Art Spiegelman reading/signing in Kansas City, over a decade ago (yikes).

The occasion was UMKC's annual Cockefair Lecture. Given the lecture's history of getting big name speakers, the crowd consisted of Ladies Who Lunch and me (wide-eyed and clutching my sister's copy of Maus).

Spiegelman promptly shocked the bejeezus out of everyone by giving a fantastic, forty-five minute lecture about all the New Yorker covers he'd done that got banned. With illustrations. 

For the first five minutes, the audience was pearls and horror. For the last forty, they were eating out of his hand.

A great start.

Spiegelman then proceeded to do three things that, even as a fledgling signing-snob, absolutely blew me away:

Scott Andrew's Operation Motherland is currently sitting at #23 on Amazon's sf/adventure chart. If you missed it, Scott dropped by for a two part interview here and here.