Paul Pope is comics’ dark wizard with a foot in the world of fine art and one sqaurely planted in the world of four-color mass-produced pulp. A spiritual heir to Frank Miller’s throne, Pope’s drawings are simultaneously sensuous and completely cracked, a fusion of Egon schiele, manga and lashings of Ralph Steadman. Even if I didn’t speak English I’d feel Pope’s creepy, sexy genius seeping through the page and into my pores. His Batman: Year 100 (.pdf excerpt here) is an instant classic, but his own characters and storylines stand ahead of all the franchise work in the world.

“Airplanes” captures the brilliant sweet sadness of a goodbye between lovers that don’t want to part. Check it out here — it’s on Nerve.com, but safe for work.

Pope’s Flickr photostream is really, really fun. You can see sketches, finished works, drafts, a glimpse behind the curtain at the wizard’s work. I love this tablecloth sketch of Aragorn. I boosted the thing into my own stream so I could post it, but it’s worth seeing it in a larger size, with the artist’s notes.

I love this drawing of the Silver Surfer. It’s this fusion of Schiele and Jack Kirby, crackling with the power cosmic — and again, you’ve got to see it in full.

You can see his blog here, although it doesn’t update all that frequently. If you’re looking for more background, this story from a 2006 edition of Wired adds to the legend.

I’m pretty new to his work, myself, and I’m looking forward to a lot of long cold rainy days with time to dive deeper. And man — if Pope was as gifted with a tattoo machine as he is with pen and ink, I might have to reconsider my position on sleeve, neck and facial tattoos …

This is from my notebook, written on the subway this morning:

There is a man standing next to me reading a paperback. One of his hands is gripping a pole and the other is holding the book with the cover and pages folded back, the front and back covers mashed together in a horrific forced kiss.

This constitutes abuse in my book. It’s the book equivalent of a mother yanking a child’s arm outside a bus station bathroom.

It is all that I can do not to snatch the book out of this guy’s hands and show him the correct way to hold it: With one cover and chunk of pages per hand, the subway pole crooked in an elbow. Alternately, he could hold the book with ring, middle and index fingers along the spine for support, his thumb and pinkie holding the pages open.

But instead he does neither. He is a fat man riding a gasping sway-backed pony towards a great Golden Corral on the horizon, blindly bending the tool that takes him where he wants to be and screw the consequences.

Now he’s sitting next to me, this intellectual barbarian, still bending his book without even needing a free hand for the pole. What an asshole. This is a man who wipes his hands on the curtains, who hawks and spits into empty lockers and plucks roses made of frosting off uncut wedding cakes with his bare and grubby fingers.

Books are not to be treated this way. It’s an abuse. Some of you out there may be closet book-benders — and you may be thinking “Simmer down, Simmermon, paperbacks are meant to be folded. They can take it.”

You people better stay in your grotty little closet around me, is all I have to say. Is it right throw a cat across the room repeatedly just because he’ll probably land on his feet? Is it right to repeatedly tie an octopus’s arms in knots just because they’re soft and flexible?

A book is more than a content delivery mechanism. It’s not a single-use syringe that you just uncork, squeeze once and ditch. It’s more than a CD, more than the plastic fork that carries your lunch to your mouth. Maybe it’s just me, but I have fixations on certain editions, certain printings of my favorite books. And while I’m far from a book collector — I’m really, really hard on physical objects, actually — I think that books ought to be treated with a little dignity, regardless of how many hands you have free.

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Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion

Well I’ll be damned — an eight-limbed toddler in Behar, India is going to have at least half of her limbs removed in a life-saving operation. From ThisIsLondon.co.uk:

A toddler born with eight limbs and believed by some to be the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess Vishnu, is set to undergo a 40-hour operation to remove half of her limbs.

Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a ‘parasitic twin’ and will go under the knife at the hands of 30 surgeons to remove two of her useless arms and legs.

The headless ‘twin’ is joined to Lakshmi at the pelvis and has its own spinal column and kidney.

I wonder if her remaining limbs will function normally — or if they all do, and the doctors are just lopping off the ones that are inconveniently positioned?

I tried to write a couple dozen times today but my words got jammed up in my arms somewhere. They were all hot and excited, jostling around and sprinting to get on the train but couldn’t fit out the tiny doors at the end of my fingers.

So I’m posting this mix disc instead. Some of you have heard these songs from me before – it’s got a bunch of favorites on there. But there’s new stuff, too — so click, download, enjoy. You should be able to grab a PDF of the artwork and print it out, too.

Here’s the mix…

… and here’s the cover art.

This is up via Yousendit — good for one week or 100 downloads. Let me know in the comments if there’s any trouble and I’ll figure something out.