I've written about this before, but it's getting very close now: The 33rd issue of McSweeney's is going to take the form of a Sunday newspaper titled The San Francisco Panorama:

It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We're going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it'll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over.

You can pre-order the Panorama here. Unlike a normal Sunday newspaper, it costs $16 (unless you live in the Bay Area). But I'm really excited about this, and I think you should be too.

The fan was complaining about Charlotte Braun, an ill-fated female Charlie Brown analog. Schulz made it sound as though he was deleting Braun from the strip due to this one fan's complaint:

I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her. If she appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her.

He also included a sketch of Braun with an ax sticking out of her head. Weird to think that he was so receptive of this one fan, though; if Schulz had lived long enough to see the dawn of the blog comment, he never would have gotten any work done.

Charles Schulz is responsible in large part for expressing the neuroses of the modern age in popular culture, but Ditko aged Schulz's neurotic children into teenagers and then full-grown men and women. You look at his artwork and you see the doubts in your own head spread out on a page in spidery lines. He's really something wonderful.

This seems like a pretty appropriate video to watch just before Halloween weekend:

I appreciate how the narrator gets all the tricky Lovecraftian pronunciations exactly right.

(Via Topless Robot.)

From Publisher's Weekly and offered without comment:

Apparently Michael Jackson was working on a comic book for years with friend (and son of Deepak) Gotham Chopra and now Random House’s Villard imprint is prepping to release the fruits of this seemingly unlikely collaboration. The book, Fated, is about a Jackson-esque pop icon named Gabriel Star whose fame has left him isolated and emotionally cut-off. After a suicidal swan dive from his hotel one night, Star survives only to see his celebrity grow and discover that he’s becoming, per the publisher, “something not quite human.”

Slog Tipper Rich points us toward an anti-feminist website called The Spearhead, which is currently arguing that women are fucking up science fiction, and that science fiction belongs to men, and women should butt out. It begins "Science fiction is a very male form of fiction," and it continues:

The current generation of boys will not have this inspiration from science fiction, at least from science fiction on television and in movies. That’s because there is an undeclared war on real science fiction on TV and in movies. The former Sci-Fi channel, now “Syfy”, is a good example of what has been happening to science fiction on television. In 1998 Bonnie Hammer took over the Sci-Fi channel and declared that “more female viewers were needed”. Over the next several years, the Sci-Fi channel became increasingly feminized losing many of its traditional male viewers in an attempt to go after women viewers. This included making the logos “warmer and more human” because the logos before were “too male and too dark”. The biggest change was in the feminization of the programming shown on the Sci-Fi channel. The re-imagined re-delusioned Battlestar Galactica is a good example.

Also at fault for ruining sci-fi? The gays:

• "It's good being a man, isn't it? Just a couple of men, doing man-things. Yup, that's us."

Things are worse in Britain. A few years ago Doctor Who was brought back. The man who brought back Doctor Who was Russell T. Davies, a gay man who proceeded to add a recurring character called Captain Jack who comes from the 51st century that was bisexual omnisexual. Yes, omnisexual as in not only is this character bisexual, but he has no problem with having sex with non-humans too. If you read interviews with Davies and the writers they use the term omnisexual to describe Captain Jack. Davies has also admitted in interviews that he believes everyone will be “omnisexual” by the 51st century. Davies had more plans like this for Doctor Who, but there were so outrageously bad and obnoxious that the leftist BBC actually put a stop to him doing that (citing that Doctor Who was traditionally a “family show”).

Thanks to Slog Tipper Rich for sharing the Spearhead with all of us. Rich also points out "I have a feeling that they don't realize that the name of their site would be the coolest gay bar name ever."

New words and expressions added since 1999's edition include

artfuck noun
1. an artistic person, especially one who is elitist or pretentious.
2. something (especially a piece or style of music) that is pretentiously artistic. Often as adjective.

fug (a written euphemism for fuck in various senses and parts of speech; see fuck for examples). [Associated chiefly with Norman Mailer, who was required by his publishers to use the euphemism in The Naked and the Dead (1948).]

Among recent coinages, "fucktard" needs no explanation. The saucy Wellesley College term "fuck truck" gets a ride. Sheidlower says he's "keen to antedate it, I know it's possible." As a 20-year-old grad student, he discovered that Lord Byron, in a private letter, used "tool" as a verb meaning, "well, you know, to have sex." And Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson, writing to a friend, described an older lady, admiringly, as a "jolly fuckstress." "The masculine, 'fuckster,' is much older—there are three 17th-century examples."

The book offers uses of fuck from the major anglophone countries and backs up the lexicography (270 pages of headwords, every one underpinned by citations drawn from the earliest discovered use onwards) with a weighty introduction that provides a masterly analysis of every aspect of the word. The author deals with the word’s etymology (and the variety of palpably inept folk etymologies that have accompanied it), its incorporation into the list of taboo terms, its appearance in every form of media and (it seems) in every century.

If your grammar-hatin' eyes haven't rolled out of your head yet, click over here for a thrilling ride (with diagrams!) through the syntax of the fuck in the expression Fucking shut the fuck up.

So Wertz threw a benefit party for herself to raise money for health care bills, and she made a poster which reads "Fuck America" at the top, because Wertz has a delightfully juvenile sense of humor. And then that poster wound up on The Beat, one of the major comic book news websites, and the comic book fans became outraged. At Wertz.

This is another one of those clarifying moments as I contemplate people who attend events titled “F*** America”.
I mean…..wow. I realize the woman has some major gripes….but F-America? Really?

I think if you study hard and get a good job then you will have very good healthcare. I have great healthcare w/Boeing and they even pay for acupuncture and chiropractor. You have to encourage people to work hard. You cant just hand everything out to everyone. That stunts growth.

“The world owes me a living. and peer approval. and art fans. and free healthcare.”
Hey, Fuck you too, Julia.

Can you smell that compassion? Funnybook readers, you really know how to bring the class!