We're not ashamed to admit that today, nearly two decades after Pee Wee's Playhouse taped its final episode, we can name most of the characters that were embedded into the show's fantastical set (oh, how we coveted Magic Screen, to say nothing of plush, toothpaste-hued Chairry), the creation of which was helmed by illustrator, painter, and designer Gary Panter. And so we were thrilled to discover that Panter has a blog, and while only updated once every couple of months, it does not disappoint. Late last year, Brooklyn-based Panter wrote of his experience dropping off a cover design at the Manhattan offices of Marvel Comics, where he was directed to deposit his envelope at the end of a hall ("There on the floor, by the door, was a pile of packages, but also some thrown-out pizza boxes in the same pile....Is this any way to run a Death star?"). But we call your attention to Panter's most recent post, in which he weaves a wonderful tale-cum-thank you note to the employees of a Taco Bell he recently visited. An excerpt:

I can't chew gum and walk straight, so I can only vaguely imagine the fog one must enter; what psychic challenge it must be, trying to order ones senses while taking the order by earpiece, given all the contradictory sensorial input; running back and forth from the colorful branded zones of Baskin-Robbins/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/Dunkin Donuts—how many colors and smells can you intake per minute? You have to be as canny as a bartender, mixing subtle ratios of matter and flavor bits, into tasty Manhattans of 100% cheesefood, microwaved ground fried beef, frosty sour cream, gloopy russian dressing and so forth, soft or crispy?....I feel for you. All of you. You all. Not just all of you. All of you all.

Investor's Business Daily senior editor and editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez (pictured at right), winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning (he also won in 1994), has accepted that his work can't change people's minds, but it just might save the world, he told the New York Post's Kyle Smith in a recent interview.

"I'm not naive enough to think I'm gonna change people's minds," he says, but "editorial cartoons are a lot like advertising. You're selling an idea. Just like millions are invested in ads because they're effective I think editorial cartoons can be effective. We're trying to save the world incrementally."

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One of those things this writer missed telling you about while he was off lifting heavy boxes and gallivanting around the South was that our friend Stefan Bucher drew his last Daily Monster late last week. After setting a goal of thinking up, drawing, filming and editing, Bucher has now moved on to other things (Daily Unicorns?) and we wish him all the best. Here's the last:

If you find yourself suddenly missing Mr. Bucher after this viewing, we highly suggest going back and reading over our Seven Questions with him.

One of our favorite movie moments of all time is when Good Will Hunting's Will (Matt Damon) pulls out a historiographical can of whoop-ass on a snide young scholar looking for a scuffle. ("You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably....next year, you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about ya know, the Pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.") Although the film may have sold a few books for Wood, we suspect it was better at moving copies of another tome mentioned in the film: A People's History of the United States, written by Damon's childhood neighbor, Howard Zinn. Since its publication in 1980, the book has sold more than 1.7 million copies, but what about those who prefer comics to dense pages of text? Well, now they have their own version.

A People's History of American Empire is the classic told "in comic form," created by Zinn in collaboration with historian Paul Buhle and cartoonist Mike Konopacki. Published this month by Macmillan, the book "opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution," according to the publisher. And this being a comic book, there's an added hero angle:

The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians.

Ron Hogan of our sister blog, Galleycat, recently picked up on what we hope isn't a new trend in international publishing. A Hong Kong publisher has compiled years worth of blogger Darren Di Lieto's interviews with illustrators and hundreds of works by the interview subjects into a book--without the permission of the illustrators and without crediting Di Lieto or the blog (the illustration news portal The Little Chimp Society) as the source of the material. To make matters worse, the book includes a CD of all of the images in the book (with filenames that are identical to those on the LCS site), suggesting that they're without copyright and free to use.

Di Lieto learned of the plagiarized volume from Jonathan Edwards, one of the illustrators whose work is included in the book, and wrote about the horrific incident on his personal blog. "I'm currently in the process of contacting the included illustrators, to let them know they've been ripped-off," writes Di Lieto, who is working to track down the publishers, a company with the ironic moniker of "Great Creativity Organization." "I've been in contact with the [Association of Illustrators] to get legal advice, but I think at the end of the day I or the illustrators who have had their copy stolen will not be able to do much about this situation without major backing or support."

You know how we do love us some Stefan Bucher, from reporting on his various doings to even hitting him up for a little Q&A a while back. So it was with great pleasure to hear from the fellas over at 36 Point who have joined forces with Bucher to create a new monster drawing (you'll recall that he's the brain behind The Daily Monster), filming his process and interviewing him about his work to be turned into the documentary below, and then auctioning off his creation on ebay for the benefit of the American Red Cross. How's that for a full package of goodies? That said, with this post alone, you should now have plenty of Bucher to last you through the whole weekend.

To be graphic novels, or not to be graphic novels? That is the question we tackled earlier this week with news of Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware's distaste for the term. But some book news compels us to take a more literal approach. Next month, John Wiley & Sons will published manga-inspired, graphic novel versions of works by William Shakespeare. The books were developed by Adam Sexton, who teaches literature and writing at NYU and Parsons. He promises that these first-ever manga editions of the bard's most popular plays (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet) "combine the stunning effects of manga while remaining true to the original context."

For the illustrations, Sexton turned to several alumni of the School of Visual Arts' BFA Animation and BFA Illustration and Cartooning Departments. Macbeth is illustrated by Candice Chow (BFA 2004 Animation), Hamlet by Maria Kristina "Tintin" Pantoja (BFA 2005 Cartooning), Julius Caesar by Hyeondo Park (BFA 2006 Cartooning), and Romeo and Juliet drawn by Yali Lin (BFA 2006 Cartooning). Meanwhile, Sexton isn't stopping at Shakespeare. He's planning manga versions of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which will both be illustrated by Lin early next year.

In the nomenclative tussle of Graphic Novel vs. Comic Book, two of the genre's highest profile creators prefer the latter term. "I don't like 'graphic novel,'" Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi told the Wall Street Journal recently. "It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating--it's just a media type." She added that fellow cartoonist Chris Ware feels the same. "He says [the term 'graphic novel'] sounds like Lady Chatterley's Lover," said Satrapi.

The WSJ interview also revealed that Satrapi, who co-directed the film version of Persepolis that shared that jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and last night was bested by Julian Schnabel's astoundingly beautiful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in the Golden Globe category of best foreign language film, initially had no interest in making her book into a film. "I thought it was the worst idea," she said. "But they give you enough money and you can have a studio--you have to be crazy to say no."

Elsewhere in Chris Ware-related news, we've learned that Dave Ball of Dickinson College and Martha Kuhlman of Bryant University are at work on editing a collection of scholarly essays about the Chicago-based contemporary graphic novelist/comic book artist/cartoonist. Subtitled "The Cult of Difficulty," the book will aim to address such questions as "How does Ware's work intersect with advertising culture, web sites, graphic design, and packaging?"

Christoph Niemann's jars-o-fun? Andrea Deszö's flower power (above)? Paula Scher's blog dissection (which we loved back in April)? Yep, they're all there, in the NY Times' Notable Op-Ed Art slideshow.

Geoff Boucher at the LAT (getting better all the time, by the way) reminisces about the olden days of comics as he critiques Marvel's new Digital Comics, where they've taken the classics and turned them into a clickable web-based slide shows. "The Amazing Spider-Man," "The Avengers" and "The Fantastic Four" are all there, decades-old and looking as good as new. There are even some web-bonuses, like narratives of the story arcs by writers. But as we quickly learn, the motives are not to preserve the comics for an aging fan base, but to cultivate a new one:

The glut of slick magazines and the quirky business history of comics distribution has made it hard for kids to stumble on a comic book if they aren't looking for one. "We don't have a natural lifestyle intersection point for kids anymore," says Dan Buckley, president of publishing for Marvel Entertainment. "We think we can find one online." In other words, Marvel is banking on the idea that it can catch passing youngsters somewhere near the corner of YouTube and MySpace.

Sigh. Does it always have to come down YouTube and MySpace?