Planet Karen, the acclaimed web comic, is now hosted by Girl-Wonder!

The Gigcast interviews Girl-Wonder.org's Karen Healey, of Girl Read Comics (And They're Pissed)

TalkAboutComics.com interviews Karen Ellis, creater of Planet Karen.

Girl-Wonder.org now has an account on ComicSpace.

Girl-Wonder's Counterpunch now hosts various regendered renderings of comic characters, demonstrating the commonplace sexualization of women in comics.

Super. Girl. joins the Girl-Wonder team!

Rachel Edidin now has a blog, Inside Out, with Girl-Wonder, in which she discusses the comics industry from an insider's perspective.

New blog (Love) Letters Page has been created to talk about the successes of comics. The first letter by JLG discusses Wild Girl by Leah Moore and John Reppion.

Director Hideaki Anno has announced that the first new Evangelion movie will premiere September 1 in Japanese theaters. Source: Anime Nation

Bang Zoom Entertainment's Anime TV podcast premieres tomorrow on iTunes, YouTube, and other digital distribution sites. The show will be hosted by Johnny Yong Bosch.

You know, the readers of this blog, between you all, know everything. Last year I posted about Joe Hill saying One of my favourite short stories from last year was called "Best New Horror" by an author I'd not previously heard of named Joe Hill, in PS publishing"s Postscripts #3. His website's http://www.joehillfiction.com/index.htm , and I just noticed that he has a collection out, 20th Century Ghosts. I don't have much time for reading currently, but I'm going to order a copy.and the next morning I got an email from someone named Jeff saying,Thanks for your post on Joe Hill yesterday. It happened to be the other half of a coincidence that gave me a fun few minutes of detective work on the web. Perhaps you knew this already and were being coy, but it turns out Hill is actually Joe Hill King and his parents are backwoods Maine hermits who have dabbled in the writing game themselves from time to time.See, I came home late with a copy of the new Entertainment Weekly and, working from the back, read Stephen King's latest essay wherein he gave a shout-out to a friend of his kids' named Shane Leonard. Good for him. Then I came upstairs to peruse a few blogs, clicked on the Hill link you provided and somewhere on there spotted a nod to Hill's web master -- a guy named Shane Leonard...Like I say, between you, you people know everything, or you figure it out. It was something that, now I knew it, I decided not to remember or to mention here -- mostly because I could see why Joe was doing it under his own steam, and I thought that was a good thing. I was pleased I'd liked the story first, before realising that the author was the nice young man I'd met at the Season of Mists signing in Boston, fourteen years earlier.Anyway, I loved Twentieth Century Ghosts, and was then very surprised by Heart-Shaped Box, which I had expected to be quiet and literary, like the short stories, and was instead a terrific roller coaster, almost impossible to stop reading. I loved it, took pleasure in blurbing it, and was extremely pleased to see this New York Times review by Janet Maslin who seems to have enjoyed it just as much as I did.I see from his website -- http://www.joehillfiction.com/ -- that he's now, as of yesterday -- on an author signing tour. Go and see him if he's coming near you. Tell him I said Hi.(So far this year, my favourite book is Diana Wynne Jones's The Pinhoe Egg. It's the nearest thing to a sequel to Charmed Lives she's written -- a Chrestomanci novel with Cat in it, and a lot more besides. The sort of book that makes you sad on page 400 because you only have a hundred pages to go and then it'll be done.)Dear Neil;Furtherto your comments on "The Land of Green Ginger", I remember seeing it televised in the late '50s. I searched the IMDB and it was Episode 6 of Season 1 of "Shirley Temple's Storybook" shown 18 April 1958. Each episode of the series dramatized a (usually) well known fairy/Arabian Nights/fantasy story. I really can't actually remember the episodes but I do remember the longing for the next episode in the series.Cheers,Paul BurrowsOddly enough, some years ago I bought the video from someone on eBay. It was an odd sort of thing, not really funny, not quite sure what it was, and I wondered if it was the experience of working on it that sent Langley back to the material for what became the 1965 edition of the book, which is much sharper and more knowing and odd. It is out there, and probably pretty soon it'll probably show up on YouTube....This came in from a very happy Elizabeth, the manager at DreamHaven...42 orders so far. Your fans rock! You can tell them I said so. Also that we will fill orders as fast as possible, but there may be some delay, because the manager is now teary-eyed and it slows down her typing.Love,ElizabethI'm as grateful as she is....and right now I find myself playing, over and over, "When My Ship Comes In" a piece of music I found on the Fabulist, by the North Atlantic Explorers.And over at http://polloxniner.blogs.com/polloxniner/2006/02/_having_lived_l.html, is the North Atlantic Explorers cover of Lloyd Cole's "I Will Not Leave You Alone", which is a perfect Valentine's Day sort of a song, if you wanted one. (My very favourite Valentine song is probably Thea Gilmore's "Holding Your Hand" but I couldn't find it up online, so I am not linking to it.)

DrMaster will release The Art of Yasushi Suzuki this May. The volume will include 100 images from Ikaruga, Sin & Punishment, and the Japanese cover of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice. Source: ICv2

"Don't Drink This" Coffee and "LCL" Orange Juice goes on sale on April 12th

Classic Anime Returns for an all new series

Desert Punk, Samurai 7 and Speed Grapher

Funimation's new releases, television exposure cited

Media Blasters' Voltron Collection 3 has been delayed from February 27 to May 8, following the new schedule established by Collection 2's delay due to problems with the box set's tin packaging. Thanks, Gage. Source: ICv2

I've been a fan of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis for over fifteen years, probably since Terry Pratchett and I did our first signing there for Good Omens (had I signed there before? I think so, but I can't remember. I first met owner Greg Ketter in 1987, on a train from Brighton to London, though). I like Greg Ketter and the staff, I love getting my books there (they have things I never see anywhere else that I WANT. I'm sure that lots of bookshops sell the annotated archy and mehitabel, but if I walk into DreamHaven something like that is the first thing I see. Happiness).A few years ago I gave them www.neilgaiman.net, which I had, as a storefront, mostly because I got tired of replying to people who wanted to know where they could buy something -- anything -- by me "DreamHaven Books." I sign stuff for them when I pass by.Some people think I have a stake in the shop or something, and I don't, other than a desire to still have it around as somewhere to do my shopping or to do signings or to phone and ask weird book-related questions. I've seen too many good bookshops go down in the last decade.Greg's published a few of my books and audio books. They've even functioned as a maildrop for me over the years. Good people, good bookshop (and comics shop, and toys, oddments and even, in the backroom, eye-watering reading matter for adults only shop). (I don't know of any other shop that has "Vintage Sleaze" as a category for used books.)I got an alarming email from Greg this morning...We had a break-in on Saturday night. They got a bit of cash but wreakedterrible havoc on the store and my office. Damages will be costly butinsurance should cover a lot of it. But after the lull in currentbusiness, this really will hurt. I don't like charity but if you couldencourage people to maybe buy an extra book off us soon, it may help.Three bookstores have closed in the Twin Cities in the past two months andI don't want to make it four.You can find them online at http://www.dreamhavenbooks.com. Their current catalogues are up there, for new and for used stuff. There's cool new stuff. There's stuff on sale.If you want stuff by me -- or by people like Charles Vess or Dave McKean, who've worked with me, go and explore their http://neilgaiman.net site. Lots of signed stuff, and things you really can't find elsewhere. (They have three audio CDs, for example -- one's a double CD -- with many stories and such not recorded anywhere else.)And if you're in the Minneapolis area, pop in. It's a big purple building. You can't miss it.Go buy books from them. And tell other people. This is me being selfish. I want to buy books at DreamHaven for a long time to come. Good things die when people forget.

Japanese Government, MEXT declare Anime and Manga as important parts of cultural policies