Indy comics: Johanna Draper Carlson reviews a handful of self-published comics at Comics Worth Reading.

History: Jason Thompson takes a look at the early days of manga publishing and the creator Ippongi Bang, who drew rebel manga and liked a good party, too.

Quickies: Top Shelf recently brought over not one but four Swedish graphic novels. Not sure where to start? Rick Marshall has quick looks at all four, ranked in his order of preference.

Art comix: Charles Hatfield is pleasantly mystified by Blaise Larmee's Young Lions, a wispily drawn story about conceptual artists.

Previews: The reader is the winner every time when Paul Gravett plays the Previews game.

Review: Greg McElhatton reads the graphic novel version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and concludes that you can stretch a joke too thin.

Politics: I don't follow DC's non-manga lines closely enough to be able to intelligently evaluate Rob McMonigal's claim that the company is regressing into a white-male bastion, and I won't go there with the Tea Party logic, but I'm including this link for discussion purposes. One could argue the opposite, that they kept CMX going long after they probably should have killed it, but I think that CMX, like Minx, could have been a success if anyone outside the immediate circle of editors had acted like they cared.

Criticism: Domingos Isabelinho launches his new column at The Hooded Utilitarian with some musings on criticsm, wondering, "What twisted mind picks up the scalpel after love?" and then puts Pierre Duba's Racines under the microscope. Also at HU: Noah Berlatsky, ever the contrarian, turns in a rare negative review of Naoki Urasawa's Monster.