Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, Joe Infurnari, Sara Edward-Corbett, Hans Rickheit and over a dozen more cartoonists will do their part to revive the dying art of broadsheet-style comics with the launch of pood, a newsprint comics anthology debuting at this year's MoCCA Art Festival on April 10-11. Spearheaded by Blurred Books' Kevin Mutch & Alex Rader and artist Geoff Grogan, creator of Look Out!! Monsters (one of the great hidden artcomix gems of the '00s), the long-hinted-at pood will clock in at a whopping 17" x 22 ¾", with 16 full-color/black-and-white pages of sci-fi adventure, Western action and general weirdness, all for a measly $4. After its MoCCA unveiling, pood will hit comic shops in July and go quarterly thereafter via Mutch, Rader and Grogan's new imprint Big If Comics.

Personally, I don't see the appeal of newsprint. Newspaper-sized comics, sure -- Kramers Ergot 7 is a mind-blower -- but when I see things like Wednesday Comics or Comics Comics or even Paper Rodeo I think to myself, "Wow, wouldn't this be much nicer on paper that holds colors properly and isn't literally unpleasant to touch?" I just don't have the newspaper (or zine) nostalgia gene that would enable me to look past the limitations of the paper itself. That said, am I up for getting giant comics pages from the creators of Afrodisiac or The Squirrel Machine for less than a cost of a Subway footlong? You betcha.