i have occasionally spoken in support of the tradition of hand-letteing in comics, probably in these posts, so naturally the odd procedure of hand-drawing and lettering the whole front page of a newspaper is going to catch my eye:

Paper’s Front Page Is a Work of Art
"In uncertain times for newspapers, readers of The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., might be forgiven for wondering if what they saw when they looked at Friday’s front page was a cost-cutting measure: all the words and even the pictures on the printed page had been hand-drawn, down to the weather box and the captions. But the transformation was the work of the Turkish artist Serkan Ozkaya...


The paper's own site has the story, The front page itself, and also a video showing the artist at work. They're selling prints of the page too.
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JRSM gave me something called a splash award last Monday. Alas I don't have time to follow all the rules of acceptance as wee Hayley Campbell is home for Easter, but thanks for the good words. Hayley herself has been working at Gosh comics for some time and writing their weekly what's-in-this-week blog.
From hell has turned up on a 'graphic novel' bestseller list for April, undoubtedly due to the Watchmen ballyhoo.
And Leotard is nominated for an Eisner award in the best painted/multimedia art category.

larry Latham has posted all thirty three of Ernest Griset's illustrations from Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry. adapted by Captain Sir Richard Burton, 1870.


If they take your fancy you can read this entire antique book online at burtonia.org in a pdf of a scanned copy of the original printing. Found via the wikipedia page on Burton. Sent looking by my pal dr jon. Here's the cover.
More on Griset here, with a great colour piece:

'an admirable and apparently inexhaustible draughtsman who possessed much satirical power and produced countless drawings in grotesque of animals and human savages, which wise collectors obtained for trivial sums at an untidy little shop near Leicester Square'. This shop was in Suffolk Street, and he had produced and sold sketches there from the mid 1860s.
He contributed to the magazine Fun (which was similar in style to Punch) for some years, and the editor, Tom Hood, wrote verses for his drawings in Griset's grotesques, published in 1867. Mark Lemon, the editor of Punch invited him to join the staff in 1867, but he left after disagreements in 1869.

i don't know the provenance of this, and make no claims for its veracity, but it's the kind of yarn we like to chuckle at around here. Thanks to Dan Best who, being a very thorough legal gentleman, attached the following note: "... as a lawyer i think he has a legitimate defence to the breach of contract claim, provided postitution is not illegal in the country of question, in which case the contract would be void in any event." (click to enlarge)