Jon Morris

Anyone who identifies as a comics nerd (and we use that word in the most celebratory sense) must love reading. And even beyond reading comics, there are plenty of books about comics that they could be reading. So dive in to this gift guide and find a book or two for the history buff, nerdy academic relative, or bookworm kid in your life!

The first thing you need to know about Jon Morris is that he really, really loves Superman. Actually, no, that's not right --- the first thing that you should probably know is that he's a cartoonist of no small talent who loves delving into the more obscure bits of comic book history, and who recently wrote an entire book on the strange and obscure superheroes that have fallen by the wayside over the years. But second? Yeah, second is probably gonna be that Superman thing. Put those two facts together, and you've got the motivation behind Villains of Steel, an art project where Morris drew 75 of Superman's foes to celebrate the hero's 75th birthday last year. Now, the whole thing has been collected as a pay-what-you-want download, and it's pretty amazing.

The Justice League of America and The Avengers are the top teams in comics, super-groups composed of the most popular, most powerful and most iconic superheroes in their respective publisher's fictional universes. Jon Morris' League is... not that kind of league. Morris, a graphic designer, cartoonist and writer, has devoted himself to compiling and chronicling the weirdest superheroes from throughout comics history on his blog Gone & Forgotten, which he's maintained since the late 1990s. Those efforts have lead to a new book, The League of Regrettable Superheroes: Half-Baked Heroes From Comic Book History, which features a full 100 of the most spectacular misfires of the 20th century comics industry, from 1939's Bozo The Iron Man to 1997's Maggot, from shoe shill AAU Shuperstar to the compressed air-powered speedster Zippo. We spoke to Morris about his selection process and what it really means to be "regrettable."

Tomorrow marks this year's final observance of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. In honor of the holiday, cartoonist Jon Morris created an illustration of one of comics' Jewish characters for each night of Hanukkah, including some superheroes and cartoonified real-life legends, to create a cool and clever comic book menorah. The creator of the Cornered, DC Fifty-Too and Marvel Universe Too blogs is an artist frequently spotlightedhere on ComicsAlliance, but Morris may have outdone himself with this lovely holiday series. Note how each character is perfectly expressed not just in how Morris draws them, but in the way they interact with their candles i.e. Batwoman perching on hers or Arthur worrying about dropping his.

If you spend as much time thinking about comics as I do, you probably find yourself creating hypothetical-based thought experiments about super-team line-ups and such. Usually I only share them with Chris Sims, who then goes on to turn them into an Ask Chris and get paid for my idea. [cough] But a few weeks ago, I took to Twitter to ask people who they would recruit for an all-female, seven-member Justice League. The response at the time was great, with lots of interesting variation in potential team rosters, but then the idea got a bump again when artists started posting drawings of their ideal Justice Ladies teams on Twitter and Tumblr. I've collected nine such line-ups, including my own, which kicked everything off, but you can check my Twitter feed to see all the responses I received.

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, as well as the special qualities of comic book storytelling, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great pinups, fan art and other illustrations on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwork that we come across in our regular travels across the Web. Some of it’s new, some of it’s old, some of it’s created by working professionals, some of it’s created by future stars, some of it’s created by talented fans, awnd some of it’s endearingly silly. All of it is awesome.

  We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, as well as the special qualities of comic book storytelling, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great pinups, fan art and other illustrations on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art E

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, as well as the special qualities of comic book storytelling, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great pinups, fan art and other illustrations on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Eve

If you're like most of us at ComicsAlliance, there's a good chance that you remember that fleeting year or so in the mid '90s when comic shops were overflowing with the heavily-decorated circular disks known as pogs, plus all of their prevalent slammer, mat and "pogtainer" accessories. Well, get stoked on a kind of resurgence next week as Regular Show #12 fills both physical and digital

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great images on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwor